Travelers carrying money north from Natchez made tempting targets on the isolated roads of the early 1800s. Part Two of The Devil’s Road follows Samuel Mason and Joseph Thompson Hare, two notorious land pirates whose crimes became part of the darker history of the Natchez Trace.
Ancient burial mounds line the Natchez Trace, preserving the history of people who lived there nearly two thousand years ago. At one of those sites, Pharr Mounds, a brutal 1992 murder added a much more recent story to this ancient landscape.
In 1972, Bryce, Virginia and Bobby Durham were murdered in Boone, North Carolina. An investigation produced arrests and murder indictments, but the case collapsed. Fifty years later, information from Georgia revived the investigation, leading authorities to Billy Sunday Birt, Billy Wayne Davis and an unexpected explanation for the crime.
In 1929, five men in Stone County, Arkansas, were charged with murdering Connie Franklin. Then, just days before the trial, a man appeared claiming to be Franklin, very much alive. This Southern Mysteries Classic revisits the bizarre Arkansas Ghost Trial and the questions that still remain nearly a century later.
At the bottom of West Virginia’s New River Gorge, the nearly abandoned railroad town of Thurmond hides a history of coal wealth, rival businessmen, gambling, violence and suspicious deaths. This episode traces the rise of Thurmond and the infamous Dun Glen Hotel, the crimes that earned the area a lawless reputation, and the town’s transformation from a booming C&O railroad center into a preserved part of New River Gorge National Park and Preserve.
At the bottom of West Virginia’s New River Gorge, the nearly abandoned railroad town of Thurmond hides a history of coal wealth, rival businessmen, gambling, violence and suspicious deaths. This episode traces the rise of Thurmond and the infamous Dun Glen Hotel, the crimes that earned the area a lawless reputation, and the town’s transformation from a booming C&O railroad center into a preserved part of New River Gorge National Park and Preserve.
