Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society or even earn the label Crime of the Century. But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.

I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author,

and in each episode of this show,

I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today

but was huge when it happened. This is crimes of the centuries. The first thing the baggage agent noticed at the Los Angeles Train Depot on October 18th,

1931 was the odor. It wasn't emanating from the passengers who had arrived aboard the overnight

Phoenix to LA train, though a little B.O. would have been excused considering the long ride

in cramped quarters.

But no, this stench clearly came from the checked luggage.

Upon closer inspection, the culprits were obvious.

Two trunks had been checked in Phoenix, heavy trunks like abnormally heavy.

The bulkier of the two weighed more than 200 pounds, while the smaller was still a hundred plus. But it wasn't the size of the

trunks that drew baggage agent Arthur Anderson's attention. It was the smell and

the ousing. After all of the train's luggage had been pulled from a storage compartment and lined up on a flatbed

truck, the ousing was impossible to ignore.

It was ruddy in color, viscous and unsettling.

Anderson instinctively knew it had to be blood.

That matched with the deathly stench that accompanied it,

led him to jump to an unnerving conclusion.

Surely there was something dead inside these trunks.

But Anderson was much more generous with his next thought

than he could have been, instead of worrying about, say, human remains, he assumed

...