In October 1882, Kentucky Gov. Luke Blackburn sent state troops into Eastern Kentucky to protect two condemned men awaiting retrial — one of the largest military deployments the commonwealth had ever made over a criminal case.

Newspapers reported he had said the troops were there to support the dignity of the law, if the whole of Boyd County had to be killed protecting the prisoners. A later state report argued the words were wrongly attributed to him. It hardly mattered. Someone had already hanged Blackburn in effigy from the same sycamore where George Ellis was lynched.

When a mob tore up the railroad between Ashland and Lexington, Major John Allen loaded roughly 180 soldiers — many young and barely trained — and both prisoners aboard a commandeered steamboat called the Granite State. People gathered along the Ashland bank to see it pass. Then all hell broke loose.

At least five civilians were killed when soldiers fired their guns into the crowd. Most were bystanders. The soldiers and the official report describe the steamboat being fired on first from the shore; witnesses at the coroner's inquest testified no organized gunfire came from the bank at all. Both accounts are in the record, and they cannot both be right. The jury found Allen culpable. Nothing came of it, and he was later promoted.

The series concludes with the retrials in Carter County and the executions of Ellis Craft in 1883 and William Neal in 1885 — three years, three months and three days after the infamous child murders that became known as the Ashland Tragedy.

Hosts Marcus Roland and Emily Steele are joined by historian Joe Castle.

This is Part 4, the final installment, of a four-part series.

Keywords: Kentucky true crime, Kentucky Case Files, Ashland Tragedy, Granite State incident, Ashland Kentucky, Boyd County, Kentucky State Guard, Luke Blackburn, Major John Allen, militia shooting, Ellis Craft, William Neal, Carter County, Grayson Kentucky, due process, historical true crime, Joe Castle, true crime podcast, Kentucky history podcast

On Jan. 3, 1882 — the day after three men were arrested for the Ashland murders — as many as 1,500 people descended on Catlettsburg, Ky., for a preliminary hearing. That is more than the population of the town itself.

The railroads ran extra trains. People came from 50 and 60 miles away. Business in the town stopped entirely. Then the court delayed for want of witnesses, and by 10 that night reporters were writing that a crowd had gathered at the public square and there were fears of trouble before morning.

The next day, 77 newspapers across the country carried the story, most on the front page. Editorials openly questioned whether men accused of murdering children deserved the protection of the courts at all. Ashland's leaders spent that winter fighting on two fronts — keeping their own neighbors from lynching the prisoners, and keeping the rest of the country from branding their town a lawless place.

The Ashland Tragedy Case, Pt. 2: Justice covers what happened when the case reached a courtroom: a judge who moved the prisoners downriver using three steamboats and a deception played out in front of thousands of spectators, and two murder trials held less than a month after the crime.

Hosts Marcus Roland and Emily Steele are joined by historian Joe Castle, author of The Ashland Tragedy: Murder, a Mob and a Militia in Kentucky.

Content warning: this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence and sexual assault drawn from trial testimony.

This is Part 2 of a four-part series.

Keywords: Kentucky true crime, Kentucky Case Files, Ashland Tragedy, Ashland Kentucky, Catlettsburg, Boyd County, George Ellis, William Neal, Ellis Craft, 1882 trials, accomplice testimony, Judge George Brown, Ohio River, steamboats, Gilded Age justice, historical true crime, Joe Castle, true crime podcast, Kentucky history podcast

Around 4:30 on the morning of Christmas Eve 1881, a woman in Ashland, Ky., looked toward her neighbor's house and thought she saw lamplight. It was fire.

By the time neighbors forced their way inside, three teenagers were dead: 17-year-old Robbie Gibbons, his 14-year-old sister Fannie, and Fannie's best friend Emma, who had been sent next door the evening before so the Gibbons children wouldn't be alone in the house. Daylight revealed what the darkness had hidden — blood on the bedsheets, an axe and a crowbar matted with hair, an overturned can of coal oil. Three physicians examined the bodies and reached the same conclusion. The children had not died in the fire. The fire had been set to conceal what killed them.

Pt. 1 of The Ashland Tragedy Case follows the first two weeks of an investigation that gripped the nation — and went badly wrong. A citizens' committee hired a respected Ohio detective, who arrived promising to examine every fact before settling on a theory — and settled on one within days: that the children's own father had done it. Newspapers across the country printed it. John Gibbons had been in West Virginia for more than a month. It took a deputy U.S. marshal named James Heflin, a train ride deep into the mountains and a stack of sworn affidavits to prove it. Then an ordinary conversation in an Ashland store cracked the case open for real.

Hosts Marcus Roland and Emily Steele are joined by historian Joe Castle, author of The Ashland Tragedy: Murder, a Mob and a Militia in Kentucky, the definitive work on the case.

This is Part 1 of a three-part series.

Listen at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Keywords: Kentucky true crime, Kentucky Case Files, Ashland Tragedy, Ashland Kentucky, Boyd County, 1881 murders, Gibbons family, Emma Thomas, historical true crime, Ohio River, Gilded Age crime, wrongful accusation, yellow journalism, Joe Castle, true crime podcast, Kentucky history podcast