Common Threads: Hunting for a Serial Killer in Virginia City in the late 1800’s

Common Threads presents
Hunting for a Serial Killer in Virginia City in the late 1800’s

Speaker:
Robin Flinchchum, Author

Robin Flinchchum is an award-winning journalist and historian whose work explores crime, myth, and memory in the early American West. She will be discussing her fascinating new book, The Redemption of Julia Bulette: Murder, Myth & the Hunt for a Serial Killer in Early Virginia City.

Trained in journalism, Flinchum brings investigative rigor and narrative precision to nineteenth-century sources, reexamining one of the Comstock’s most enduring legends. On a cold January night in 1867, Virginia City prostitute Julia Bulette was strangled in her bed. Her accused killer, John Millain, was swiftly caught and publicly hanged, and the case was considered closed.

More than 150 years later, Flinchum asks what was overlooked. Was Millain responsible for other murders, reduced to passing mentions in old newspapers and forgotten by history? Tracing a possible trail of violence from San Francisco’s Tenderloin to Nevada’s richest mining town, Flinchum uncovers how myth, memory, and justice collide in the early American West.

Join us for an afternoon of history, mystery, and conversation.