Appalachian Murder, Mystery And Legend · Larry Bentley

The Blue Eyed Six

·26 min·5 clips

Larry Bentley opens by pushing back on the usual caricatures of Appalachia. He places the mountains in deep time, calls them the oldest in the world, and frames the region as one full of hard lives, hard stories, and old memory. From there he narrows to a story out of Pennsylvania about Mr. Raver and the men who think they can turn murder into an accident or a natural death. The first idea is whiskey. They try to get Raver to drink himself to death with cheap rock-gut, hoping he will poison himself, stumble off, or simply stop breathing. He does not oblige them. He gets drunk, but lives through it, more a happy drunk than a dead one. The second scheme is colder. They get him drunk again, haul him out in a wagon, and dump him in a freezing mountain night near a creek, trusting exposure to finish the job. That fails too. Joe Raver wakes the next morning alive, cold, sore-headed, and complaining like a man who has crawled back out of his own grave. Then comes the railroad idea. The men try to tie him up to the tracks and wait for the midnight freight to do the rest, a plan Bentley treats as pure boneheaded cruelty. Even that does not land cleanly. They lose their nerve at the last second and drag him clear just before the engine blasts by. Bentley keeps the narration moving with asides, jokes, and plain moral disgust. He does not separate the comedy from the horror; he lets them sit together until the ugliness shows through. The ending turns back to the mountains and the old belief that they hold more secrets than ghosts, and sometimes make monsters pay.

As heard by us

A porch-side true-crime tale of repeated murder attempts and stubborn survival.

Larry Bentley tells this insurance-murder story in the Appalachian Mountains like a porch warning: plainspoken, a little rough, and nasty in the way the best true crime can be. The repeated attempts on Mr.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a grim Appalachian tale about a man they tried to kill three times and still could not keep down.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Appalachian Murder, Mystery And Legend