PARIS GREEN: Inspired By a True Crime Case | #MurderNoir

A private eye called out to a quiet farm on a still September afternoon finds two sisters poisoned and shot, a brother in the wind, and a barn even the animals won't go near.

THE TRUE CRIME CASE THIS STORY IS BASED ON: On September 5, 1893, on a farm outside Winnebago, Illinois, widow Bridget Hart returned from a brief errand in her potato field to find her twenty-six-year-old daughter Mary lying face-down on the porch steps, bleeding from her mouth and nose, and her twenty-three-year-old daughter Nellie staggering in the barn with a green stain of arsenic-laced Paris green pesticide running down her dress. Before she died the following afternoon, Nellie identified her own brother — thirty-five-year-old John Hart, the family's black sheep, recently returned home after years of drifting and feuding with his siblings over his share of their late father's $50,000 estate — as her attacker. He had forced both sisters to drink the poison and shot each of them at close range, Mary four times. John fled on horseback but was captured that same night in a Rockford barber shop, where he calmly drank a small dose of laudanum as police closed in. He was tried in January 1894, convicted in under an hour despite a defense that blamed his brothers, claimed malaria and mental illness, and accused the dead girls themselves of conspiring to poison him, and was hanged in the Winnebago County jail yard on March 16, 1894 — bringing to a close a case made stranger still by the fact that his father had taken his own life two years earlier with the very same poison.

ORIGINAL CASE SOURCES…
https://www.hauntedrockford.com/the-hart-family-murders/

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Originally aired: April 27, 2026
EPISODE PAGE at WeirdDarkness.com (includes list of sources): https://weirddarkness.com/noir-parisgreen