Missouri & North Carolina: Love Songs and Death

July 1877. A dirt road in rural Missouri. A fifty-eight-year-old woman named Martha Parrish is shot dead by her own son-in-law while trying to rescue her daughter from an abusive marriage. Fifteen years later and five hundred miles east, an eighteen-year-old maid named Ellen Smith is shot behind a luxury hotel in Winston, North Carolina — and someone writes a song about it. Two historical murders. Two women killed by men who claimed to love someone close to them. One ended in a double coffin. The other became a folk song you may have heard without knowing it was real.

Season 40: Twin Portraits — double-feature true crime episodes exploring two historical murders from different American states, connected by a single theme. In Episode 3, the theme is love that kills — and the songs that outlive the dead.

This episode contains discussions of domestic violence, murder, suicide, and public execution. If you need to skip this content, support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

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