Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast · Blue Ewe Media

431: The Cape Cod Murder of 1899 w/ Theresa Mitchell Webster

·1 hr 15 min·4 clips

Edwin Ray Snow told the court he killed Jimmy Whittemore “on the impulse of the moment.”

1. Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast covers the Cape Cod murder of 1899 and the life of Edwin Ray Snow. 2. Eric interviews Theresa Mitchell Webster, a former television reporter, former editor for The Cape Cod Voice, and author of The Cape Cod Murder of 1899. 3. The episode asks why Snow’s case mattered in Yarmouth and how a local archive file became a full historical account. 4. Webster says she found Snow through a two-inch newspaper item in the Yarmouth Register while writing Yarmouth of Yesteryear. 5. She explains that local police officers in Peterson’s Market asked when the next installment would appear. 6. Webster says Snow’s prison file from the Massachusetts State Archives was thick, ribbon-tied, and full of letters, parole records, and an autobiography. 7. She describes Cape Cod in 1899 as a set of village communities in Barnstable County, with Yarmouth Port, South Yarmouth, and West Yarmouth separated by woods and one road. 8. She says Yarmouth had 28 core families dating back to the 1600s and that those families intermarried across generations. 9. Snow was adopted as an infant after being abandoned at an orphanage in the Boston area around March 1882. 10. Webster says Albert Snow worked as a carpenter and Ida Snow stayed home while extended family linked them to Barnstable and Dennis. 11. Snow’s trouble began at age 16 with a February 1898 burglary involving Henry and Walter Baker, and then a March 1898 theft from his aunt Isabel Lewis. 12. The court records cited in the episode include stolen coins, a promissory note, cologne, and three pounds of candy, followed by his sentence to Concord Reformatory School for about 10 months. 13. After release, Snow worked several jobs, lived with Aunt Nellie in Middleborough, and returned to Cape Cod in September 1899 while his parents vacationed in New Hampshire. 14. Webster says he took his father’s .32-caliber handgun into the woods between South Yarmouth and Yarmouth Port and met 21-year-old Jimmy Whittemore, a bakery delivery man for Rufus Gage. 15. She says witnesses saw Snow and Whittemore together, and Snow later said he pulled the gun “like a bandit in a dime novel” before the shooting. 16. The episode describes Snow’s arrest after he fled by train, stole a bicycle, and was recovered by police, then held in Barnstable County Jail singing Bible verses. 17. Webster says Snow was convicted at trial, sentenced to die in the electric chair, and then spared because of his youth, which sent him to Charlestown State Prison instead. 18. She recounts multiple parole hearings, support from Reverend Spence Burton and prison staff, and testimony from Idella Whittemore, who said, “It is well enough to give him a chance.” 19. The tone is interview-driven and archival, with long stretches of historical reconstruction, quoted records, and local Cape Cod detail. 20. Listeners who like Massachusetts history, prison records, and local true crime will get the most from it, while anyone wanting a fast whodunit may skip it.

As heard by us

A murder case that turns into prison history, juvenile justice, and the cost of punishment.

Teresa Mitchell Webster and Eric Rivenis keep the focus on Edwin Ray Snow's prison years, and that choice gives the episode its grip. The prison file adds a level of detail that makes the story feel less like a mystery and more like a record of punishment, juvenile justice, and…

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You get a true-crime story that opens into prison records and juvenile justice.

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