Episode
Wyoming and New York: Children in the Dock, 1892
- Published
- Sep 8, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2095
- Processing state
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- http://mythsandmalice.com
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Summary
Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary — fifty true crime stories from fifty states. Wyoming, 1892. A fiftee- n-year-old orphan train rider murders two young men in a boxcar and becomes the first person executed by the state. New York, 1906. A seventeen-year-old immigrant kills the uncle who abused her and walks free from a packed Manhattan courtroom. Two teenagers. Two states. Two verdicts that split the question of whether a child's history belongs to them or to the law. In this historical true crime double feature, Foul Play examines the execution of Charles "Kansas Charley" Miller and the acquittal of Josephine Terranova — two cases that reveal how gender, geography, and political timing determined which children America chose to protect and which it chose to destroy. The Victims Waldo Emerson and Ross Fishbaugh** were eighteen and twenty years old, from St. Joseph, Missouri. They were not vagrants. They had outfitted themselves for a tramping adventure on the Union Pacific line with new clothes, spending money, and arms. On the night of September 27, 1890, they were shot in the head while they slept in a boxcar somewhere between Pine Bluff and Hillsdale, Wyoming, by a fifteen-year-old boy they had been traveling with. Fishbaugh was found alive but died without recovering. **Gaetano and Concetta Riggio** were killed in their home at 110 East 220th Street in the Bronx by their niece and goddaughter, Josephine Terranova, in 1906. Gaetano had been Josephine's legal guardian and godfather since her arrival from Sicily. Trial testimony established that he had subjected her to years of forced labor and sustained sexual abuse behind closed doors. The Crimes Charles Miller — known as Kansas Charley — was born in a Manhattan tenement in 1874. Orphaned by age six, he was pla…