# New Hampshire & Colorado: Two Forgotten Murders, 1886–1897

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/foul-play-a-historical-true-crime-podcast-51278/new-hampshire-colorado-two-forgotten-murders-1886-1897
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/foul-play-a-historical-true-crime-podcast-51278/new-hampshire-colorado-two-forgotten-murders-1886-1897.md
Podcast: [Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/foul-play-a-historical-true-crime-podcast-51278)
Published: 2026-05-26T09:00:45+00:00
Episode link: http://mythsandmalice.com
Audio file: https://audio3.redcircle.com/episodes/d77b99f6-7923-4117-b625-c6c44110684e/stream.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/foul-play-a-historical-true-crime-podcast-51278/episodes/new-hampshire-colorado-two-forgotten-murders-1886-1897
Duration seconds: 2429

## Resource

This episode contains discussions of murder, execution, racial violence, and a botched public hanging. If you need to skip any section, the chapter markers below will help you find your way around. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes. This Episode Season 40 of Foul Play covers America's forgotten crimes — fifty states, 250 years, and the stories that slipped out of the history books. Episode 8 closes out the season with a double portrait. One case from New Hampshire. One from Colorado. Eleven years apart. Two thousand miles between them. The same question at the center of both: when the law finally catches up with a killer, does it actually deliver justice? This is historical true crime at its most uncomfortable. Case A: The Great Falls National Bank Murder — New Hampshire , 1897 Joseph A. Stickney was sixty-eight years old when a man walked into his bank on Good Friday morning, April 16, 1897, and cut his throat. Stickney was the cashier of the Great Falls National Bank in Somersworth, New Hampshire — a mill city of seven thousand people where the Salmon Falls River dropped one hundred feet over a mile and powered seven textile mills. The bank had operated since 1865. On a holiday morning, with the mills closed and families walking to Mass, Stickney was alone at his desk with $150,000 in money and securities behind him. The man who killed him was Joseph E. Kelley, twenty-four years old, born in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Kelley had been convicted in Somersworth five years earlier for breaking and entering. He had studied the bank's routine. He walked in with a blackjack, knocked Stickney to the floor, cut his throat, and left with approximately $6,000 in cash — leaving $144,000 behind. The historical murder investigation moved fast. Kelley hired a hor…

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