Delaware Behaving Badly

Delaware Behaving Badly is a fresh compendium of essays about a state’s true crime cases.

Dave Tabler’s piquing regional true crime book sums up Delaware’s headline-stealing cases.

Treating particular crimes as “windows into the First State’s evolving identity,” the book is an informative overview of case highlights and crime’s impact on Delaware’s communities and lawmaking. The chapters are brief and matter-of-fact, raising compelling questions that are not always answered. Still, the book’s curation is thoughtful, encompassing cases including murders, bigamy, an art heist, and oyster piracy.
The collection begins with seventeenth-century witchcraft laws that uncovered fraudsters and became excuses for racism. Black citizens, for example, were maligned as voodoo practitioners. Elsewhere, amid lingering revolutionary conflict, a British officer was charged with murder, leading to divided public opinion on subjects of mercy and justice. Greed is spotlighted in the case of a bold woman who planned to kidnap free men and sell them into slavery. On these and other topics, the book handles social issues related to freedom, prejudice, and profit with care. Delaware’s geographical position between the northern colonies and the southern slaveholding states is gestured toward too.

Some essays draw sharp connections between specific crimes and broader social climates at a given time. These include a snapshot account of a former railroad worker whose misguided sabotage against the railways resulted in a manslaughter conviction, set against the backdrop of a sympathetic public whose members felt that the unfair railroad system had long mistreated its employees. Still other chapters are candid about Delaware’s imperfect relationship between criminal perpetrators and those who deliver justice, citing oversights and power struggles. One town’s acceptance of smuggling because they benefited from it, and law enforcement’s occasional complicity, resulted in little change. The book’s coverage of vice trades, the sex trade, and trafficking strikes similar notes, with “tacit police approval” leading to mixed levels of law enforcement. An exception is an essay about a rapist whose violent exploits sparked statewide reform of the prison furlough program.

Delaware Behaving Badly chronicles the most scandalous, unsettling, and at times absurd criminal episodes in Delaware’s history, from the colonial period to the 21st century. Drawing on vivid newspaper accounts, court records, and historical archives, the book tells the stories behind the headlines: crimes that exposed not just individual wrongdoing but the social, racial, and political tensions that shaped the First State. From Patty Cannon’s kidnapping ring and oyster wars on the Delaware Bay to the art heist masterminded by a suburban burglary gang and the shocking abuses of Dr. Earl Bradley, each case reveals something deeper about the culture, power structures, and blind spots of the communities involved. With careful attention to both detail and narrative pacing, the book offers more than just true crime—it holds a mirror to Delaware’s public life and asks what these stories say about who we were, and still are.

from Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer
(Reviewed: October 2025)

Delaware Behaving Badly joins the other books in Dave Tabler’s Delaware history series, incorporating the same jovial blend of history and delightfully unusual facts that give Delaware’s experiences the added edge of interest needed to attract non-Delawareans to its story.

The true crime focus of this guide outlines some magnificent events and circumstances that lend to its inclusion in any true crime library collection.

Take, for example, the 1690 story of “When Spells Become Criminal Acts.” The saga considers Delaware’s early supernatural accusations and prosecutions, which depart from the familiar early Salem witch trial history to enter into lesser-known territory surrounding the mixed beliefs of Anglicans, Quakers, Dutch Reformed Church members, Lutherans, and Mennonites who influenced supernatural pursuits in a different manner than the Puritan-rooted Massachusetts.

Here, the 1604 Act that shaped responses to accusations of sorcery involved attempting remedies for bewitchment that superseded legal punishment to enter into realms of not just medical cures, but preventative measures.

The history of these approaches provides intriguing forays into the racial and ethnic tensions in Delaware’s urban centers, considering crime and solution in a much broader light than most early American histories.

Contrast this survey with the surprisingly violent clashes that emerged over oyster pirating in 1901. Yes, oysters. This problem enveloped New England, but Dave Tabler’s contrast between different state reactions and operations creates a particularly intriguing history of cross-references that is enlightening and hard to put down:

The oyster piracy era drew to a close through a combination of technological advancement and biological calamity. State governments steadily tightened their grip on the industry, deploying armed patrols and motorized enforcement vessels that could effectively chase down poachers. Delaware and New Jersey strengthened their cooperation, creating a unified system of licenses and patrols that made it harder for pirates to exploit state-line jurisdictional gaps.

These examples and many more are the reason why the monikers “Delaware history” and “true crime” may attempt to identify the audience for this book, but in fact fall short of its possibility for an expansive appreciation by virtually anyone with any degree of interest in American history.

This is why librarians across the country should consider adding Delaware Behaving Badly to their collections … but they will want to take an active role in profiling it to assure it doesn’t stay on the shelf, perceived as a read for Delaware-centric audiences only.

Delaware Behaving Badly deserves so much more, offering many political, cultural, social, and psychological insights into its history and disparate types of crime to make it a winner in many arenas of American history and experience.

Delaware Behaving Badly: First State, True Crimes
Dave Tabler, 292 pages, 9798992166729
(Reviewed: August 2025)

Author Dave Tabler’s Delaware Behaving Badly is the latest in a series of his Delaware histories. This volume explores the state’s dark underside, with each chapter centering on a crime that occurred in Delaware, from accusations of witchcraft in the colonial era to international espionage in the 21st century.

Most of Tabler’s chapters are ten pages or fewer. In each, Tabler recounts a sensational crime, often exploring similar incidents throughout Delaware’s history and skillfully placing the crime in historical context. For example, the author follows an account of a brothel raid in late 19th century Wilmington with a discussion of the enforcement of laws against prostitution and vice since then.

In another chapter, the author recounts an incident in the 1920s where a mob of anti-Klan locals attacked a night-time KKK meeting. Tabler uses this incident to explore the larger history of the Klan in the state.

He also describes a young bank employee who stole over $100,000 from his employer and fled abroad. To the surprise of police, he returned to Delaware and surrendered quietly at his wife’s urging. After serving time, the employee advised banks on how to improve their security.

Tabler often connects the crimes to themes that resonate today, such as the environment, tariffs, and race and gender issues, while never being heavy-handed.

The author relies mainly on press reports. These sources are most valuable if corroborated using other types of documents, e.g. court papers, arrest reports, or census data. It’s not clear that he conducted further research beyond scouring period newspapers.

On balance, though, this is a remarkably entertaining book. Tabler is an engaging storyteller who usually begins in the middle of the story with a powerful crime narrative and then zooms out to take a wider view and fill in historical context. His concise prose moves at a brisk pace.

Readers interested in the history of the Mid-Atlantic region will enjoy Tabler’s polished, readable work.

DELAWARE BEHAVING BADLY
First State, True Crimes
Dave Tabler
January 1, 2026

A sweeping account of crime and disaster in Delaware’s history.

“Delaware may be small, but its criminal history contains multitudes,” writes Tabler at the outset of his narrative of the Diamond State’s seamy underbelly. “These stories span a spectrum—from blood-chilling murders that haunted generations to curious capers lost in dusty archives, from soul-crushing injustices that demanded reform to schemes so preposterous they strain credulity.” Tabler takes his readers through the gamut of the seediest misdeeds, from statewide scandals involving prominent politicians and other public figures to grotesque local murders, all drawn from state lore extending well over a century. He tells readers about Noah Benson, whose headless body was found in 1891 in the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, sparking a sensational murder trial that filled the headlines of all the local papers (the head was never found). A more contemporary account outlines the sexual predation of pediatrician Dr. Earl Bradley, who in the 1990s abused dozens of children (a nurse claimed that he “made girls undress before routine exams, kissed and hugged them, and remarked about attractive mothers”). Tabler mentions that state Attorney General Beau Biden wanted Bradley’s offices “wiped off the face of the earth.” In most cases, Tabler offers larger lessons to be learned. For example, about bigamist clergyman Irvin Taylor, who had a deserted wife in Delaware while he was an upstanding married man in Iowa, Tabler writes, “The scandal exposed something more universal: the ease with which a man entrusted with moral and spiritual leadership could live a lie in plain sight.”

A less talented writer might have assumed that the salacious nature of this kind of history would do most of the heavy lifting as far as entertaining readers, but Tabler knows better. He turns the history he’s researched into good stories and often contextualizes it; regarding lawyer-turned-murderer Thomas Capano, he writes: “The once-powerful attorney who had manipulated the highest echelons of Delaware politics—and believed himself untouchable—died alone in a prison infirmary. It was a final, ignominious chapter in his fall from grace.” The author also delves deep into specifics, aided by both his vast research and his sharp ear for great quotes plucked from regional publications, as when Delaware’s newspaper Every Evening wryly commented on customers who persisted in drinking backwoods moonshine even after the state’s Liquor Commission issued beer-making licenses: “Tell the nation that instantaneous death would result from pulling the lobe of the left ear four times in rapid succession, and the undertakers would do a big business.” He’s equally adept at highlighting either absurd dark humor or savage tragedy, depending on the nature of the horror he’s describing, and his choices give the book a fine feeling of balance and depth. He tells the story of a constable named Brown found throttling Wilmington’s mayor in 1891 (“Yes, I grabbed him by the throat,” the constable evenly said, “but he grabbed me first”) with as much storyteller commitment as he does the many con artists who’ve targeted the most vulnerable throughout the state’s history. It’s all done with energy and detail; true crime fans and Delaware history buffs will be delighted.

Delaware murder and mayhem served with substance and style.