Episode 113: The Murder of Peter Porco & the Boorn Brothers

Kristin starts us off with our most old timey story ever. It was May of 1812 in Manchester, Vermont, and something was up. Russell Colvin was missing. People were pretty sure he’d come back. He had a wife. He had a child. He had obligations. Plus, he was known to wander off from time to time. But then months passed. Then years. People in town became suspicious. What if Russell hadn’t wandered off? What if he’d been murdered?

Then Brandi tells us about a November morning in 2004. Peter Porco, an Appellate Division court clerk, had always been reliable. So when he didn’t show up for work one day, a coworker went to Peter’s house to check on him. The coworker peered through the windows to discover a grizzly scene. 

And now for a note about our process. For each episode, Kristin reads a bunch of articles, then spits them back out in her very limited vocabulary. Brandi copies and pastes from the best sources on the web. And sometimes Wikipedia. (No shade, Wikipedia. We love you.) We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases.

“Then Again: A case of who done… what?” by Mark Bushnell for the Vermont Digger
“The Boorn Affair,” Cincinnati Daily Star, May 24, 1875

“First wrongful conviction: Jesse Boorn and Stephen Boorn” Bluhm Legal Clinic Center on Wrongful Convictions 

“Christopher Porco” by Rachael Bell, The Crime Library

“Memory of Murder” episode 48 Hours

“Christopher Porco 15 Years Later” by Diego Cagara, Spotlight News

“Christopher Porco: The Unthinkable” ForensicFilesNow.com

“Christopher Porco 2: The Explainable” ForensicFilesNow.com

“Murder of Peter Porco” wikipedia.org