Episode
Rhode Island & North Dakota: Who Killed the King?
- Published
- Sep 22, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2063
- Processing state
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- http://mythsandmalice.com
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Summary
Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes. This is Episode 13, covering Rhode Island and North Dakota with two true crime cases from the 1880s and 1890s that circle the same question: who do you believe when the dead cannot speak? October 1885. A wealthy Black businessman in Newport, Rhode Island, is found dead at his kitchen table -- two gunshot wounds, unchewed bread still in his mouth. The city calls it suicide before the day is over. Eight years later, a hired hand in North Dakota murders six members of the family that trusted him, and a fifteen-year-old girl walks barefoot to town to report it. Both killers were inside the circle. Both were trusted. Both destroyed the people who let them in. This episode examines what trust costs in a country still deciding which lives deserve investigation and which can be dismissed with a shrug from the mayor's office. The Victims Benjamin J. Burton was the wealthiest Black businessman in Rhode Island when he was killed in October 1885. He had arrived in Newport around 1845 from Connecticut and spent four decades building a baggage transfer empire -- the Original Express and the Bellevue Avenue Express Line -- moving trunks between the wharves and the Gilded Age mansions. Burton was a civil rights organizer who helped desegregate Rhode Island's public schools in 1866, working alongside Isaac Rice and George T. Downing. He was fifty-nine years old. He had been eating breakfast when he was shot. Daniel and Barbara Kreider were a Mennonite farming family who had relocated from Lancaster County, Penn- sylvania, to a homestead southeast of Cando, North Dakota. Daniel was born in 1856; Barbara came from one of Lancaster County's most established Mennonite families -- the Rissers, whose meeting hou…