Los Angeles. October, 1931.

Somewhere in the desert night, on the overnight train from Phoenix, a sleepy baggageman notices something seeping from the corner of a trunk. He's seen this before — hunters are always trying to sneak deer meat past the railroad. So he writes out two red warning cards, tags the trunks, and goes about his work.

By Monday noon, a calm, well-dressed young woman is standing at the baggage window of the Southern Pacific station, asking for those trunks. The baggage master won't release them. He asks her to open them. She doesn't have the keys, she says — she'll be right back.

She never comes back.

What unfolds over the next seventy-two hours will become the biggest crime story in America — a story of two trunks, a bandaged hand, a devoted little brother asked for one impossible favor, and a woman who steps out of a Ford roadster into the lunch-hour crowds on Broadway... and vanishes. In the same week the whole country dims its lights for Thomas Edison, a hundred detectives are hunting one twenty-six-year-old minister's daughter through the dark.

This is Part One of the case the newspapers called the Trunk Murders.

A correction: in this episode I say this story will be told in two parts. I was wrong — there's simply too much story. The Trunk Murders will be a three-part series.

Content warning: this episode deals with the murder of two young women and includes descriptions of violence, including dismemberment. Listener discretion is advised.

If you have information about this case, or a forgotten case that deserves an episode, visit Section29.com.

Music: TrackTribe (Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, Fred Beteille — tracktribe.com), plus "Smoking Noir," "Stalking My Next Victim," and "True Crime Mystery Music" by Joel Fazhari, "Mystery Investigation Documentary Music" by Tunetank, and "Energy Rock" by Jonas Blakewood, free under the Pixabay Content License.

We use AI tools to enhance the narration and edit the audio on this show.