Wyoming and New York: Children in the Dock, 1892

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