My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 247 - Champions In Our Own Ways

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

In this week’s quilt episode, Karen and Georgia cover the survival of Mary Vincent and the case of Typhoid Mary.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Oh, right. Hello. And welcome to my favorite murder. That's Georgia Hardstar. That's Karen Kilgarov. We are here with you on Thursday, November 5th. That's right. 2020.

That's right. What a week. And what a week it's been. Oh, my God. So much crazy stuff, guys. Yeah. It's currently, right now, as we're speaking, Wednesday evening. Yes.

So things are still up in the air. Nothing has been announced officially. There's lots of reason to have good feelings, but God forbid we have good feelings. Yeah, I'm not. I don't have good feelings yet, but I'm there. Everyone I know and love is having good feelings, and so I'm going to trust you guys.

But, hey, you're right to fear good feelings because we haven't had them in a long time, and we all have PTSD from 2016. That's real. So this is also similar that it can't feel good at the moment. And even if it does feel good, the whole narrative that we're learning this week is that it is as bad as it seemed the last four years.

That's right. It's still a negative positive. Sure. There's no only positive after an experience like the one we've had with this leadership, but the fact that at 9 o'clock last night, looking at Twitter, it was a very different story than the story that's happening today. Oh, it was insanity.

So, yeah, I think I did it in a way that scared me into then this morning, waking up and going, oh, all is not lost. Oh, wait a second. Quite the opposite. Yeah. So we just needed to be official, and we need responsible parties to come out and say, stop trying to create violence and negativity. Yeah.

I had a therapy appointment today, and I had a realization that I get along really well with my mom when there's a Democratic president. And I realized like, oh, yeah, the Obama years, I could just laugh her off, laugh all the shit she said to me off. You'd be like, oh, mom, you know what I mean? But then the last four years, every time she brings something up, it triggers something from my childhood. Sure.

So when we go to this mediator slash therapist in two weeks, I feel like maybe I'll be in a better place to be open to her. That's the dream. It is. Yeah, because it's the balance of power shifting or the reality. We have spent time in another reality. Right. It takes away some of her power over my emotions and feelings, and that'll be nice.

And high time, and it's high time that happens. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Amen. Enough already. Amen. Enough already.

That's right. What are you doing to distract yourself this week from... Oh, you know, just a ton of podcasting. I don't, I don't understand how I'm still podcasting. I have, I don't, Stephen is there with me every time I do it. I have nothing to say anymore. I can't, it's literally like, do you want me to describe how I made toast this morning? Because that's fucking, it's just unbelievable that through all of this,

we've just continued podcasting. It is weird. It is weird. Like, all we have to talk about, and everyone's like, all we have to talk about are what TV shows we're watching to distract ourselves from the end of the fucking world. Or like, I got to see someone face to face. Right. I'm like...

And here's the candy I'm binging on right now. For real. I had, I actually had to go throw out a bag of the nerds' ropes. Oh, these cans? Or whatever those nerds' things were. There was a different version of them that people kept recommending, so I saw them. Um, yeah, they were like, like this version, much actually easier to eat as opposed to the rope that where the nerds get everywhere.

I actually was like, oh, I could handle that, but I don't need it in my house. No, no. I had several handfuls and then stood up and walked to the garbage can through the Moyan said, stop pretending you can just fucking eat candy. Like, enough already with this fucking behavior. I'm doing that, but with alcohol. Yeah. How is it going?

It's going well, actually. This time totally feels, it feels a little different. Like I'm not doing it because I'm not doing it for like 30 days and I'm not doing it to like lose weight. I'm doing it because suddenly I realize I'm not having fun anymore. And I'm not, it's not actually giving me anything and I'm not enjoying it at all. So it feels like a little shifty, a little different. Sure.

Like suddenly I'm ready to deal with the anxiety that I've been pouring alcohol on for 20 years, you know? Yeah. Maybe it's because I have a really great therapist right now. And I'm seeing her twice a week, but there's something, it's something that feels a little different this time. That's good. And you have security in your life and you have other things to worry about.

Right. And you like give bigger things and maybe not, maybe you can just update the story, which is I'm not, I wish I could do the same for myself. But that whole idea, this is what my therapist always says is we had something happen to us. It's usually around like 12, 13, and then your like limbic system or whatever, whichever one it's called, like your reactive system kind of stops taking in information after that. They're like, yeah, I've already seen this.

I'm not fucking doing it again. And she always says that to me. She's like, the worst thing already happened. This is all just kind of like reacting to the memory of what happened. And so, yeah, the more when you think about that horrifying, I mean, horrifying. And you should get to skip it. It's such a terrible age. I was in rehab at 13.

Yeah, you went for it. You went for it. I was like, let's make this the worst year possible. Oh, God. But I am, and I'm journaling about it now, which is actually really helpful. And I'm doing that. So I want to recommend if anyone else is trying it, which we all are at some point, right?

So like aside from the stuff I was reading before, when I tried this, you know, last year, the beginning of this year, This Naked Mind by Annie Grace. I'm listening to. And then I found a new book. It's called Quit Lit. I didn't know that was a thing. Quit Lit. Well, I've never heard of that.

I hadn't either. Like, you know, all the sobriety books I read that are like, here's how to do it. And here's what worked for me. And here I'm a woman and we can do it. It's called Quit Lit, which I love, isn't that great? So here's my new Quit Lit suggestion. It's called Mrs. D is Going Without. And it originally was an anonymous blog way back when blogs existed by this woman in New Zealand.

And her name, her name is Lotta Dan, and she is, I'm identifying with her so much. And it's just a really light, easy read about how fucking hard it is to become sober when you, even though you know you need to. So I'm enjoying that. Great. Yeah. But I mean. Other people's stories, that's kind of the key.

Right. Knowing that it isn't special to you. You're not the only, not only are you not the only one, it's very typical. Yeah. It's a, tons of people deal with substance issues. Everybody does in some way or the other. Yeah. So we all deal with soothing our, soothing our trauma in some way or another.

Yeah. Ideally with therapy and learning, you know, really, truly had a cope with it. But that doesn't usually happen. And it takes a long time to get there. Well, and also we'll pick things up and put them back down and you get it, you go in and you go out of it. And then you, there's a drama within doing that and that's all part of it. And if you can kind of pull back and see that that's all part of it and it's not like, oh,

I failed again, but it's like everybody fails again and again and again and then tries again. And the whole point is building your resilience to keep trying and to kind of keep open. I think that's just it. You just don't, it's never the final chapter. You just get to keep trying. That's right. That's, yeah. It feels at 40 suddenly like crazy that I'm just now ready to not obsess about when I get

a drink again or drinking or that I have a hangover or that I feel like shit. And like this, this whole pattern that I've been doing, I'm suddenly ready to not, to not distract myself with that anymore. Sure. It's like, it just seems wild, but it took, you know, that's how long it takes. I'm sure it'll happen again, whatever. It's always something because literally it reminds me of when I was in my 20s and my great idea for my eating disorder was I was going to take, I took fenn fenn, but without

the downer fenn, it just was the, it was the first version. So it was uppers only. And so I stopped eating almost entirely, didn't care about food, never thought about it, lost a ton of weight very fast and started obsessively, compulsively shopping where I literally went to the Beverly center every single day and had my closet looked like a little mini gap. It just had stacks of color coded shirts. It was pure insanity.

And that's when I saw that it was like, oh, it's not about the thing I'm doing. Right. You couldn't, you didn't have to eat your fucking stress away anymore. You needed something else. So shopping. Yep. Became it. Something will replace it and it's just about the, because you have to dig down further.

It's not just the thing. Yeah. It's what's underneath it and like sitting with it. So my, my therapist told me this really great analogy, I think it is where it's like, okay, there's a tiger in a cage and the tiger's pacing back and forth in this little cage. It's whole life, but it's a comfort and then suddenly it gets put out into this big field and gets taken out of the cage, but it continues to pace back and forth in the same way. It continues to pace back and forth in the same area the cage would have been.

Wait. Because that's what it knows. That's what's always worked. That's what's safe. And that's the only way it knows how to deal with life. And you can't realize you have this big open expanse of other possibilities. Yep. I think that's right.

Well, yeah, it sounds, it sounds right on. I mean, it makes sense to me. It also makes me think of how when I stopped drinking after I was hospitalized for it, you didn't get fucking hospitalized at County Hospital for it. Hey. Hey, Rehab at 13. Let me just remember. Hey, look, we've been champions in our own ways this whole time.

That's right. But when I, when all the alcohol was finally out of my system and I was home for a couple days, I had that dream where I was standing like on a prairie with tall grass, like up to my hips, green grass, and this wind was blowing and I could see all the way up and all the way to either side. Like I was a crazy, like a fly with like crazy vision, complete peripheral, and it was like 360 vision or 180 vision. Instead of this tunnel that you've been looking into for so long.

It was so moving and so like, I was just kind of in the dream going, oh, I get it. Like, thanks. Thanks for being so on the nose brain. But it is, it reminds me of that tiger story because it is that thing where it's like, yeah, you don't have to just go in circles anymore, which can be just as intimidating and just as fraught and, you know, there's freedom is scary too. Yeah. Learning how to pace the cage as a young person worked for you.

And so you've been, you keep doing it even though the cage is gone because you haven't yet learned that you're free and how to. And because if you have these coping mechanisms that go four feet by four feet by four feet, you're not going to be like, watch me while I fucking take off into the woods. Like you never learned how to take off into the woods. No, that's all new. It's like, you got to give yourself, you know, let yourself adapt and adjust and fall down and get up. I feel like the two, two therapy sessions a week is really, is really helping me with that.

Yeah. Finally, it's good. After fucking a decade of therapy, like it's just crazy how that works, you know. Yeah. But then it's good. Then like, I love the when, when I suggested to my therapist, I was like, should we go to three days a week? And she's like, I don't see why not.

You have the money. And I was like, you're right. Yeah. What else are you going to fucking spend it on nerd ropes? That's not doing anything for you. I've got to stop spending it on words. Yeah. Please stop sending me suggestions of nerd things.

I don't want to eat that shit anymore. Because also it, I realize like pacing the cage, eating a bunch of sugar and then laying on the couch and panicking is a vibe. It is like a choice and a feeling that I don't have to be in anymore. Yeah. And you are, you are, you are like triggering emotional reactions with sugar. Sugar does that to you and your hormones and your sugar is the fucking worst. It's so bad for you.

It has to get eventually someone has to figure out. Once we're going to do a COVID vaccine first, then can we please have a sugar vaccine? Yeah. Because those people that are like, I'm not that into dessert. I'm like, where, where, what part of the world is your family from? I mean, get your jeans. Truly. I have two unopened bags somehow, a fucking mint Milano's in my house because I just

can't not have them like constantly need. I need it. I know. I know. Oh, should we talk about the Queen's Gambit that we both found out that we're in love with? Yes, we should. On Netflix. So good.

Where did you find it? Because someone tagged me in it and I didn't know what it was. Someone on Twitter was talking about it. I think it was James Urbaniak or somebody who I, I like their taste and think they're smart. And they basically were like, wow, I'm surprised. I didn't even know what this was. And all of a sudden I stumbled upon it and it's such, such a delight. So I kind of had bookmarked it.

And then, uh, yeah. And, and the second it started, I was just like the visuals, the storyline, the fucking everything. So good. It's so good. So basically I wrote down that it's, um, it's like Amelie meets, what was that Toreg movie? Where he super. The what movie? The, um, about Toreg.

Wait. Toreg, the Volkswagen van again? No, wait. Toreg. The SUV by. The guy who solved, who solved the puzzles in World War II. Oh, Alan Turing. What was that movie called?

Turing. The imitation game. Imitation. Thank you. Was that it? Thank you. Okay. So it's like, Amelie meets the imitation game.

Don't you think a little shirt? Yes. Totally. Yes. Why not? And the word, uh, cocksucker gets bandied about a lot in the first episode by children, which I really appreciated. And there's children on pills, no spoilers, but it's, yeah, it's, it is absolutely where it,

the only thing is it's a, it's just a fictionalized story. It's from a book, um, I believe. Yes, it is. I looked it up. It's from a book. I wanted that person, that character to be real. I know. So badly.

But of course, because it's a perfectly written character with a perfect background and the whole storyline is just so compelling that. Yeah. Also, how about the hotel in Russia? I was just like, I want to walk around that hotel so bad. I did too, but I haven't gotten there yet. I've only gotten through. Episode one was really long.

I got through that and now I'm starting episode two, but I, I'm excited about it. It's good. It's a delight the whole way through. Doesn't disappoint. All those actors are so goddamn good. So good. The little baby boy from a, um, from love actually, who plays in the band. Yes.

Oh, I thought he's David Spade when I first saw him in a trailer. He's David Spade's illegitimate child. He's the cutest. He's such a good actor. Yeah, he is. The queen's gambit and queen is like chess. It's not like the queen. So, right.

So I saw someone say, I don't want to watch it because I'm sick of British royalty stuff. And it's like, no, no, no, no. It's about chess. Fine. Get out then. Then get out and take your opinion with you. It makes me feel really stupid because I don't know how to play chess. Do you know how to play chess?

You know, what's funny is, uh, as I was watching it, I had a recovered memory in grammar school. I did play chess and there was, uh, like a chess, we got to go to one of the mobile home buildings that was like the out, out building on the grammar school property. Wilson school. What up, Wilson wildcats. What up.

But, uh, we got to go out there and this there, we had a really smart, genius chess teacher and we would just all sit there and play chess all the time, but it wasn't like how they were doing it where we knew it. We didn't know, uh, ways of play and whole systems and names of anything. You weren't a savant, a legitimate fictional savant. But I was kind of, I mean, we don't know whether or not I was. You could have been in the right, in the right situation. You make me, even if I were, no one was paying attention to be, even if I would be like,

can I go to this chess tournament? My dad would be like, I'm not driving you there. I'm not driving all the way to Nevada. I want to watch chess. But it was kind of funny because I was like, this is so interesting. And then I was like, wait a second. I used to, I used to love chess, but I didn't.

I don't have a memory of the con of the concept of the game except for like, one of them could move and like an upside down L shape. That's kind of all I can remember. It's hard. I never got, I never got past checkers. Checkers is very complex when you think about it. Getting to double up on things. Oh, sure.

Sure, sure. Sure, sure. What else are you watching doing? I escaped into, last night, I basically was like, stay off Twitter, stay off social media. You have to, you have to give yourself over to the question mark of this situation. And, you know, so I turned on one of my BBC series. Oh, Martin Cheslewet, which is a Charles Dickens series, BBC series. Oh, that's comforting.

That's comforting. Tom Wilkinson is one of the leads who is just the most delightful British actor that's been in a million things and won in a million awards. And you know who he is. Yeah. But it was one of those things where I was just like, oh, I need something completely removed from modern life right now. And it worked and then I went to sleep.

Angora sweater. Of people talking like this to each other. And then some horses. Without animal cruelty. Carriages. Right. Yeah, yeah. That sounds nice.

Yeah, it was good. So for Exactly Right News, we're really excited because at the end of this episode, you're going to be able to hear the brand new trailer for our brand new Exactly Right podcast called Tenfold More Wicked that we told you about. It's hosted by crime journalist and author Kate Winkler Dawson, who she's written some of your favorite true crime books. My favorite recently is the book American Sherlock, which is an incredible, if you haven't read it, it's unbelievable. It's basically, you know, it's about one of the first forensic science scientists in America.

So Kate is the host of this podcast. And she basically takes all of her journalistic and author knowledge and intelligence, essentially, and she digs into the story of one of the first serial killers in America. And it is. And there's a whole kind of like side story about neuroscience. It's just a fascinating historical true crime series that she's hosting that we really think you're going to love. Definitely.

It comes out on Monday, November 23rd. So be sure to like and subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts and stay tuned at the end of this episode to listen to the trailer. It's really an awesome podcast. So good. So proud. So proud. So proud.

Our little fledgling network is becoming this like, you know, it's growing into a adolescent. It's, you know, it's becoming its own person and like learning and growing and like. And making friends with really smart people who make their own podcasts really well and make really good stuff that they want to come to our party. It's it's the best. Yeah. It's it's really good. Yeah.

And thanks for supporting us, you guys. It's all because we have the best freaking listeners. Yes. Absolutely. We think of you when we're trying to pick these podcasts and what you might like and what might serve you in your day to day lives. And there's many more to come that we're very excited about. Yeah.

I can't believe it. I'm so I wrote down today like on a forum that like it was like, what do you do? And I'm like, podcaster, writer and business owner. I'm a fucking, we're business owners. How cool is that? I mean, it's all right. I don't know. Business owners who as of this weekend won't have an office anymore, which is so sad.

I know we had to give up our lease on our office. We had basically rented an empty office for the past six months or whatever. But I know, I know it's such a weird time, you know, and it's such a weird time. It's nice that we can all kind of go through it together and distract ourselves with podcasts and television, things that we like and whatever and also, you know, feel connected to each other. And one of those ways that we're doing that is by and maintaining our sanity is by putting up a quilt episode this week. Karen and I both picked one of our favorite stories that we've ever done.

And so we're going to post those. They've never, they've never been in an episode together and they're not live. They're, you know, older episodes that we love, older stories that we love. Right. And that we, and that you've told us you love. So it's, it's, um, yeah, we're doing, this is kind of like the Eagles greatest hits. Just because this week was, has been incredibly stressful as has been for everybody. So we weren't going to be doing this usual homework, trying to take it easy a little bit

and then be like, okay, well, we can at least we'll hang out, we'll check in and then we'll play some stories that people, we know people like so that we don't all go crazy. Because I, I'm having a hard time unclenching my teeth. Much, much less sitting down and writing a six page book report. Oh, totally. Six pages. I laugh in the face of six pages. It's, they're never six pages.

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Oh, all right. So should we, mine's going first this week, so I'll introduce that. So I'm going to take you back, dear listener, all the way back to May 27th of 2016. May of 2016 when we were so young and innocent and stupid, believed in the world. Oh, God, take me back. I mean, let's go back now. Let's just let's just do it mentally, have a fun mental exercise of going back to George's

old department with no air conditioning. That's right. If it was May 27th, it would have already started to get very hot. That's right. 2016, I think I probably had minimum two jobs at the time. Oh, Vince and I had just gotten married. That's sweet. That's a nice thing.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, we were just, we were just slowly putting this thing together and Georgia everyone's well would show me some good positive thing on her phone. And then I go, that's done. Don't get used to it. I'd show you the numbers or like where we are on the comedy chart and you'd be like, shut the fuck up.

It's not real to get it away from me. I don't believe in anything. That's my beautiful journey from, from show business cynic to a wide-eyed believer in the mat in the possibility of magic. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, this is from episode 18. Oh my God.

Oh my God. Investigation 18 discovery. What do we call it? The investigation, investigation. Investigating discovery. Who knows? Back when we would do that. Not only the extra work of trying to make one of those good pun titles,

but I also had people, I'll never forget my friend Owen Alexen who I worked with. He was the showrunner on our show I was writing on and he wrote into me for one of them that was so good and it was like, we needed the help or I'm like, we can't keep doing this. Yeah. If we have to rely on outside source. Yeah. We start, we just, we drop that like naming, naming podcasts after the number

pretty quickly. Yeah. We had to. Yeah. Because that was like, it was so much work. But anyway. Yeah. Investigating discovery.

So this is actually a story that last summer we did some compilations of like your guys' favorites, favorite shows. And this is a story of mine from your favorite show. And it's the unbelievable and amazing survival story of Mary Vincent. So here's 2016 me telling 2016 Georgia in 2016 Georgia apartment about this nightmare story. Should we get into the murder? Favorite murder.

Oh, sorry. I don't know how to sing as I mentioned earlier. They didn't know that was. Here we go. Guys, here we go. I'm going first this week. I think you're first. I think I am.

I'm going to get cuddled in. Yeah. I'm going to have this half a glass of whiskey. Drink some of your whiskey. I wish I could. I drank all mine already. Before you were 30. It was up in 1997.

I had my last shit. God, I was good at it. My therapist told me that we're doing an experiment where I'm drinking two glasses of booze a day just to see how it goes. So I'm allowed to have two glasses of booze a day. Oh, no more, no less. Yeah. We're just like seeing how this goes.

So it's almost like, what if you don't feel like it? Oh, no, then I still have to force it down. Yeah. And this is clearly like, this was two glasses of whiskey and one big cup. Well, that's fun. Does that count as one? It does to me. There you go.

If I was your therapist. Hell yeah, girl. I had this realization when I was trying to think of this week's, there's so many good cases. And there's so many people who are passionate about the cases that are their stories or just ones they like or think are fascinating. There was a guy that tweeted me a case. His Twitter handle was at Arkansasyer. So it was almost like Arkansas lawyer.

And it was a case of a guy, I think his name was Bobby Lee Foster or Bobby Joe Foster, who killed his own mother, Edna, and decapitated her and put the head in the local church and then took the eyes and mailed them to Eisenhower. What in the actual fuck? Yeah. It was crazy. But so I was kind of into that. Thank you for sending that.

I love it. I mean, you know, but I had a realization that when we were talking about our kickoff murders, the ones that got us kind of into it, I realized that factually and date wise, I had an earlier one than Diane Towns and it because it happened in the Bay Area. And it's this Lawrence Singleton attack on Mary Vincent and later murder of. So I'll just tell you about it. Let's let's unpack. Let's unpack this.

It happened in 1978. So I was eight years old and this was on the news. It was like in 1979 is when he went to trial and all the stuff happened. And it was on the news every night. My parents were livid. They talked about it all the time. You must have just been you were there too. Yes, because it was we watched the news together as a family every night before dinner.

I feel like there's nothing more harmful for a kid. Yeah, no one knew. I know. It was back. This was the late 70s where no one knew what was good or bad for children. It was all just like, eat your cereal, go outside, try to survive, come home and then we'll watch the news together. It was a generation away from children after children being coal miners.

It was that weird time in between coal mining and children being carried their entire lives until they get to college. Right. Essentially. So I'm the last of the last of that generation. I lived. So here's the story on September 29th, 1978, a man named Lawrence Singleton, who was a merchant seaman, always a bad job that Richard Speck was a merchant seaman.

Oh, really? Yeah, there it's bad news. I think it's what happens when you're like super fucked up and but you're so fucked up, you don't want to join the army. Right. So you're like, oh, I'll go out and ship for a while with a bunch of dudes. Yeah. Yeah. So he picked up a 15 year old hitchhiker named Mary Vincent in Berkeley, California.

Mary had run away from home. She lived in Las Vegas. Her parents were getting divorced. It was all fucked up and she had friends in the Bay Area and relatives. So she made her way up to the Bay Area, but she was homesick and she'd been on her own for a while. She had a boyfriend that was bad to her. She she left him, ran away. She just wanted to get back home.

Sweetie. So she is hitchhiking in Berkeley and a van pulls up and there are two people hitchhiking behind her. Now, just so you know, there's Mary Vincent herself tells this story on an episode of I Survived. It was season four episode one and it is epic. I know you don't like survivors. I fucking love survivors and things like this where you get the firsthand account of something. This story is also insanely fucked up. I guess if there if she's it's been that long, I can go with it.

Right. And she's it's when they can tell their own story. They're not, you know, that they're able. They're in charge of this narrative and they can tell you what happened. And yeah. And like when it's a grizzled fucking bartender like cafe waitress and she's like this. This is what fucking happened to me. I can deal with it.

But when it's like some college girl whose life is ruined. No, you will because here's the thing. The saddest part about it, but the truest part about it is it happens to a lot of people. So when you have one woman sitting there going, here's what happened to me. A, B, C and D, you not only get the don't fucking hitchhike, keep your eyes open, pick up on context clues. You have all that, but you also have survive and you can survive and you can come out the other end and help other people.

And it's okay to it's okay to tell your story. Like you don't have to keep this huge secret. There's other people who have been through similar or worse. Yeah. And you have to tell your story. It's part, that's part of healing. Right. So, so a lot of what I have here is basically her first hand account.

Holy shit. So the van pulls up and there's two hitchhikers behind her in Berkeley, 78. And the guy that's driving the van says he only has room for one person and says it's Mary. Well, the two hitchhikers behind her go, don't get in that van because they can see into the back of the van. The whole thing's empty. There's plenty of room. But if a person saying he only has room for the young girl, they go, don't take that ride.

But she was so tired. She just wanted to get home. So she was like, and he looked like a grandfather. Oh, really? Yes. He's this big pot belly kind of grisly old guy. He was like in his mid sixties at the time. So she's like, what's that guy going to do?

Yeah. So she gets in and she's really tired. She's been walking and hitchhiking for a long time. So she says, I'm, I'm trying to go back home to Las Vegas. He says, I'll give you, I'm going to Reno, but I'll give you a ride to Los Angeles, which is that, that right there. What? That doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense. Why? So she settles in and she falls asleep. Don't do it. Don't do it. She wakes up and they have gone east and not south. When she finally sees a sign, they're somewhere out in Patterson. They're somewhere out by Modesta, they're, they're on the other side of the five.

There's a lot of, for people not from here, there's a lot, especially in the seventies, there's a lot of no man's land. Yes. A lot of, especially in the central valley, which is where he drove her out to, it's just all empty rural farmland roads, little hills with a oak tree on top. There's nothing. So she notices that they're going east. She freaks out, confronts them, says, what the hell are you doing?

He says, I'm sorry, I'm an honest man. I made an honest mistake. Let me just turn around. He pulls around, he turns around, starts going down the road. He says, sorry, I have to go, I have to relieve myself. He pulls the van over. She's getting nervous. She realizes this is now a bad situation. It's, it's nighttime.

He's down relieving himself and she looks down and realizes one of her shoes untied and she thinks to herself, if I have to run for some reason, and I could outrun this old fat guy, but if I have to do it hurt, she's like, I got to tie my shoes. So she gets out of the van too. She bends over to tie her shoe and she blacks out. He hit her in the head with a sledgehammer. She wakes up.

She's tied up in the back of the van. After a sledgehammer hit, she wakes up. She wakes up. So he just conks her out. Yeah. She doesn't like, thank God she didn't die. She's, when she wakes up, she's tied up and she's naked and he starts raping her. He rapes her all night and into the morning.

And the whole time, she's of course crying. 15 years old crying, whatever, and saying, just set me free. Please. I won't tell anyone. Just set me free sometime in the morning when he's finally done. He pulls her out of the van, unties her and says, you want to be set free. I'll set you free. Okay, picks up a hatchet out of the back of the van, cuts off her left arm.

She's screaming below the elbow. She's screaming, freaking out, going crazy. She grabs him with her right arm going freaking out. He takes the hatchet and he starts hacking off her right arm. What the fuck? The craziest thing to me is as you're telling this, I'm like reminding myself that she survived, but it doesn't fucking sound like she's going to. I know.

I know. It's, it's crazy. So she is holding on to him, but she falls backwards anyway. And that's when she realizes that her right hand has been, her right arm has been chopped off. Oh my God. So she's all, of course, in total shock, confused, losing blood, looking, and this is the most fucked up part of her story.

There's more fucked up than that. This is, it peaks in fucked upness right here. Holy shit. She sees him. She's looking and like she can't understand what just happened. And she's looking at him and he is flicking his arm like this. He's flicking his arm out. Yes.

No. She looks and her right hand is still holding on to his arm. Oh my fucking. Ew, I just got, I gave myself chills and I know this story. Because you had your hand in like a claw just now. I did it. So she passes out or she like kind of goes limp. Sure.

She's bleeding obviously profusely, losing blood, lightheaded, laying on the ground. So she just goes limp because she just doesn't know what to do. This she's now in the presence of a monster. He thinks she's dying or dead. He drags her body over to the railing and throws her over a 30-foot cliff. On the way down, she breaks four ribs and he drives away. Now later on, when the police catch him, which they, I'll just let you off the hook now. The police catch him and they put together that the reason he did that is because he

thought she'd be dead and they did. He didn't want them to be able to get her fingerprints. Did they? Okay. Who found her? How did she get found? I tell you now. Oh, please.

So she's down in this fucking ravine and she's laying there and she's losing blood like crazy and she wants to go to sleep. But she said that there is a voice in her head saying you cannot go to sleep. You have to get up so they can catch this guy. So she puts her bloody stumps in the dirt and makes a mud pack. So she stops losing blood. Oh my God. Uh-huh on both, on both arms.

And then she starts crawling back up the ravine 30 feet. It takes her all night. Oh no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That was the morning. He dumped her over in the morning. So she crawls back up the ravine. It takes her all day.

She finally gets up to the top of the ravine and back onto the road at night. And then she starts walking naked, covered in blood with two stump arms. She walked for three miles. Oh my God. The first car that came up was two dudes in a convertible and they saw her and they fucking sped away. Nope. Yep. Yes.

And she said herself in this, I survived, she goes, I look like something out of a horror movie. She's like, I didn't blame them at all because it was, I mean, beyond something you'd see in a horror movie. Yeah. And on a faraway, like a deserted road in the middle of the night where there's no, this is out where there's no street lights. There's your, like she said she was walking by the light of the moon. And in my mind too, it's like these two dudes are married men and they're gay lovers and they're like on a clandestine, you know, romance thing. And if they stop to help her, they have to call the cops. They're going to get caught together.

Yep. That's just in my head. That's like, that's very plausible. So like, hopefully these aren't monsters. I mean, here's what I'm sure of. They carry it with them to this day. Yes, they do. Imagine leaving a person like that.

And then they read the newspaper the next day. And they're like, look what we did. And she could have died. They could have saved her and then she could have died. But here's who did save her. Who? She walks a little further. A couple who was on their honeymoon.

Oh, no, no, no. Who took the wrong exit and is driving around trying to get back to the I-5. Oh, which is close enough so that Mary heard the noise of the I-5 all day. And was like, I just have to get back up because there will be someone if I walk toward that sound. So that's how she guided herself back toward civilization. These people grab her, put her in the back of the truck and say, we're going to get you help. And she said she heard them speeding so fast you could hear the tires screeching. They get to a phone.

Can I say real quick what half the people listening, the murderinos? Yeah. Dream honeymoon. Exactly. Exactly. Like, what else are you going to do? Fucking play canasta? Well, because imagine you, you're like, oh, I've married, I love him so much.

He's the man for me. Now, if the man for you was one of those guys in that convertible who was like, we have to get out of here. You'd be like, you get out of my life forever. I bet they're still together. 100%. They get her, they get to that pay phone, they call and they air left her to the hospital. It wasn't even an ambulance situation. They were like straight in.

Oh honey, the relief she must have felt to be saved. So, she, sorry, I'm on the next page already. Because you're, by the way, I won't ever know you're like fucking telling this. You're not even looking at your notes. Because this, because I remember this happening when I was little. Holy shit. And I remember my mother being so livid and she would talk about Lawrence Singleton, this disgusting piece of shit. She would talk about him all the time.

Well, because I'll get into it. Was all this, was all these, were all these details on the news? No, but it was, it was a man who raped a girl, chopped her arms off and threw her into a ditch. That's enough. That was plenty. Yeah. Because you can't, that's when it was like, oh my God, that could happen. Totally.

That's real. Even the word rape, like you don't even talk about like couples in fucking sitcoms didn't sleep in the same bed. Right, exactly. Well, I'm not from the 50s, Georgia. Oh my God. I mean that the Brady Bunch was the, so. Oh my God. So she lost over half the blood in her body.

Wow. But from her hospital bed, she described a picture of him so accurately to the police sketch artist that Lawrence Singleton's next door neighbor saw it and immediately called the police. Even though she was friends with him and like knew him for years, she was like, that's Lawrence Singleton. That's my next door neighbor. She's one of us. Oh yeah, that's exactly. And I do have to say this, in the article that I found that piece of information from, for some reason in the line, it said housewife and bowling expert. Wow.

I want her life. They really described her to a T. I really, I want that life. That's a pretty good life. Yeah. So they arrest Lawrence Singleton nine days later. I like to call him Larry. Larry.

And when he was questioned, a Singleton told the police that Mary was a $10 horror that, that he was passed out drunk in his van and that his other friend Larry is the one that attacked her. And that there were two other hookers in the van at the time. What a fucking monster. Lunatic. So she testifies against him in court. Get a girl. With two prosthetic, her two prosthetic limbs on, she'd already been fitted for them. Still a teenager.

I mean, that's an, that is a hard thing to do on its own. No, listen to this, as she walks out after testifying against him, he whispers to her, if it's the last thing I do, I'll finish the job. I was hoping she'd say motherfucker or like something at him. No. No, poor girl. She ran out. So in March of 1979, a San Diego jury convicts him of kidnapping mayhem, attempted murder, forcible rape, sodomy. And forced oral copulation and gives him the maximum sentence at the time.

Can I guess? No. Go ahead. Sorry, I'm just keep interrupting. No, no, no. Seven years. 14 years. For all of that, for all of those crimes combined, the maximum legal sentence was 14 years.

That's like almost how old she was. Yes. That's exactly right. So the judge who had to pass that sentence said, if I had the power, I would send him to prison for the rest of his natural life. So along with the particularly gruesome and callous aspects of the crime, the case became totally notorious because he was paroled after serving eight years in prison. I just can't. Okay, so this is when shit went off because that's when it started on the news every night. This guy got paroled and it was like my parents talked about it.

People talked about it in the grocery store. It was like, how is this happening? And you know what happened is in 1983, they passed a work incentive law kind of quietly passed it so that they could reduce prison overcrowding where a day was cut off your sentence for each day that the prisoner spent working at the jail. Or you could make pot legal and get a bunch of fucking prisoners out of jail. That's exactly right. And make the murderers and rapists go there for fucking ever. Why in God's name would you have a work incentive law applied to attempted murderer rapists? Well, this was back when they were like rape.

It was probably her. She probably asked for it. She was probably a $10 whore, motherfuckers. So they announced that his release date, this is Ed Martin, who is the associate warden of the California men's colony in San Luis Obispo, where he was serving his time. His release date, Martin said, if there's continued good behavior and work and no change in his programs will be approximately April 28th, which was eight years, four months of time. And every one of the barrier went bananas. So here's what happened. They tried to parole him to Antioch, California.

And the mayor protests the Department of Corrections. And so acknowledging the public outcry, the Department of Corrections agrees not to release Singleton and Antioch. So they try to place him with relatives in Tampa, Florida. People rise up in Tampa, Florida, and the Tampa chapter of the Guardian Angels, which was a big thing in the 80s. Remember them? Yeah. They lead these protests and eventually the Florida officials reject the proli. So they can't go back to Tampa now.

If you're a fucking, if the hell's, what is it? Hell's Angels? No, the Guardian Angels. What are they? They were this. Oh, they were. I thought you meant the Hell's Angels. Basically, when in the 80s, when crime was crazy, it was basically at the end of the recession.

When things were kind of shady, it was like back when New York was a total dump. The Guardian Angels were this group of basically, what do you call them? Like, like mothers against drug driving type of thing? No, no, no. These were, I can't think of the term for it. It was time, by the way. Like they're not in any hurry. Well, it's just long.

And I just want to get through the whole thing. Thanks, cocktails. Listen, take your time. Everything's fine. No, but it was the, they were like, when you're like a citizen that's taking long to your own hands. What are those called? Like a citizen taking longer. So they basically were like, we're taking back the streets.

So they would go, they wore red berets and shirts that said Guardian Angels. They all knew karate. They all, they were all like muscled out dudes. And they would ride this subway at night to make sure that like vigilante. There it is. They were, they were total vigilantes and they basically were like their own gang, but a positive gang. So they just made sure like that people didn't get attacked on the subway. And every city started popping up with their own group of the Guardian Angels.

Eventually, of course, they dispersed because I think they took things a little too far as it usually happens. But anyway, they did, they actually did some good stuff in the beginning where people, there were, there weren't enough cops and there was just a lot of crime. So, so he has to come back from Tampa, Florida, which is where his family was, but they, Tampa was like, go fuck yourself. And you know, Florida's kicking out. You're probably a big, pretty big piece of shit. So then he, where did he go? So then they try to release him in Martinez, California. And, and which is also in Contra Costa County.

Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors and four city council members when a temporary restraining order from a superior court judge, barring the Department of Corrections for placing Singleton anywhere in Contra Costa County. So they're like, quit bringing that motherfucker back here. He's not allowed. Yeah. And can it happen? So, so now they try to place him in San Francisco, but police chief, police chief Frank Jordan at the time, he's told that, that they're going to bring Singleton to San Francisco for a couple weeks.

And San Francisco wins a temporary restraining order barring him from San Francisco. So then they take him to Redwood City secretly, but reporters find out that he's there in a hotel and protesters surround the hotel. And the Department of Corrections has to pull him out of this hotel and get him out before the protesters rip him apart. What a bummer to be one of those cops and be like, I fucking hate this. Yeah, you don't want to protect that piece of shit. So now a quarter of appeals overturned that restraining order saying that Contra Costa County and San Francisco couldn't have him there. So then they try to place him in El Cerrito, but which is not in Contra Costa County. That's a little bit further north, I think, but the Contra Costa County officials find out that they're going to try to place him in El Cerrito and they tell the El Cerrito.

They tell the press in El Cerrito. So then protests begin there. So basically now everyone's telling everybody they're trying to place this piece of shit in the North Bay and everybody. So then they try to put him in Richmond, but the mayor finds out and the officials are all like, fuck no, get him out of here. Then they try to bring him to a city called Rodeo, which I've never even heard of before. It doesn't even exist. But people find out and a mob of 500 people gathers around this apartment and they actually have to take him out in a bulletproof vest and he's escorted out of town by the sheriff's department. So this is kind of that thing where, yes, this is the kind of the worst story ever, but also the greatest story ever.

We're like just the citizens were like, no, dude, like maybe that maybe legislature says what that you can get out of jail, but we say no. So they move him to Concord. 175 people gather at the hotel where they're keeping him there. Finally, the governor says, put a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin and he can live there until his parole is over. Love it. Jerry Brown? George Duke Major. So that's what he has to do. He has to live on the grounds of San Quentin until his one year parole is up. Then he's free to go where he wants.

And they don't even, they're not even attracted. Well, then there's just kind of nothing they can do because nothing's in the system about him. So he goes back to Florida and when he gets there, they find out that he's there. People protest. A car dealer offered him $5,000 to leave the state and a homemade bomb was detonated near the house that he was staying in. But no one was injured, unfortunately. In 1997, a neighbor calls the police after seeing Lawrence Singleton attacking a woman in his home. And when the police arrive, they find the body of 31 year old mother of three, Roxanne Hines. She's also a sex worker, but I wanted to say the mother of three part first so that people care.

Yeah. So that they know that she was so hard up for money. That financial problems made it so that she had to do this. And then she got stabbed 12 times in the face and chest by this piece of shit. And when he answered the door, he answered the door to the cops with his shirt open and blood all over his chest. So how many cold cases can be attributed to him? There's no way that it was one in 78. Well, they say that the reason that he got parole the way early like that was because he didn't have priors. Which is not to say he didn't do anything, but that he didn't have a record.

Still, I think cutting off a girl's arms and leaving her dead is worse than your prior for aggravated assault or whatever. And I think you're right. That's not a first crime at all. Especially when you're 60, you know, like you're starting that, you know. Yeah, no way. Okay. So Mary Vincent goes to Tampa to appear at his sentencing and tells her whole fucking story. Good girl. She describes her whole attack.

The whole, the toll that the ordeal has taken on her whole life because of course it's been, you know, a terror. And she's, you know, she's gotten her life together a little bit, but of course she just lives in constant fear. Sure. When she was, when he was paroled, like she was doing fine and going to art school in the Pacific Northwest. Can you imagine? Then he got paroled and she fell apart. Of course. As he said to her, as she left the courtroom, I'm going to finish this.

If it takes the rest of my life, I'll finish the job. Like. Yeah. Why isn't that considered when he's, when they think he's going out for parole? Yeah. The jury deliberated for one hour and he was sentenced to death because good old Florida. Good. So unfortunately he died of cancer in the prison hospital instead of being fried.

You know, we're very, we're being very vicious in this. We really are. In this one. But his apparently what he said in when he was sentenced, he said he did, he denied mutilating Mary Vincent. He still denied it. Not killing her. Just mutilating. No, no, no.

Mary Vincent is the girl whose arms he chopped off. Yes. He denies doing that. But he said about the stabbing of Hayes. I'm sorry about the death in this case. I'll have to carry it on my conscience the rest of my life. The death. The death and the narcissistic move of this is sad for me, the Diane Downs move.

So just to wrap it, Mary Vincent did win a $2.56 million civil judgment against Singleton, but she couldn't collect because he was unemployed in poor health and only had $200 in savings. Of course not. So she did eventually get married. She moved to Orange County. She has two sons and she started the Mary Vincent Foundation to help victims of traumatic crime. Oh, sweetie. Yeah.

That poor girl, isn't it crazy that like she would have been better off stealing a car and getting a misdemeanor than hitchhiking? You can't trust old men that look like grandfathers. And here's another thing I was thinking about. Like when she had a bad feeling, he stopped to pee and get out of the car. The thing about that is, is like, if you have a bad feeling, do what you need to do and apologize for it later. Like steal the car and drive the fuck off. Apologize later if it turns out he wasn't going to kill you.

Right. Trust your gut. Yeah. If you have to blow some guy off at a bar because he's giving you the creeps, but you don't want to be rude, blow him off and apologize later if it turns out that he wasn't a creep. Because if he's not a creep, it won't be a problem later. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. That's intense. I know. It's crazy. And if you want to see it, you can, you can watch on iSurvived at Mary Vincent and tell that story yourself. I might have to start watching that. The thing is about true crime shows is that I really don't like reenactments. There's no reenactments in this.

It's the people telling their story and they do, they start the segment with a picture of where it actually happened. Yeah. And it's all straight to camera storytelling. Okay. It's pretty brilliantly produced. That's why I like it. No, I did that. I can totally do that.

Yeah. I know. That was a big one. Yeah. Let's all take a collective breath. Yeah. Anyone needs to use the bathroom. Go use it now.

Oh, Karen, always one of my favorites that I remember hearing that and I had never heard that story before and I was just blown. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. It's. It's an emotional ride hearing that story. And that the story is about the survivor, that the story, these stories, I think this is when I first started learning, being taught by our audience, how these stories are actually

about the survivors or about the victims, the victims, families. Yeah. Mine's a little different. This is from episode 105, which happened in January of 2018. So we were in the pod loft by then. Right. And like, yeah, that was, that was fun. And the episode.

I don't know. And the episode was called Proclensity, which I still think is one of the best words I've ever made up in my life. Sure. I mean, you've made up some real dizzies, but that one's pretty great. I stand by that one. And so this is the story of Typhoid Mary, which is just so bananas and so wild. And I just, you know, you can't believe it happened.

And then you watch the drunk history that came out later of it. Yeah. With fucking Betsy Sedaro playing Typhoid Mary brilliantly. That she is one of my favorite comic actors. So hilarious. She's so funny. So funny. So enjoy Typhoid Mary, everyone.

And oh my God, turns out a global pandemic just happened two years later. Who knew? All right. My murder. Okay. So, you know, I'm obsessed with fucking infectious diseases and plagues and flu epidemics. Uh-oh. You know, I love all this shit, right?

Sure. That's my passion. Illness? Uh-huh. Like end of days shit. Right. Level stuff. Mm-hmm.

Okay. And right now, the flu right now in mid-January 2018, the flu is already an epidemic this year, which is fun. I just got a shot. Did you get a flu shot? Mm-hmm. Oh, good. I think it's uh, uh, irritated and I'm gonna die.

But anyways. Well, at least you won't have the flu when you die. Exactly. So, uh, on that note, because it's so fun, I thought I would do, uh, you know, our good friend, uh, Typhoid Mary. Nice. Okay. Here we go.

In the summer of 1906, on Long Island's Oyster Bay, have you been there? I haven't. I think they take one of those little trains. A jitney? A jitney to get there. Right? I don't know. 1906, a jitney?

Did they have cars? It was made of straw. Don't know. Maybe a horse jitney. Um, so Long Island's Oyster Bay is the towny playground of New York's rich and famous, teddy fucking Roosevelt, none other than had his summer white house there. Oh. It's all fucking rich people.

Sure. Um, and, uh, everyone freaks the fuck out when in a span of just one week, six of the 11 people in the home of a wealthy banker, also, he's the banker to the Vanderbilt's even. Ooh. Charles Warren's household comes down with typhoid fever while they are there on vacation. Typhoid is a bacterial infection. Let me tell you about it.

Okay. It's a vanilla typhi and it's viewed back then as a disease of the crowded slums and tendons, which we'd love to talk about in New York. It's associated with poverty, the lack of basic sanitation, immigrants assumed to live in disease-ridden crowded housing are scapegoats of typhoid. So when a rich fucking family gets it, it's bananas. Typhoid is one of the 20th century's most terrifying killers because an infection could spread through a house before anyone knew what was going on.

The first week, uh, the infection seems almost, you know, like just a regular flu. Then there's the fever, some abdominal cramping, but nothing really crazy to show that it's typhoid. And then during the second week, fever goes crazy. The patient becomes delirious, blood clots form under the skin. The entire abdomen becomes distended. Ooh. Third week, inflammation of the fucking brain and intestinal hemorrhaging, intestinal hemorrhaging.

And the death rate of those infected is anywhere between one in 10 and three in 10. So it's really easily spread by eating or drinking food or water contaminated with the feces of infected persons. Ew, what? So think about that in the 1900s, literally 1900s, you know, when they didn't like wash their hands and stuff and like water wasn't, you know, cleaned and shit. And they all lived in like houses and stuff that were all, you know. Yeah.

With that, I mean, that was back still when people would get up and just pee in a bowl under the bed. Right. Right. Just like slosh it back under. Probably throw it out the window. Sure. Where is that?

When they threw stuff out the window, throw the baby out with the, probably. I bet it. I bet they did. Let's say yes. But I like the idea that people would do it in rich houses. They didn't. So that's the thing. Okay.

Like they didn't. So it was really weird that this typoid was an outbreak in a rich house. So people were, that's why on Oyster Bay, they were like, this is a fucking something's wrong. Not here. Not in my family, not in my backyard. Right. Not in the Tony playground of the rich and famous.

Hell no. No. In 1900, it killed 35,000 Americans. There's no cure. Antibiotics didn't exist and a vaccine was not yet available. Horrifying. So scary. So the, Charles Warren's landlord was freaking out that the family outbreak would prevent

him from leasing his summer house again. He thought they would burn it to the fucking ground because of typoid. So he was like, fuck this shit. He hires freelance sanitary engineer, George Soper. A freelance sanitary engineer. Dr. George Soper. Okay. Which is like, you sound fun at parties.

You sound like you have a made up job. Yeah. P. Yeah. It's called a janitor. No, no. He's like, he investigates sources of typhoid fever outbreaks to determine the cause. Like he's the dude who is like, Dr. House.

He's fucking house. He's like, come over to my house, figure out what happened here. Okay. Like why is everyone sick? He's the dude who figured it out. Like. What was his name again? George Soper.

Dr. George Soper. Okay. So he's like, he's like, what's his name? Detective. Colombo. Sherlock Holmes. Can you edit that? You can leave that part in.

He's like the Colombo Sherlock Holmes of diseases. Okay. Okay. Of, I was going to say diarrhea. Diarrhea. What? Stop it. We don't use that word.

No, please. We do use that word. So everything. So Soper tests everything. He's like super excited about gross stuff, apparently. He tests the house plumbing, local shellfish company. Everything comes up negative for typhoid. But then he looks into the cook who had worked for the Warrens weeks before the outbreak

and discovered that a female Irish cook who fit the description of a cook who had worked in other households where typhoid had broke out, broke out, broke on the pass that she had worked there right before everyone fell ill of typhoid and had also just cooked for the Warrens. So. I don't know why you'd hire an Irish cook. We can't fucking cook. Apparently she was good at it.

It's all pot roast and like red potatoes. Yeah, but I think that back then they liked the simplicity of it all. Oh man, such a bummer. I mean. That sounds fucking amazing to me. That's all I want is pot roast and red potatoes. Are you serious? With some horseradish.

Yes. What about Jell-O with fruit cocktail floating inside of it? Fruit cocktail, yes. Yeah. Of course, my grandma's special. What did she put on it? Thousand Island dressing. No.

Hard stop. That's an iceberg lettuce. No. That's Irish cooking, my friends. Do you know what I want? I want iceberg lettuce with Thousand Island and I want Jell-O with fruit cocktail. I don't want them to meet each other. Well, sorry, my grandma says you have to and that's my job to make it happen.

And you have to finish it. You do. I mean, fair enough. Maybe that was. She forces us to eat spinach as tiny babies and very few of us have ever broken a bone. Spinach. But you fucking twist her ankle all the goddamn time. I roll it.

But it don't break. Grandma. Okay. Grandma. He was, okay. So we can't find her because she left after every outbreak begins, she fucking ladders out of there and doesn't give a forwarding address. SOPER learns of an active outbreak in a penthouse on Park Avenue where two of the household

servants were hospitalized and the young daughter of the family had died of typhoid. Oh no. And she, and he discovers, SOPER discovers that the family cook was the same woman who had cooked for the other families. It's 40-year-old Irish immigrant, Mary Mallon. Oh, Mary, wash your hands, Mary. There we go. What are you doing, Mary?

And what does she say? And she says, ah, I just need to stir the soup with my hand real quick. I can't do it. No, you're going to do this whole fucking story. We need it. Okay. SOPER starts stalking Mary Mallon and tells her, and he tells her she's transmitting disease and death by her job.

But he sounds very bad at like telling people things and explaining in a calm, like, you know, self-possessed manner to an Irish immigrant probably because he had some prejudices against Irish people. So do you think he was like too nervous to tell her or he was like screaming at her? I think he was screaming in her face, this thing of transmitting disease and death. And she's this like Irish immigrant is like, what are you talking about? So he didn't explain to her how she, as a woman who was perfectly healthy, could be infecting others with typhoid.

He attempted to get, and then he goes on to attempt to get samples of Mary's feces, urine and blood, I think just by yelling in her face that he needs samples of her feces, urine and blood. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, man, get away from me. Not surprisingly, this just pissed Mary off. And one time she chased him away with a large kitchen fork when he tried to come get her feces. Get out of here.

I don't know. That's my Irish. Get out of here. Get out of the kitchen now. You always have to start way high and then go down really low. Okay. Since Mary refused to give samples, he decided to compile a five-year history of her employment. He found that of the eight families that had hired Mary Malin as a cook, members of seven

of those families claimed to have contracted typhoid fever, even though Mary had never shown signs of the ailment. And with this, Soper becomes the first author to describe a healthy carrier of salmonella typhi in the United States. So the person who can carry it, never get ill by it, but pass it on to other people. So she's basically immune to this thing she has. But she has it and is giving it to everybody else. And part of her argument is like, well, I'm fucking fine.

It can't be me giving it to anyone. Right. Also, and let me use my whole arm as a stirrer in a spoon. Right. And I just want to stir this fucking stew. I just want to touch the bottom of the pan. Right. With my fingernail.

I mean, put this under my fingernails and put it into the stew. What's the big deal? What is the problem? My fingernail ladle. Right. Without washing my hands. Okay. Let me tell you about Mary.

Mary Malin was born in September of 1869 in Cooks County, Cookston, County Tyrone, Cookston, College, a small village in the north of Ireland that was among one of Ireland's poorest areas. She immigrated to the United States in 1883 at the age of 15. Her aunt and uncle, who she had been living with, died. So she was living in Swallard, Swallard housing in the Lower East Side, fending for herself. She found work as a domestic servant and apparently her proclensity in the kitchen led her to be a cook. So she was somehow good.

What in the kitchen? I don't know. I've copied and pasted a word that I never used. Proclensity. Pro-pensity? Proclensity. Proclensity. That's a word.

I don't think it is. Oh, shit. Hold on. I refuse. I copied and pasted it. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. That sounded so good and I was going to. It kind of was like a, like the combination of propensity and declension, but I'm almost

positive. You're, you're a search proclensity did not match any search with her propensity. Is that right? Well, I'm never copying and pasting from Wikipedia again. The grammar is odd. That's not true. So it's not, there's no. Yeah.

There's no, it's propensity or that's like it, the correction, the correct. Oh yeah. Maybe they just. The correct word is propensity. Fuck. All right. I'm not adding that out because this is who I am. Look.

I mean, show, sometimes we get words wrong. It's okay. My proclenstan in the kitchen. It sounds like proclenstan sounds like a, like for men who are losing their hair, shampoo. Take mint proclenstan every night. Right. Okay. In 1900, she worked in Mammaronic, New York.

Heard of it? Nope. Where within two weeks of her employment, residents developed typhoid fever in 1991. She moved to Manhattan where members of the family whom she worked for developed fevers and diarrhea. That's a bummer to have at the same time. Yeah. That's horrible.

You don't know what's happening and you have diarrhea. Right. Jesus. The laundress died there. Oh no. whose name they don't mention anywhere, which is like, listen, she's someone too. That's right. And then Mary Mellon goes on to work for a lawyer.

She left after seven of the eight people and that household became ill. She fucking lairs. Why did she keep leaving though? I don't know. She's so innocent. Well, it's so, it's hard to tell because it's like, did she leave because everyone got sick and so the house stood still and they didn't need anyone? Or what did she know?

Isn't that one you need help the most? It's true. Chicken soup doesn't cook itself. Yeah, that's right. Chicken soup doesn't cook itself up those stairs. To stir itself. Jesus Christ. Okay.

Chicken soup can't stir itself without an arm and it can't walk upstairs. Exactly. So then in 1906, she goes to Oyster Bay and within two weeks, 10 of the 11 family members are hospitalized with typhoid, changes job again. Same thing happens, cooks for the war and same thing happens, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Doctors theorize that Mary Mellon likely passed typhoid germs by failing to vigorously scrub her hands before handling food.

Probably the elevated temperatures of cooking food would have killed all the germs and bacteria and shit, but then they found out that Mary Mellon's like most popular dish. Her specialty? Her specialty was ice cream that she cut up raw peaches into and froze so nothing had gotten cooked. Oh. Can you imagine those wet fucking peaches with her little like cutting knife and all the nail under her nail stuff?

As she's cutting peaches, she's also cutting a little bit of her finger along with it. Oh, God. She had a real poor clumsity for cutting up her own flesh. I can't believe I got that word. Okay. The New York City Health Department finally, they try to get her to chill the fuck out and she won't. Finally, they send position.

She won't. She's like, fuck you and everyone. I must cook. She's like an angry, an angry woman. She had to fight for her, like her life livelihood. She didn't have anybody. Yeah. Nobody.

It reminds, so I just started watching Alias Grace, which you had talked about liking and it reminds me of like she came over on a ship and that fucking, in that nature of absolute bullshit. Yeah. And she's like, fuck you. I'm working to like live my own life. I mean, it's the ship journey alone, so upsetting for most people coming to this country. Traumatizing.

Just horrifying. And then they show up and then it's like, I hope you have a job. Yeah. Good luck with that. Yeah. Also, you don't wash your hands enough. Yeah, that's right. What are you talking about?

You know what that reminds me of real quick? Yeah. When I lived in Scotland, there was a commercial that was on like UK TV and it was, are you a washer or a walker and it was just a, it was pretend camera, like hidden camera in a bathroom to see if people walked up, checked their face and walked away or washed their hands and walked away. And since that commercial, I think before that I was very like, nah, who cares one way or the other?

I know if I need to wash my hands or not. Since that commercial, I've, oh, I wash my hands every single time. You just can't trust doorknobs. You just can't trust door handles. You just should wash your hands as much as possible. Yeah. And I do. I mean, don't go out of your fucking mind.

And I do. But like do your best. Don't be a walker. That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. My dad, every, he won't sit down at, we'll go to lunch anywhere. He had just gotten out of his car, he hasn't touched anything. He won't, he's kind of has OCD though, but he'll go wash his hands before sitting like

every time you can't even start talking to him. Oh, wow. He'll go wash his hands. I wonder if that's like, his parents were really strict about that, like before eating. Yeah, maybe. It's a good idea. But once in a while, I'll look at my hands, especially when I'm wearing cheap jeans. Oh, no.

When you, there's nothing worse than having dirty hands as an adult at like a meal. There's only worse than like putting a food thing into your mouth and being like, when was the last time I washed my hands? That's my fucking thing of like, and then you, there's only so many times you can go, well, I'm, I'm strengthening my immune system. Right. No, most of the time you're not. You're just putting someone else's fucking urine hands in your fucking mouth and I mean

the doorknob. Yeah. Okay. So New York City Health Department sends in physician Sarah Josephine Baker to talk to Mary. So the singer? Yeah. Right.

Almost. It'd be amazing at night. She was just like, hey. Amazing dancer. Yeah. Hey, I'm so gross. That's not good. Baker said that by the time she was, she said, quote, by that time she was convinced that

the law was only persecuting her when she had done nothing wrong. So Mary was like, hardcore fuck you. Yeah. We're like that. Yeah. Right. So this chick, Sarah Josephine Baker, her own father and brother had died of typhoid when she was young.

And so she had felt pressure to support her mother and sister financially. So at 16 years old, she decided on a career in medicine. Wow. And this, and this is like the early 1900s, the late 1800s, this she is a badass motherfucker in her own right and people should fucking study her, et cetera, for feminist reasons. She's fucking awesome. So she goes to find Mary Mallon and with her help, the New York City Health Department takes Mary into custody in 1907 and places her into forced confinement inside a bungalow

on 16 acre North Brother Island off the Bronx shore. So if you live in, had lived in Manhattan or been in Manhattan, you see this fucking island over there, like off the shore that you can like see. It's almost like Alcatraz in San Francisco. Right. It's all the only thing, only companion she has and tell me if this doesn't sound amazing. She's in confinement. All she has is a fox terrier and you're like, living the life.

Can I please? So wait, I think I'm in that confinement right now. You put yourself in Mary Mallon's fucking confinement. We're all, all Irish women are doomed to live the life of Mary Mallon. It just repeats itself. Damn it. Okay. So my, on this Brother Island was the Riverside Hospital, which is where she's at.

It's founded in the 1850s as a smallpox hospital to treat and isolate victims of that disease. So they just fucking put them on this tiny island outside of Manhattan and you can see Manhattan and you're like, oh, well, I want that. And they're like, no, you're sick. Too bad. It eventually expands to other quarantineable diseases like leprosy and venereal diseases. So they just like later people onto that island. Did they really?

Yeah. And then you get some venereal disease and then you have to go. So like, go stay here and tell you're in the same room with all the other people with venereal diseases. Yeah. That sounds like a party. I mean, those are the people that party. Yeah.

A lot of great personalities in that room, I bet. I mean, I'm sure. Okay. With her forced confinement, Mary Mallon, everyone, the media goes fucking nuts because this woman has been spreading this disease and killing people with it. So media goes nuts eventually in 1908 in the Journal of American Medical Association. She is nicknamed Typhoid Mary. That's where she gets her name.

So the professionals really came in to shit on her. Yeah. They were doing top notch journalism. Good job, everybody. So turns out Mary Mallon is immune to the disease herself. She's the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen, which is pretty fucking cool. Mary Mallon custody, Mary Mallon, Typhoid Mary, let's call her, admits to poor hygiene.

She's like, yeah, what are the motherfuckers, say it, say it in Irish. Oh, I can't say. That's all you should say. Who cares? Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, there's other things to worry about. Exactly. There's people starving in my country. She said she did not understand the purpose of hand washing because she did not pose a

risk. Girl, you're the cook. You're the cook. You pose a risk. It doesn't matter how healthy you are. They authorities are like, let's get rid of your gallbladder because that's where they believe the typhoid bacteria resided. And she was like, fuck no, fuck you.

I don't even have the disease. And she was unwilling to see working as a cook too. So like, well, let you go. Just don't work as a cook. And she's like, nope. I know. She's like, fuck yourself. Fight.

Fight. Fight. Mary, fight. We're so angry. It doesn't make sense. Irish women. Irish women. Fight.

Fight. Fight. And then a herky. Herky. She is forced to give 163 samples of various bodily substances to the doctors there, 120 of which tested positive for the bacteria. She was teeming with this disease. To the hilt.

To the gills. To the gills. So Mary stays there for three years until test results from a private laboratory, yes, I said that, came up negative for typhoid. And with this information in 1909, Mary sues the health department for her freedom. But everyone's like, where did she get the money to sue the health department? And then it's like a secret thing that maybe William Randolph Hearst was like, well, giving the money if you give me like an interview.

So like he was like springing people. Genius. Yeah, so smart. And then the New York Supreme Court's like, go fuck yourself. No. But then in 1910, there's a new health commissioner, he lets her go if she promises never to work as a cook again. And she's like, okay, great.

She's like fine. I didn't like that much anyway. Yeah. So in February of 1910, Mary agreed that she was quote, prepared to change her occupation and would give assurance by affidavit that she would upon her release, take such hygienic precautions as would protect those with whom she came in contact from infection. Meaning wash your fucking hands. I'll wash my fucking hands.

No, I just I felt like I wanted to defend, but there's like it's an indefensible. Go ahead. You know, some people don't think it some people think what that her being locked up is indefensible. No, she killed a ton of people because she refused to walk. She it's like she wouldn't give in anything where it's like, okay, well, if you're the cook, you have to admit hand washing is kind of key. I realize it was that was kind of a new idea back then.

But still. Well, the thing is, so she thought they were all to get her all this shit you're like decades later. They're like, well, if she had typhoid her whole life, maybe it fucked her brain up a little bit and she was paranoid and crazy. Oh, yeah. But wait, it gets worse. Okay.

Okay. So they let her out. They lose track of her. Goodbye. That idea cut to five years later in 1915, a typhoid outbreak happens at Manhattan's Sloan maternity hospital struck 25 workers and killed two of those workers. When Soper, our friend George Soper's back, he looks into the outbreak and he's like, this looks fucking familiar.

Oh, no. Traces it back to the cook who's an Irish woman named Mary Brown this time. She changed her name. She found a good man. Nope. She changed her name so she could become a cook. Like she was doing it. Now.

Now she's responsible for it. Now she's being a dick. You know what I mean? Yeah. Now it's criminal. I think. It's Mary Mallon. Ba-ba-ba.

Turns out she changed her name and during her years of release, she had cooked in hotels, restaurants and institutions. Wow. So she was like, she'd gone and they'd given her a job as a laundress. You make no fucking money. It's really hard work. Doesn't smell good. Doesn't smell good.

She was like, fuck this shit and went to cook. Wherever she worked, there were outbreaks of typhoid. However, she changed jobs so frequently so she had eluded the blame. She's captured and again can find a North Brother Island where she continued to refuse to acknowledge that she had any connection between herself and the typhoid cases. Well, at that point, it's so stacked up against her that she might as well just do that because she's so guilty that the second she breaks it's over. Yeah.

Exactly. So after the second apprehension, she spends the next 23 years of her life as a prisoner in forced isolation. Hundreds if not thousands of asymptomatic carriers who had been identified were allowed to walk the streets of New York freely, but typhoid Mary lived alone in exile, partly due because the public were fucking pissed at her because she wouldn't stay in the kitchen. Like if she had just not gone back to cooking. Yes.

That's second time around. Exactly. She, I mean, I didn't, it's sad that she lived in isolation, but why are you being so stubborn? Yeah. Calm down. Karen. Uh-oh. Karen's having things in the mail.

My face just starts to fall apart. I don't want to do it. It just comes out of me. Your typhoid tears just started running out your face. The devil inside me. He made me so mad. Stayed at the kitchen. On November 11, 1938, Mary Mallon dies of pneumonia at age 69, still in captivity.

autopsy found evidence of live toifoid, typhoid bacteria in her gallbladder. So, yeah, they were right. Her body's cremated and her ashes were buried at St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx. So, Mary Mallon, it's thought that she infected 51 people and three of those illnesses resulted in death. And that's based on George Soper's, you know, looking into it, but she used so many aliases that it's thought that the true death toll could have been way fucking higher. Some estimated that she had made her have caused 50 fatalities, which I just saw that in a random article, so I don't know if that's even true. Historians say she contaminated at least 122 people and killed five, which sounds a little more likely.

So crazy, though. Yeah. So, throughout the 20th century, typhoid fever steadily declines due to introduction of vaccinations and improvements in public sanitation and hygiene, a.k.a. washer fucking hands. And today, typhoid fever is considered a rare condition among developed countries. Raid is approximately five cases per million per year. As your fucking brother Island and Riverside Hospital real quick, this fucking island of disease off the Manhattan, which sounds amazing, right? Sounds amazing. The island has been abandoned since 1963 after it was a detention. It was lasted detention facility for juvenile drug offenders in 1963. How badly do you wish you could go and just sit on the wall and like stare at people?

There are, you know, there's some black light posters in that building that you know, there's some people out there who have stories of like, they were like, you know, my mom working in the mental. She worked at a hospital called Langley Porter in San Francisco. It's up on the hill. Yeah. And and people in the sixties used to send their kids, they got caught smoking pot one time. No, they sent their kids to the mental hospital. So she said there were in its in the like mental eight sixties, all these kids, there was like an influx of kids are like, they're incorrigible in their drug addicts where they had only done like one joint or whatever. We're saying no to things. Exactly. And they were housed with people

who are legitimately in need of mental mental health issues. And I'm sure those kids were like, well, I'm never doing anything bad again. Yes. The shit that they saw like, yeah. Or they were like, I don't know. She just said it was really sad and bummed her out a lot. It's clearly complicated. Yeah. So these kids got sent there in 1963. Finally, it closed. It's now uninhabited and designated as a bird sanctuary. But wait, it's illegal for anyone to go on the island without permission from the city. All the buildings, though, still fucking stand. And these photographers sometimes go on there and take photos and you can see a bunch of the photos. We should put them up on Instagram of these gorgeous like brick

buildings that are falling in a disrepair. And you can see the rooms where Mary Mallon was fucking housed. And you can see the typhoid wing and you can see the fucking crematorium. And it's like, it's insanely gorgeous. I am asking any murderer who works for the city of Manhattan to please let me and Karen come see the fucking island. Come and get a disease of our own for ourselves. And since it's like under, you know, under watching you, it's really hard to get on there. Everything is still there. So like people haven't graffitied and people haven't stolen shit from the island. That's amazing. You need to see the photos. Everything is covered in wildlife. It's gorgeous. Oh, I want to see that. It's amazing. It sounds

like the island they threatened to send or that they promised to send Dr. Lecter to in silence of lambs that ends up to be that they were like fakesies when she recites that thing. You are allowed to walk on the beach every day, whatever. I want to read that. It's so good. Do it again. You will be allowed one. You will be allowed one. Walk one day a year. So you can walk freely on the beach with armed guards or other snipers. I don't know. My friend, my friend, Amy, who you met when we were in Wisconsin, she, she has science lambs memorized. I've watched it with her and she'll just say the line real quick before it's my favorite thing in the world. I love it. You will be allowed to walk. She'd be able to do that

speech right off the, right off the dome. It's so good. I love it. Oh, these domes. Okay. It's illegal. Blah, blah, blah. But you could still see the building, the room where Typhoid Mary spent the last 23 years of her life. What's she doing there? Oh man, she was bummed. But it sounds, it's just like there's varying accounts where it's like some say she was like actually helping out there and like a maid and some say that she was just like in seclusion and they abandoned her and used her as like a look at Typhoid Mary. You know, some people would come to the island. Yeah. It's like that kind of thing. So you don't really know. I hope there was a fox terrier. I hope so. Yeah. And then I also want to mention

there's a podcast. If you're into this shit that like I am, there's a podcast that's kind of new. It's hosted by two, these two young ladies who are grad students in disease ecology. Oh, it's called this podcast will kill you. And it's just about infectious diseases from history. And every episode is that and these these two girls are named they're both named Aaron are like, it's just an awesome podcast. This is great. Yeah. So this podcast will kill you. I love it. I like to imagine that Typhoid Mary sat in seclusion in her room on that island and fantasize of all the different things she'd like to put her hand in. So then like she'd be like corn chowder or whatever. And then she's like mashed potatoes and then

both fantasies just like both bare arms go all the way in like she cleans her fingernails in the chowder. Yes. I wonder if she like requested like cooking magazines and like red recipes and was like stick stick your arm completely in to be like this looks good. But you know what needs my arm, my arm, my fingernail clippings. And it's not funny. It's disgusting. It's terrible. But isn't that amazing? It's incredible. Also the idea this did you watch the Nick when it was on? Yeah. And they have an there's an episode involving her. I watched the little the little scene where they they and yes, where they confront her. Yeah. Yeah. It's that was such a good show and they did that around. She

was great. But they did that where they would take those things out of history and be like this is what where you don't have any sense like things before modern medicine and modern stuff. It's just the weirdest idea where they'd be like somebody come in and they'd be like well, we tried to stick a tube in their arm and then they died like the end or it's just it was so crazy precarious. And the Nick is such a great show. I love that. Yeah. If you're into that kind of thing, you should definitely watch it. It was great. Also, if you've ever taken cocaine to the point where it was a problem for you, I warn trigger warning huge cocaine trigger warning for the Nick opium to be a doctor and do coke all the time. No,

maybe you're into opium dens too. Trigger warning. If you love to lay back with a bunch of people dressed in traditional Chinese garb. Yeah. Yeah. Then this will be hard for you to get through. It's going to make you nuts. But if you love surgery without gloves or anesthesia, this is the show for you. What a show or Clive Owen. Right. That was great. Thank you. That was fun. I love to learn. I love I love teaching. No, I love saying words wrong. I love to learn. I love to lie. I love to make up new words. I love to just have fun with it. Just say shit that and you know, don't have any for clint city for caring. I mean, I have a real for clint city to just say what I want. And I think we all do. There's

a freedom in that in these for clint cities we all have. And this for clint see us time. There's a freedom. It's so the funniest thing about Typhoid Mary is she she had a real problem with for clint clint slieness. No, I love it. It was a fucking valiant effort. I tried, but you could see me. You can see me making that you turn for miles away. Would you have made that attempt two years ago before this podcast? Absolutely not. No, not at all. Real bias against puns, as you know. And so I applaud you. And no, I think it's the effect that you have on my life. I'm making you stupider. You're breaking down those pun walls. I am stupidering you hard, you know, real hard. Yep. Well, great job. 2018, Georgia. Thank

you. Thank you. 2020, Karen. I remember hearing that in back then and being so shocked, like the details of that story are so much more ridiculous than you even think. Yeah, it's kind of insane. The just the storyline of that of her and that it's just spread. That's one person. It's one person's fucking refusal to see reality and use all to fucking take responsibility for themselves. That kills people and like changes the course of history because they won't just simply wear a mask. Oh, wait, what? What? Sorry. What are we talking about anymore? Jesus. All right, should we wrap it up with some fucking hurray? Let's do it. And then also make sure to stay tuned for the 10 fold more wicked preview after the

fucking hurrays. This first one is from precious. Gore grind. And it says my fucking raise that after I lost my job and insurance due to COVID, I was not too quietly freaking out. I'm a type one diabetic and was very close to running out of the two insulins I take daily because it would have cost me literally thousands out of pocket. I decided to ask the world of Facebook and Instagram if anyone had any to spare. A sweet baby angel came to the rescue and was able to provide me with enough insulin to last several months. I can't say thank you enough to that kind stranger for helping me quite literally stay alive. That's incredible. That's beautiful. Our world wasn't our country wasn't like that, but it's incredible. Seems

like we need health care. Seems like everybody. Everyone deserves it. Yeah, I think everyone does deserve it. And this is from Instagram. It's from Katie be click. My fucking right is that after a hurricane Zeta threw a tree on top of our house, totaling our car and barely missing our little girl's bedroom window, our neighbors and friends fully restored our faith in humanity. A neighbor we hardly know found us huddled in the basement and drove us out to grab breakfast. A murderer from across the country sent us a door dash gift card and another sent us groceries through Instacart. Neighbors have offered their cars and helping hands and even though a tree falling on our home is totally on brand for 2020.

I am so damn thankful for the people holding hands metaphorically anyway and helping one another through it. Damn beautiful. Fucking rough. Love it. Love it. I know. It's really nice to hear those stories and to and to feel that kind of like when people are given an opportunity, they will help other people out. I think it's an important it's an important storyline that doesn't make anybody any money to talk about these days, but it should happen much more. Yeah. Okay, this one's from bethany.is.killing.it. My fucking hooray is actually a follow-up earlier this year. I sent in a fucking hooray about I don't know if we read the other one. I love it. It's like, don't worry about it. I'll do both now. Earlier this year, I sent

in a fucking hooray about how I had been selected to become a naval officer. Well, just last week I graduated from officer candidate school. I am now the first officer ever in my family's long history of serving in the military. I've also had many sailors from throughout my tenure enlisted career reach out and express their excitement. I hope to use my influence to help my sailors. And like I said months back, I think we did do this one. I think we did. Okay. Well, here's the update. Great. I hope I can continue to continue to show all of my sailors that a woman can kill it in this career. Congratulations, Bethany. Way to go. Keep kicking ass. Way to go. And thank you for your service. Yes. Yes. Okay. This one is from Lisa Horton

76. I have a bittersweet foster care fucking hooray for you. Mostly sweet. My husband, daughter and I got to be a foster family for the best baby ever. And during the 14 months we had him, his dad was able to make some huge life changes, including getting sober and get to a place where he was able to care for his son again. So we recently had a say goodbye to our boy, which was so hard, but also so sweet and inspiring to see this man who has had a very hard life completely turn his life around for his son. We are still very close and he facetimes us at bedtime every night so we can tell our boy we love him. It's a major success story. And even though we didn't get to keep our favorite boy forever, fucking

hooray that we got to be part of such a beautiful process. If anyone out there has ever considered being a foster parent now is the perfect time. Isn't that beautiful? Yes. That's lovely. Yeah. What an amazing thing to do. I guess I just have one thing to say. And it's just on Halloween this year, my very good friend Patty Riley died of cancer. And you guys might know her because she is my roommate from college, my friend from high school. I've told tons of stories about her on this show. And she was battling cancer for a while. And it seemed like she was going to be okay. And she just took a very sudden turn. And I guess I just want to say, first of all, I haven't really processed it in any real way because it happened

really fast. But I know a lot of stuff is going on in the world right now and everybody is stressed and freaked out. And there's tons of anxiety and whatever. But you are alive. And you're lucky. And Patty was the kind of person who made sure every day that she impacted the people around her, whether it was her, her two boys, her family, her good friends, which she had tons of. She really, really cared about being a good person. She's also one of the funniest people I've ever known. But her whole goal in life was to just always really be caring toward other people. So as much as her death feels like just a complete injustice, and it's such an intense loss. The way she lived was such an amazing example

of how you can be. And it's something that's always impressed me and has always inspired me. So I just wanted to say that we'll miss you, Patty. Your death is a huge, huge loss to so many people. Thank you, Karen. That's beautiful. I'm so sorry for her family and for you and the world and who doesn't get to know her. Thanks. Yeah. I mean, you know, everybody's dealing with so much stuff right now. It just feels like then on top of that one regular tragic life events happen, it's just like, it's just, it can be so overwhelming. But I think it's important that everybody just kind of, you know, is grateful. That's what I'm trying to do, I guess, is what I should

be saying. Yeah. Is I'm trying to focus on the positive. I'm trying to be grateful for what I have, which is so, so much. And I'm trying to, you know, I don't know, be a better person. I think we all are. Yeah. And it's noble in and of itself. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. To Patty. To Patty. Well, thanks for listening, you guys. Thanks for being here. We hope, we hope and we hope you hope too. Yeah. We have so much hope. Despite it all, there's just still hope. There is. And with that, stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? Okay. Let me tell you this story. In upstate New York, there's this little village called Dryden. And for centuries, the people there have welcomed

strangers into their churches and into their homes. It used to be one of those places where everyone in town was invited to a wedding. So it was a really close, really trusting community. In 1842, a stranger arrived. He was a handsome, charming, brilliant scholar named Edward Ruloff. He found work with a local farming family, a very prominent family. Their home was always open to anybody that needed a place to stay or passers-by. You know, they were just that kind of people. But something about Edward Ruloff was just troubling. He was arrogant. He was snide. And he was sometimes really cruel. And he was absolutely obsessed with his own academic research. He seems like what you would call an incredible narcissist. He's very hostile to people who

don't appreciate his own genius. He seduced the family's teenage daughter. And from the very beginning, their relationship was unstable. Their fights were vicious. And then they were deadly. There's a story about him taking her away and her turning around and waving. And that's the last memory like her mother and some of them had of her. It was a terrible tragedy. It's not that we hadn't had murders here, but not a murder like that. Edward Ruloff killed at least five more people over the next 25 years. Now this is the beginning of the time when railroads make it possible to move around. It was not particularly uncommon for people to carry on double lives. People fall for the snake oil salesman. They actually enjoy the snake oil salesman. He had

everybody fooled for a long time. Sort of like a tadbunty. He's confusing to me. And he was the boogeyman in upstate New York. He's not confusing to me. He's a psychopath. When Ruloff was caught, it seemed like he would finally be punished. But that's not what happened. Scholars and scientists jumped to his defense. Ruloff claimed that he had made this groundbreaking discovery in the field of linguistics. And a lot of people believed him. They argued that his mind was just too valuable to waste on the gallows. Yeah, if there was a kind of magical key to understanding these languages, and that would have made a lot of people's lives a lot easier. Would his brain really save his life? Are there some ideas so astounding, some minds so brilliant, that they

should allow a killer to get away with murder? People really think that the brain can justify behavior. And this is totally mistaken. Edward Ruloff's brutal crimes and his incredible brain would make history by marking the birth of modern neuroscience. This is just a world-changing difference in how we think about brains. It's right up there with understanding evolution. I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson, and this is 10-Fold More Wicked, a podcast about the most intelligent killer in American history. 10-Fold More Wicked premieres on Monday, November 23rd on Exactly Right. Subscribe now on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.