Beginning on Jan. 22, a pair of former Juneau journalists will help guests time travel back to 1909 – with the help of delicious cake.<\/p>\n
Ed Schoenfeld and Betsy Longenbaugh are restarting their series of true crime discussions, called “Death, with Dessert,” similar to a series they hosted before the pandemic.<\/p>\n
“We did three ‘Death by Chocolate’ shows at the (Juneau-Douglas) City Museum,” Longenbaugh said in a phone interview. “That last one was about two weeks before the city shut down for COVID.”<\/p>\n
[Jury selection begins in Yakutat killing trial]<\/ins><\/a><\/p>\n The series will begin with a presentation on Robert Stroud, otherwise known as the Birdman of Alcatraz for his ornithology habit. Stroud, in his capacity as a pimp, murdered a client who had shorted one of his employees on recompense for her services.<\/p>\n “We were really interested in the gap between reality and myth,” Longenbaugh said. “He was really a despicable person. But Thomas Gaddis wrote a very sympathetic portrait.<\/p>\n In “Death by Chocolate,” Longenbaugh and Schoenfeld exhaustively researched three murders that occurred in Juneau in the early 1900s. For “Death, with Dessert,” they’ve branched out slightly, covering two Juneau murders and a dismemberment in Sitka.<\/p>\n “It was a woman who chopped up her husband and threw him out the window not really understanding tides. This was in 1957,” Longenbaugh said. “I grew up in Sitka. I knew there had been a dismemberment, Actually, there’s been a couple. This is the old one.”<\/p>\n The third will focus on the killing of a sex worker in Douglas in 1916, Longenbaugh said, which led to the closing of what was termed “The Restricted District,” where sex workers habitually plied their trade.<\/p>\n “A lot of prostitutes were killed in Juneau. But they often weren’t sex crimes. They were killed for their wealth. People would steal from them. And sometimes kill them,” Schoenfeld said. “Most of them weren’t under the thumb of a pimp. Most of them were independent business women.”<\/p>\n Longenbaugh and Schoenfeld say they research their topics exhaustively, spending hours gathering data and preparing their presentation.<\/p>\n “It takes 200 hours per show, maybe more,” Schoenfeld laughed. “This is not how you make money.”<\/p>\n