The biggest corruption scandal of the 1920s just took a devastating turn for oil tycoon Harry Sinclair and his associates. A federal appeals court in St. Louis ruled that Sinclair's infamous Teapot Dome oil lease—obtained while Albert Fall served as Interior Secretary—was completely fraudulent and must be canceled immediately. The court's scathing 65-page decision described "a trail of deceit, falsehood, subterfuge, bad faith and corruption" and ordered Sinclair's Mammoth Oil Company to account for every drop of oil taken from the naval reserve since January 1925. Meanwhile, tragedy struck Cape Cod when three women returning from a sewing bee were killed after their automobile was demolished by a New York, New Haven & Hartford passenger train at a West Barnstable crossing. The victims included Mrs. Shirley Crocker and Mrs. Mary Gonzales of West Barnstable, plus Miss Bertha Knight, a home furnishing specialist from Amherst's Massachusetts Agricultural College. In a heartbreaking aftermath, Sidney Crocker tried to throw himself in front of the next train after learning of his wife's death, but neighbors restrained him.

The Teapot Dome ruling represents a major victory for government reformers trying to clean up the corruption that plagued Warren Harding's administration. This scandal, along with the ongoing trials of former Attorney General Harry Daugherty (also featured on today's front page), epitomized the sleazy intersection of politics and big business that Progressive Era reformers had been fighting for decades. These stories capture 1920s America at a crossroads—booming economically but grappling with unprecedented corruption scandals that would ultimately help reshape how Americans viewed their government and big business relationships.

• Sugar hit its highest price of the year at 6 cents per pound—nearly a full cent increase—due to heavy retail demand during peak canning season
• A mysterious character named John Cooper from Kewanee, Illinois, claimed to be heir to a $9 million estate but disappeared to St. Louis while townspeople tried to verify his story and banks found no records of his alleged deposits
• In the Hall-Mills murder case, defense attorneys planned to attack the character of star witness Mrs. Jane Gibson, dubbed the 'pig woman,' to impeach her testimony
• Fred P. Seavey, former postmaster of Port Clyde, was fined only $200 for shortages in his accounts partly due to financial hardships from caring for his 'practically helpless' crippled daughter
• Massachusetts is fighting in the Supreme Court for states' rights to enforce daylight saving time laws, with the state grange and locomotive engineers opposing the practice

• Albert Fall, the Interior Secretary who granted Sinclair the fraudulent Teapot Dome lease, would become the first cabinet member in U.S. history to go to prison—he'd serve nine months in 1931 at age 70
• The New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad that killed those three Cape Cod women was already struggling financially and would become a famous example of railroad decline, finally going bankrupt in 1961
• Harry Daugherty, whose conspiracy trial is covered on this page, was Warren Harding's campaign manager who famously predicted Harding would be nominated in a 'smoke-filled room'—coining that immortal political phrase
• Michigan Governor Alex Groesbeck, whose political machine was 'wrecked' according to today's front page, had actually been a progressive reformer, but his defeat foreshadowed the Republican Party's shift toward more conservative politics
• The widespread fear of another influenza epidemic mentioned in today's ads reflects lingering trauma from the 1918 flu pandemic that killed more Americans than World War I