It’s July 1914 in Horicon, Wisconsin. A Croatian laborer named Joseph Dejanovich wakes up in the middle of the night to the blow of an axe — and somehow survives. His wife, nineteen-year-old Barbara, is arrested and charged with attempted murder. The evidence seems damning: a sharpened axe, a fired revolver, a bloodstained nightgown. But when the case reaches the courtroom, nothing is quite what it seems.
In this episode, Carl Reinemann reconstructs one of Dodge County’s most forgotten crimes — tracing the lives of two immigrants navigating a world that wasn’t built for them, a courtroom that struggled to believe what it was seeing, and a verdict that raised more questions than it answered. And all of it unfolding in the same summer that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin ran red — a few counties away, just weeks later.
A story about domestic violence, immigrant life, gender, and justice in early twentieth-century Wisconsin. And about the silence that settles over the people history decides not to remember.
One Shot at History digs into the forgotten corners of local history — the stories that lived briefly in newspaper columns and then quietly disappeared. Hosted by Carl Reinemann, each episode brings a single overlooked nugget of history, a case, crime, or community moment back to life with dramatic narration, rich historical context, and a reminder that real history happens to ordinary people. Because the past only happens once.
However you listen, we’re there — Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeart, Pandora, and just about everywhere else podcasts live.