Missouri & North Carolina : Love Songs and Death

This episode of Foul Play explores two haunting true crime stories from post-Civil War America, both centered on love, violence, and the enduring legacy of women killed by men they loved. In Missouri, 1877, Martha Parrish, a 58-year-old doctor’s wife, is murdered on a dirt road while trying to rescue her daughter Susan from her abusive husband, James Hayden Brown. Brown, a violent man with a criminal family history, kills Martha in a fit of rage after she intervenes. His wife Susan, devastated and trapped in a cycle of abuse, later takes her own life and is buried in the same coffin as Brown, their hands arranged in an embrace—a powerful symbol of love that defies logic. In North Carolina, 1892, 18-year-old Ellen Smith is lured to the woods behind the Zinzendorf Hotel by Peter de Graff, who denies paternity of her child and threatens her. She is murdered, and her body is found with her apron hung on a branch and a note in her pocket. De Graff is arrested, convicted, and executed, but his final words—'I killed Ellen. I loved her'—and the subsequent rise of the folk ballad 'Poor Ellen Smith' ensure her story survives. The song, passed down through generations, becomes a lasting monument to a woman who might otherwise have been forgotten. Both cases reveal how domestic violence, lack of legal protection, and societal silence shaped women’s lives in the 19th century, while also showing how stories—through burial, memory, and music—can outlive tragedy.