My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 372 - Math with Karen & Georgia

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

On today’s episode, Georgia covers the tragic disappearance of Anthonette Cayedito and Karen covers the legendary story of Phineas P. Gage.  For our sources and show notes, visit www.myfavoritemurder.com/episodes.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is actually happening is a podcast that features extraordinary true stories of life-changing events told by the people who live them. In a special five-part series called Point Blank, this is actually happening sheds a light on the forgotten spree killings of Rancho Tejama. Follow this is actually happening wherever you get your podcasts. Kate Winkler Dawson is back with season eight of her historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked, on Exactly Right. This season, entitled The Morphine Murderous, takes place in pre-prohibition New Orleans

where the absence is plentiful and nightlife is king. When four members of a church-going Crawford family mysteriously die, people begin to question whether these deaths are a horrible coincidence or if somebody close to them is a serial poisoner. Over the course of six episodes, Kate interviews historians and New Orleans crime experts to analyze the evidence and uncover the truth of the century-old mystery. Stay tuned at the end of this episode for the season eight trailer of Tenfold More Wicked with Kate Winkler Dawson. Get new episodes of Tenfold More Wicked every Monday on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or

wherever you like to listen. Goodbye! Hello, and welcome to my favorite murder. That's George Hardstar. That's Karen Kilgaris. There's supposed to be something after that, but I never know what it is, you know? We try to leave it blank. Yeah.

We try to see if it'll fill itself in. Yeah. If we can improv. What's been going on? There's nothing that stands out. It's not raining. It's not 50 degrees and freezing. No.

I'm not watching. The last of us is over, but what else is there? Life. You know what there is? Perry Mason. Oh, Perry Mason for sure. Perry Mason's begun, and it's really, really good. It is.

It's so good. Love that show. You know what we're binging now? I keep bringing things up years after they've been on. We were watching Ozark, and we had tried to watch it in the beginning. We're like, I don't like that. We both didn't like it, but then I just realized as we were watching it, I'm like, let's try it again.

There's nothing else. We had started on episode three on accident in the very beginning, and that's why we were like... Oh, so you were confused. I don't like this show. This isn't making any sense. And then I was like, oh, we were both like, I don't remember this watching episode one. Episode one's amazing.

Yeah, it's great. He's like, we definitely didn't watch it. You're like, wait, who's this girl? I've never seen her before. And then there's randomly... Yeah, it was a lot of random people. Just James Bateman out of nowhere. I don't understand.

What's he doing? He lives in Chicago. What is he here in the Ozarks? What? That's my foibles. What's up with you? Actually, there's a couple new shows that are on right now. Last night, we just binged Swarm.

We didn't think we were going to binge Swarm. I don't know it. But Swarm is... You got to watch it. It's on prime. It's Donald Glover's new show. Love him. Go watch it.

I love it. We binge... We were like, well, let's just try it out and see. And we ended up watching five episodes. Who's we? Really fun. Me and Zach Noe Towers, my comedy friends. We like to do a movie night and sit around and usually eat chips and watch movies.

Is there a nerd cluster still a thing in your life? They are not, no. After a while, you eat enough of those and it feels like you are basically sitting down to specifically rot the center of your teeth out. You can't deny that that's what's happening when you eat those things. Do you know what I got recently that I can never buy again? I've never had this amount of not restraint. What's the opposite of not restraint?

Indulgence. Like, oh my God, is the Scandinavian swimmers from Trader Joe's, it's their little fishy gummies? You know what I'm saying? No? Holy. I've never had them before. Oh my God.

It was like embarrassing. How bad. It got. Well, but you, something about, I feel like the people that work at like Central Trader Joe's are people who have fucking great taste in food in general, where they're like, okay, you might like this weird thing over here, but we're just going to do the thing that like a bunch of people like are kind of obsessed with and we're going to do it really well. Oh God.

And they're very good at that. They're sour ones. What if I try those? I can't do it. I just can't. Might as well. Well, just as something in the future, you've got a birthday coming up. There's some reasons to eat sour gummy.

Oh, so I was going to recommend a show before, which was on top of the fact that Perry Mason's back swarm, you should try. But the one I was actually going to get to that I had written down, but, and I was actually looking at, but then I thought of swarm because we just watched it last night is a show on HBO called Rain Dogs. Oh yeah. I've seen that. You've watched it or you've seen the thing.

No, no. I've seen it on the. Yeah. I was scrolling. Watch it. It's really good. Okay. It's good.

Okay. Very cool. It's like a mom who is doing sex work to make sure her and her daughter aren't homeless. Wow. She's a writer and she's basically starting trying to figure out how to make money doing that. Wow. Like, you know, basically kind of writing the line in between and it is amazing.

All I've got is the literal three books about the apocalypse I'm in the middle of right now. And how's that? And how's that feel? Is that a relief when you're reading that? You don't have it said the other day that maybe crack up. I was like, we were driving home. I was in a bad mood and he was like, well, let's get you on the couch.

Let's get you home. Let's get you on the couch. Tuck you in. And then we'll put on something violent and depressing. They were just like, yeah, that's kind of all I want. You're like nailed it. Violent and depressing. That's all I want sometimes, you know, when it's gloomy out and I'm in a bad mood.

Yeah. Sure. It's just how it is. And I, he kind of nailed it. It's kind of like, don't you think it kind of opens up your, it just opens up your perspective a little bit when you're just like internal and then you get to kind of go outside of yourself and worry about other people. Right.

Right. Very effective. Yeah. Definitely. All right. Should we get into our business so then we can get into our violent and depressing stuff that we want to tell people? Absolutely.

Let's get some exactly right highlights going. Oh, before that, should I do my corrections corner? Cause this one made me laugh so hard. Yeah. Marin, let me know. And I knew when I was saying it was, it sounded incorrect, but I was always like, well, what do I, when it comes to like feet and measurement, we talked about the explosion out of Mount St. Helens going 13,000 feet in the air and then said the height of the Eiffel Tower, but

he meant to write 1,300 feet in the air. I mean, I should have caught that one. No. The 30,000 lifeboats on this, but you know, you just get caught up in the, in the story of it. Yeah. I don't have a good imagination for numbers. I can't figure that out.

Still sounds huge. I'm not a goddamn contractor. I don't, I don't have a tape measure on my, um, belt, but yeah, so if anybody felt like really bewildered and upset learning that the Eiffel Tower is 13,000 feet tall, calm your nerves because it's only 1,300. Oh man. That sounded, that's, that's an overwhelming Eiffel Tower for sure. That is, oh, it's so big.

It's like a megalodon Eiffel Tower and it's scary. That's scary. It goes all the way to the top. I was way to the top and then it keeps going. Okay. That was my only thing. Okay. So Erin highlights comedian Chris Gethar joins Michelle Bouteau and Jordan Carlos to answer

questions on this week's episode of adulting. And on that's messed up an SVU podcast, Karen, Lisa discuss Manhattan transfer, not the band. It's episode 17 from season 17 of SVU based on the true crimes committed by Christopher Dorner in 2013. And if you want to hear Georgia talk about those stories, she covered that Christopher Dorner case on episode 25 of our show, this one, so long ago. On bananas, Curt and Scotty's guest is comedian Ivy Lee, host of the podcast, fear of going outside on Spotify.

It's a laugh. Check it out. And this is so exciting. So Georgia had covered the story of Pearl Hart, the band at Queen. Pearl Hart had this amazing quote, I shall never submit to be tried under the law that neither I or my sex had a voice in making. And we were very inspired by that because it really feels like the kind of thing that's happening to women in America right now, your rights have been taken away.

They are actually jailing women for having miscarriages. This is not some sort of story on the news that's far away from you. It's actually happening in your country right now. We're all upset about it. Everyone feels frustrated and maybe even a bit powerless. So what do we do? Me and Georgia, we make merch. We put that Pearl Hart quote on a t-shirt.

You can pre-order it on the website and 100% of the proceeds go to Planned Parenthood. That's right. Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which works to advance access to sexual health care and defend reproductive rights. So yay for that. So go get your merch so you can donate as well to Planned Parenthood Action Fund. And thank you. Yes.

And you're going first? I'm first. Okay. In the aftermath of a shocking crime, people always ask why? Why would someone do something like that? What could possibly push them to commit such a horrible act? Was it money, revenge? What makes people like that tick?

I'm Candace DeLong, host of the podcast Killer Psyche, where I explain the thoughts, motivation and behaviors of the most violent figures in history. You may think you know these cases, but trust me, you do not. Using my decades of experience as an FBI agent and criminal profiler, I dig deeper into the twisted psychology of why. Many of the cases covered on Killer Psyche I actually worked on, like the serial killer Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Dennis Rader, also known as BTK. Follow Killer Psyche wherever you get your podcast.

You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Here we go. Okay. Boom. Boom. So today, I'm going to tell you the story of the FBI's oldest missing Indigenous person's case in New Mexico. It's the unsolved disappearance of Antoinette Cayadido.

So the sources used in today's episode are an Albuquerque Journal article by Joe Lyme and Gutierrez Kruger, a Gallup Sun article by the vet Herman, a Charlie Project entry by Megan Good and an NBC News cold case spotlight article by Rachel Trost. So let me tell you about Antoinette. Antoinette Christine Cayadido is born on Christmas Day in 1976 in Gallup, New Mexico. Gallup's a small, nice little town nestled in the heart of several tribal lands, including the Navajo, Zuni, and the Hopi reservations. Over 40% of people who live in Gallup have Indigenous roots, and this is certainly true

for the Cayadido family. Antoinette's mother, Penny, is a member of the Navajo Nation, which is also known as the Diné Nation. Antoinette is the oldest of three sisters. Wendy is two years younger than her, and Sadie is four years younger. The girls are raised by their mother after their parents separate when Antoinette is very young, by all accounts, Penny is a present mother who loves her children. And there's also an unsolved mysteries about this, and the mom is just so heartfelt and

so sweet and lovely, just, I mean, it's heartbreaking. She works hard as a single parent to feed her three children, and as Antoinette gets older, she starts taking on more and more responsibility for her little sisters. Antoinette wears glasses, she has brown hair and these big brown eyes and freckles. Her nickname is Squirrel, and her favorite color is purple. Her sisters, Wendy and Sadie, remember her as being like a second mom to them. By the time she's six years old, Antoinette makes sure her sisters' lunches are packed and their clothes are ironed.

At school, she's a star student and an athlete who is kind to her classmates. She's quick to help out her friends anytime they need it. She's just a lovely young girl. She's passionate about church and is known to always wear a little turquoise cross on a silver chain. So when our story takes place in 1986, Antoinette is nine years old. So on April 5th, here we are in 1986, everything seems to be normal in the Cayadido residence. The apartment is right off Route 66, one of the most famous highways in the United States,

and the Cayadido household is well placed in the neighborhood and Penny is a social butterfly. Wendy, Antoinette's younger sister, remembers quote, my mom was always going out, we had a lot of people coming over to the house. That night on April 5th, it's no different. It's a Saturday, so Penny gets a babysitter for her three girls and is out for the night. When she returns around midnight, Penny sends the babysitter home and is awake for a few hours before falling asleep sometime before 3 a.m. It's now the morning of April 6th.

Penny wakes up early to get the girls ready for Bible school and the family always goes to church together. So Penny walks into the girl's bedroom and finds only Wendy and Sadie there. Antoinette isn't there and her family starts searching the house, then it gets wider and they start searching the neighborhoods, going neighbor to neighbor, and her mom starts panicking. The Cayadidos neighbors try to be helpful, but Antoinette is just nowhere to be found. And as Penny searches, a few neighbors tell her that they saw a brown van or truck parked outside the Cayadidos apartment early that morning between like 6 or 7.

Some neighbors even say they saw a man walking directly toward the Cayadidos apartment from this car. Unfortunately they can't prove any more detail than that. It's all just like a horrible nightmare scenario, even just like walking into the room and one child isn't there. That's just, yeah, horrible. The image of the little girls, the little sisters going door to door in their pajamas trying to find their sisters just heartbreaking.

Penny of course calls the Gallup police at around 11 a.m. after a lengthy search. Police reportedly told Penny she would need to wait another eight hours before she could file a missing persons report because that's how it was fucking done in those days. By the time the official search for Antoinette begins later in the day on April 6th, investigators find no trace of her. The only information police have is the nondescript report of the brown vehicle and that Antoinette's sisters had last seen her wearing a pink nightgown. So there's like just nothing to go on essentially.

Almost immediately Antoinette's trail goes cold because the apartment is located right next to a major freeway. That's always a problem obviously. Police fear the car, her neighbor saw is long gone. Only members are questioned and an extensive search is organized but Antoinette is not found and there's no clues to where she went. Then five years later after Antoinette's disappearance, investigators get their most significant break from an unexpected source when Antoinette's younger sister Wendy, who is five years old

at the time of her sister's disappearance, comes forward with a story. She's 10 years old now and she feels confident now telling the police that she and Antoinette at the net were both still awake in the early morning hours of April 6, 1986 and Wendy goes on to tell them that they heard a knock at the front door of the apartment. Penny, the mom was deep asleep, didn't hear it and then so she says Antoinette got up to answer the door and Wendy remembers that Antoinette didn't immediately open the door but asked who was there and the person on the other side said they were quote, Uncle Joe. So they do have an Uncle Joe so Antoinette opens the door as Wendy watches.

And Wendy says she believes Antoinette was then grabbed by the two men and taken out of the apartment. So she actually witnessed the whole fucking thing. Oh, shit. Little baby. A little baby had to witness it as a five-year-old who kind of didn't know it was going on. And then potentially these people knew this family because they knew enough to say it's Uncle Joe.

Right. Right. Or did they just like make up an Uncle name? You know what I mean? They would have made up Uncle name if they were wrong, wouldn't get that door open. Right. Right. I mean, it's just one of the odds.

Yeah. I realize you're saying it's like a common name but it's the perfect way to get that door open if it's true. Absolutely. And the police do suspect it's someone in their circle that knew about their family that knows them, that is obviously friends with an Uncle Joe, somehow just know. So yeah, that's totally true. So when she's asked why she didn't come forward sooner, Wendy reports that she was terrified

and she was worried her story wouldn't be believed and she saw her mom crying so much she didn't want to make it worse, you know, just five-year-old thinking. Five-year-old coping. Yeah. She says, quote, I was so scared if I had said something sooner, they probably would have found her. So despite Wendy's feelings of guilt, investigators obviously don't blame her and police use the information Wendy provides to generate further leads and they interview all of Anthony's

actual uncles, including Joe, but nothing comes out of it. There are other crucial moments in this case that carry almost the same weight as Wendy's story. About one year after Anthony's disappearance on April 12, 1987, Gallup police get a phone call. It's not clear whether the phone was, it sounds like the call went to 911, the dispatcher in Gallup somehow. So we don't know if she dialed 911 or just the police department.

But it's recorded by the 911 operator. On the phone call is a girl who identifies herself as Anthony. She says she's an Albuquerque and just when she's about to say more and she sounds panicked, you can hear a man's voice on the line saying angrily who said you could use the phone and then the phone call ends. And it's like, first you're like, well, that's a hoax probably, right? There are just some kids playing a prank, but then they had her mom listen to the fucking awful recording and she's like, that's definitely her voice.

The way she said her name, I can tell it's her, I know. It's like positive that she's, of course, I mean, it's best case scenario. She's still alive again, like how do people survive these moments? How do people get through this? It's so horrible. It's so awful. I listen to it and it's awful and it's heartbreaking. I don't recommend listening to it.

So then the girl screams and a scuffle can be heard and then the line goes dead. The call is only 40 seconds long, so it's too short to be traced. This is the thing that I sometimes like, when you make up like what forensics advancements could be, wouldn't it be amazing if they could go back to those recorded things where it's like we can't get anything on it and it's like advancements, it doesn't work that way because the technology is different and it's like, you know, landlines and stuff. It would not be amazing as a DNA version of being able to go back and be like we finally could trace it.

Totally. This place. Oh my God. That would be amazing. Sorry. My made up fantasy of like how to take care of those just like older crimes where there was just, it seemed like we had no technology comparatively. Totally.

There's nothing to go on, but like eyewitness statements and those are obviously not great to begin with. Right? Yeah. That's so sad. That would be a fucking incredible. I mean, maybe in 20 years, I'm going to send it to myself in the mail that I do. So several years later in 1991, a waitress in Carson City, Nevada is serving a table

of three. There's a teenage girl and an adult couple who the waitress describes later as quote unkempt and the girl keeps dropping her silverware to the ground like over and over and it's happening so much that the waitress thinks it might be on purpose as a way to bring attention to their table. So every time the waitress hands the silverware back, the teenage girl grabs her hand firmly and squeezes like trying to send her a message. After the group leaves the restaurant, the waitress is busing their table, picks up the

girl's plate and under the plate, there's a note that says, help me call the police. Holy shit. Yeah. By the time she sees that and calls it in, the girl and the couple are long gone and when investigators show the waitress a photo of Anthony, she believes it's the same girl she served at the restaurant. Oh, wow. I wonder who's thought to show that, I mean, that's Carson City, Nevada, I don't think is

close to New Mexico, Gallup, New Mexico, so it's pretty. Carson got that information out about her being missing. That's amazing. What an awful feeling for that waitress to just have it slip through your fingers, you know. Sorry that I don't know this, but what year are we now talking about? Now we're in 1991. Okay.

Because still, it's before I feel like that kind of awareness, you'd have to be a very specific kind of like date line watcher to have gone out after that, like, and then gone and like, I'm like, why didn't she just write down the license plate? But like, if that's not in her awareness, then she's just kind of like, that was weird. Yeah. She's not having any further examination of that. Sure. I mean, we're taught to like, don't be nosy, you know, but it's like, maybe if she hadn't

like dropped the bill and it's like, it's coming and made them wait until the cops got there or something like that. But you'd have to have a certain kind of mind. Totally. You'd just kind of be like, I don't know what's going on. Yeah. I don't know. I'm in no way blaming that waitress at all, but I just feel like there's some good in

the fact that I think in 2023, the average person would have been like, at least get the license plate. Well, you know what this reminds me of this part is the Elizabeth Smart case where a citizen was paying attention and realized something was off with this young girl who was with these two unkempt people and called it in, didn't mind their own business. And yeah, that was, that was much later, so that makes sense. Yeah. Also, right now, how I look on the Zoom, I would be classified as unkempt at any Denny's

in America. Me too. Me too. Me and I rolled in and I was like, holy shit. Yeah. So, you know, no judgments. I feel like everyone was unkempt in 1991. Yeah.

There was a real baggy, there was a baggy phase we were all going through. But I think that thing that people are like, I think that descriptor is being more of like these people that you don't fit in in a Denny's. Right. Like, you don't think like it doesn't seem like you should be even in a Denny's. Right. And then you're living on the edges, on the fringes of society. Totally.

Totally. If you don't look like everybody else in the Denny's. Definitely. In Nevada. In Nevada. Carson City, Nevada of all places. It's a free, like no, about as low key, low expectation of restaurant as possible. Yeah.

Yeah. For sure. Oh, and it says here that Carson City, Nevada is almost 900 miles away from Gallup, which is a 13 hour drive. It's crazy that they were able to pick out this photo of Anthony and show it to her, which is good investigating, I think. Yes, it is. But once again, nothing substantial comes out of this clue.

Damn. I know. The disappearance of Anthony Nett has, understandably, just tortured the Coyote family. Wendy says, quote, it just broke my whole family up. It was a very dark and dysfunctional time. And then in 1992, the TV show Unsolved Mysteries features Anthony Nett's disappearance and her family participates willingly to generate interest in the case. I just watched it.

In addition to cooperating with ongoing police investigations and the media interviews, Penny also seeks out spiritual guidance from various Navajo medicine men and women to help connect her with her daughter. And they show some of that in the Unsolved Mysteries episode as well. It doesn't bring Anthony at home, but Penny says in the interview that it brings her comfort that as a result of these rituals, she believes that Anthony Nett is still alive and also that they thought she possibly had a child of her own at that point. So that was what they saw.

Sadly, Penny, the mother, struggles throughout the rest of her life with drugs and alcohol to cope with Anthony Nett's disappearance, which is like, Jesus, who among us, you know? So awful. At various points throughout the investigation, police suspect her of knowing more than she says about her daughter's disappearance due to a failed polygraph, which I think at this point we all know polygraphs are bullshit. And she passes away in 1999 with no answers about what happened to her daughter. Horrible.

I know. But the sisters Wendy and Sadie both have given interviews over the years. They talk about the hardships of her childhood in the aftermath of Anthony Nett's disappearance. When they're young, they're bullied at school for having a sister who's missing. Oh, well, those children will go to hell. Yes. The bullies. That's my Catholic guarantee.

Yes. Yes. I mean, that's another thing that's the evolution that we have lived through. Can you imagine a child of today? No. Even saying a word about it, it's just like, what was wrong with all of us? It's like bullying was a rite of passage, and that's why we're all in therapy now. That's right.

Is bullying was, like, endorsed, supported, it was engaged in, and all eyes were turned away. It was horrifying. I got pantsed in fifth grade, and me and the girl got sent home. Wow. I was the victim of this. Hidious. Fucking bitch.

Okay. Wendy now speaks openly about her experiences with drugs and alcohol, using them to cope with her sister's disappearance, saying, quote, that was how we coped with the pain to numb it, not to forget about it, but to put it on the shelf. And she has since gotten sober and lives with her family in California as of 2016. And Sadie is featured on CNN in October 2022 recently. She continues to speak out about her sister's case saying, quote, I have a hole inside of my life because we don't know where she is.

And Sadie uses her search for Antoinette as a platform to bring attention to the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women. Back in October, 2021, in episode 296 of our podcast, Stakeouts and Balloons, was fucking called for some unknown, unremembered reason. It'll be explained in the podcast when you listen to it. We talk about the disproportionate rates of violence against indigenous women and girls at length. And I covered the cases of Keanna Klomp, Amber Ducaro, and Ella May the Gay.

So I wanted to just do a follow up real quick on those. Amber's tragic murder is still unsolved, and Keanna and Ella are still missing, unfortunately. Their lingering open cases are reflective of a major problem that very much persists. Most of indigenous women are missing or murdered in the US and Canada. Many of these cases remain unsolved. It's a staggering number. The families of those who have gone missing or have been murdered work tirelessly to bring attention to these cases.

Ella May the Gay's niece, Seraphine Warren, took matters into her own hands when she felt investigators weren't taking the search for her aunt seriously and in an effort to bring awareness not only to her aunt's disappearance, but to all the unsolved cases of missing or murdered indigenous women, Seraphine walked 2400 miles over the course of four months from her aunt's house in Arizona to Washington DC to meet with politicians in demand action. Which is incredible. It's like the people who should not have to be doing anything. Right.

They're the ones who are suffering. They're the ones who've experienced the loss. And yet this girl has to take to the road to walk across the country to get attention for this. It's just to get a little attention. It's crazy. Even though there have been policy changes in the last few years to direct more resources and urgency to this issue, Native women and girls still obviously are at a complete disadvantage

when it comes to missing and murdered. Antoinette's case is still open with the Gallup Police Department. A box with her files remains in the office in a visible place. So investigators are reminded on a daily basis that this case remains unsolved. And as of 2023, police just mostly have theories that's all they have. They think it's possible Antoinette has passed away or was perhaps a victim of human trafficking, which totally sounds right to me. That's what it was.

But there's no conclusive answers. As police spokesperson said that new detectives are taking a fresh look at the evidence on a regular basis. But for Wendy and Sadie, this isn't enough. Antoinette was her big sister, their caretaker, who cooked them meals and who went by the nickname Squirrel. Wendy describes how it's becoming harder and harder to remember the details of her big sister as the years pass.

She says, quote, I just go off the picture and off the stories I was told as the years go by. I don't really know her. It hurts me. 30 years is a long time not to know who your sister was. And until they get that closure, Sadie has a message for her big sister. She says, quote, she has a family that loves her. She has sisters we haven't given up.

And that is the tragic disappearance of Antoinette Christine Cayedito. It's so heartbreaking. Any story like this is heartbreaking. The idea that she may have made contact two different times is just like torture. The recording of her calling, like she had an opportunity. She got her way to the phone. It was like close and so heartbreaking. So to end this story, we want to make a donation.

And so we're going to donate $10,000 to the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center. That's N-I-W-R-C dot org. And they're dedicated to reclaiming the sovereignty of tribal communities and safeguarding native women and their children. So check that out and we're happy to be donating to them today. Yes we are. That's a great way to end such a sad and frustrating story. And if you have any extra money that you can donate, that would be amazing.

It's a cause that needs support. It needs eyes and ears and dollars, so anything you can do. I'm going to talk about a thing that if you took a Psychology 101 at any point in your educational career, you've probably heard this man's name. It's a legendary story. There's a lot of lore behind it. Some of it isn't true. Some of it is unbelievable, but true.

This is the legendary story of Phineas Gage. Oh, shit. Good one. Good one. You know who I'm talking about? I absolutely took Psychology 101 at Santa Monica Community College in, like, 1998, baby. And this is one of those ones where, if it's a psychology class or whatever, physiology, what would it be?

Anatomy. But when they try to explain to us, basically, how much we don't know about how our brains work in this modern era. But there's been things that have happened historically that have taught us a thing or two. So this is a pretty amazing story. Main sources for it are a Smithsonian article called Phineas Gage, Neuroscience's Most Famous Patient by Steve Toomey, Malcolm McMillan's book, An Odd Kind of Fame, Stories of Phineas

Gage, and a Slate article by Sam Keane. And then you can find the rest in our show notes. So this story begins over—no, this makes me laugh so hard. Marin, who's a great writer, does stuff like this sometimes, and I'm like, hey, I'm on to you. Because it said, the first line is, this story begins over a half a century ago in Pennsylvania. But when she says that, I think she means the 90s. It's like half a century ago.

That's 50 years. No, I know. That's true. It's the fucking—am I right? It's the 90s. No. It's— At the 80s?

80s. Wait, because I'm 40. I'm 40, and I was born in 80. It's the fucking 90s. Bath. With Karen and Georgia. Okay, part of the story begins in the 90s in Philadelphia. A couple named Jack and Beverly Wilgus, they collect vintage photographs.

And over the years, they've amassed tens of thousands from thrift stores and yard sales and online auctions, and each for its own special reason. So sometimes it's the photographer's eye and the design of the actual layout of it. I have some of those in my collection, my weird collection of haunted vintage things. There's nothing like the basket of pictures in an old thrift store. I have one of a guy running into the water at the ocean, and it's from 1968. And it's him from behind, and he's the most average-looking guy. But I saw it in this basket, and I was just like, yes, this is it.

This has a story. I love that. That vibe. I have a cabinet of family photos, and in it, throughout, are just strangers. Frame photos of strangers that I wanted to stay at sales or whatever. So I was like, who's that? I'm like, I have no fucking clue. Just this rad lady with a red bouffant from 1960.

Yep, I have a bunch of this. So we're like the Wilguses. They get it. It's basically what calls to them. So one of these pictures that they found is a daguerreotype, and in this picture, a man is looking straight into camera with a very intense gaze. One eye is closed. It's actually injured, so it's been sewn shut, and the other is wide and bright.

He's dressed very nicely in a high white collar and a black suit jacket, and he's holding a long, heavy-looking iron rod that cuts diagonally across the photo. And the Wilguses guess that that thing is a harpoon, so they put it up on their website and they write, we invented an encounter with an angry whale that left him with one eye stitched shut, which is great. Yeah. Makeup stories about it. I love it.

Absolutely. But they also keep this picture proudly in their home, so they have a display case where they cycle through all of their antique photos, like we're talking about. The whaler, as they call him, never moves out of it. He's always there because it's such a good picture. They upload all their pictures in 2007 on the Flickr. Cool. Got it.

Yeah. So when they upload this portrait, they just put on their Flickr account underneath, they put one-eyed man with harpoon. And of course, it's the internet. So the second other people see that and think they're wrong, they're going to let them know. So not long after posting, Beverly receives a message from someone saying, that is not a harpoon in the photo because it's too small and it's not the right shape. The Wilkises are not surprised by this.

They don't know the difference. It was just a little story. First we have harpoon experts having to correct someone. Okay. Yeah. What else do we have? And they're like, don't gaslight us about harpoons. That's right.

And next we're going to have... Then they go, do better. Do harpoons better. Do better. But the Wilkises are into it because they're like, fine, tell us what it isn't, help us find out what it is because they're curious and they want to know, but they don't have to wait very long because in December, a self-professed history buff named Michael Spurlock sees that photo and he knows the caption is false.

He thinks the thing in the man's hand looks more like a tamping iron. So back in the 19th century, tamping irons were used during controlled explosions. So they helped push explosive powder in sand down into blasting holes that were then detonated to break up rock like when they were building the railroads. So Michael becomes drawn to this man's face and that injured eye. So he sees the eye, he sees what he believes to be the tamping iron. He kind of looks back and forth and he thinks, oh my God, this is a picture of one of the most famous men in the field of psychology or neuroscience, not a doctor or an inventor,

but a patient. And up until very recently, there were no known photos of this person. What? Really? Phineas P. Gage. Oh, what a find. So we'll tell you now about Phineas P. Gage and this insane life that he led. And you may have know this already if you took a certain elective in high school or college,

but if you never did, if you ended up taking sculpting or something like this, let me tell you about this man. So he was born in 1823 in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He grows up on a farm. He then leaves home to work in railroad construction and by 1848, when he's 25 years old, he is killing it professionally. He is working in Vermont as the foreman of a railroad construction crew. Killing it.

Yeah. He's doing great. So this crew has the very risky job of blasting a pathway through the area's rocky terrain, of course, so that the railroad tracks can get laid down. And that involves handling dangerous explosives every single day. So Phineas is the guy you want doing this job here. He's thorough. He's detail-oriented, hardworking, smart, and friendly.

He's also physically very strong, a historian named Malcolm McMillan, who's written extensively about Phineas, describes him as having, quote, an athletic frame that imparted energy and strength to his mind and body, making it possible for him to endure great mental and physical labor. Sounds like someone had a crush. Well, and there would be good reason, because when you see this daguerreotype, he's a true hunk. He's a hunk of the 1800s.

Yes. And I think that was a really popular tumbler of historic boyfriend pictures. Oh, yeah. Phineas P. Gage is the hottie of pictures like that. He's a stunner. So we'll talk about what got him famous. On the afternoon of September 13th, 1848, around 4.30 p.m., Phineas is preparing a controlled explosion near Cavendish, Vermont.

So first he drills a deep hole into the rock bed. He pours in the explosive powder. Then he's supposed to pour sand onto the top of that powder and then take that tamping iron and tamp it down. The sand then creates a seal on the top and then basically he lights a fuse and the fuse burns down, he runs away, and then basically there's an explosion, but it's a controlled explosion. Got it.

But that's not what happens today. Instead, Phineas drops the explosive powder into the blasting hole and then he gets distracted. He turns his head away from the hole, probably like to talk to somebody nearby, and he forgets the crucial step of dropping in that sand. So he picks up his tamping iron to pack in directly down onto the explosive powder. And this is a three and a half foot, 13 pound iron rod that he's doing this with. When he starts to do it, it hits bare rock, ignites a spark, and then explosion. Kaboom.

Kaboom, big time. We went to see Dina Martina, who is this amazing drag queen, and she did this thing where she did these songs, she was singing live. And then when she get into the second verse and then do the chorus, and then she just yells, explosion. And there's an explosion sound effect in the song ends, and then she explains how sometimes when she's singing, she just gets kind of bored. So she yells explosion, and that's the perfect way to end any song.

Explosion. A date like that would be amazing, like a phone call with your mom, you just yell explosion in the middle of it. I think you can. I think that the good news is from Dina Martina is you can do that. The permission has been granted. Okay, so here's what's insane. So Phineas doesn't have a chance to run away.

He is right next to this when this explosion happens. And it basically launches the tamping iron that was in his hand up and out of the hole it's down into like a rocket, which strikes Phineas under the left cheekbone, travels upward behind his left eye and exits out the top of his skull. A 13 pound, three and a half foot rod shoots through his head, continues to fly another 30 yards through the air. No. And it lands behind him into the ground, sharp and upright, like a dart.

I must have not paid attention in 101 because I always thought it got stuck in his head. No, no, no, you probably were taught that. We will talk later about all the crazy lore and lies around this thing. I think I got taught the same thing too. And I had a thousand questions about like literally how does he go on like a public transportation? Like how would you walk around? It baffled me and it was not true. I just pictured him wobbling around with a fucking harpoon in his eye the whole time.

Oh, okay. No. Good to know. Not true. Okay. So, and that's just it is it seems more unlikely that it would travel through cleanly. Okay. So everyone around when the explosion happens immediately assumes Phineas is dead.

He's not to the ground. He's covered in burns. Blood everywhere and brain matter all around him. But when they rush over to help him, they see not only is he not dead. He is conscious. He's talking. And pretty soon he gets up and starts walking around. Holy shit.

So arrangements are made to get him to the doctor. They put him in an ox-drawn cart and they take him on a mile long ride back to town. Oh, I thought it was bumpy and fucking. Bumpy. Yes. Awful. Awful. Right?

Humidified. I don't know. Bad weather. Immediately it's like shitty weather, huge head wound. But here's the thing. He sits up in the cart and is conscious the whole time. It's not like he's laying down and moaning or anything. He's just sitting there like, yep, we got to go take care of this.

Wow. When the cart arrives at his rooming house, he gets up, gets off the cart without assistant, climbs the stairs up to his room and goes into his room. So they're staying at this rooming house because he lives in New Hampshire, but they're in Vermont, I believe, yeah. So they're in Vermont. So the rest of the guys come up, they put him in a chair, tell him like, you're fine. Obviously he must be in shock.

Totally. And he's also losing a ton of blood. Right. It's a huge head wound and they bleed. So the others that were with him will later remember him smearing blood on like everything he encounters because it's just everywhere on him. He sits in the chair and calmly waits for the doctors to arrive. Back at the scene of the accident, everyone's talking about what just happened and the railroad

workers who saw it firsthand, they can't convince the other people who didn't see it that it really happened until they walk them 30 feet over to where the tamping iron is sticking out of the ground, still slick with blood and brain matter. And that's the way they go. He left and this is here, but it's just unbelievable that he would still be alive at all. So around five o'clock is when a doctor finally arrives to examine Phineas. His name is Edward Higginson-Williams and he, of course, also struggles to comprehend what's just happened.

Okay. So listen, the wound is about the radius of a soda can and the length of a credit card. That's big. It's a big old hole in his head. So around six o'clock, another doctor named John Martin Harlow arrives. He's a young physician. He's been in practice about four years. So together, the two work to stabilize Phineas, but he's lost a ton of blood.

He's still actively bleeding. Of course, it's a massive and sensitive injury. The doctors can't just dress it and compress it like they normally would. And on top of all that, Phineas is still conscious and speaking to the doctors as they treat him. It's like a zombie. It's fucking talking. I mean, how unnerving would that be?

Where you're just like, it's a massive head wound and it's like, no, okay. One second though. Hold on. He's telling them he's never lost consciousness throughout, even right after the blast. He jokes about how tough treating him must be. The doctors, of course, are floored. Their patient is alert, coherent, can remember the accident vividly and accurately. He's able to recognize his worried family members who rush in to check on him.

All of his five senses are tested and working properly. It's just like unbelievable. It becomes clear Phineas doesn't have any idea how injured he really is though when he defiantly states that he's going back to work in a day or two. That of course will not happen. So within a couple hours of treating Phineas, Dr. Harlow takes the reins and he's of course a classic 19th century doctor. There's some very problematic practices back then.

He believes in phrenology. They're up against a lot in terms of how bad this injury is and how long ago it is. But Dr. Harlow works urgently and intelligently on Phineas. Phineas' skull is completely fractured, not to mention he's losing the blood, of course. So as the hours pass, his pulse is all over the place. By that night, he's weak and delirious, he's just clinging to life. It's not until 11 p.m. that night, which is six hours after the accident that Dr. Harlow is finally able to stop the bleeding.

This situation is so dire that his family actually calls a local carpenter to start making a coffin. But Dr. Harlow, he's not doing that in the least. He's not giving up at all. He's got the bleeding stopped, so now he shaves off Phineas' hair. He cleans the head wound, removes about an ounce of damaged brain tissue, and then this is pretty gross. So if you are one of those people that barfs easily, don't listen to this.

I might have a problem. Okay. Well, here, we can do it like this. Do you want to hear about what's actually going on in the wound? I'll hear everything. Oh, okay. I love gross stuff, and I hate it. You're like, I'll hear it.

I'll just barf about it. He basically has to go in and adjust the detached pieces of his skull to see if he can refit them or if he has to get rid of them if they're too small or fractured, using his bare fingers to poke around. So basically, they get the very basics done of getting the wound in place. But every time Dr. Harlow thinks that he stabilized his patient, something else happens. After a few days, Phineas' health takes a dramatic turn for the worse, his face and brain swell up like a balloon, and he goes from being coherent and being able to communicate

to being, quote, decidedly delirious with occasionally lucid intervals. So he basically switches and goes from being, hey, I remember everything going to happen to like being delirious. A week later, Phineas' body starts to give out. He's also developed a very concerning fungus on the top of his head, but he hangs on. So two weeks after the accident, Dr. Harlow performs emergency surgery to address the life-threatening swelling in his brain. While all that is happening, word of Phineas' unlikely survival is beginning to create

a bunch of chatter in the outside world. It's being written up in newspapers and tabloids. So as Phineas is fighting for his life, he's also becoming famous. Then finally, 22 days after the accident, Phineas starts showing signs of improvement. His wounds are healing, the fungal infection goes away, and even though he's moving in and out of consciousness, he's finally able to, this is maybe the grossest thing of all about the story, hold down lots of milk and finally get some much-needed calories. Mm, milk.

I literally almost texted Marin when I read that line of, like, please don't ever use the phrase, hold down lots of milk ever again. Oh, it's 1800 milk too, so it's probably warm from the cow's teat. You know? It's got butter floating in it, and it's all confines. It's thick. It's real thick. It's thick.

Yeah. Mm. It's like what we would call whole milk. It's just like triple that. Yeah, totally. There's debris. There's certainly debris. Light hay.

So he gets his calories from lots of milk. Mm. Then on November 8th, 56 days after the explosion, Phineas is finally out of the woods. His wound is closed, the infection is totally gone. He can get out of bed and walk around again. Of course, his left eye had to be sewn shut, and he has lost, of course, a lot of his strength, a lot of his muscles, but amazingly, less than three months after the accident, he is cleared to go back home to Lebanon, New Hampshire.

But he is not going back to his old life. Of course, it's like miraculous that he survived it all, but he has lost a lot over the last three very traumatic months, including his career. And the one thing he's gained, which is his fame, is, you know, a double-edged sword, because he overnight becomes both a tabloid celebrity and a medical oddity. And of course, as was the practice back then, it's a very dehumanizing sideshow quality that his life begins to take on. According to Slate, a Harvard Medical School professor at the time named Henry Bigelow

presents Phineas at a conference alongside a stalagmite. So it was like, here's one fascinating scientific thing, and here's another. So just as dehumanizing as possible. But our man Phineas is smart. He sees the opportunity that's here for him. He has to make money while he recovers, you know, if he can do it like this, fine with him. He's the original influencer, essentially.

Yes. He's making that money, you know what I mean? You have to see a picture of him. He really is the original influencer. It's like, that picture of him is the first selfie. He's making branding money. I'm proud of him. It's the first thirst trap, sorry, I don't know my, I don't know my lingo.

You got it. Okay. So basically any museum or conference that invites him, he's like, sure, I'll go, you know, I'll take that money. And he always takes his tamping iron, which might seem gimmicky, like you're talking about branding. He's like, yep, it's me, the guy that this went through my head. But it is more than a prop for him.

According to Malcolm McMillan, it's possible that Phineas brings that tamping iron to prove to other people as much as to himself that what he went through was real. Yeah. Cause if it's like a closed up wound, you can't tell how big the thing was. So if he's like, see motherfuckers. Right. Yeah. And it's like, I went through this.

This is mine to brag about and just wave around my head if I want to. Right. After a while Phineas has fewer and fewer requests for public appearances, which is like, I'd love to talk to his representation cause that's insane. How would you not want to talk to him forever? So compelling. So his financial situation starts getting shakier by the day. So he pulls a complete 180 and he starts a brand new career as a stagecoach driver.

This job takes him all the way to Chile, where he lives for the better part of the next decade. And then at the end of the 1850s, Phineas's health begins to decline. By a February of 1860, he's having massive seizures and convulsions. So he heads back to the United States and goes to live near his family, who have recently moved to Santa Clara County in California, Northern California. Then on May 21st, 1860, Phineas Gage dies at just 36 years old. He amazingly survived nearly 12 years with a largely destroyed frontal lobe. So even though Phineas's life is fairly private in his final years, the fascination about

his story of survival continues to this day. It's a true legend of medical history and his name is enshrined in thousands of textbooks. A video on Harvard's YouTube channel even calls him, quote, the textbook case for post-traumatic personality change. But in the retellings of Phineas's story, even by the best medical minds and institutions, there's a ton of bad information that's being passed off as fact. The most over-the-top versions of Phineas's story claim that he becomes a freak show staple in traveling circuses, which is not true.

Others claim he lived with the tamping iron sticking out of his head for 20 years, also not true. So that's how I was taught that. And there are claims often made by very smart people that Phineas emerged from his injury with the mind of a sociopath. They describe him post-accident as a lazy slob, a total bully, or a sexual deviant. There's one book from 1994 that claims Phineas had, quote, lost his soul because of his brain damage.

And others include the vague claim that his friends considered him, quote, no longer gauge after his recovery. So this man has his frontal lobe destroyed. And so that should not be surprising if he is different in some way or seems changed. Of course, you'd be that way if you, like, moved to a different house across town, much less had a near-death experience to a degree, to that degree. He remembered the fucking explosion moments after it happened, like, that's going to change you.

A very reliable source, although she was talking to doctors, so it could have been exaggerated, but his own mother would go on to tell Dr. Harlow that he switched jobs a lot, which would be very unusual for him, that was not his style. And she also notes that he developed, quote, a great fondness for children, horses, and dogs, which is exceeded only by his attachment to his tamping iron. You basically have a near-death experience, and you're like, you know what, I can't deal with any more other people, you know what, I can't deal with dogs and horses and children. Even my lucky tamping iron.

And my fucking tamping iron that basically I have to hold on to to go, this happens to me. Yeah. God damn it. It seems fairly agreed upon that Phineas's impulse control, focus, and social capabilities were blunted after the injury, which is consistent with frontal lobe trauma. But the idea that he became a soulless sociopath is inane. And as Malcolm McMillan points out, many historians and researchers seem to be projecting here,

using to use this man's one in a million head injury to showcase all of the brain's complexity, fragility, and mystery. Because no one really knows what we can and can't live with, what really happens. It's the brain. And the frontal lobe is the part of the brain that controls decision-making logic, behavior, and motor control. And it's integral to who we are as individuals, so it would only follow that Phineas's behavior and personality would change.

What's compelling and optimistic about his story is that Phineas's case suggests that the brain can, on some level, recover, maybe even heal itself after the most serious trauma. All of that is like, wow, look at what this can do. It's amazing that the part about Phineas Gage's life that you rarely hear about is his second act. You have to think about the complexity of, just a couple years after his recovery, him learning a brand new career as a stagecoach driver. It's a tough job, the job itself, but then you also have to keep schedules.

You have to follow routes, care for the horses, talk to passengers. And you, of course, have to have very serious dexterity in your hands and fingers to be able to control the reins of a team of horses. Unless he moves all the way to Chile, which means that he adapted to an entirely new culture and probably, at least at arguably the most basic level, learned a new language. Macmillan likes to push back on the over-the-top claims about Phineas's personality shift. He says, quote, if Phineas was, quote, no longer Gage for some time after the accident, he finally came close enough to being Gage again, and maybe even being an improved version

of himself. So all of those new things and more, like if the best thing for your brain is to learn a new skill, he's doing it. Yeah. Okay. So just to wrap this up, so we're back now in 2008 after Michael Spurlock leaves a message for the Wilgis's on their image on Flickr of Phineas P. Gage. So the Wilgis's start googling, and they learn Phineas's tamping iron and his skull are in

a collection at Harvard's Warren Antomical Museum. So they reach out, and a few weeks later, Michael Spurlock's theory is confirmed. The tamping iron and the photograph matches the one in Harvard's possession, and the man in Wilgis's daguerreotype portrait is in fact Phineas P. Gage. Oh my goodness. Which is like now you, because you're good at thrifting, you own like a serious piece of history. Totally.

That no one knew existed. Yeah. And then two years later in 2010, another photo of Phineas Gage emerges, and this one was found in storage by one of his descendants. So after a century of tall tales that clouded the true identity of Phineas P. Gage, he's finally given a face and the last word on his life. And that is the story of Phineas P. Gage, a man who Malcolm McMillan described as, quote, the survivor of one of the most remarkable, if not the most remarkable injuries to the

brain in medical history. Wow. At the end. Setting it straight. Right. Set the story straight. Right. Five, four.

Phineas Gage. He's so hot. Wait. Show me. Show me. Imagine how I just spelled the name Phineas by Google. F? Did you do that by?

Holy fucking potty. Am I right? Yeah. Doesn't he look ready for like a Netflix period piece about Cowboys? Totally. Or like an Amber Crombie model or something? Yeah. Like an Amber Crombie level.

Damn. Amber. It'd be so good to be like, I'm a model for Amber Crombie and Finch. Wow. Great. Great story. Great job. Bid a history for us.

I think that episode, like many of our episodes, contained multitudes. We really ran the full range of feeling and experience. That's right. After seven years, we're pros. I think we really are starting. We're onto something here. We're starting to get our sea legs going. Well thanks for listening to us for seven, five, four, or one year, depending on who

you are. You know what year you are at. You know what you're doing. We appreciate you as always. Y'all are our friends and family. And we love you. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a true crime historian, author, and the host of Tenfold War Wicked on Exactly Right. For this season, our eighth will be in early 1900s New Orleans. This is a story about the very painful deaths of four people in one family and the woman accused of killing them.

But did she do it? After calling this season, the morphine murderess. I would have to describe her as sociopathic, psychopathic, addictive personality, and someone that they saw themselves maybe deep down inside as an angel of mercy. But in reality, there was nothing that she did that was merciful. This is a story about a city struggling with rising crime. Crime is like very much in the bones of New Orleans. It's like an act against God and of nature to live here.

It's about addiction and deception in the medical industry. Was there ever a risk to them? Yeah. I mean, I wasn't a good nurse. I wasn't as attentive as I should have been. I was skipping treatments. I was skipping certain medications. Obviously, they weren't getting the medications that were owed to them.

A high nurse is not a good nurse. And it's about a motive as mysterious as the woman accused of murder. I think there's a lot more deeper psychological issues there because later on in life, we don't know if she killed again. I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson, and this is season eight of Tenfold War Wicked. Season eight of Tenfold War Wicked premieres on Monday, March 20th on Exactly Right. New episodes every Monday. Follow the show on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to Tenfold War Wicked early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. This has been an Exactly Right production. Our senior producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton. Our producer is Alejandra Keck. This episode was engineered and mixed by Stephen Ray Morris. Our researchers are Maren McClasham and Sarah Blair Jenkins. Email your hometowns and fucking hurrays to myfavoritmurder at gmail.com.

Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at myfavoritmurder and Twitter at myfavoritmurder. Goodbye. Listen, follow, leave us a review on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Prime members, did you know that you can listen to My Favorite Murder early and add free on Amazon Music? Download the Amazon Music app today. You can support My Favorite Murder by filling out a survey at wendery.com.