While studying the array of officials who made up New Jersey’s 19th-century criminal justice system, I often pore over aging coroner’s reports, trial transcripts, and police blotters. While doing that in South Jersey, I came across an unsettling Salem County Cold Case, the murder of Abigail Dilks in 1874. From the beginning, the mystifying case…
Category: Criminal Justice
The Coroner Investigated Deaths
For over three hundred years, coroners took charge of investigating unnatural or mysterious deaths in Maryland and Delaware. When someone raised the alarm after discovering a corpse, this county official hurried to the locality to examine the death scene, gather evidence, and figure out how the loss occurred. Colonists brought this grim job over from…
Talking About Murder and Railroad Accidents with WBOC
Tuesday, WBOC’s Delmarva Life asked me to stop by the Salisbury studio to talk about terrible railroad accidents and crimes, a time when murder and mayhem rode the rails on the Peninsula. In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, trains were the dominant form of transportation and unsettling accidents and violent deaths…
The Dark Underside of History: Solving Ruthless Murders, 19th Century Cold Cases & Shocking Crimes from Yesteryear
Friday I talked to WBOC’s Delmarva Life about the dark underside of history, the subject of a program hosted by the Wesley College Parker Library on Tuesday evening, Feb. 22, 2021. This Delaware Humanities talk, “CSI: The Historical Edition,” considers some of the most disturbing, mysterious crimes from yesteryear, as it examines how lawmen from…