Jan. 27, 2026
Taos, New Mexico: The Headless Body in the Fortress Mansion
On July 3, 1929, U.S. Deputy Marshal Jim Martinez scaled the walls of a fortress-like mansion in the heart of Taos, New Mexico. What he found inside would spark one of the American Southwest's most enduring mysteries—a bloated, headless corpse dressed in the unmistakable clothing of Arthur Rochford Manby, the 70-year-old English con man whom locals considered the most hated person in town.
The hastily convened coroner's jury reached a swift conclusion: natural causes. The severed head, they reasoned, was the work of Manby's starving German police dog. The body was buried that same afternoon in a shallow grave behind the mansion.
Then the witnesses started coming forward. Within days, a dozen credible Taos residents—including prominent artists and businesspeople—reported seeing Arthur Manby alive on July 4th and 5th, a full day after his supposed death and burial. When authorities finally examined the remains more closely, they discovered the head had been severed by a sharp blade, not animal teeth.
Was it murder? Or had the master swindler orchestrated his greatest con—faking his own death to escape decades of enemies and debt?
Timeline of Events
The Manby mystery spans four decades of fraud and violence in New Mexico Territory.
1883—Twenty-four-year-old Arthur Rochford Manby arrives in New Mexico Territory from England, fleeing financial scandals.
1894—Manby begins systematically acquiring interests in the Antonio Martinez Land Grant, a 61,000-acre Spanish colonial holding.
1913—After nearly two decades of manipulation, Manby claims ownership of virtually the entire Martinez Grant.
Late June 1929—Manby disappears from public view. Mail piles up.
July 3, 1929—Deputy Marshal Jim Martinez discovers the headless body. Coroner's jury rules natural causes. Body buried same day.
July 4-5, 1929—Multiple credible witnesses report seeing Manby alive in Taos.
1933—Body exhumed for second examination; forensic experts confirm decapitation was by blade, not animal.
Historical Significance
The Manby case embodies the lawlessness that defined New Mexico's territorial era and the exploitation of Hispanic land grant communities that resonates today. For thirty years, Manby operated within a system that allowed wealthy, connected men to systematically strip generational landowners of their property through legal manipulation. His connections to the "Santa Fe Ring"—a corrupt network of lawyers, judges, and politicians—enabled him to acquire enormous land holdings while avoiding consequences.
Today, the Manby mansion site houses the Taos Center for the Arts. The communities he terrorized never received justice, regardless of whether Manby died in that fortress or escaped to live out his days elsewhere. New Mexico authorities have never officially closed the case.
Sources: Frank Waters, To Possess the Land: A Biography of Arthur Rochford Manby (Swallow Press, 1973); James S. Peters, Headless in Taos; New Mexico State Records Center and Archives (59 folders of Manby case files); Taos News historical coverage.
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WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of July 3, 1929, U.S. Deputy Marshall Jim Martinez stood outside Arthur Rothford Manfee's fortress-like mansion in the heart of Tows, New Mexico.
00:16.078 --> 00:25.971
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd come to serve legal papers to the 70-year-old Englishman, but the moment he approached the back door, he knew something was quite wrong.
00:27.622 --> 00:32.308
[SPEAKER_00]: flies, hundreds of them, blackening the screen door.
00:32.348 --> 00:35.772
[SPEAKER_00]: They're buzzing audible from 20 feet away.
00:37.514 --> 00:39.997
[SPEAKER_00]: Martinez scaled the high Adobe wall.
00:41.038 --> 00:49.648
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside, on a simple army cut, in one of the mansion's 19 rooms, he found a bloated corpse wrapped in a blanket.
00:50.629 --> 00:56.937
[SPEAKER_00]: The body had no head.
00:58.216 --> 01:02.042
[SPEAKER_00]: The right side of the face and lower jaw have been shot away.
01:03.604 --> 01:13.600
[SPEAKER_00]: Man-be's German police dog, Lobo, sat calmly beside the body, which was still dressed in the dead man's unmistakable clothing.
01:14.842 --> 01:21.692
[SPEAKER_00]: Knee high at waist up boots, and red long underwear, with a diamond stick pin, still fastened.
01:22.955 --> 01:29.383
[SPEAKER_00]: Within an hour, a hastily convened coroner's jury, ruled the death natural causes.
01:30.524 --> 01:35.570
[SPEAKER_00]: The dog, they decided, had simply chewed the head off out of hunger.
01:36.972 --> 01:46.583
[SPEAKER_00]: The body was buried the same afternoon in a shallow grave at the back of the property, but then the witnesses started coming forward.
01:49.280 --> 01:51.722
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back, friend, to hometown history.
01:52.483 --> 02:00.450
[SPEAKER_00]: The podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past, to uncover how local stories shaped the world.
02:01.510 --> 02:02.311
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
02:02.972 --> 02:05.334
[SPEAKER_00]: And today, we're exploring Tows, New Mexico.
02:05.354 --> 02:18.645
[SPEAKER_00]: A quiet artist colony that in 1929 found itself at the center of a mystery that remains unsolved, 95 years later.
02:19.587 --> 02:27.434
[SPEAKER_00]: was at the ultimate escape, even now, New Mexico authorities have never definitively closed the case.
02:29.556 --> 02:39.405
[SPEAKER_00]: According to the coroner's jury, Arthur Manby died of natural causes, a heart attack most likely, some time around July 1st.
02:40.546 --> 02:48.733
[SPEAKER_00]: His body had been in that sweltering room for two days.
02:48.713 --> 02:54.500
[SPEAKER_00]: But within days of the burial, witnesses began stepping forward with the problem.
02:55.542 --> 03:00.047
[SPEAKER_00]: They'd seen Arthur man be alive after the body was discovered.
03:01.649 --> 03:16.408
[SPEAKER_00]: A dozen credible residents, including prominent artists and business people, reported encounters with man be on July 4th and 5th.
03:17.536 --> 03:19.639
[SPEAKER_00]: The body itself raised questions.
03:20.480 --> 03:24.326
[SPEAKER_00]: By all accounts, man-be had been quite robust for his age.
03:25.107 --> 03:29.633
[SPEAKER_00]: A stalkie, barrel-chested man, who weighed around 180 pounds.
03:31.055 --> 03:36.523
[SPEAKER_00]: The headless corpse, 5'7, maybe 155 pounds.
03:37.965 --> 03:45.636
[SPEAKER_00]: When Doc Martin finally examined the remains more closely, he found something the initial
03:46.865 --> 03:53.234
[SPEAKER_00]: The body showed signs of decapitation by a sharp instrument, not animal teeth.
03:54.555 --> 04:11.438
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody and Tows seemed particularly surprised that Arthur Manby might have staged his own death, or that someone might have wanted him dead, because for 30 years, Manby had been quite possibly the most hated man in New Mexico.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Arthur Rochford manbe arrived in New Mexico territory in 1883, a 24-years-old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He told folks he was the son of a wealthy British industrialist, with connections to aristocracy.
04:27.197 --> 04:33.004
[SPEAKER_00]: In reality, he had been forced to leave England after repeated financial scandals.
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[SPEAKER_00]: New Mexico offered something London couldn't, opportunity for a man willing to bend the law.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He started small, mining claims, land speculation, business partnerships that somehow always ended with man-be-owning everything and his partners ruined.
04:54.510 --> 05:03.447
[SPEAKER_00]: But in 1894, he discovered a scheme that would define the next 30 years of his life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It had been granted to Spanish settlers in the 1700s under Spanish colonial law, which recognized communal ownership.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe, Adalgo, promised to protect existing Spanish land grants.
05:24.014 --> 05:32.931
[SPEAKER_00]: But the U.S. government required owners to prove their claims under American law, which only recognized individual ownership.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Martinez Grant Ares mostly poor Hispanic families who lived on this land for generations couldn't advocate the complex American legal system.
05:46.156 --> 05:46.917
[SPEAKER_00]: They needed help.
05:46.897 --> 05:49.840
[SPEAKER_00]: Man be offered to be that help.
05:51.141 --> 06:02.551
[SPEAKER_00]: He convinced the airs to sign over their interest in exchange for legal representation and cash payments, small amounts, $20 here, $50 there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These families were desperate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd already lost access to much of their ancestral land, but Man
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[SPEAKER_00]: By 1897, Manbe claimed ownership of virtually the entire Martina's grant.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The original families left with nothing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When some tried to fight back legally, they discovered man-be-hat friends in high places, lawyers, judges, and territorial politicians who were, by all accounts, part of what locals called the Santa Fe Ring, a corrupt network that controlled New Mexico politics
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to court records from the era, at least eight families lost everything to man-be-schemes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some left the territory entirely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Others stayed and seathed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But man-be's fraud extended beyond land.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He sold shares and phantom mining operations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He created fake companies, sold stock, then disappeared when investors demanded returns.
07:20.030 --> 07:28.643
[SPEAKER_00]: By the early 1900s, Arthur Manby had become a one-man crime wave, and then, him the violence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1884, while Manby was still establishing himself in New Mexico, a man named Ross Edmondson was found dead outside Tows.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His head had been severed from his body.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Manby was arrested and charged with murder.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The trial should have been straight forward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Witnesses placed Manby at the scene.
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[SPEAKER_00]: An Edmitsen had been publicly threatening to expose Manby's early business frauds, but Manby's connections to the Santa Fe ring paid off.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was acquitted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't the last time a decapitated body would be connected to Arthur Manby.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Over the next 40 years, by all accounts, at least eight other bodies turned up in northern New Mexico, all decapitated, several connected to Mambi's business dealings or personal disputes, no convictions, no justice, just a mounting pattern that everybody and Tauce knew about, but couldn't prove.
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[SPEAKER_00]: are the early 1910s, things got weirder still.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Manby co-founded what he called a secret society, ostensibly a social club for wealthy men, but according to newspaper accounts from the period, this wasn't a gentleman's club, it was a criminal organization.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The society forced new members through brutal initiation rights, including mocked beheadings.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They terrorized whole towns and villages through intimidation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They ran bootlegging operations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some sources suggest they even offered murder for higher.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In Arthur Manby, by then in his 50s, sat at the center of it all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine living in a small town, where everyone knew a wealthy, connected man, was literally getting away with murder.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Any parent would understand that kind of fear.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You teach your children to avoid them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You'd cross the street when you saw him coming.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But you couldn't leave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This was your home.
09:47.602 --> 09:53.528
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1920, Mambi's reputation was so dark that he'd effectively become a pariah.
09:54.740 --> 10:09.527
[SPEAKER_00]: He retreated to his fortress mansion on Taos' main plaza, 19 rooms, high Adobe walls, iron barred windows, and that German police dog that never left his side.
10:10.749 --> 10:12.192
[SPEAKER_00]: He was preparing for war.
10:14.180 --> 10:23.055
[SPEAKER_00]: For the last decade of his life, or what everyone thought was the last decade of his life, Arthur mayn't be lived like a man under siege.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He barricaded himself inside the mansion, multiple locks on every door.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Those iron bars on every window.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He slept with weapons.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The dog Lobo was trained to attack on command.
10:40.471 --> 10:48.760
[SPEAKER_00]: Man be rarely left the property, and when he did, he'd return hours later, glancing over his shoulder the entire way back.
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[SPEAKER_00]: was it paranoia, not entirely, man-be-had real enemies, lots of them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The families he defrauded, the investors, he'd swindled.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The secret society members who turned against him are the late 1920s, why do few people had reason to want Arthur man-be dead?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Despite his isolation, man be still conducted business, he still filed lawsuits, dozens of them actually, trying to defend his land claims against mounting legal challenges, he still wrote letters, he still had visitors, though not many.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of those visitors was a woman named Tara Cia Ferguson.
11:38.947 --> 11:43.777
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd been involved with Mambi since she was quite young, 14 by some accounts.
11:44.678 --> 11:52.294
[SPEAKER_00]: And by 1929 she was living part time at the mansion, helping to care for the increasingly erratic old man.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ferguson later told investigators that man had become obsessed with the idea that someone was trying to poison him.
12:01.847 --> 12:04.130
[SPEAKER_00]: He tastes his food carefully before eating.
12:05.011 --> 12:06.873
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd smell the water before drinking.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some nights, he'd hear noises outside, and spend hours sitting in the dark with his rifle, waiting for an attack that never came.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When you've spent 40 years making enemies, that level of fear might not be entirely irrational.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then, in late June 1929, Arthur Manby disappeared from public view.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No one saw him leave the mansion, no one saw him around town, his male piled up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His dog was hurt barking at odd hours.
12:44.821 --> 12:52.268
[SPEAKER_00]: Until July 3, when Deputy Marshall Martinez climbed that wall and found the headless body.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The identification should have been simple.
12:57.688 --> 13:00.373
[SPEAKER_00]: The body was dressed in man-be's distinctive clothing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was found in man-be's locked mansion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The diamond-stick pen, alone, should have been proof enough.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But then the witnesses came forward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Joseph Henry Sharp, a respected artist and founding member of the Tows Art Colony.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Swarheets seen Arthur Mambi walking down the street.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On July 4th, the day after the burial
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[SPEAKER_00]: other artists, business people, and residents backed up Sharps account.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They described encounters with man-being on July 4th and 5th, some had conversations with him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These weren't unreliable witnesses or people with grudges, but
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[SPEAKER_00]: These were credible prominent members of the community.
13:49.097 --> 13:56.531
[SPEAKER_00]: According to newspaper reports, at least a dozen people claimed to have seen man be alive after his supposed death.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some witnesses say he was heading south toward the Colorado border.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Others claimed he was making arrangements to leave the country entirely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the weeks before the body was discovered, man-be-head liquidated several assets, selling property, closing accounts, converting investments to cash.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's believed he accumulated somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000, a substantial fortune in 1929.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That money was never found.
14:32.030 --> 14:36.398
[SPEAKER_00]: The body itself raised more questions, the longer people looked at it.
14:37.420 --> 14:44.775
[SPEAKER_00]: Doc Martin's examination revealed not just the size discrepancy, but other details that didn't quite match.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The hands were rougher than Mambi's well-documented soft aristocratic hands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The feet didn't match the size of boots, typically war.
14:55.283 --> 15:02.658
[SPEAKER_00]: They were Mambies, certainly, but they were also the perfect props for staging a death.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Natural causes, dog chewed the head off, case closed, body buried same day.
15:13.593 --> 15:19.780
[SPEAKER_00]: It's believed that three members of the original coroner's jury had financial ties to manbie.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They benefited from his land schemes over the years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They had reason to help him disappear if that's what he wanted.
15:29.330 --> 15:35.436
[SPEAKER_00]: But if manbie staged his death and escaped with $40,000, where did he go?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And whose body did he use?
15:41.251 --> 15:46.821
[SPEAKER_00]: After mounting pressure, authorities exhumed the body for a second examination in 1933.
15:48.544 --> 15:53.112
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted definite answers, was this Arthur Mambi or not?
15:54.375 --> 15:56.779
[SPEAKER_00]: The examination was inconclusive.
15:56.759 --> 16:03.369
[SPEAKER_00]: After four years in the ground, the remains were too deteriorated for certain identification.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, this was decades before DNA testing, but the forensic experts did confirm one thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The head had been severed by a blade, not by a dog.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had decapitated this person deliberately,
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[SPEAKER_00]: the case went cold.
16:24.537 --> 16:29.524
[SPEAKER_00]: Arthur Mambi was declared legally dead as a state dispersed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His land claims eventually resolved through other channels, but the questions never went away.
16:36.635 --> 16:42.443
[SPEAKER_00]: To this day, New Mexico authorities have never officially solved the case.
16:43.233 --> 16:55.664
[SPEAKER_00]: was the body and the grave author, Mambi, murdered by one of his many enemies, or wasn't an unknown victim whose body Mambi used to fake his death and escape justice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Both theories have their evidence.
17:00.395 --> 17:05.666
[SPEAKER_00]: whether man be died in that fortress or escaped to live out his days somewhere else.
17:06.749 --> 17:11.519
[SPEAKER_00]: The communities he terrorized for 30 years finally got peace.
17:12.762 --> 17:16.971
[SPEAKER_00]: The land grant families, though they never recovered what they'd lost.
17:17.973 --> 17:20.378
[SPEAKER_00]: At least they didn't have to fear him anymore.
17:21.725 --> 17:26.071
[SPEAKER_00]: Taos began healing from three decades of corruption and violence.
17:27.313 --> 17:32.360
[SPEAKER_00]: Today you can still walk past a location of Manby's mansion in downtown Taos.
17:33.962 --> 17:45.218
[SPEAKER_00]: The building itself is long gone, replaced by newer structures that serve the thriving arch community that ultimately came to define this town.
17:46.767 --> 17:53.438
[SPEAKER_00]: but folks who study New Mexico history still debate what really happened on that July night in 1929.
17:55.161 --> 17:55.902
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it murder?
17:56.784 --> 17:57.585
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it escape?
17:58.386 --> 18:04.837
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it one final elaborate fraud from a man who'd spent his whole life manipulating the truth?
18:06.360 --> 18:09.244
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe that's the perfect ending for Arthur Manby's story.
18:10.587 --> 18:12.690
[SPEAKER_00]: Appropriate that we don't know for certain,
18:14.054 --> 18:25.264
[SPEAKER_00]: He lived in shadows, he died, or disappeared, in shadows, and 95 years later, he still keeping his secrets.
18:27.386 --> 18:40.939
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the story of Arthur Mambi and Tauce New Mexico, a telefront to your fraud, decapitated bodies, and a mysterious death that still hasn't been solved.
18:40.919 --> 18:48.709
[SPEAKER_00]: If you found this story as haunting as I did, share it with someone who loves unsolved mysteries from America's past.
18:50.291 --> 18:51.132
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
18:51.913 --> 18:53.434
[SPEAKER_00]: Every hometown has a story.
18:54.496 --> 18:55.637
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight it's Tows.
18:56.438 --> 18:58.320
[SPEAKER_00]: And the man nobody could trust.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not even in death.
19:02.025 --> 19:02.826
[SPEAKER_00]: Good night friend.
00:02.140 --> 00:14.736
[SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of July 3, 1929, U.S. Deputy Marshall Jim Martinez stood outside Arthur Rothford Manfee's fortress-like mansion in the heart of Tows, New Mexico.
00:16.078 --> 00:25.971
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd come to serve legal papers to the 70-year-old Englishman, but the moment he approached the back door, he knew something was quite wrong.
00:27.622 --> 00:32.308
[SPEAKER_00]: flies, hundreds of them, blackening the screen door.
00:32.348 --> 00:35.772
[SPEAKER_00]: They're buzzing audible from 20 feet away.
00:37.514 --> 00:39.997
[SPEAKER_00]: Martinez scaled the high Adobe wall.
00:41.038 --> 00:49.648
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside, on a simple army cut, in one of the mansion's 19 rooms, he found a bloated corpse wrapped in a blanket.
00:50.629 --> 00:56.937
[SPEAKER_00]: The body had no head.
00:58.216 --> 01:02.042
[SPEAKER_00]: The right side of the face and lower jaw have been shot away.
01:03.604 --> 01:13.600
[SPEAKER_00]: Man-be's German police dog, Lobo, sat calmly beside the body, which was still dressed in the dead man's unmistakable clothing.
01:14.842 --> 01:21.692
[SPEAKER_00]: Knee high at waist up boots, and red long underwear, with a diamond stick pin, still fastened.
01:22.955 --> 01:29.383
[SPEAKER_00]: Within an hour, a hastily convened coroner's jury, ruled the death natural causes.
01:30.524 --> 01:35.570
[SPEAKER_00]: The dog, they decided, had simply chewed the head off out of hunger.
01:36.972 --> 01:46.583
[SPEAKER_00]: The body was buried the same afternoon in a shallow grave at the back of the property, but then the witnesses started coming forward.
01:49.280 --> 01:51.722
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back, friend, to hometown history.
01:52.483 --> 02:00.450
[SPEAKER_00]: The podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past, to uncover how local stories shaped the world.
02:01.510 --> 02:02.311
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
02:02.972 --> 02:05.334
[SPEAKER_00]: And today, we're exploring Tows, New Mexico.
02:05.354 --> 02:18.645
[SPEAKER_00]: A quiet artist colony that in 1929 found itself at the center of a mystery that remains unsolved, 95 years later.
02:19.587 --> 02:27.434
[SPEAKER_00]: was at the ultimate escape, even now, New Mexico authorities have never definitively closed the case.
02:29.556 --> 02:39.405
[SPEAKER_00]: According to the coroner's jury, Arthur Manby died of natural causes, a heart attack most likely, some time around July 1st.
02:40.546 --> 02:48.733
[SPEAKER_00]: His body had been in that sweltering room for two days.
02:48.713 --> 02:54.500
[SPEAKER_00]: But within days of the burial, witnesses began stepping forward with the problem.
02:55.542 --> 03:00.047
[SPEAKER_00]: They'd seen Arthur man be alive after the body was discovered.
03:01.649 --> 03:16.408
[SPEAKER_00]: A dozen credible residents, including prominent artists and business people, reported encounters with man be on July 4th and 5th.
03:17.536 --> 03:19.639
[SPEAKER_00]: The body itself raised questions.
03:20.480 --> 03:24.326
[SPEAKER_00]: By all accounts, man-be had been quite robust for his age.
03:25.107 --> 03:29.633
[SPEAKER_00]: A stalkie, barrel-chested man, who weighed around 180 pounds.
03:31.055 --> 03:36.523
[SPEAKER_00]: The headless corpse, 5'7, maybe 155 pounds.
03:37.965 --> 03:45.636
[SPEAKER_00]: When Doc Martin finally examined the remains more closely, he found something the initial
03:46.865 --> 03:53.234
[SPEAKER_00]: The body showed signs of decapitation by a sharp instrument, not animal teeth.
03:54.555 --> 04:11.438
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody and Tows seemed particularly surprised that Arthur Manby might have staged his own death, or that someone might have wanted him dead, because for 30 years, Manby had been quite possibly the most hated man in New Mexico.
04:13.561 --> 04:19.929
[SPEAKER_00]: Arthur Rochford manbe arrived in New Mexico territory in 1883, a 24-years-old.
04:20.970 --> 04:27.157
[SPEAKER_00]: He told folks he was the son of a wealthy British industrialist, with connections to aristocracy.
04:27.197 --> 04:33.004
[SPEAKER_00]: In reality, he had been forced to leave England after repeated financial scandals.
04:34.205 --> 04:39.872
[SPEAKER_00]: New Mexico offered something London couldn't, opportunity for a man willing to bend the law.
04:41.084 --> 04:53.308
[SPEAKER_00]: He started small, mining claims, land speculation, business partnerships that somehow always ended with man-be-owning everything and his partners ruined.
04:54.510 --> 05:03.447
[SPEAKER_00]: But in 1894, he discovered a scheme that would define the next 30 years of his life.
05:04.760 --> 05:13.015
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been granted to Spanish settlers in the 1700s under Spanish colonial law, which recognized communal ownership.
05:14.277 --> 05:24.034
[SPEAKER_00]: After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe, Adalgo, promised to protect existing Spanish land grants.
05:24.014 --> 05:32.931
[SPEAKER_00]: But the U.S. government required owners to prove their claims under American law, which only recognized individual ownership.
05:34.233 --> 05:45.094
[SPEAKER_00]: The Martinez Grant Ares mostly poor Hispanic families who lived on this land for generations couldn't advocate the complex American legal system.
05:46.156 --> 05:46.917
[SPEAKER_00]: They needed help.
05:46.897 --> 05:49.840
[SPEAKER_00]: Man be offered to be that help.
05:51.141 --> 06:02.551
[SPEAKER_00]: He convinced the airs to sign over their interest in exchange for legal representation and cash payments, small amounts, $20 here, $50 there.
06:04.072 --> 06:05.453
[SPEAKER_00]: These families were desperate.
06:06.174 --> 06:16.583
[SPEAKER_00]: They'd already lost access to much of their ancestral land, but Man
06:17.744 --> 06:23.080
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1897, Manbe claimed ownership of virtually the entire Martina's grant.
06:24.393 --> 06:27.297
[SPEAKER_00]: The original families left with nothing.
06:28.579 --> 06:49.607
[SPEAKER_00]: When some tried to fight back legally, they discovered man-be-hat friends in high places, lawyers, judges, and territorial politicians who were, by all accounts, part of what locals called the Santa Fe Ring, a corrupt network that controlled New Mexico politics
06:50.887 --> 06:57.493
[SPEAKER_00]: According to court records from the era, at least eight families lost everything to man-be-schemes.
06:58.734 --> 07:01.076
[SPEAKER_00]: Some left the territory entirely.
07:02.137 --> 07:03.859
[SPEAKER_00]: Others stayed and seathed.
07:05.180 --> 07:07.582
[SPEAKER_00]: But man-be's fraud extended beyond land.
07:08.463 --> 07:11.165
[SPEAKER_00]: He sold shares and phantom mining operations.
07:11.986 --> 07:18.632
[SPEAKER_00]: He created fake companies, sold stock, then disappeared when investors demanded returns.
07:20.030 --> 07:28.643
[SPEAKER_00]: By the early 1900s, Arthur Manby had become a one-man crime wave, and then, him the violence.
07:30.666 --> 07:40.541
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1884, while Manby was still establishing himself in New Mexico, a man named Ross Edmondson was found dead outside Tows.
07:42.003 --> 07:44.246
[SPEAKER_00]: His head had been severed from his body.
07:45.388 --> 07:48.653
[SPEAKER_00]: Manby was arrested and charged with murder.
07:49.021 --> 07:50.724
[SPEAKER_00]: The trial should have been straight forward.
07:51.525 --> 07:53.508
[SPEAKER_00]: Witnesses placed Manby at the scene.
07:54.850 --> 08:04.724
[SPEAKER_00]: An Edmitsen had been publicly threatening to expose Manby's early business frauds, but Manby's connections to the Santa Fe ring paid off.
08:05.566 --> 08:06.227
[SPEAKER_00]: He was acquitted.
08:08.570 --> 08:13.898
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't the last time a decapitated body would be connected to Arthur Manby.
08:15.380 --> 08:38.620
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the next 40 years, by all accounts, at least eight other bodies turned up in northern New Mexico, all decapitated, several connected to Mambi's business dealings or personal disputes, no convictions, no justice, just a mounting pattern that everybody and Tauce knew about, but couldn't prove.
08:39.933 --> 08:43.739
[SPEAKER_00]: are the early 1910s, things got weirder still.
08:44.820 --> 09:00.304
[SPEAKER_00]: Manby co-founded what he called a secret society, ostensibly a social club for wealthy men, but according to newspaper accounts from the period, this wasn't a gentleman's club, it was a criminal organization.
09:00.284 --> 09:07.255
[SPEAKER_00]: The society forced new members through brutal initiation rights, including mocked beheadings.
09:07.275 --> 09:10.620
[SPEAKER_00]: They terrorized whole towns and villages through intimidation.
09:11.842 --> 09:13.685
[SPEAKER_00]: They ran bootlegging operations.
09:14.767 --> 09:17.912
[SPEAKER_00]: Some sources suggest they even offered murder for higher.
09:18.854 --> 09:24.182
[SPEAKER_00]: In Arthur Manby, by then in his 50s, sat at the center of it all.
09:25.900 --> 09:33.187
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine living in a small town, where everyone knew a wealthy, connected man, was literally getting away with murder.
09:34.349 --> 09:36.851
[SPEAKER_00]: Any parent would understand that kind of fear.
09:37.512 --> 09:39.254
[SPEAKER_00]: You teach your children to avoid them.
09:40.355 --> 09:42.497
[SPEAKER_00]: You'd cross the street when you saw him coming.
09:43.718 --> 09:44.659
[SPEAKER_00]: But you couldn't leave.
09:44.699 --> 09:46.121
[SPEAKER_00]: This was your home.
09:47.602 --> 09:53.528
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1920, Mambi's reputation was so dark that he'd effectively become a pariah.
09:54.740 --> 10:09.527
[SPEAKER_00]: He retreated to his fortress mansion on Taos' main plaza, 19 rooms, high Adobe walls, iron barred windows, and that German police dog that never left his side.
10:10.749 --> 10:12.192
[SPEAKER_00]: He was preparing for war.
10:14.180 --> 10:23.055
[SPEAKER_00]: For the last decade of his life, or what everyone thought was the last decade of his life, Arthur mayn't be lived like a man under siege.
10:24.136 --> 10:28.844
[SPEAKER_00]: He barricaded himself inside the mansion, multiple locks on every door.
10:30.066 --> 10:32.250
[SPEAKER_00]: Those iron bars on every window.
10:33.672 --> 10:34.794
[SPEAKER_00]: He slept with weapons.
10:36.216 --> 10:39.141
[SPEAKER_00]: The dog Lobo was trained to attack on command.
10:40.471 --> 10:48.760
[SPEAKER_00]: Man be rarely left the property, and when he did, he'd return hours later, glancing over his shoulder the entire way back.
10:50.208 --> 10:57.122
[SPEAKER_00]: was it paranoia, not entirely, man-be-had real enemies, lots of them.
10:58.104 --> 11:02.052
[SPEAKER_00]: The families he defrauded, the investors, he'd swindled.
11:02.934 --> 11:12.132
[SPEAKER_00]: The secret society members who turned against him are the late 1920s, why do few people had reason to want Arthur man-be dead?
11:13.327 --> 11:32.179
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite his isolation, man be still conducted business, he still filed lawsuits, dozens of them actually, trying to defend his land claims against mounting legal challenges, he still wrote letters, he still had visitors, though not many.
11:33.796 --> 11:37.504
[SPEAKER_00]: One of those visitors was a woman named Tara Cia Ferguson.
11:38.947 --> 11:43.777
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd been involved with Mambi since she was quite young, 14 by some accounts.
11:44.678 --> 11:52.294
[SPEAKER_00]: And by 1929 she was living part time at the mansion, helping to care for the increasingly erratic old man.
11:53.658 --> 12:00.706
[SPEAKER_00]: Ferguson later told investigators that man had become obsessed with the idea that someone was trying to poison him.
12:01.847 --> 12:04.130
[SPEAKER_00]: He tastes his food carefully before eating.
12:05.011 --> 12:06.873
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd smell the water before drinking.
12:07.935 --> 12:16.965
[SPEAKER_00]: Some nights, he'd hear noises outside, and spend hours sitting in the dark with his rifle, waiting for an attack that never came.
12:18.295 --> 12:24.947
[SPEAKER_00]: When you've spent 40 years making enemies, that level of fear might not be entirely irrational.
12:26.243 --> 12:32.109
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, in late June 1929, Arthur Manby disappeared from public view.
12:33.410 --> 12:39.836
[SPEAKER_00]: No one saw him leave the mansion, no one saw him around town, his male piled up.
12:41.077 --> 12:43.540
[SPEAKER_00]: His dog was hurt barking at odd hours.
12:44.821 --> 12:52.268
[SPEAKER_00]: Until July 3, when Deputy Marshall Martinez climbed that wall and found the headless body.
12:54.442 --> 12:56.666
[SPEAKER_00]: The identification should have been simple.
12:57.688 --> 13:00.373
[SPEAKER_00]: The body was dressed in man-be's distinctive clothing.
13:01.375 --> 13:03.499
[SPEAKER_00]: It was found in man-be's locked mansion.
13:04.561 --> 13:07.967
[SPEAKER_00]: The diamond-stick pen, alone, should have been proof enough.
13:09.470 --> 13:11.353
[SPEAKER_00]: But then the witnesses came forward.
13:11.333 --> 13:17.806
[SPEAKER_00]: Joseph Henry Sharp, a respected artist and founding member of the Tows Art Colony.
13:19.128 --> 13:22.334
[SPEAKER_00]: Swarheets seen Arthur Mambi walking down the street.
13:23.597 --> 13:26.322
[SPEAKER_00]: On July 4th, the day after the burial
13:27.837 --> 13:32.406
[SPEAKER_00]: other artists, business people, and residents backed up Sharps account.
13:33.307 --> 13:39.078
[SPEAKER_00]: They described encounters with man-being on July 4th and 5th, some had conversations with him.
13:40.441 --> 13:44.749
[SPEAKER_00]: These weren't unreliable witnesses or people with grudges, but
13:44.729 --> 13:47.855
[SPEAKER_00]: These were credible prominent members of the community.
13:49.097 --> 13:56.531
[SPEAKER_00]: According to newspaper reports, at least a dozen people claimed to have seen man be alive after his supposed death.
13:57.753 --> 14:01.700
[SPEAKER_00]: Some witnesses say he was heading south toward the Colorado border.
14:02.903 --> 14:06.990
[SPEAKER_00]: Others claimed he was making arrangements to leave the country entirely.
14:08.388 --> 14:18.864
[SPEAKER_00]: In the weeks before the body was discovered, man-be-head liquidated several assets, selling property, closing accounts, converting investments to cash.
14:20.346 --> 14:27.477
[SPEAKER_00]: It's believed he accumulated somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000, a substantial fortune in 1929.
14:29.119 --> 14:30.902
[SPEAKER_00]: That money was never found.
14:32.030 --> 14:36.398
[SPEAKER_00]: The body itself raised more questions, the longer people looked at it.
14:37.420 --> 14:44.775
[SPEAKER_00]: Doc Martin's examination revealed not just the size discrepancy, but other details that didn't quite match.
14:45.917 --> 14:50.646
[SPEAKER_00]: The hands were rougher than Mambi's well-documented soft aristocratic hands.
14:52.077 --> 14:55.223
[SPEAKER_00]: The feet didn't match the size of boots, typically war.
14:55.283 --> 15:02.658
[SPEAKER_00]: They were Mambies, certainly, but they were also the perfect props for staging a death.
15:04.161 --> 15:12.297
[SPEAKER_00]: Natural causes, dog chewed the head off, case closed, body buried same day.
15:13.593 --> 15:19.780
[SPEAKER_00]: It's believed that three members of the original coroner's jury had financial ties to manbie.
15:20.841 --> 15:23.484
[SPEAKER_00]: They benefited from his land schemes over the years.
15:24.525 --> 15:27.988
[SPEAKER_00]: They had reason to help him disappear if that's what he wanted.
15:29.330 --> 15:35.436
[SPEAKER_00]: But if manbie staged his death and escaped with $40,000, where did he go?
15:35.456 --> 15:38.740
[SPEAKER_00]: And whose body did he use?
15:41.251 --> 15:46.821
[SPEAKER_00]: After mounting pressure, authorities exhumed the body for a second examination in 1933.
15:48.544 --> 15:53.112
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted definite answers, was this Arthur Mambi or not?
15:54.375 --> 15:56.779
[SPEAKER_00]: The examination was inconclusive.
15:56.759 --> 16:03.369
[SPEAKER_00]: After four years in the ground, the remains were too deteriorated for certain identification.
16:04.511 --> 16:11.220
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, this was decades before DNA testing, but the forensic experts did confirm one thing.
16:12.162 --> 16:16.288
[SPEAKER_00]: The head had been severed by a blade, not by a dog.
16:17.730 --> 16:20.995
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had decapitated this person deliberately,
16:22.274 --> 16:23.476
[SPEAKER_00]: the case went cold.
16:24.537 --> 16:29.524
[SPEAKER_00]: Arthur Mambi was declared legally dead as a state dispersed.
16:30.586 --> 16:36.575
[SPEAKER_00]: His land claims eventually resolved through other channels, but the questions never went away.
16:36.635 --> 16:42.443
[SPEAKER_00]: To this day, New Mexico authorities have never officially solved the case.
16:43.233 --> 16:55.664
[SPEAKER_00]: was the body and the grave author, Mambi, murdered by one of his many enemies, or wasn't an unknown victim whose body Mambi used to fake his death and escape justice.
16:57.247 --> 16:59.132
[SPEAKER_00]: Both theories have their evidence.
17:00.395 --> 17:05.666
[SPEAKER_00]: whether man be died in that fortress or escaped to live out his days somewhere else.
17:06.749 --> 17:11.519
[SPEAKER_00]: The communities he terrorized for 30 years finally got peace.
17:12.762 --> 17:16.971
[SPEAKER_00]: The land grant families, though they never recovered what they'd lost.
17:17.973 --> 17:20.378
[SPEAKER_00]: At least they didn't have to fear him anymore.
17:21.725 --> 17:26.071
[SPEAKER_00]: Taos began healing from three decades of corruption and violence.
17:27.313 --> 17:32.360
[SPEAKER_00]: Today you can still walk past a location of Manby's mansion in downtown Taos.
17:33.962 --> 17:45.218
[SPEAKER_00]: The building itself is long gone, replaced by newer structures that serve the thriving arch community that ultimately came to define this town.
17:46.767 --> 17:53.438
[SPEAKER_00]: but folks who study New Mexico history still debate what really happened on that July night in 1929.
17:55.161 --> 17:55.902
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it murder?
17:56.784 --> 17:57.585
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it escape?
17:58.386 --> 18:04.837
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it one final elaborate fraud from a man who'd spent his whole life manipulating the truth?
18:06.360 --> 18:09.244
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe that's the perfect ending for Arthur Manby's story.
18:10.587 --> 18:12.690
[SPEAKER_00]: Appropriate that we don't know for certain,
18:14.054 --> 18:25.264
[SPEAKER_00]: He lived in shadows, he died, or disappeared, in shadows, and 95 years later, he still keeping his secrets.
18:27.386 --> 18:40.939
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the story of Arthur Mambi and Tauce New Mexico, a telefront to your fraud, decapitated bodies, and a mysterious death that still hasn't been solved.
18:40.919 --> 18:48.709
[SPEAKER_00]: If you found this story as haunting as I did, share it with someone who loves unsolved mysteries from America's past.
18:50.291 --> 18:51.132
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
18:51.913 --> 18:53.434
[SPEAKER_00]: Every hometown has a story.
18:54.496 --> 18:55.637
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight it's Tows.
18:56.438 --> 18:58.320
[SPEAKER_00]: And the man nobody could trust.
18:59.222 --> 19:00.283
[SPEAKER_00]: Not even in death.
19:02.025 --> 19:02.826
[SPEAKER_00]: Good night friend.
