For this week's installment of #TBT, we focus on some of the obscure, shady, and downright criminal goings-on of the San Francisco yesteryear.
The Barbary Coast, for instance, was full of vice. Bootlegging and gambling were commonplace in speakeasies during Prohibition, and a slew of shocking crimes—before and since—have made spines tingle all across America.
The Woman Scorned
Laura D. Fair began an affair with Alexander Parker Crittenden in the late 1800s. Fair claimed that the two were engaged; she didn't know until a full year after meeting Crittenden that he was married. He promised to divorce his wife for Fair. In 1870, on a ferry headed from Oakland to San Francisco, Fair shot him in front of his family, in a fit of rage. He died days later. She was the first woman sentenced to death by hanging, but her conviction was overturned, due to the prejudice evidence in her first trial.
