The Ghost Of Ed Neal

Hey, true weirdos at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. People are good, right at their core, fundamentally decent and kind and all that. I mean, sure, there are some real monsters walking among us, but they're the exception, not the rule. Aren't they? People are basically good. Right? Well, yeah, except you know, when they're not packing up people together, you've got a crowd and a crowd is a living thing. And like any living thing, it can become infected. Hate and fury and vengeance can be as contagious as any disease, and a crowd infected with that can turn into a mob.

Oh, they got a small beam of light. Weird stuff. Cattle rustler sounds like something out of a cowboy movie out of a long ago frontier past. It's still a thing today. You know, a crime that costs ranchers big money. Since 2017 in Wyoming alone, more than 4000 head of cattle done got rustled or went missing as the Wyoming Livestock Board phrased it. Missing an interesting choice of words, especially if you're like us and know that mysterious and inexplicable cattle mutilations have never stopped happening in this country, and have never been solved. But this story is about a regular old cattle rustler, a regular old thief, whose greed drove him too far, and whose punishment ignited bloodlust in a community, a community that described itself as good people, fundamentally decent and kind and all that. His name was Edward Neal, but there's a real possibility that Ed Neal was just the name that he borrowed, just the name he died with. He had a handful of aliases, Louis Arnold, Thomas D. Livingston, John D. Caton. He claimed to have been born in Rochester, New York, said he'd lived in Colorado and California and in Kansas City, Kansas. He was a snappy dresser. When he was arrested in Omaha, he was wearing sharp black trousers, a black coat, a black derby hat, and a silk scarf draped around his collar. The press described him as a person of medium height well proportioned would weigh about 150 pounds and features of an effeminate kind, forehead smooth and high hair arranged in a handsome pompadour style, and was as beardless as a 10 year old boy. He may have sported the persona of the brooding dandy, but there isn't anything special about Ed Neal. He was just another crook, just your average sociopath who did as he pleased and took what he wanted when he wanted it. Things, money, lives, whatever. He cruised through the world the way a shark cruises through the water, dangerous by nature, a born predator. He may have fancied himself a mastermind. But guys like Ed Neal are just about a dime a dozen. What sets Ed Neal apart isn't so much what he did, as what happened after he left this world behind. The terrible violence he inspired and the ghost he became. Today, Millard is a neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska, annexed by the city in 1971. But once upon a time, it was a town, a very small, very rural town. It was founded in 1870 by a man named Ezra Millard. He'd arrived in Nebraska in a hovered wagon in the summer of 1856. Ezra Millard was a fourth generation American at that point, the son of a family that had established itself in the new world in the 1700s. Millard was a good businessman. And when he plotted his town, he did something different. He designed the streets to run parallel to the Union Pacific Railroad tracks. And Millard soon had a rail station of its own, 21 miles by rail from the big city of Omaha. Rural as the area was, by 1884, Millard had a two story schoolhouse, a post office, a newspaper, a church, a bank, a couple of grain elevators, a pair of blacksmith shops, a lumberyard, a cigar factory, a couple saloons, and three hotels. When our story begins, just 328 souls called Millard

Nebraska home. Now Nebraska's population had exploded after the Civil War. Settlers poured in from both the eastern US as well as northern Europe. They were lured by the promise of land ownership under the Homestead Act. And these settlers helped Nebraska become the very first state admitted to the Union after the Civil War ended. In fact, the very first claim ever filed under the Homestead Act was by a farmer named Daniel Freeman, who staked his claim on a parcel of land near Beatrice, Nebraska. The population of the state more than doubled in the 1880s, thanks to the enormous waves of immigration. The state of Nebraska, which was once considered part of the great American desert, was rapidly transforming into an agricultural paradise. But farmers are ever and always at the mercy of nature. And a lengthy drought parched the land in the early 1890s. Crops failed, farm prices plunged, and thousands were left homeless.

But Allen and Dorothy Jones, they didn't live to see the worst of that. In February 1890, Allen and Dorothy Jones were tenants on the Penny Farm near Millard. It was a bucolic spread ideal for grazing cattle. Allen and Dorothy were no longer young. Allen was 71 years old. Dorothy was 60. The couple had been living with their son John QA Jones in Irvington, Nebraska. It's a small town northwest of Omaha. Their son-in-law Dennis Cadwalader was leasing the Penny Farm from the owner, Dr. Penny in Council Bluffs, Iowa. But Dennis Cadwalader had his hands more than full and he needed a favor. Would Allen and Dorothy be willing to go stay at the Penny Farm as caretakers, both of the property and its livestock? The arrangement was temporary just until a man could be found to run the place. They agreed despite their advanced ages. Fact is, life expectancy at the time was about age 44 or 45 for a male. So Allen Jones was really bringing his A game at age 71. But they were reasonably fit and healthy. The neighbors called them spry and the Penny Farm was a peaceful and beautiful place.

Now the Penny Farm was a big spread. But Allen and Dorothy were the kind of people who made it a point to know their neighbors. The nearest farm to theirs belonged to a man named Samuel Root, whose son Charlie saw Allen and Dorothy out and about nearly every day. Another neighbor, LJ Carpenter, ran a livery stable close by and his foreman Theodore Mott was also familiar with the older couple. It was Charlie Root who first noticed that something was amiss at the Penny Farm. It had been days since he'd seen Allen or Dorothy. And now that he thought about it, it had also been days since he'd seen the Penny cattle out on the graze. And where had the horses gotten off to? Strange. Charlie went to his father with the news. And meanwhile, Dr. Penny was increasingly alarmed by his inability to make contact with his caretakers. The Cadwaladers assured him that Allen and Dorothy were solid dependable people. So surely there must be some perfectly reasonable explanation for their silence. Still, Dennis Cadwalader's son Frank agreed to go pay a visit to the Penny Farm to check on his grandparents. He made the short trip from Council Bluffs on Wednesday, February 13 1890.

Accompanied by a man named C.A. Phillips, Frank later testified that the pair checked every fence and outbuilding on the It was just as Charlie Root reported. The animals were nowhere to be seen. The Penny farmhouse was tidy, the bed neatly made up, the dishes washed and put away. The place looked right. But where on earth had the inhabitants of the farm gotten off to? The men spent that night in the farmhouse figuring they'd solve whatever mystery this was come morning.

It was the next day, February 14 1890, Valentine's Day, when they finally found the missing Allen and Dorothy Jones. The men had gone back out to the barn for one last look. And this time they saw it. The Jones had kept the Penny farm in good order, everything neat and in its place. So it was odd that the dung heap next to the cattle barn looked sloppy. Grabbing a man rake the pile into order carefully probing as they went.

That's how they found the body of Allen Jones. And then they found the body of Dorothy Jones that had been hidden beneath a heap of cornstalks. And to their horror, they saw that rats have been feasting upon Dorothy's remains. The couple were dressed in heavy winter coats, and had both been shot to death. Dorothy had been shot in the back twice, one of the bullets nearly tore her heart in half. Allen had been shot in the back three times. The bullet holes were so close together that police surmised that the killer had been standing almost directly behind each of his victims. Nearby were pails of cattle feed undisturbed. The dead bodies, the buckets of feed, the missing livestock all told the story. Allen and Dorothy had died at the of a thief, a rustler. Based on the decomposition of the bodies and the rodent activity. Law enforcement believed that the couple had been murdered on or about February 5. Whoever had done this unspeakable crime had done it with skill and cunning.

Knowing the caretakers were elderly and alone, knowing how to drive the livestock off the land without arousing suspicion. It might be trickier to get away with murder today, thanks to modern criminal forensics and DNA. But even back in 1890s Nebraska, you couldn't leave a giant messy trail of evidence and expect to skate on a crime this heinous. Forget fingerprints and ballistics for a second. And remember the missing livestock.

Those animals were branded easily identifiable. And the whole lot sure enough was soon found in South Omaha, placidly chowing down on the feed provided by their new owners. The animals had been sold by a man named Neal, current whereabouts unknown. The law had little doubt that the thief was also a double murderer. And now the search was on. Police fanned out across Millard asking questions, though not one person reported seeing or hearing any unusual activity at the penny farm. LJ Carpenter, remember who owned delivery stable nearby? He had a story to tell. Carpenter told police that sometime after February 1, one clear, a man approached him asking if he'd be interested in buying some horses at $10 each. Something about the deal seemed off to Carpenter, so he declined. Then the stranger inquired as to whether Carpenter's employee Theodore Mott might be freed up to help drive a herd of cattle to the stockyards in South Omaha. It was good money for Mott and a slow time at the stables. So the deal was done. The men shook on it, and Mott left with the man. However easy the money was to drive that herd the few miles to Omaha, Mott had to regret taking the gig. Because less than a week after the bodies of Allen and Dorothy Jones were discovered, the local sheriff arrested Mott along with two other men on suspicion of committing the murders at the penny farm. The evidence was thin. I mean, the stolen livestock was the only thing linking the men to the killings. But all three told the same story. We were hired to move the stock by a man named Ed Neal. All three claimed that Neal told them he was running the penny farm and was ready to the stock and close the place down. The fact that this mysterious Ed Neal had then sold nine of the 10 stolen horses for less than half their value immediately sparked suspicion.

But Neal was nowhere to be found. Which didn't slow Omaha Chief of Police Weber Seavey down a bit. He got on the phone and began calling police departments and penitentiaries around the country. He had what he hoped was a good physical description of Ed Neal. And between that and the description of the crimes committed, Seavey eventually hit pay dirt. The warden of the Iowa State Penitentiary had released a man barely six weeks earlier who fit the description. That man was named C.E. Neal, and it only just completed a two and a half year sentence for grand larceny. Boom, got him. Now all Chief Seavey had to do was find him. What she did, thanks to the Chief of Police in Kansas City. They had a man named Neal sitting right there in a jail cell. He'd been arrested in KC for stealing cattle. And don't you know that KC chief told Seavey that when he was captured, Mr. Neal had three gold watches in his pockets, items he said he purchased at a pawn shop in Omaha. Seavey's cops had put in the legwork and Seavey already knew about the big spender who dropped so much cash at Fred found him. Seavey took the photographs of Neal that were sent from Iowa and Kansas City and showed them to the pawn broker and the men who'd purchased the penny farm cattle and horses. All agreed that C.E. Neal was the very same man who introduced himself as Ed Neal. Now, it was Neal's bad luck that the clerk at the pawn shop was both highly observant and very chatty. 18 year old William Schnell was struck by his customers fancy attire, a double breasted ostracon coat. That's a black curly fur taken from the skin of lambs. Though, Schnell suspected in this case, it was a fake. He was wearing a black derby hat, high collar shirt, not typical for Omaha. And Schnell said, it was a little odd, the way the man kept his right hand out of sight. That was an important detail and proof that Schnell maybe should have considered a career in law enforcement. I didn't like the looks of him. He was quite a quick talker and acted sort of nervous. He kept his right hand out of sight and asked to look at the watches. He finally bought a couple, solid gold. He also bought a pair of link cuff buttons and a cheap little imitation diamond pin. When he went to pay me, he pulled out a big roll of bills which seemed to look as though they'd count up pretty high. When I saw that roll, I laughed and remarked, you must have made a big stake somewhere. He replied, Well, I just sold a lot of cattle down in South Omaha and now I'm on my way to St. Joe to sell some more. Schnell laughed and then said, I guess you better let me sell you a good revolver. But there was no need for that. The customer reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a hammerless blue barrel Smith and Wesson 38 caliber revolver hefting the weapon. The man declared, I know this all right.

My brother and I tried it just the other day and I want to tell you son, I am a good shot. A very good shot. Schnell observed that the hand holding the gun was shaking ever so slightly. Mister, you seem sort of nervous. The customer pocketed replied, Yes, a man is nervous sometimes. And with that, the strange encounter was over and the well-dressed man left the pawn shop. Neal was promptly extradited to Omaha with a preliminary trial scheduled for March 10th, 1890. No worries though, because Neal declared that he was an innocent man dragged into a terrible tragedy by the real killer. One Fuller Schellenberger, better known as Joe. Though at first the law doubted that a man named Joe Schellenberger even existed. It turned out that Neal and Schellenberger had shared a jail cell in 1888 in Logan County, Nebraska. And Schellenberger once tracked down by Omaha police had a story to tell that was big different from the one Neal had offered up. Neal claimed that Schellenberger hired him to drive the stolen cattle and market and that it was Schellenberger who pulled the fatal trigger on Allen and Dorothy Jones. Schellenberger said that was all lies. He'd never heard of the penny farm and he never hired Ed Neal to drive livestock anywhere.

Schellenberger said he'd only been to Omaha once and never to the crime scene. Meanwhile, Neal insisted Schellenberger was the mastermind in the shooter and that he, Ed Neal, would hang before confessing to a crime he'd not committed. Be careful what you wish for Ed, but we'll get to that. Schellenberger finally confessed to the part he played in the murders at Penny Farm. He told chief of police CB that Neal had urged him to come to Omaha for a visit. Once there, the two men headed out of town on horseback. Neal explaining that there was a place he needed to go and wanted Schellenberger to accompany him. After riding in a southwesterly direction for a while, I asked him where he was going. Neal drew a revolver, pointed it at my head, and said, this means business. You come along with me. The man rode in silence for another four or five miles. Then he said, I'm gonna do some work tonight, and if you ever give it away, I will kill you deader than hell.

Schellenberger said that Neal kept his revolver in his hand for the entire ride. When the men paused so that Neal could adjust his saddle girth, he warned his old cellmate again. He said if I dared make a break, he would kill me then and there. The pair arrived at Penny Farm and were met by a third man who Schellenberger did not know. He said Neal and this other man had a conversation which he could not hear, and then I saw the old man some distance away doing his evening work. Schellenberger said that Neal asked Allen Jones if he had any cattle he'd be willing to sell, but he couldn't hear the answer. Allen Jones turned then and headed for the farmhouse, and Neal announced that they'd be staying the night on the farm. Then he produced a bottle of whiskey. We all three took a big drink. I felt the effects of it. The third man said to me, let us go right in and do our work and get out of here. Then Neal turned to me and said, now you stay with me if you want to save your life. The third man said if you don't, I'll stamp you to death myself.

Schellenberger described what happened next, and vivid as the confession was, the details didn't exactly match the evidence found at the scene. Schellenberger claimed that Neal shot Dorothy Jones in the head as she lay on the bed, but the autopsy found two bullet wounds in her back, and the bed in the farmhouse was pristine. Schellenberger said that Neal struck Allen Jones in the head with a revolver, knocking him unconscious, and when the elderly man came to, Neal shot him and dragged him out of the house. The next details do line up. Schellenberger described Neal dragging Allen to the manure pile and firing two rounds into the man's body, but then he said that both bodies were hidden together in the dung pile, and we know that wasn't the case. Schellenberger said that Neal ordered him to open the gate, and with the man taking his horse, Schellenberger followed the stolen cattle on foot. I walked along with him for about three quarters of a mile, and when I got behind, jumped over a fence and ran. I heard Neal say, the son of a bitch is gone, and I never will get him. I passed through Omaha very late, got onto the Union Pacific Railroad, and walked toward Nebraska City. I went to my brother-in-law, Heck, and lived with him until I was arrested. I'm not certain. I think it was Monday night, February 3rd, that the murder was committed.

And the very next day, after making this dramatic confession, Schellenberger admitted that he'd lied. There'd been no third man on the scene. The whole thing was a fiction. It was later insinuated that the chief of police, Weber Seavey, engineered a false confession in hopes of getting conviction in the case, because it was a big deal in Omaha at the time, and the police were under incredible pressure to solve it.

And we haven't even talked about this other guy, C. W. Sherman, who was arrested. That's the mysterious third man. He insisted it was Schellenberger who committed the crime. Does your head hurt yet? But listen, it ended up not mattering what Sherman said, or that Schellenberger falsely confessed, because it was soon revealed to be a stone cold fact that Schellenberger wasn't even in Nebraska at the time of the killings. What? Why didn't he just say that in the first place? As for Sherman, every word he said about Schellenberger being the shooter was a lie, clearly. So, Sherman, while in custody awaiting trial, attempted suicide with a razor blade, and then promptly denied it was a suicide attempt, saying instead that he was doing a bit of bloodletting to cure a headache. Either way, he never stood trial for the murders of Allen and Dorothy Jones. He stayed locked up in Omaha for months on suspicion alone, and no sooner was he released in July 1890 than he got caught stealing a horse and went right back to jail. Definitely a liar, and a thief, and maybe a murderer. But something was in the air that spring in Omaha. Something dark and violent with a potential to explode into chaos. This elderly couple, brutally slain, their bodies defiled, and for what? The theft of some livestock, which Ed Neal sold for pennies on the dollar. It was senseless and bewildering, and more and more it was clear that someone needed to pay for the crime. Someone needed to be convicted. The community was growing restless and impatient. There were whispers that if justice wasn't served soon, somebody was going to get killed. In April 1890, the county prosecutor announced that the trial of Ed Neal would commence on May 13th. Among the 59 witnesses set to testify against Neal, Joe Schellenberger. Sherman remained in jail, denied bail, with no clear sign of what might lie ahead for him. The trial lasted nine days. Jury deliberations lasted 17 hours. It was a packed and overflowing courtroom that heard their verdict. Ed Neal was guilty of murder in the first degree. Apparently, the jury was in unanimous agreement from the moment that Neal was guilty. They just elected to drag the process out in order to earn one more day of jury pay. Neal was taken from the courtroom, and the judge ordered Schellenberger brought in. The prosecutor then requested that all charges against him be dismissed. The judge agreed. It was over for Schellenberger, as yet unclear for Sherman, and the end of everything for Ed Neal. Early in the morning, on Friday, October 10th, 1890, crowds began gathering at the courthouse in Omaha, filling the streets. There were people on rooftops perched atop walls, even clinging to the tops of telegraph poles. More than 7,000 people, all craning their necks and stepping over each other in hopes of getting a view. They had come to see the Penny Farm murderer, Ed Neal, hang for his crimes. The gallows themselves were enclosed by 16-foot high walls, hidden from view of the spectators. 200 or so dignitaries, including the mayor of Omaha, had prime seats right there beneath a waiting noose. The condemned man was solemnly walked from the jail and passed this VIP section to the spot on the gallows called the death trap. He was asked by the sheriff if he had any last words. Pale and trembling with faltering speech, Neal nodded. I killed that poor old man and

woman all by myself. No one helped me. I'm sorry, and I've repented and believe I am forgiven. I'm sorry for the balance of the Jones family, and I hope they'll try and forgive me. He knelt in prayer. He stood unmoving as the black hood was tugged down over his face. He offered no resistance as straps were buckled around his ankles and his crossed arms.

Neal was like a statue as the noose was adjusted around his slender neck. A reporter described what happened next. There was no mistake about the lever operating successfully, and the only reason why the execution was not the height of affection was because the drop failed to dislocate the neck and the life of the body ebbed away rather slowly. It became one hour before doctors in attendance pronounced Ed Neal's body dead.

Modern person that you are, you might think that this grim and awful public spectacle more than satisfied the community's desire for justice, but you'd be wrong because remember a crowd is a living thing and like any living thing, it can become infected. Hate and fury and vengeance can be as contagious as any disease and a crowd infected with that can turn into a mob. Ed Neal was the 10th person legally executed since 1867 when Nebraska entered the union. The word legally matters. Lynchings were a big part of so-called frontier justice in Nebraska. Omaha came in second place in Nebraska City when it came to the numbers of illegal hangings, but Omaha seemed to have a real flair for mob violence and it was public mob violence, not like the private mobs you might associate with the lynching. This was like the whole town going mad in broad daylight, not the hooded KKK creeping out after dark. A few days before Ed Neal was executed in that gruesome botched hanging at the courthouse, another man had been arrested and accused of the rape of a young girl.

That man's name was George Smith. He was a 50-year-old porter on the and a black man. The newspapers of the day tripped over each other in a competition for who could dream up the most racist headlines. I don't even want to repeat the words. It was vile, foul stuff and much of the story that was reported turned out to be grossly inaccurate. As I've said before, if you hate the media now, please promise me never get into a time because the press back in the day often had more in common with a carnival barker than it did any notion of ethical journalism. The night of Neal's execution, as his body lay cooling on a slab at the local mortuary, the crowd remained unsatisfied. It's as though watching Neal's body twitch and writhe as he slowly suffocated at the end of that rope only made them hungrier for more. There's a term for that. Bloodlust.

And the crowd that night was caught in its grip. This was a crowd primed to become a mob. After all, hadn't these people just read in the Omaha World Herald that there was every reason for the lynching of a lustful young negro because he was too vile to live? And then, on the very night of Neal's hanging, another newspaper published a story stating that the victim in the George Smith case had died. The fact that this was not true, that the paper had gone to press without fact-checking the story, made no difference. Once a crowd becomes a mob, there's no reasoning with it. The people in that mob that look like your friends and neighbors, they've become something else. Something savage.

Part of a hive mind bent on destruction. The police and city authorities did nothing. By nine o'clock that evening, the mob had grown. It's estimated five to ten thousand people gathered at the county jail. Now officials began demanding that they Even the governor-elect of Nebraska pleaded for peace. It was too late. It took the mob nearly two hours to break into George Smith's jail cell.

They beat the man senseless, then dragged him through the streets of Omaha with a rope tied around his neck. To shouts and cheers, they strung him up on the telegraph wires in front of the opera house. The Omaha Bee wrote that Smith was probably already dead by the time he was lynched. What a small mercy that would be. As Smith's lifeless body dangled from the wires, one by one the mob slowly drifted apart and away, the bloodlust satisfied at last. The people in that mob returned to their homes and carefully refitted the masks of polite civility that they usually wore.

The masks of good people, fundamentally decent and kind and all that. Believe it or not, this terrible tale has two more surprises waiting for you. And if you're thinking, an episode this shameful has got to be one that the people who participated in it were desperate to forget. Think again. First surprise, a museum in Omaha called the Eden Musee put together an exhibit, a life-size detailed wax figure tableau of Ed Neal slaughtering his victims Allen and Dorothy Jones. And the advertisement for this macabre display read, to the public at great expense and trouble we present an attraction this week which at the moment is doubly pertinent that we have a surprise for many people we will not deny.

On the contrary, we expect the name Eden Musee to be in the mouth of everyone interested in the Penny Farm tragedy. We expect to surprise all Nebraska with this attraction. Spectators could start with a look at life-size wax figures of the British Royal Family and then end with a horrible double murder. What a big day out in the heartland that must have been. Second surprise, the ghost of Ed Neal allegedly haunts the bejeebers out of the Douglas County Courthouse to this day. The hazy apparition of the condemned man was seen many times by many different people over the years. According to Clyde Sunblad, one-time clerk of the county court, documents and files locked in the building's vault and inaccessible to all but a few frequently showed signs of being disturbed.

Weirdly, cigarette stubs would be found among the stream papers as well. Folks in Omaha were still chuckling about Ed Neal's ghost right through the 1950s, like it's a fun and colorful folk story. But when they tell it, they almost always, always leave out the part about how an angry mob out for vengeance wasn't satisfied to see Ed Neal hanged. That mob was still hungry, still screaming for blood, and so that mob of people attacked and lynched an innocent man because George Smith was innocent and he had the alibi and the witnesses to prove it. Which makes you wonder if maybe becoming a ghost is a kind of punishment in the afterlife. Choose evil here and be trapped here in this world. No tunnel of white light for you. No reunion with your loved ones who've gone before. No glimpse, not even a peek at the source, at the eternal glory of the creator.

Just your lost and hopeless spirit stuck forever and ever and ever in the dreary place where you made the decision to trade in your soul. Next time on True Weird Stuff. What happens when a man and woman leave everything behind to create a brand new Garden of Eden? Is there any place in this world where the serpent can't That's on the next True Weird Stuff.

This was, uh, I gotta tell you Max, you know, like I could not believe the way the people of that time in that place behaved. I just, I mean, listen, public executions, we have a hard time as modern people wrapping our heads around like packing a picnic and taking the kids to see a person hanged. It's not the public executions that stopped me short, it's that they, they were out for blood. These kindly farmers and pharmacists and train, railroad employees and school teachers and government officials and plumbers, look what they did.

Did you ever hear of a book called The Oxbow Incident? Yeah. And that's very much what this reminded me of because The Oxbow Incident, and it became a movie many years ago, I think 1940s. But anyhow, it was a story of these guys who had heard that this rancher had been murdered and they're going down the road and they come across these three guys who said, who had the cattle with the branding from the rancher who they said was murdered.

So they determined that he murdered the rancher and that they'd stolen the cattle. So they decided, let's hang them. So they hung the three guys and they get down the road a little farther and they find the rancher fully alive. And he said, no, I sold those to them. So it's just this idea of a mob mentality, a mob is never good.

And I wish that we were so evolved that this wasn't still a problem today, but it still is. Frontier justice and mob rule, it is still a problem today. And you know what's interesting? Back then, the mob gathered in the street and became more and more restless and amped each other, amped each other, amped each other, amped each other until an act of unbelievable violence and savagery went down and an instant man lost his life. Today, social media takes the place of the city street, right?

People are on social sites and they're they're amping each other up and feeding that hatred and that distrust because there's no such thing as a happy mob or a good mob, right? Like at no time in human history has a crowd of people turned into a mob hellbent on cleaning the beach. It always ends badly. At no time do you get a mob of townspeople delivered goods to the food bank. No, a mob, a mob is a way for decent, civilized people to drop the mask of goodness that they wear every freaking day and give in to their most base, dark animal impulses. That's what a mob is.

So there were so many aspects of this story. I mean, you could do a whole fun folksy tale on the haunted courthouse, but when you know what really happened with Ed Neal, it's not fun to me. Like it's not, oh, the courthouse is haunted. And the people who committed the mob who did this, because a mob is faceless, right? An individual committing a crime, we can point to you and say your name, but a mob is a faceless thing. The people that participated in that had no shame because if they did, we wouldn't have had a dazzling wax figure attraction at the local museum that was a sellout success.

I've got to tell you that that was the most shocking thing about this to me. I mean, you're taking somebody notorious like that and you're making a wax figure of them committing the crimes? What? Yes. And the two people, so let me start, I'll start from the top. So Allen and Dorothy Jones were very old, like at a time when most men didn't live to see 50, especially if you had a hard life of physical labor out in the elements, right?

They were old. They had no enemies. They basically were babysitting the house for a bit and they lost their lives in this just shitty act of greed. I mean, I hear the patrons saying of True Weird Stuff, Marge Gunderson in my head all the time, you did all this for a little bit of money? Because that's what it came down to, right?

It is. But check this out, Max. This was a first. So Joe Schellenberger was not in Omaha. He wasn't in Nebraska at the time the crimes were committed. He was actually in a jail cell, another state over. And thank God for the sheriff of that county who called the police chief in Omaha and said, you got the wrong guy. This guy is innocent. Why did he confess?

Yes. We suffer from this right up until this modern moment, the phenomenon of false confessions. It does happen. So Schellenberger, his nickname was Simple Joe. Oh, I got it figured out now. And the police chief in Omaha, when I tell you that this was a community that was out for blood, they were out for blood before an arrest was made. And the police chief knew that he needed to get a suspect and a conviction for the murders at the Penny Farm. He knew Schellenberger wasn't telling the truth, but he needed a conviction. And that is some dirty dog police work right there.

It was a bogus confession. And it was allowed, that whole charade was allowed to happen. That happens today. We see this happen all the time. We even have, like I think there's a whole branch of the Innocence Project, isn't there, that works on the phenomenon of false confessions? Right. Because you have a lot of people sometimes who are so worn down and especially if they are not critical thinkers.

And they're scared. And they are people pleasers. And they go, is this what you want me to say so I can go home? Because I'll say this if that's what you want me to say. And then I'll be able to go home. And that's how you get some false confessions. This cop, Weber Seavey, pretty legendary, pretty legendary officer of the law in terms of just his career. I mean, he had kind of a legendary career. And here's what I mean by this is a first. So back then, back in the day, 150 years ago or so, it was very, very common to not give people's first and last names. So you would get a last name, and a date and a location. And then you have to tunnel back through other kinds of documents and records to match up. Is this the right Seavey? Is that the right Neal? You follow what I'm saying?

So I'm trying to confirm that I have the right police chief. And his ancestors, I guess maybe his great, great grandchildren have a tribute Facebook tribute page to him. Oh, wow. I've never in all of our true weird travels, I've never come across that before. And so I know it sounds like I'm taking a shot at him. But the truth, if you can't handle the truth, then you need therapy. The truth is, is that police chief Seavey extracted a false confession in the hopes of gaining a conviction. It happens. The fact that he did lots and lots of good things in his career doesn't erase the fact that this happened. So I think we can say that without fear of the Seavey family, great, great grandchildren coming for us.

So that was that was interesting to see a lot of times the people in these stories, it was it's like they never existed. They're just swallowed up by time and gone forever. But the Seavey family takes a lot of pride in their great, great grandfather's accomplishments. So we have, you know, we have this tragic loss of life. Ed Neal, that probably is not his real name. By the way, that's just the name he had. And he had a crap life coming up. You know, I think he was spent part of his childhood in a brothel. Man, the Wild West was wild. It does live up to that. And this is, even though it's Omaha, and it's 1890. And we're talking about farmers. That's the Wild West. You know, cattle rustling, horse thieving. This is cowboy movie stuff. And then you layer into it the lynching of George Smith, who is also known in the history books, if you look as Joe Coe. That man, you know, that man was murdered. He was murdered.

Yeah, just plain and simple. That man 50 years. First of all, he's 50 years old. He has an alibi. There are witnesses attesting that he was not where they said he was did not do what he said he did. And the newspapers of the day did nothing but pour gasoline on that fire. They the racist headlines, the racist editorials, the failure to fact check a single detail, they just went to print with whatever the frick they thought would sell newspapers.

And that man paid for that with his life. The third victim of the penny farm murders is George Smith. And it's wild to me that in the telling in the of Ed Neal, that it's this folksy ghost story. And that we have somehow managed to, you know, get that good old fashioned amnesia about the true details. And in a lot of ways, the news reporting media today is very much like it was back then. I mean, it's about the story. It's about whatever is going to get the most people to either read your newspaper or view your telecast. It's all clicks and likes, right? Right. I mean, we it makes me kind of this story made me sad in so many ways. One of the things that I was saddest about is how brief our moment of glory was as a people. Because we're, I'm with you, I feel like we're descending right back to frontier justice, and carnival shit show media.

And, you know, mobs, mobs deciding, you know, how things are going to go. It's so depressing. I mean, I literally was weepy. With this one, the crime itself, to get back to that, the the initial crime of stealing, and you talked about the quote from Fargo, I thought I just I had that in cold blood that murder, the clutter murder in Kansas went through my mind to that you had, you know, anytime you have any sort of theft, just don't kill people, take whatever you want and go, you know, and, and they didn't even sell the animals for what they were worth, which this is why like, I'm so exhausted with how stupid criminals are, they're just so freaking stupid. Their stupidity is exceeded only by their casual violence. Do you not think that it causes people to gossip at the stockyard, when you're selling cattle and horses for a fraction of their market value? Well, and then of course, they're branded with that ranchers brand.

You know, just the kid in the pawn shop, Chanel. Yeah. And I want to shout out our voice actors in this episode. Doc, Kary Bowser, our producer, Kary Bowser played Chanel, the pawn shop employee who should have been in law enforcement. The kid had such attention to detail. He was so super observant. And my favorite thing that Chanel did. So anytime in true weird stuff, we have a person saying words, those are verbatim what they said, either in an interview or on the stand or in a publication like those, those are their verbatim words. We don't make up dialogue for these characters. Chanel was like, I could tell his coat was fake. This kid had it all going on. He was a really critical part of breaking the case. Because the weapon that Dorothy and Allen was killed with was a 38 caliber Smith and Wesson, which is the weapon that Ed Neal showed Chanel kind of bragged about in the pawn shop. So Kary Bowser played Chanel. I dragged my husband Kevin Nash off of his recovery for his orthosurgery to play the part of Schellenberger. And we got Zane Nash who played Aesop Wilson in the Mother and Ghost episode to come in and play Ed Neal.

Ed Neal was convicted of double murder and hanged before his 30th birthday. Time, the Wild West was wild. Yeah, I mean, these are very, these are very often, these are people that are just starting their adult lives. And I know that people grew up faster back then, blah, blah, blah, but still, still, the tragedy in every direction in this story. I don't think there's a single hero in this entire tale. How about you? No, there really isn't. I haven't thought about that. But usually you can find some one person, you can say, well, this, this person has some redeeming qualities, we shall, you know, we shall feel better about humanity, because this one person stands out.

You don't have any of that in this, do you? The closest we can get is young Charlie Root going to his dad and saying, there's something weird happening on the penny farm, which is how the alarm got raised. Because Charlie, Charlie was a real friendly kid. And he, you know, there's not a lot to do out there on the prairie. And he looked forward every day to chatting with Allen or Dorothy.

So he was the he was a good, you know, he's a kid, you raise the alarm. The only other heroic behavior in this entire episode came from the sheriff in Missouri, who called the chief of police CV and said, Joe Schellenberger didn't do anything. I he was here, I can prove it. You got to let him go. If that man had not done that, think how differently this whole thing would have played out potentially. Yeah. That's as close as we get to a hero. Yep. I guess they would have they would have ended up killing both of them. I mean, I mean, hanging both of them. Neal and Schellenberger. I think so. Yeah, I think Schellenberger Neal might have skated because they positioned Schellenberger was the shooter. And he's simple Joe, I don't think he had a lot of credibility. I don't know what it's like in the old days. But I know now if you're in the commission of a crime, and there's two of you, and you're like, let's just say you're doing an armed robbery, and your partner kills the people, you know, the people that they're they're robbing at the convenience store, let's just say, you are charged with murder, even though you didn't pull the trigger, because you were in the commission of that crime, you will be charged with murder as well. Schellenberger Yeah, to your point, Schellenberger, they would have hanged him too.

And, you know, these are people that are long, long, long dead. But I spent so much time with these characters, that I get all kinds of feelings for them. And I felt so sorry for Joe Schellenberger. I just like, he just bounced from one piss poor piece of judgment to the next. He had a hard time saying no, he was easily manipulated, you know, easily persuaded to do things to come along and go along and get along. And the thought that he might have been hanged for nothing makes you want to cry. You know, there's so many lost souls knocking about on the edges of these stories.

And that's the feeling, isn't it that you get like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, and I think the thing about the mob mentality, it's kind of like, it reminds me of what happened in Nazi Germany, the people, I mean, Adolf Eichmann, the guy who was ordering the killing of the Jews, he was a hardware salesman before the war. So these a lot, you know, you take somebody that if World War Two had never happened, he probably would have sold hardware until he died, you know, and we never would have known what a monster he is. The same is true with these people in this mob.

I mean, they went back. Yeah, they put their masks back on. Yeah. And went back to, you know, selling you a pound of flour at the mercantile or whatever. Like, it's terrifying to think about. And it's something it's one of those things that fascinates me, the way you can have a handful of people. And you can have a crowd.

But you, you inject one drop of rage into that crowd. And now you have something that is seething and alive and immune to reason. Can't reason with a mob. There's a, there's a great line. I was in a play called Judgment at Nuremberg, and there's a great line in it. And the judge, I played the judge, and there's a speech that he has. And he says, look, if he said it'd be one thing if all of these people and there were all kinds of judges and whatnot that were before him that had committed these atrocities in Germany, he said it'd be one thing if these people were monsters. But they're not. Do you know what I mean? Not monsters like, like a Charles Manson or a Jeffrey Dahmer or one of those kinds of monsters.

These people are the people that we, that walk among us. And the weird thing about this, and the thing that's really haunting is you realize that when the right set of circumstances happen, those people you brush up against at the grocery store, at the dry cleaners, at the DMV, are people that are capable of these monstrous things. People you see today are capable of that.

Because we all wear a mask. I mean, we, we are, we like to pretend that we're not, we're animals, we're mammals. And we've been carefully socialized as to how to live in large groups of other mammals, right? We, we know how to use utensils when we eat. We remember to put pants on when we leave the house. We play by a whole complex system of rules and regulations that keep us from turning on each other. If you're honest, that's kind of what what happens.

That's the whole point of civilization is to keep you from turning on each other. So what happens and there are all sorts of fascinating experiments. What happens when you crowd too many people together? Well, they have a tendency to turn on each other. What happens when you when you crowd a bunch of people together, and you charge an electrical current of that's when you get a mob and you get looting. Like for example, the phenomenon is a great example.

So Max and I, Max is a big Philly sports fan. And of course, that's the city of my birth. And we joke like you really want the Phillies to win the World Series. You really want the Eagles to win the Super Bowl. It's just you're worried about the burning and looting afterward. And, you know, it's kind of like everybody from Philly, like we all laugh about it. We're like, we love this town so much. We're going to burn it down. But that's that mob mentality that takes over and overrides. People from Philadelphia think they're supposed to act that way. Well, they think we're going to act this way. I think we're supposed to. But you're right.

That is the thing that haunts me about the potentially winning another World Series. Well, when I was a kid and the Phillies won the World Series, I mean, there was it was that was like all the news. The news was rioters on Market Street after the Phillies win. That was that was I mean, they had been in existence for almost 100 years and had never won the World Series when you were a kid and won the World Series. So it was even heightened more. Oh, yeah. I mean, if it's been 100 years, are you not allowed to burn down a CBS? Hello.

I thought this was. Yeah, we we all wear if you think about it, like be real, be real with yourself for just one hot second, true weirdos. We all put a mask on every single day and we adjust it very carefully. The mask that reminds us to slow down when the kid runs in front of the car when we're crossing through the neighborhood. The mask that reminds us that no matter how impatient we are with the older person in front of us at the checkout line, we can't kneecap them.

Right. The the mask that makes us pay our taxes and stop at red lights and pay for what we're taking out of the store, like a million, a gazillion little and big things. But you become part of a mob and now no one can see your face. No one's sure if that's you in and all of that inarticulate anger and frustration, all of those appetites that you have so carefully suppressed and groomed and redirected and restrained. Well, anything goes when you're in a mob and the responsibility is it's there's enough responsibility to go around. So I'm absolved a little bit of some of this because, well, they're doing it.

OK, but but they're doing it, too. And you have cover. Humans are really, really good at a couple of things. One of them is hypocrisy. The other is rationalization. And the third, of course, would be projection. But let's talk about rationalization here. It is now it's like ten o'clock at night in downtown Omaha and the crowd is surging and they are pulling their ripping the bars off this cell door to get to this poor man who is terrified and innocent and has done nothing to anyone. Right. You're in that mob.

Now, you maybe never laid your hands on George. And that's how you defend yourself. Oh, I was there. I was I was trying to get home. And I mean, there were people everywhere. Oh, terrible. Do you know how many people in that mob the next day when they woke up in their little houses and put their masks back on? How many people had a story to tell themselves to excuse their behavior? All of them, all of them, how many? That's how many. And then just when you think, well, here's a shameful episode that we're going to kick under the carpet.

Huh? No. We put on our Sunday best and we go march our kids and ourselves past. Oh, look, there's the queen or the king. I guess it would have been a king. Right. In 1891, there's the king of England. Oh, and there's Dorothy Jones face down on the floor with two bullet holes in her back. So incredibly lifelike and realistic. The name Eden Musee will be in every Nebraskans mouth like that. It's it's not just that they didn't feel shame.

Like it's shameless. It's the most brazen, shameless. It's Twilight Zone. It's a Twilight Zone episode. Hmm. My my other favorite name from this episode was the name Ezra Millard. I can't imagine having that name today and being in middle school. That's the Millard family. Of course, you know, if you're if you go to Omaha, Millard's a neighborhood that the city grew and grew and grew and grew and grew until it swallowed the little town of Millard up. As for Millard, such a fascinating that's another fascinating American story. But there's no there's no real like and then they killed everybody who are and then he invented water. His family came over before America was America. They came over in the 1700s, early 1700s. And they were incredibly industrious and hardworking and entrepreneurial. And they just really went to town on the American dream. And Ezra Millard bought that town, named it for himself and built it. And when I was telling my husband about this episode, he's like, wait a minute.

If all the city streets in Millard ran parallel to the train tracks, how did anybody get anywhere? Well, it's a good question. It is. I need you. I need you to think about a cowboy movie. Close your eyes. Not if you're driving. Close your eyes. You know how in like even in Little House on the Prairie, the town had one street and there were some shops and a saloon and sheriff's office and maybe a doctor's office. And on the other side of the street, there'd be some businesses and like, you know, a brothel and a pharmacy. The town was so rural that they didn't need to run in one direction. And you went out of town in the other direction.

You've got that railroad track getting in the way on those those streets that would be perpendicular to it. Right. Yeah. It's it's a wild little wacky detail. But Ezra Millard, he was one of those he's one of those like solid examples of American can do. People came to this country and they took advantage of everything the new world had to offer.

Sherry, could we please have him be the good guy in this story? So I can one hero. So so when we finish this, I can feel good about something. Yeah. He you know, he is he is a shining example of what people talk about, you know, when they talk about coming here and dreams coming true. Yeah. Now he's fourth generation.

So he benefited from that. You know, he had three generations of Millard's before him who were doing quite well in the new world. But yeah, I guess he's as close to a hero as we get. You know, I this is I see a lot of disgusting, like really unethical, gross journalism. But this this one really is something I mean, don't even bother to fact check it.

No, the blood is on the hands of that angry mob. The blood is on the hands of those two newspapers and everyone associated with them. And on the civic leaders and law enforcement, because what are they doing waiting till nine o'clock at night when there are nearly 10,000 people amassed to blow the whistle? You want to tell me that you explain that one to me. You let it get to that point. You knew at that point you knew when you said you people need to go home that nobody was listening. At that point, the mob was fully formed and mature and ready to go. So there's so much blood on so many people's hands. And and then you know, we went to the wax museum.

Yeah. Where we recreate we recreated these horrific crimes, because I can't you know, what's the modern equivalent? Like what's our most recent? Oh, um, Lori Vallow, and Chad Daybell, killing Lori's two children, and burying them in the backyard in Rexburg, Idaho. I want you to imagine the town of Rexburg, Idaho announcing that Rexburg's museum would be in everyone's mouth because you could come see in lifelike detail, the wax tableau of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell, putting these two kids in the ground. That's the that's what this was in Omaha back then. Sure. I can't say that I wouldn't go. Well, it would be research and you'd get reimbursed.

Okay, would I? Okay, I would get you some paper receipts. So thank you. Well, and a refrigerator magnet. Promise. At least a key chain. Thank you. That's why I love you. So yeah, yeah. I guess the best we can hope for, since we both feel that things are devolving. I guess the best we can hope for is that each and every person listening to this right now will think twice before getting carried along by a surging tide of their furious fellow citizens. Because remember, if you learn nothing else, remember this, a mob has never mobilized to do good.

And you don't want to be a part of that ever, ever, ever. So that wraps up this episode of true weird stuff. Got a wild one for you next week. I mean, a wild one for you next week. Well, you're gonna go to it. You're gonna go there's just no chance this is true. And I'm here to tell you, the weirder and more bizarre and more vile the behavior, the more likely it is to be true. I know you were hoping the opposite. We'll see you next time on true weird stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review true weird stuff, hit our website, true weird stuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true weird stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr.

Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Shane Nash. Copyright 2024 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.