Episode 1: The Clue of the Blue Bottle

On a spring day in 1919…

a woman’s body was found bound, gagged, and strangled in a garden in Barre, Vermont. Who was she? Who killed her? In this episode, we try to solve a cold case — reopening a century-old murder investigation — as a way to uncover the history of evidence itself. What is a clue? What is a fact? What is a mystery? We put the pieces of the puzzle together: photographs, newspaper articles, a private eye’s notebook, the trial record and, last but not least, a trip to the scene of the crime.

Image: Tire tracks left at the scene of the murder

KEY SOURCES

The Barre Daily Times. You can search old issues here, at the Library of Congress. Or read the first story to report the discovery of the body here. 

James R. Wood’s detective notebooks, in the Wood Detective Agency Records at the Harvard Law School Library. You can read his notes on this case here. 

The crime scene photographs, in the Wood Detective Agency Records. You can search through those here. The very disturbing photograph discussed at the opening of the episode is here. 

State v. Long, 1919. The trial record is held in the Vermont State Archives in Montpelier, and isn’t digitized. But we have posted a little excerpt here. 

The Papers of Maud Wood Park, in the Women’s Rights Collection at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe.

An oral history with a doctor from Barre who lived there in 1918 and 1919 during the Spanish flu pandemic, in the archives of the Vermont Historical Society.