by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
“The Weekly Alta has recently begun the publication of the story of Joaquin Murrieta, revised. The story is more attractive in its new form than ever before, and the publishers have been unable to supply the demand for back numbers.” --The Santa Barbara Times, Saturday, November 26, 1870, p. 2
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Cordelia Brown Botkin was a woman of voracious and insatiable appetites: for sex, for sugar, for liquor, and gambling, and murder. And in time, she would become as well-known for her love of cheesecake photo shoots as she was for her love of the decadent dessert itself.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Emma Theresa Cole Barrett Williams McVicar LeDoux was promptly charged with the premeditated, first-degree murder of one Albert Newton McVicar, and she pleaded not guilty to the charge.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Albert N. McVicar was most definitely dead.
With his 6’4”, 185-lb. frame doubled up like a pretzel inside the four-foot Saratoga steamer trunk, his “corpse was found curled up with wounds on his head,” writes true crime author J’aime Rubio. “His nose had been completely fractured…Blood that poured from his head and nose settled at the bottom corner of the trunk…”
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
It took a fiery earthquake—and over 3,000 lost lives—to boot Mrs. Emma Ledoux to page two. Mother Nature had to literally move Heaven and Earth herself to wipe the smirk of the simpering, beautiful murderess from the front of every single newspaper across the Golden State.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
But from the moment William Chester Spence married Lulu Holden Klamroth Dodd in Oakland, California, on Wednesday, July 29, 1925, it was a match made for the hereafter. The widowed carpenter, 47, and the twice-divorced medium, 52, shared a passion for the paranormal, and by the time of their marriage, they had seen enough of life to know that the Other Side was never very far away.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
As the fiery leaves of autumn give way to winter’s fog and frost, the colder seasons mingle in swirls of scarlet through icy tendrils of bone-white mist. An otherworldly haze of tule fog descends upon the Central Valley like a collective ghost, enveloping the vineyards in its numbing embrace.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Exactly one century ago, the Halloween patrol was ready to hit the streets. And with fifteen extra officers on duty that night, no crime would go unpunished.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Forty-eight hours before he was murdered, Percy Williams was living large on the last night of September, 1890.
The favorite son of a former Attorney General of California, Williams was all of 26 years old, wealthy, married, with an infant already in the ground, since the previous February—but here he was at the Palace, Stockton’s premier bordello, cozying up to madam Dora Russell on El Dorado Street…only several blocks from the mansion where his young wife Bessie slept alone in their cold marital bed.
Cradling the rose quartz pendulum in the palm of my hand, I gingerly picked my way across the dusty, uneven terrain of Sanger’s Bethel Cemetery, my darting eyes peeled for gopher holes. It was a beautiful day for a séance in a deserted country graveyard: a breezy, cloudless summer afternoon, unseasonably cool for the middle of a Central California July. And yet my palm was sweaty, sticking to the pendulum, and I felt oddly self-conscious.
