Paranormal Yakker

Dead Ends: A Killer's Guide to New England

• Stan Mallow

Share episode

Ever wondered what it would be like to vacation through the darker chapters of American history? If the answer is yes, you’ll want to join me, Stan Mallow, host of “Paranormal Yakker” as I interview award-winning travel journalist Dawn M. Barclay, the creative mind behind "Vacations Can Be Murder: A True Crime Lover's Travel Guide to New England."

Dawn reveals how a simple true crime tour in Minneapolis sparked an idea that evolved into a comprehensive travel guide series. With meticulous research spanning historical newspapers, case law, and trial transcripts, she's created the ultimate resource for travelers fascinated by the macabre. The guide covers everything from infamous murder scenes to haunted hotels and restaurants, each pinpointed to exact locations to create seamless vacation itineraries across New England's six states.

Prepare to have your historical knowledge challenged as Dawn uncovers surprising facts—like Connecticut's witch trials that predated Salem by over 40 years, resulting in 16 executions. She shares spine-tingling details about notorious criminals like the "Mall Passer," a counterfeiter whose storage locker revealed evidence of multiple murders across several states. For the adventurous traveler, Dawn highlights unique accommodations including Boston's Liberty Hotel (formerly Charles Street Jail that once housed Malcolm X) and the ultimate overnight experience at Lizzie Borden's house-turned-bed-and-breakfast in Fall River.

This fascinating conversation explores how true crime tourism has evolved into a legitimate travel niche, connecting history buffs, paranormal enthusiasts, and crime aficionados with meaningful, educational experiences. Whether you're planning your next vacation or simply curious about America's dark history, this episode of “Paranormal Yakker” promises to transform how you think about travel. 

Send us a text

Hi, everyone, I'm Stan Mallow, welcome to Paranormal Yakker. My guest today is award winning travel journalist& suspense author Dawn M Barclay We’ll be talking about her book Vacations Can Be Murder; A True Crime Lover's Travel Guide To New England. Dawn M Barclay, welcome to Paranormal Yakker. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. The idea of writing a travel guide for the growing numbers of people who are including in their vacations or devoting them completely to exploring the darker side of places they visit is a great one& fills a needed gap in the travel & tourism industry. By any chance is there a backstory on how you came up with the idea of writing such a guide? I have been a travel journalist for a long time back to the 70s& early 80s & I had written my first travel book back in the late 2023, I guess or 2022. It came out & it was a niche guide called Traveling Different Vacation Strategies For Parents of the Anxious, the Inflexible & the Neurodiverse. So that talked a lot about traveling with children on the spectrum, although it could work for any child, any neurotypical child as well& that book did really well. I won the Lowell Thomas Gold Award for it, which is like the Oscars of travel writing. I was very proud to be able to bring that book to market & help people who thought they couldn't travel or didn't know how to travel with a child on the spectrum. So coming off of that, I was looking for other nonfiction opportunities because I was basically a fiction writer up to that.& I was in Minneapolis for a convention called BoucherCon, which is the world mystery convention, it's for fans & authors,& I took a true crime tour of Minneapolis& St Paul & I thought to myself I wonder if anybody has written a book that encompasses all of the true crime tours around the country & that got me looking into this whole idea. It was the seed of the idea which would become this book Vacations Can Be Murder, which is the first of probably 10 or more volumes covering in the United States. The book I am now interviewing you about covers New England, specifically Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut & Rhode Island,& it is the first of a multivolume series covering the US & beyond, as you just mentioned. Is there any reason or is it just a toss of the coin that New England is the first in your series? I just decided to start in the upper right hand quarter of the country& move south. So the next book is New York, New Jersey & Pennsylvania. Then I'll move down to Capitol district, then I'll be in the south& then I'll be moving west. I just wanted to do it in an organized way. For each state, you include a wealth of information such as major crimes in that state, where they were committed, where criminals are jailed& bodies buried, haunted restaurants & hotels, ghost tours & paranormal hotspots. Researching all of that had to be a monumental task. How Dawn did you do it? A lot of sleepless nights. It took about 6 months to write the book. It takes me about a month to write each date & then a month to do fact check, a lot of time to do the bibliography& I used a number of resource tools, including newspapers, going back a couple of hundred years or however long I could get, you know, whenever I could get them, it where newspapers couldn't cover what I needed, I contacted historical societies & libraries. I read books, I read case law& trial transcripts,& yet all finally came together What Dawn was the decision making process you used in deciding what you would& would not include in the New England edition of Vacations Can Be Murder? Yeah, it's good you had you said New England because in New York you had to committed at least 6 murders before you got in because there was so much crime. So it kind of was a state by state basis.& I would look at all the crimes dating back as far back as I could. Some of them date back to the 1600s all the way up to 2023, 2024.& I took what I thought was a good mixture of past & present. I tried to include serial killers, but also mob hits & mass shootings& theft, grift, whatever I could to make a good mix,& I also limited it to crimes where I could pinpoint where they happened because the heart of the book are the itineraries& the itineraries bring together all the disparate parts of the book that I've included& puts them in an easy to follow format, breaking the state up into several different parts so you can tour in one to 3 days the section you want & include the hotels & the restaurants& the museums & everything else I' I've put in. So if I didn't have an exact location, I'll give you an example, but it's from New York& that is the preppy murder in Central Park of Jennifer Levin. Because I only had a general area which was Central Park I didn't include it in the book because there was not a specific place you could go. On the flip side Boston strangler I had the addresses of every single apartment building so I put them in. Where it comes to private houses I do not give you the house number, but I do give you the block number so you can walk that block, but you're not going to be standing outside of somebody's private home gawking. You Dawn, have saved tourists who love to explore the paranormal side of destinations they visit hours of research by concluding each chapter with easy to follow itineraries that bring all the different pieces together& as you say a logical way, & they do you also include historical facts that many people may not have been aware of. One that I found fascinating is that more than 40 years before the Salem Witch Trials, where 19 alleged witches were executed, Connecticut had Witch Trials with 16 alleged witches were executed. What Dawn was your reaction when you came across tidbits like that in which in essence turns history as many of us know it would think we know it on its head? Well, I don't really know what people know. You know, it would surprised me, but it might not surprise a lot of people who are really into this kind of information. Those Hartford Witch Trials happened between 1647 & 1663. I'm sneaking a look at my cheat notes& there were actually 43 trials& 16 executions many in Hartford, 3 in Wethersfield sorry & on May 26, 1647 Alice Young of Windsor was the first to be executed. A servant girl Mary Johnson was the first to confess to witchcraft in Connecticut, but was likely coerced by extensive torture,& she was executed somewhere between 1648 & 1650 accounts vary. So yeah I was surprised& when I see something like that, of course I'm going to put it in, but I don't know who knows what. What I'll do now, Dawn is mention a few of the many categories you cover& ask you to give me an example of what you write in that category for whatever city pops into your mind. This is going to be author's choice.

Here goes:

Tell me about a crime that was committed preferably one that boggled the mind& caused you sleepless nights? So I am going to read something from the book from Rhode Island, but I will say in advance that I'm not going to get the pronunciation of this man's name right so please excuse me. I even listen to the YouTube video to get it right& I can't remember it so I'm sorry. Barrington, James Mitchell DeBardeleben II was a kidnapper rapist, torturer, counterfeiter & suspected serial killer, a guy FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood described as the best documented serial sadist since the Marquis De Sade. He spent much of his time in shopping malls passing counterfeit bills, earning him the nickname the mall passer. Once he was arrested in 1983, so this is fairly recent, the Secret Service searched his storage locker for his counterfeiting equipment& found something even darker, audiotapes & photographs of sex slayings, a death kit for quick murders on the run, even a bloody pair of women's underwear evidence that linked him to as many as 18 years worth of serious sexual crimes & murders in multiple states, including Louisiana, Michigan, Delaware, New York, & North Carolina. His main crime in Rhode Island, for which he was charged, but never tried, was the murder of Edna Therrel MacDonald, the real estate agent who met a Mr Peter Morgan on the evening of April 29, 1971, allegedly to show a home on Heritage Road in Barrington. During their meeting evidence suggests that after a struggle, MacDonald was bound & gagged, suffered a blow to her head& had been strangled with one leg of her stockings. This was not the first time he had murdered a real estate agent, Jean McFall met a similar fate in Bossier City, Louisiana. She was left hanging from the rafters in the attic of a for sale home. In 1988 DeBardeleben was convicted & sentenced to 375 years in prison, & in 2011, while serving that sentence, he died of pneumonia at the Federal Medical Center in North Carolina. Can you Dawn tell me about a hotel as well as a restaurant that are purported to be haunted, who are the spirits who allegedly inhabit them & in what ways have they made themselves known to those who claim to have seen them? I'll give a couple of examples of of things I've included, but I only list a couple of lines because the heart of the book is really true crime. In Down Connecticut there is a place called Harry's Jailhouse on Warwick St& I give all the contact information. It's now a restaurant, but it was a jail back in the 1850s& it was rumored to be haunted. One of the things I think is really interesting, not necessarily haunted, but it is crime related it is the Liberty Hotel in Boston & there's also Clink, which is their restaurant& the Alibi Bar& Lounge on Charles St used to be the Charles Street Jail& was once home to inmates such as Malcolm Little, who was Malcolm X & Sacco & Vanzetti. Due to poor living conditions, the jail was declared unfit & closed for good a Memorial Day weekend 1990. In 2001 it was converted into a deluxe hotel, parts of the jail are still visible there, but if you want something more haunted in Fall River, you can stay in Lizzie Borden's bed & breakfast, so that's her former house. They'll tell you what rooms belong to who. They have tours of the entire home. You can tour the cemetery outside as well. What is your hope the readers of your Guidebook to New England get out of it after reading it? I hope they have a really enjoyable vacation. I love subcultures, & I am fascinated by people who have unusual interests,& so this feeds into the interests of any one who is into true crime, is into the paranormal since I do list the haunted restaurants, hotels, & ghost tours, is into looking at the outside of jails& knowing who was incarcerated inside,& also for tombstone tourists who like to go to cemeteries& see where various people were buried. This feeds into all of that, & it would be my hope that not only would they enjoy their vacation, but they might write to me afterward with pictures & a story about their trip or allow me to interview them& I'll put them on the vacation's can be murder blog& so everybody can enjoy their trip. Should viewers of Paranormal Yakker want to buy, Vacations Can Be Murder; A True Crime Lover's Travel Guide to New England,& also learn about the other books you've authored, how Dawn can they do that? For Vacations Can Be Murder, they can go to VacationsCanBeMurder.com. They can also go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo Bookshop, any place where they sell books online. It's available in paperback & e-book. If they're interested in my fiction, which is psychological suspense, domestic suspense, this even a couple of romantic suspense books there, they can go to www.DMBarr.com. That's the name I write under for my fiction.& I'd love to hear from people so if you're a reader & you want to review me great, but if you just want to chat about the books, ask me questions I'm always open to that too. Dawn M Barclay, I thank you for being my guest on Paranormal Yakker. It was great yakking with you,& I look forward to interviewing you in the future when you publish other travel guides. in your Vacations Can Be Murder series. Thank you very much for having me. My absolute pleasure, thank you.