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
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
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.
