On Trial for Murder: America’s Most Famous Murder Trials

Step back to the Gilded Age in New York City, to a night in 1906 at Madison Square Garden, when millionaire Harry Thaw murdered the man who defiled his wife, starlet Evelyn Nesbit, years earlier. What appears to be a clearcut case of cold-blooded murder devolved into a sensational trial over the novel “insanity defense.”

Your next stop is Western Idaho, where class conflicts between the miners’ union and the government turned deadly when a planted bomb killed former governor Frank Steunenberg. When Pinkerton investigator James McParland extracted a confession from the bomber, the stage was set to put union leader William “Big Bill” Haywood on trial.

Travel south to Atlanta, where in 1913 Jewish businessman Leo Frank went on trial for allegedly murdering a teenage girl in his factory. Complicating the narrative was an eyewitness who changed his story, as well as investigators plagued by confirmation bias, and Southern racial dynamics that made an honest trial all but impossible.

Do juries always get it right? Can public opinion sway the results? The infamous Sacco and Vanzetti trial over a deadly robbery brings these questions to the fore. This lecture takes you into the tumultuous 1920s, where issues of social class, race, and xenophobia created a spectacle around the trial of two Italian Americans.

Not all crimes are solved. The death of numerous Osage tribe members in Oklahoma—known today as the “Killings of the Flower Moon”—continues to captivate our imaginations. Dive into a world of oil money, inheritance, and mass murder with this survey of just one investigation into a sequence of homicides.

A woman alleges that she was assaulted on her way home one night, but the story of a gang assault doesn’t add up. Then, a murder committed out of vengeance. Delve into a three-act story of Tommie Massie, his wife Thalia, and the last chapter in the courtroom career of Clarence Darrow, “America’s greatest defense attorney,” that changed the politics of Hawaii forever.

The murder of Emmett Till in 1955 is one of the most famous in American history. In this lecture, uncover what we know about the murder—including recent revelations—and the trial of his killers. See how this brutal crime shocked the nation, galvanized the civil rights movement, and exposed the violent racial prejudice in the South.

In this survey of the Dr. Sam Shepherd case, explore the relationship between mass media and due process. Shepherd, who was accused of killing his wife, was the victim of media sensationalism and a muddled investigation. Learn the truth about a case that continues to intrigue the public, after it served as an inspiration for Hollywood’s The Fugitive.

We’ve seen how public hysteria can shape the wheels of justice. Now, turn to the story of “The West Memphis Three,” a trio of teenagers wrongly convicted of brutal child murders during the “satanic panic’ of the 1990s. Find out how coerced confessions and flimsy evidence led to years of wrongful imprisonment.

Round out this course with the trial of an American citizen abroad. In 2007, college-aged Amanda Knox was accused of murdering her roommate in Italy. Her conviction and eventual acquittal shed light on how cultural misunderstanding, media distortions, and systemic failures can have grave repercussions in a high-profile case.