Criminalia

John Healy wasn’t a real doctor. Charles Bigelow was never a scout in the United States Army. And, the products they sold weren’t actually based on healing secrets of the Kickapoo people. Yet, the two...

30 Apr 202433min

Norman Baker was an entrepreneur, a pioneering radio personality, and a fake doctor. He was a masterful propagandist, and through his radio station and multiple tabloid publications, he manipulated Am...

23 Apr 202433min

Though the Pink Pills couldn't stand up to the wild advertising claims that the product was a cure-all, the pills were actually potentially medically beneficial to some people with a certain -- common...

16 Apr 202426min

William Bailey called himself a doctor, but his career was as a shady businessman, not a medical professional. In the early 20th century, he launched a series of start-up companies, capitalizing on th...

9 Apr 202432min

Today, if you’re asked to think of a tractor, most of us probably imagine farm equipment. But in the late 18th century, a physician named Elisha Perkins made and sold a different kind of tractor – a d...

2 Apr 202427min

When Maude Mayberg was 38 years old, this was back in 1890, she 'discovered' an elixir that transformed her life. It was called Fruitcura, she said, and it cured her ailments when medical doctors coul...

26 Mar 202428min

Clark Stanley was a silver-tongued Texas cowboy who called himself the ‘Rattlesnake King’. Back in the late 19th century, he wasn’t the first charlatan going from town to town in the American West, ha...

19 Mar 202423min

From illicit love letters to political bribes, everyone has a secret, and it’s the threat of exposure that’s key to this crime -- and we discovered a whole lot of surprising examples along the way -- ...

12 Mar 202438min