To his supporters, he was a relentless crusader for justice, a people’s champion against cruel and greedy elites. To his opponents, Huey Long was a dangerously power-hungry demagogue who threatened democracy. Maybe both sides were right. Either way, he had made many enemies in American politics and in his home state of Louisiana when he was killed in Baton Rouge in 1935. Just who killed him is a another question, however …
The life of Abraham Lincoln was filled with tragedy. The weight of the war-torn republic fell upon his shoulders. The anguish of a nation seemed writ upon his face. In the last weeks of his life, even after he had won reelection and overseen the defeat of the Confederacy, the sixteenth president of the United States looked like a specter of the man who had entered the White House five years earlier. Perhaps it is no surprise then that, following his shocking assassination in 1865, stories emerged over and over again that the spirit of President Lincoln still haunts his former residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The show comes back for a seventh season next week! There won’t be a particular “theme” for the season; rather, we’ll be covering a melange of subjects - some suggested by our listeners - spanning everything from the murder of a medieval archbishop to recent political killings. Episode 7.1 will be in the spirit of both Halloween and the upcoming US presidential election: a look at the legend of Abraham Lincoln’s ghost.
In the final episode of our season on the theme of conspiracies, we travel to Arizona in the 1970s. Mafia money was being laundered in the state through various schemes involving local businessmen and political players. On the verge of uncovering a huge story on Mob involvement in gambling, Bolles was catastrophically wounded when a remote controlled bomb was detonated under his car. He died eleven days later from his horrendous injuries.
One year later, the body of a businessman from Tucson was found in the desert. It seemed that he too had fallen afoul of the deadly forces that would do anything to keep their criminal activities from being exposed.
In the conclusion to our look at the life and death of the British scientist and weapons inspector, we are joined by Andy Thomas. Andy was with us earlier this season to talk about his new book, Conspiracies, which deals in part with the Kelly case. In this episode he and Niall discuss the findings of the Hutton Inquiry and consider what might really have happened.
This is the third and final installment of the investigation.
In the second installment of this investigation, we consider some of the evidence presented during the Hutton Inquiry. As we discover, much of the evidence is … problematic. When the judge leading in inquiry, Lord James Brian Hutton, declared that Kelly had committed suicide, several medical experts came forward to challenge this verdict, stating that the manner of death described was a virtual impossibility.
We conclude this case next week.
In 2003 Dr David Kelly was at the very pinnacle of his career. A brilliant scientist and world-renowned inspector of biological weapons sites, he had worked everywhere from Britain’s top secret military labs at Porton Down, to ex-Soviet weapons facilities, to alleged WMD caches in war-torn Iraq. But when he questioned an aspect of the UK government’s justification for going to war - the “forty-five minute claim” - he found himself in a new type of conflict zone. And a deadly one, at that. For, just one day after ebulliently giving evidence to a parliamentary committee, in which he had reiterated his disapproval of the controversial claim, Dr David Kelly lay dead.
This is the first installment of a three part investigation.
In the second and concluding part of our look at the life and death of Scottish campaigner Willie McRae, we consider why the authorities failed to fully investigate his death, and we discover that he might have been in possession of some very dangerous information at the time.
A thorn in the side of the British establishment, Scottish lawyer and political heavyweight Willie McRae met his doom on a windswept hillside in the remote Highlands. An anti-nuclear activist and leading supporter of Scotland’s independence from the UK, McRae made enemies over the years. But did anyone have motive enough to kill him? We look at the last hours of his life, the unusual aspects of the scene where he was found, and the baffling official investigation that followed. This is the first installment of a two-part investigation.
By the end of the 1960s, the Black Panther Party had been almost completely infiltrated and taken over by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The target of J Edgar Hoover’s illegal COINTELPRO operations, leading Panthers had been killed or imprisoned, while paid agents controlled by FBI field offices ran much of the party’s activities and inner workings. Fred Hampton was, perhaps, the last leading figure within the party who stood in the way of its complete political decapitation. Just as it seemed certain that he would assume the national leadership of the Panthers, Hampton was shot and killed during an early morning raid on his Chicago apartment. Though this was initially ruled to have been a justified action by the raiding party of police officers and FBI agents, subsequent information and a prolonged legal battle indicated that this might have been a deliberate assassination.
Michael Connell was at the cutting edge of a new electronic frontier in US politics. In the 1990s, he developed media strategies and computing infrastructure for numerous Republican political campaigns. When George W Bush won the White House in 2000, Connell’s star continued to rise. But with the higher profile came higher stakes - and political controversies. By 2008, he was caught up in a lawsuit claiming that his websites had been used for electoral fraud. Under the legal microscope, Connell died on December 19th, 2008 when his single engine aircraft crashed en route from Washington, DC to Akron, Ohio. The Internet went wild with dark rumors that his death had been no accident.
Host Niall is joined by best-selling author Matthew Quirk, who discusses his latest book, Hour of the Assassin. A thriller set in Washington, DC, the novel leads us into a hidden political realm where a powerful figure in the shadows uses dark money, blackmail, and murder to achieve his ambitions.
Matthew is a former writer for the Atlantic magazine, and the author of six books. He spoke with Niall in early-May, 2020.
Olof Palme wished to live an ordinary life. He hated having security guards around him; instead, he wanted - demanded - as much freedom as possible for himself and his family. Problem was, being the Prime Minister of Sweden is no ordinary job, and Palme was no ordinary man. A titan of Swedish politics, he was also a significant player on the world diplomatic stage. This Social Democratic politician made enemies of far-right extremists, apartheid operatives, and a number of wealthy and powerful people. He was, in short, a man with a target on his back. Unguarded, walking home from an evening at the cinema with his wife, Palme was struck down by an assassin’s bullet on February 28, 1986. Thus began a massive manhunt - a search for the killer, or killers, that remains unsolved to this day.
An interview with Andy Thomas, the author of a book called Conspiracies: The Facts. The Theories. The Evidence. Andy is a historian, folklorist, and explorer of unexplained mysteries. His new book focuses on some of the most popular conspiracies of our times, including theories over assassinations, UFO cover-ups, the “New World Order”, and the Moon Landings. He also considers conspiracies surrounding cases such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the alleged assassination of British scientist and whistleblower Dr. David Kelly (which we’ll look at later this season).
No sooner had the news of Robert Maxwell’s death broken than the rumor mill started to churn. Had he committed suicide or had he been murdered? Or maybe it was a heart attack or just a simple accident? Maxwell certainly had enormous pressures upon him, with his business empire on the brink of collapse and the possibility of criminal charges looming on the horizon. But he also possessed information from a lifetime of covert activities - intelligence that was of great value - secrets sensitive enough to kill for.
In 1991, Robert Maxwell met his demise. After a lifetime of ruthlessly pursuing his ambitions and satiating his appetites, usually at the expense of those around him, one of Britain’s most colorful characters fell from his yacht and drowned. Or did he? Could it be that “Cap’n Bob” was murdered by those who wanted his secrets to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic with him?
In the militant struggles of the 1930s, James Riddle Hoffa gained a reputation as a fighter for union rights, rising through the ranks to become leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. From the moment he assumed office, Hoffa was the subject of investigations into rampant corruption and Mafia connections in the union. Sent to prison, he was released early on the proviso that he not seek to take “his” union back. He defied that edict, in the process angering powerful forces who wanted him to disappear.
We conclude our look at the murder of Robert Francis Kennedy, considering the police response to the statements of two eye witnesses concerning the “girl in the polkadot dress” - the person seen with Sirhan Sirhan at the scene of the crime, who was then observed running away boasting of her involvement in the killing. We also encounter serious irregularities with the ballistic evidence presented at Sirhan’s trial. And we meet the man who might have been the real assassin.
Senator Robert Francis Kennedy was killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1968, as he was campaigning to be become the Democratic Party presidential nominee. While someone was caught red handed and convicted of the murder, there are several aspects of the case that didn’t quite add up - not least the mysterious girl in the polkadot dress. Part 1 of 2.
Season 6 commences on March 16th. For the next few months we will explore stories of people whose deaths remain shrouded in mystery: murders unsolved, disappearances unexplained, and official verdicts cast into serious doubt. We begin our season with the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, who was shot to death in California during his run for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination.
