History With a Little Mystery

Another episode of Historic Murders of Portland goes live at noon, Tuesday, August 7, 2019! In this new episode, my first in a week, delves into the 1920 murder of a shop owner, August Bjorkland, in northwest Portland (today the Slabtown area) at the hands of his wife, Frankie. This is a crazy story initially, as it seems, planed to just be a suicide that turned into a murder/suicide. A tragic tale of a neglected wife unhinged. Enjoy!

The next episode in my series set to premiere live tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. sharp! This is definitely an interesting case in the series and one that stands apart from previous old cases I have covered. In short, a woman living in Los Angeles in the late 1920s contacted the local police to admit her part in a murder that she had reported committed with another man in Portland near the old Circle Theater. Why someone would openly admit to a murder that she wasn't even under suspicion for was bizarre enough to authorities but once local police started looking into the matter in Portland the whole situation only got stranger and stranger. Be sure to check in tomorrow morning (or whenever cause the video will obviously stay on my channel after its premiere)!

ANOTHER FRESH VIDEO PREMIERING TOMORROW (SUNDAY) AT 12 NOON! Usually I post earlier but I know y'all like that whole sleeping in thing on the weekend. But this episode of Historic Murders of Portland was a fun one from the chaos of the story involved, where the real story isn't going to be fully known till the very end, to the chaos of trying to make the video. You get to see my hair change drastically as the area I wanted to film was blocked off when I first started shooting and then my phone died. Thus I came back like a month later to finish the video when the Eastbank Esplenade was opened back up. This video chronicles the story of a young woman named Helen Leary who, in 1922, worked in a restaurant in that industrial area just east side of the Willamette River from downtown. While working there she met a man in his 60s named Cash Weir who was a man of the sea who lived on a houseboat near where the Morrison Bridge crosses the Willamette. Cash then introduced Helen to his s...

GOING LIVE AT 10 AM JULY 12TH, 2019! Premiering live on YouTube, this is my newest installment in my ongoing Historic Murders of Portland series. In this one I go back to the 1920s and tell the story of a man gone crazy by misguided ideas of love and vengeance that would lead him to taking over a hotel on Burnside Street on the edge of the Alphabet District! Tune in tomorrow at 10 AM! Or catch it any time after as it will be permanently available on my channel after that!

Premiering July 3, 2019 (a little pre-Independence Day content), this fresh installment of my Historic Murders of Portland series was one that really sucked me in. This story followed a Portlander of the early 1880s named Carrie Bradley who ran, let's just say, a "house of ill repute". But in addition to attracting lots of men there to connect with women there was a great deal other crimes occurring in and out of this house, which may have included multiple murders. But the most well known one, the crime that would bring down Carrie Bradley's entire empire, and lots of cronies along with her, would be the brutal murder of James Nelson Brown, slaughtered in a room in Bradley's establishment in 1882. Click on the video below to get the full story!!!

It's been a while since I've used this blog, I think over a year. But I'm planning on utilizing this a bit more in correlation with my YouTube title of Steve the Amateur Historian. I have a YouTube channel under my name with an excess of 400 videos to this point. Lots of content on a variety of different things. Currently I am wrapped up in a probably unhealthy endeavor of looking into old murder cases that have occurred in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. I have produced some 50 videos on different cases for this series and have a good many that have not been published or gone live yet. I also have a playlist on my channel just for the videos in this series. But, anyway, going live at 11:30 a.m. tomorrow morning (in this case July 1, 2019), will be the next video in my series, with the link directly below here. It takes us back to 1924 and the shooting of a security guard named Joseph Coffin who was gunned down by a man named Maynard Cole who was identified as a "poli...

...ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN OCTOBER, 2013... I just want to take a moment to discuss the term “conspiracy theorist”. Obviously, with regards to the assassination of President Kennedy I am a believer in a conspiracy. However, I believe there was a conspiracy involved after studying the case for over 20 years. I have studied, in depth, the evidence and what the case against Lee Harvey Oswald would be, without the biases of those in power and those who would benefit in having him take the fall and presumed guilty in the public’s mind. Having studied the established suspect and been convinced beyond any doubt that he was not an assassin and that if he was involved he was involved which others, which has been denied by the official conclusions, the conclusion to be reached has to be that a conspiracy took place. I believe in certain cases in our country that there was a conspiracy that took place. In further studies I have become convinced that the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. ...