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I'll save it, Lord. Hello. And welcome to My Favorite Murder. That's Georgia Hardstark.
00:02:13
That's Karen Kilgareff. And you just heard us say that for the 400th time. Oh, God, I didn't even consider that.
00:02:20
We've said that 400 times. A version of that incredibly, always spot on, perfectly delivered intro.
00:02:30
Captivating, some say, even. Some say it's the reason we got this far. That's true.
00:02:36
Because our intros are spot on. People were like, we can't stay away from this. If this is what it's going to be like with these two, if it's going to be that electric,
00:02:45
if it's going to be that important, I got to stick around. Can you believe it's been 400 episodes?
00:02:52
she said she said it's crazy it's like a lot and then it's kind of not a lot for like how long we've
00:03:01
been doing it you know what i mean yes i thought of i think someone else gave me this equation
00:03:07
but there's 52 weeks in a year we've done 400 episodes of podcasting there's 52 weeks in a year
00:03:16
So it's once a week. Yeah. That's a lot. That's a lot of a lot of consistent podcasting.
00:03:23
I see what you're saying. Yes. What's going on with you? Nothing. I just I got ready really fast for this because in classic Karen Colgariff form, I woke up
00:03:33
on the couch two minutes before we were supposed to podcast. Now I do have the excuse of having been sick and not getting very much sleep.
00:03:41
So I've been catching up by trying to watch a British TV show and immediately being asleep.
00:03:47
Immediately. So I feel a little harried, which is how I think I like showing up to these records because we don't obviously do a lot of pre-planning.
00:03:57
Yeah. We just kind of wing it. Mostly because of your background in improv. You studied at Second City.
00:04:03
You moved to Chicago. I did. They did all those things. You did all those improv things.
00:04:08
Yeah, that's me. good old improv Georgia. I have a book recommendation. It's fiction. It's based on
00:04:19
when Ted Bundy broke into the co-ed's house and attacked these women. Well, the book takes place
00:04:27
starting in Tallahassee in 1978 with that attack. And it's told by one of the surviving students,
00:04:34
surviving co-eds. But it's a novel. It's fiction. Yes. It's really, really brilliant and beautiful.
00:04:39
It's called Bright Young Women. And it's written by Jessica Knoll. And the reason it's called Bright Young Women is because remember when Ted Bundy was finally
00:04:48
in court and he got sentenced and the judge said to him, you're a bright young man.
00:04:53
I can't believe you did this or whatever, which is like, fuck you. What about the bright young women that you murdered?
00:04:58
They were the ones who had a future, not this fucking loser piece of shit serial killer.
00:05:03
So it's called Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll. It's really good so far. I mean, like I'm invested deep in it.
00:05:10
That sounds amazing, actually. Yeah, it's great. It's great. What about you? What are you watching, doing, writing, surfing?
00:05:17
A lot of surfing. I don't think I have any recommendations. Well, I think the recommendation is SAG-AFTRA are still on strike.
00:05:27
And so it puts a dent in the recommendations I would personally normally do because I would
00:05:32
just talk about things I'd seen on TV that I liked or people performing that I liked.
00:05:37
I hope they solve that quickly and I hope they get as good of a deal as the writers got because I feel like the writers were so perfectly united.
00:05:46
I think the writers going through the 2008 writer strike and how difficult that was made them really have such an amazing game plan.
00:05:54
And hopefully SAG is doing the same thing and taking a page from that playbook so they can wrap it up and get everything that they asking for The fact that the writers got the thing where they not allowed to use AI in television creation
00:06:12
I don't know the details of that deal point, but they got it. And that's so humongous.
00:06:18
So hopefully that's like automatically going to be a part. Because remember at the very beginning of the strike when there were actors going, oh, yeah, I went in for that part.
00:06:26
But then they also made me dress up in green screen motion capture. And I did a bunch of motion capture for free.
00:06:33
No. Oh, yeah. People were coming forward just being like, oh, I think I've helped this idea along because they don't ask.
00:06:41
They just tell you. And like, A.I. can't write script. Anyway, did you read the obituary that someone had A.I. right?
00:06:49
No, I didn't. Could I read it to you? Oh my God. Yes. Okay. First of all, the photo kind of looks like me.
00:06:54
Of the person who died? Yeah. It's like, I think a fake photo of like an AI. Okay. Here it is. I don't know who made this
00:07:00
and I want to give them credit, but I can't because I don't know who did it, but this is
00:07:05
the bought obituary. Ready? It's a cute young girl. I just said it looks like me. So that's
00:07:11
kind of stuck up, but Brenda Trent retired from living at the age of old, surrounded by family
00:07:19
and natural causes. Oh no. A librarian from birth, Brenda, was an avid collector of dust.
00:07:25
She had a sweetheart and she married her high school. She loved having hobbies and helping
00:07:30
her sons to be disadvantaged youths. She had no horses but thought she did. The church gave her
00:07:37
a choir because she sang like a bird and looked like a bird and Brenda was a bird. She owed us
00:07:43
So many poems. The funeral will be held in 1977 in heaven. In lieu of flowers, send Brenda more life.
00:07:52
Holy shit. That is, oh wait, it was on Reddit. Is that where you found it? It was on Reddit, yeah.
00:08:00
Oh, that is. She was a librarian from birth. I mean, I wish they had that. And maybe that was the reason that came out.
00:08:10
But they should have had that in the beginning when the threat was actually like, we don't need you.
00:08:14
We'll just have AI write these scripts. Right. There's been a few of those that are hilarious,
00:08:18
but that one just fucking killed me. So good. Yeah, we're not there. We're not there.
00:08:24
It's a little like the NFTs. It's a little like the Bitcoin. We're not actually there.
00:08:30
But just because you don't know how computers work doesn't mean you have to believe it's real.
00:08:34
Right. God, my mom started talking about like how Mars has a face on it. Oh. and we have more life but i mean some shit that was like so out of control and weird that she saw
00:08:48
on a you an alien youtube channel that i was just like uh-oh uh-oh janet janet she's switching um
00:08:55
topics now she's going from politics into deep state conspiracy theories yeah well i think they're
00:09:00
big alien the alien show i think they're big into that ancient aliens that's it's very bad i mean
00:09:07
And I've talked about watching that show on here and then people have really let me know how that is racist and also just straight up quackery.
00:09:16
It's somehow still are alt-right. Believing those things are somehow still on the level of alt-right.
00:09:22
Well, because what they're saying is ancient, like Egyptians couldn't have built a thing.
00:09:26
Also go on YouTube, the same machine that gives you the face on Mars. They can show you how they built them, both levers and pulleys and things.
00:09:35
I watched it because I thought it was so kooky and it's like the kind of people you would only be able to find at like a UFO conference.
00:09:44
Necklaces humongous, just like human interest level times a thousand. Yeah, but we also had to be careful of that and what we're recommending in every way, shape or form.
00:09:56
I'm not recommending it in any way. So here's a little thing that we're going to do that I believe our senior producer, Hannah Kyle Crichton, thought of, which is very sweet because she knew that we weren't going to sit here and go through like the photo album of our lives.
00:10:13
Much of this has been a blur. So she thought it'd be nice because there are employees at Exactly Right Media who have been day one listeners or at least long time listeners.
00:10:24
So she went around and asked some people about their favorite memories of the show.
00:10:30
And then we can read them to each other. Like we've never read these before. We got them as a surprise.
00:10:35
Go ahead. Read your first one. I'm going to read this to you. This is from Sabrina Sanchez.
00:10:40
She's our marketing coordinator. She says, I'm an OG murderino. And I love when Karen and Georgia poke fun at themselves for sharing an idea for a future
00:10:47
episode and then never mentioning it again. She likes that. Okay, good, good. In the early days, they mentioned wanting to celebrate their 100th episode with a Fudgie the Whale cake.
00:10:59
They forgot about it, but Stephen remembered. He surprised them with one and they all enjoyed it together.
00:11:05
It sounded so fun and the way they described it made me want to eat it too. And then she says, P.S. This is my official pitch to have Fudgies at the holiday party.
00:11:15
I can completely remember eating that cake in your first apartment. I just feel like Stephen
00:11:21
that was such a Stephen Ray Morris move where we're like we have good intentions
00:11:25
no follow through and Stephen's there to make it happen. That's what he's there for
00:11:29
exactly. It's the reason that we all get to be here for the 400th episode. Stephen!
00:11:36
Nice one Sabrina. Stephen and Sabrina! Okay this one is from your researcher Ali Elkin and she says
00:11:43
I came to my favorite murder sometime in the spring of 2016 so pretty early It was the thing that kept me from crying on the subway while I commuted to and from my job as an office PA for a late night TV show By 2018 my work situation had improved and several co were also murderinos So we all went to the live show together at the King Theater in Brooklyn
00:12:05
Oh, where that fucking alcohol, alcoholic beverage was sold. Or no, it was the wine. No,
00:12:13
it was the alcoholic beverage. Yeah. It was some sort of like a bloody murderino or it was some
00:12:18
mixed drink and everyone in the theater was fucked up beyond belief. Yeah, they were. It was like,
00:12:25
All alcohol and grenadine, essentially. Right, exactly. And it was second only to that show we did in Australia
00:12:33
that was like the roof-raising show where like halfway through we realized, oh, you're all super drunk.
00:12:40
Yeah. Okay. That night, Georgia covered deaths at Coney Island and I remember her saying that people at the turn of the century
00:12:47
didn't really understand the mechanics of roller coasters so they would try to stand up.
00:12:51
She introduced a brand new intrusive thought that I now have every time I ride a roller coaster.
00:12:58
What would happen if I tried to stand up right now? Oh, I know it. Also, MFM has been there for me at many parties.
00:13:06
On several occasions, I've been at gatherings where I've run into someone wearing a piece of MFM merch
00:13:11
and I've immediately had someone to talk to for the duration of the party. It's been an extremely helpful bat signal.
00:13:18
In the absence of a murderino, I usually spend most parties hanging out with the dog.
00:13:22
And if there's no murderino and no dog, I'm in trouble. Oh, Allie. Allie, that's great.
00:13:29
Thank you so much. I love that. I love that she's like listening on the way to her job with this being her future job.
00:13:35
Yeah, that's hilarious. Oh my God. I didn't put that together. Full circle, Allie.
00:13:40
Great job. Full circle. Okay. My next one is from your researcher, Maren McClashen.
00:13:47
A random thing I think about all the time is Georgia and Karen talking about the quote
00:13:51
soaking dirty dishes in the sink when you don't really want to clean them. That exchange was one of those early moments for me where I was like, that's me.
00:14:00
Also, I started listening to MFM after a friend told me that Karen had talked about her mom's
00:14:05
experiences with early onset Alzheimer's disease on the podcast. I wasn't even really all that into
00:14:10
true crime at the time, but my mom was also struggling with early onset dementia. In one
00:14:15
of the first episodes I ever listened to, Karen shouts out the Alzheimer's Association and talks
00:14:20
a bit about her own family's experience. I heard that at a time when I really needed to hear it.
00:14:25
And I still love every time she talks about her badass mom. Pat! That's sweet. I know.
00:14:34
She never told me that. I love this because I think this is the kind of thing people at our work wouldn't tell us.
00:14:41
Right. Totally. Maren, that means the world to me. We have a true bond. Aside from the fact that you do amazing
00:14:46
research for me. That's amazing. Okay. Well, this, this memory is from Liana Scolacci. Oh,
00:14:54
I like to put a little Italian spice on the end of that. And she is one of our engineers and a
00:15:00
mixer here for our show actually. And a couple other shows I'm sure because all of our engineers
00:15:06
work on like two and three shows. Did you know she's a professor of engineering? No, we have a
00:15:12
professor on our staff. Yes. Yeah. I think it's for Northwestern. Hannah, is it Northwestern that
00:15:19
she teaches at or used to teach? It is. Yeah. She taught at Northwestern. Wow. Wow. That's pretty
00:15:26
big deal. Yeah. Okay. So Liana says, I started listening to MFM during the pandemic the same
00:15:32
month that I moved to Los Angeles. Super fitting then that the very first episode I heard was number
00:15:37
228, the season of the abyss in which Georgia covers the St. Francis Dam disaster. Oh, shit.
00:15:44
Remember that thing? Oh, God, that was a rough one. Yeah. Horrible. It was. Oh, hold on,
00:15:50
because Liana has something else to say. It was a hilarious and serendipitous introduction to the
00:15:54
show and to my new city. And I still laugh about the idea that Dan Dasani came up to Karen at the
00:16:00
Hollywood Reservoir. What the fuck? Came up to Karen at the Hollywood Reservoir and gave her a
00:16:06
bottle of water to keep her from panicking about the drought. I don't remember that at all.
00:16:12
That was the man. He didn't give me a bottle of water, but there was a man, you could see the reservoir from the dog park that I used to take George to because she had
00:16:20
to run like a horse. And I was freaking out because the reservoir was down like crazy.
00:16:26
And he explained to me how that has nothing to do with any water level of anything. And it just
00:16:31
goes up and down from evaporation. And he made me feel so much better. And apparently we called
00:16:36
him Dan Dasani. I get it. Oh, and then it says, stay sexy and see you later if the dam don't break.
00:16:42
Oh, Liana, thank you. Cute. Love it. Okay. This is from Asia Hamilton. She's a production
00:16:48
coordinator. She's been with us for a long time too. We love Asia. Yeah, we do. She's a QC. She's
00:16:55
our quality control master. That's right. I went to my first MFM live show in Vegas and Karen
00:17:00
covered the deaths at the Hoover Dam. But Karen accidentally only printed out half of her story.
00:17:07
So when she got to the last few pages, she realized what she had done while on stage.
00:17:13
We all had a great laugh, but fell in love with her even more because she told the rest of her
00:17:17
story from memory. And it was amazing. I blocked that out. I complete. You know why? Because
00:17:26
remember that show if it's the same Vegas show and I think it is it was that huge show with the
00:17:33
huge video screens everywhere yeah oh yeah yeah yeah it was like so not conducive to comedy
00:17:40
or a true crime podcast or anything that we knew it was like we took jobs as Cher impersonators
00:17:47
and then it was like go ahead do it do your job terrifying so insane well this last one's from Jay
00:17:54
Oh, Jay. Jay Elias who Hannah wrote in as the jack of all trades but Jay has been our assistant He worked in development He worked in ad ops He worked in kind of every department as this company got bigger
00:18:08
And it used to be me, Georgia, Danielle, Jay, and Steven at the monthly meeting.
00:18:13
Jay is a crucial part of Exactly Right and of my favorite murder and of my sanity.
00:18:19
And it says here, when Karen and Georgia toured in London in 2019, Karen took a picture of Georgia sleeping on the train.
00:18:25
In the photo, Georgia's wearing a puffy black jacket and a red sleep mask. She looks exactly like the Mothman.
00:18:31
So Karen had me make a slide in the presentation deck where the photo of Georgia is side by side with Nick Terry's drawing of Georgia in the Mothman costume.
00:18:40
I don't think it made it to the London live show that we aired, but I like to imagine that it killed.
00:18:45
Oh, my God. That's right. I do remember that. Sleep mask for sure. That's so funny.
00:18:50
I know. memories memories and like we could really do this for so long yeah because we didn't just have like
00:19:00
this kind of podcast recording yeah we've done so many other things besides the podcast because
00:19:07
of the podcast totally like touring going to different countries not just all around this
00:19:12
country but all over the world yeah and the book the book we have a book we wrote a book and people
00:19:20
actually liked the book we wrote. It was number one on fucking New York Times bestseller list when
00:19:25
it came out. Isn't that wild? That's a part of our lives and no one can take it away.
00:19:30
No. And you know why no one can take it away? Because it was given by the people that listened
00:19:35
to this podcast. We would have never had any of those things. And I know we say it and it sounds
00:19:40
corny, but that's because it's also true. The listenership of this podcast is so connected and
00:19:48
supportive and caring. They're the reason we have everything and have had everything. And
00:19:55
it's just like the greatest gift from all these people that we then get to sometimes say hi to
00:20:01
in the street. It's overwhelming to think about, but it's, yeah, it's so true. Like we are here
00:20:05
because people listen to us and care about us the way we care about them. So that's very cool.
00:20:11
It's very fun. And it's fun to think that there's a connection that we don't understand,
00:20:16
that we can only understand when we meet people and they tell us about the connection,
00:20:21
just like these guys. So thanks all you guys that actually work for us, that took the time out of your work day to share those.
00:20:28
That's awesome. I hope you clocked out before you wrote those and then clocked back in because-
00:20:32
If you spent one second on the clock, it will be found by our AI clock searcher.
00:20:40
Speaking of things that we've done that are crazy and amazing, we have a podcast network.
00:20:44
Should we do Exactly Right Corner? Let's do it. Okay. The series finale of Infamous International, the Pink Panther story is here.
00:20:53
Thanks to collaborative law enforcement and better technology, the Pink Panthers have
00:20:56
been hobbled. But professional criminals know they must adapt or pay the price. Then Erin wrote, dun, dun.
00:21:04
Binge the whole series if you haven't already. It's Infamous International. Please give it a listen, guys.
00:21:09
It's so freaking good. And thank you to the people who have been listening because it's been on the charts
00:21:13
Like since it premiered, it's been doing really well. It's been getting nice kind of critical acclaim.
00:21:18
It's very, very cool. So thanks to everybody for supporting that. Oh, over on that podcast, Do You Need a Ride?
00:21:24
Chris and Karen are joined by comedian and voice actor. Oh my fucking God. James Adomian.
00:21:30
James Adomian came on and he was, here's what I love about James Adomian. First of all, he's pretty much one of the most talented people I've ever met.
00:21:38
Like hands down. he understands how much joy his impressions bring especially when he's doing impressions of other
00:21:46
comedians to comedians so at one point he was being eddie pepitone in the car and he was just
00:21:52
screaming at the top of his lungs and he sounded exactly like eddie pepitone and then of course
00:21:57
like he did jesse ventura and i was saying i was getting like starstruck and i'm like i don't even
00:22:02
care about wrestling and like this is such a good impression that it feels like jesse ventura is in
00:22:07
this car with us. I love it. It's so good. So listen to that one. Big, huge news from the world
00:22:13
of Ghosted by Roz Hernandez. Roz's unscripted ghost hunting TV show, Living for the Dead,
00:22:19
is streaming now on Hulu. It's so good. Executive producers and show creators, Kristen Stewart and CJ Romero joined Roz on Ghosted this week. So make sure to check that
00:22:30
freaking out. It's awesome. They made this show. And when Roz first joined the network,
00:22:36
she was telling us about it. We're like, this is amazing. This is what, what great synergy you have
00:22:40
a show on. And then the strike started and we're like, Oh, now we can't talk about it. And then
00:22:44
like, cause it's unscripted. Now we can talk about it. And it's so great. So exciting. And lastly,
00:22:50
we recently unveiled a new Halloween gift for murderinos everywhere. My favorite murder.com
00:22:57
just got a facelift. So go check out our all new website and explore and let us know what you think.
00:23:05
And while you're there, check out our brand new merch for My Favorite Murder, for Ghosted, for That's Messed Up, and for a bunch more podcasts.
00:23:13
We just did a whole revamp of the website and a bunch of merch, and we're super excited about it.
00:23:20
So you might want to take a look if you haven't been over on the website for a while.
00:23:24
Do it. MyFavoriteMurder.com. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn, host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.
00:23:34
This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Lily Chu, the author of the Audible original romantic comedy Just Kiss Already.
00:23:43
It's a story about a forensic anthropologist who secretly writes mystery novels, an actress who adapts his book into a film,
00:23:50
and what happens when a meme and a media tour collide with a slow burn romance. It's performed by Simu Liu and Philippa Su, and it is...
00:24:00
an absolute blast. When you actually hear the performance, you realize that other people are
00:24:07
taking your words and what you thought was kind of a straightforward sentence like,
00:24:11
the cat in the corner is black. In my head, it's the cat in the corner is black, not the dog,
00:24:17
not the gerbil. But someone else might say it, the cat in the corner is black. That's always
00:24:21
fascinating to me. How they just bring in all these different nuances and really make it fun
00:24:27
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00:26:48
story that I'm about to tell you was recommended by a listener. Well, we're assuming that they're
00:26:55
a listener. They're on Twitter telling us what stories to cover. So it'd be super weird,
00:27:00
although not unheard of if they were not a listener. But their name is Jackie LaCroix,
00:27:05
which is a pretty great name. And she said to me on Twitter, I'd be shocked if this has never
00:27:12
been suggested to you, but this story has everything. Grave robbing, doctor with rage
00:27:16
issues, a 19th century angry mob. So I sent that tweet over to Maren and Maren looked it up. And
00:27:24
this is the story we have for you today. The story begins in February of 2021 at the Mountain View
00:27:32
Cemetery in Oakland, California. It's a clear chilly winter afternoon and reporter Erica Mailman
00:27:39
is walking with a prominent local historian and writer, Dennis Ivanovsky. And he's also the
00:27:45
docent of that cemetery. And they're there together to track down a grave site. I almost
00:27:51
said they're there together to track down a website. I was about to go off the page.
00:27:57
They're there together to track down a grave site. That makes more sense. Yeah. This is a very nice, well-maintained cemetery. It almost feels like a park.
00:28:05
And that's because Mountain View Cemetery was designed by the same man who designed Central
00:28:10
Park. Wow. Frederick Law Olmstead. I know that kind of blew me away. Yeah. And it serves as the final resting place for several famous Californians, architects, professional athletes, writers, businessmen, politicians, like the big wigs of California and the Bay Area are buried over there.
00:28:28
But of course, not everyone laid to rest here was considered important. There is an area called the Strangers Plot, which contains hundreds of unmarked graves of unidentified people who died in poverty or at war or who were convicted criminals.
00:28:44
But today, Erica and Dennis are looking for the grave of a young woman named Clara Loper.
00:28:50
She was from a poor Oakland family. She lived with serious and debilitating health conditions.
00:28:56
And as you can guess, society as it was in the 1880s did not treat her kindly. But to Erica, Clara's life and her afterlife are just as important as any of the famous people buried at Mountain View.
00:29:09
So she's been working on finding her grave for months. She called Dennis to help her with that search.
00:29:15
And she says, quote, we looked Clara up in a handwritten volume, the index of the dead, and found her on a threadbare map so delicate it cannot be unrolled many more times before disintegrating.
00:29:29
So now they're looking for the grave of Clara Loper, the victim of an 1883 body snatching who was buried not once but twice in Oakland's Mountain View Cemetery.
00:29:39
Mm-hmm. So the main sources for this research are a 2021 Atlas Obscura article. We love Atlas Obscura.
00:29:50
So good. A 2021 Atlas Obscura article called The Unfortunately Action Afterlife of a California Grave Robbery Victim written by Erica Mailman In addition multiple articles from Bay Area newspapers published in the 1880s And if you want to look at any of those or look up
00:30:07
any of those sources, you can go to the show notes. Okay, so it's the early 1880s in Oakland,
00:30:13
California and at the Loper family home where 21-year-old Clara lives with her mother Wilhelmina.
00:30:20
Clara was born with partial paralysis and a spine condition that's left her unable to walk.
00:30:26
And she's also not able to speak. Her mother, Wilhelmina, is a widow who struggles to make ends meet.
00:30:32
They don't have much money as Wilhelmina is Clara's full-time caregiver. But the house is filled with love and care and Clara and Wilhelmina are very close.
00:30:42
Talk about as a beginning, a hard luck beginning where they don't have the money for the support.
00:30:48
And also there's other kids in the Loper family. It's not just Clara. So in March of 1883, Clara develops a serious case of pneumonia and she can't hold food down.
00:30:59
So for weeks, Wilhelmina spoon feeds her daughter, but Clara can really only hold down water.
00:31:05
So Wilhelmina gets in touch with her physician, Dr. F.S. Rudolph, who starts regularly visiting the Loper home to treat Clara, but Claire's not getting any better.
00:31:15
Wilhelmina won't give up hope, though. She welcomes other physicians into the home that Dr. Rudolph recommends to help Clara, including one named Dr. D.D. Crowley, a professor of surgery at a local homeopathic school called the Eclectic Medical College.
00:31:33
Yeah. So as kind of fly by night as that might sound to us today, there were actually a system of eclectic medical colleges in the United States in the 1800s.
00:31:44
So this was taking place on the Bay Area campus, which was founded in Oakland and eventually moved into the city in San Francisco.
00:31:53
But there were other eclectic medical colleges in other cities. They don't exist anymore, but they were a big deal for a while, I guess.
00:32:00
So according to Wilhelmina, Dr. Crowley completes a physical exam on Clara's body, which includes measuring her limbs.
00:32:09
Given that Clara's diagnosis is pneumonia, for Wilhelmina, this is a red flag and it's the first of many.
00:32:17
So days pass. Clara's condition does not improve. Then Wilhelmina gets worse news, the worst imaginable.
00:32:24
Dr. Rudolph informs her Clara is dying and nothing can be done to save her. And then directly after breaking that horrible news to this so dedicated and obviously such a loving mother,
00:32:36
He then suggests that Wilhelmina donates Clara's body to the Eclectic Medical College when she's dead.
00:32:43
Not the time, buddy. There's bedside manner and then there's just being a cold prick asshole.
00:32:50
Totally. So he tells Wilhelmina that donating Clara's body would allow her condition to be studied by medical students.
00:32:59
Yet Dr. Randolph is not affiliated with that school directly. So he's just suggesting it at probably the most insensitive time he could.
00:33:10
Clara's still alive, by the way. So Wilhelmina just continues to nurse her daughter.
00:33:15
And she has to begin to come to terms with the fact that Clara will likely die soon.
00:33:22
She's almost certainly offended by the suggestion of donating her daughter's body.
00:33:27
So Wilhelmina tells Dr. Rudolph she's not going to donate Clara's body. but she tells him that once she passes, that he would be welcome to come back to perform an autopsy there in the Loper house.
00:33:41
Dr. Rudolph politely declines this offer. So the next day, as Clara fights for her life at home, Wilhelmina leaves to run errands and she bumps into Dr. Rudolph.
00:33:51
And once again, he tells Wilhelmina that she should donate her daughter's body to the Eclectic Medical College.
00:33:58
And again, Wilhelmina says no. And then just a few days later, 21-year-old Clara dies on Tuesday, April 3rd, 1883.
00:34:07
And then two days after that, because Wilhelmina doesn't have really any money at all,
00:34:13
Clara's buried in the same plot as her father was buried, the coffins stacked on top of each other.
00:34:19
So now Wilhelmina is not only devastated by the loss of her daughter, but she has all this anxiety
00:34:25
because of Dr. Rudolph's multiple remarks about donating Clara's body, Wilhelmina is genuinely afraid that he or someone he knows
00:34:35
is going to steal Clara's body from her grave. She's so concerned, in fact, that she and her family come up with a plan.
00:34:44
So they're going to plant a long piece of wire at the head of Clara's grave. And when Wilhelmina visits, she's going to check the wire.
00:34:52
And if it looks like it's moved, she's going to know that someone has tampered with the grave, which is pretty smart.
00:34:58
So body snatching at that time is becoming a problem in the United States and in the United Kingdom.
00:35:04
And it's linked to medical schools. So wild that like when we now think of as like the highest education you can get in medical schools are like at the time just stealing bodies.
00:35:16
Stealing bodies like out of pure desperation. Wild. Yeah. So the first few American medical colleges opened around the 1700s.
00:35:25
By the 19th century, they're popping up all across the country. And with the increase of aspiring doctors, there's an immediate demand for cadavers.
00:35:34
But dissecting bodies in this period, as it is today, is a routine and important part of medical school coursework.
00:35:40
But supplying bodies for dissection is a huge issue in the 19th century. Medical colleges often struggle to source bodies that doctors in training can practice on In some places it actually becomes the medical student responsibility to bring their own cadavers to class Oh my God Yikes No That not good That not good Most people don want to donate their loved one remains for dissection There are all
00:36:09
sorts of reasons, personal, cultural, or perhaps related to the sheer newness of the idea of
00:36:16
medical schools. In those early days, there's a lack of understanding of how important that kind
00:36:22
of learning is to public health. And of course, there's a huge stigma around donating bodies for
00:36:28
educational purposes. Dissection was once a common punishment for convicted murderers after they died.
00:36:34
So the equation in most people's heads, you're not going to then want to volunteer your loved
00:36:40
one. So eventually a black market for corpses is created. And in some cases, medical schools
00:36:45
would use what they called a resurrectionist to snatch freshly deceased bodies from graves,
00:36:51
morgues, or through shady dealings with immoral undertakers and clergymen. In other cases,
00:36:57
medical college doctors, students, even janitors would go out and body snatch for themselves.
00:37:04
That's not anyone's ideal setup, but educators and students reportedly viewed it as a necessary evil.
00:37:11
But often resurrectionists would target the resting places of marginalized people,
00:37:16
like those buried in potter's fields or in black cemeteries. And this was done intentionally.
00:37:22
The thinking was that society cared less about those victims, but the victims' families did care and the practice caused public outrage
00:37:30
and a slew of so-called anatomy riots throughout the country. So people had to actually like take to the streets to be like,
00:37:38
you're not allowed to do that. So in 1788, there's a famous protest in New York City called the Doctors' Riot,
00:37:44
where an angry mob attacked a medical school over body snatching. It's believed around 20 people died during that riot.
00:37:53
Oh my God. A sister school of the Bay Area Eclectic Medical College was the site of an anatomy riot in 1839.
00:38:01
And according to Erica Mailman, quote, a mob armed with firearms swarmed the college enraged by several disturbed graves,
00:38:09
including one that housed a woman who died in an asylum and was buried in a potter's field before relatives could claim her.
00:38:18
Sure enough, her body was found on the dissecting table. Oh, how awful. End quote.
00:38:24
Yeah. So body snatching becomes such a huge problem in the United States that laws are finally passed to try to stop it.
00:38:31
In 1883 in Oakland, around the time Clara Loper dies, the practice is officially illegal in California,
00:38:38
but the need for cadavers at medical schools is still there so the laws don't completely deter
00:38:44
body snatchers and i bet it also encourages these doctors who think they're smarter than everybody
00:38:51
in the world bossing people around on the day of their children's death and telling them you should
00:38:57
do this and you really need to consider that so wilhelmina seems to have sensed all of this on
00:39:03
Friday, April 6th, the day after Clara is buried, she visits Mountain View Cemetery and immediately
00:39:09
notices that the wire she set up on Clara's grave is gone. She immediately tracks down the cemetery's
00:39:16
director, D.E. Collins, and she tells him that she's worried Clara's body has been tampered with.
00:39:22
To his credit, Collins wastes no time. He grabs a shovel. He digs up Clara's grave. It's instantly
00:39:28
clear something is very wrong. Entire chunks of her coffin are missing, and it looks like it's
00:39:33
been beaten in with an axe. Oh my God. There's also crowbar and auger marks along its side. And
00:39:42
I know you know this, but I didn't. And auger is that spiral shaped tool used for drilling holes
00:39:48
in wood. Yeah. So they had their whole toolbox out there. And Justice Wilhelmina feared her
00:39:56
daughter Clara's body is gone. So they have stolen it. According to an 1883 article in the Oakland
00:40:03
tribune, all that's left behind are Clara's clothes. These have been, quote, rudely torn off
00:40:10
and thrown pell-mell into the grave. Even the stockings were pulled off. Oh my God. End quote.
00:40:17
I know. This was a common practice by resurrectionists in this era to avoid more
00:40:21
serious grave robbery charges they'd often leave behind personal effects and just take a naked body.
00:40:28
So disrespectful and just so sad for the families to have to go through that. My God.
00:40:36
So at this point, Wilhelmina is flooded with emotions. Of course, she's devastated. She's grieving, but now she's furious. So she goes straight to the police station. She asks the officers to go to the school to check and make sure her daughter's body isn't there. And the next day, six policemen show up at the Eclectic Medical School with a search warrant.
00:40:58
Several of these officers will eventually testify about the cagey behavior of the medical school staffers that afternoon.
00:41:04
For example, Dr. Crowley, the one who came by the Loper's house and measured her limbs, he's said to have, quote, looked pale.
00:41:12
He would swallow conclusively occasionally as if a lump were rising in his throat.
00:41:17
One officer describes Crowley as, quote, perspiring freely. So, yeah, so he's dabbing his forehead with his kerchief.
00:41:25
Dr. Crowley quickly flags down his colleague, Dr. Jenny Webb, and she takes the officers around the school building.
00:41:34
They start by looking in lecture halls and adjoining closets. The policemen find a few incriminating items that they collect as evidence, including two shovels with fresh dirt on them and a bunch of clothes that have dirt and grass stains on them.
00:41:46
And these clothes are eventually linked to a specific med student who is also the college's janitor named David Rand.
00:41:53
The investigators also find a crowbar and an auger and a large box that has quote a stain in the bottom similar to the body of the deceased end quote So it quickly assumed that this box was used to transport
00:42:07
Clara's body from her gravesite to the school. Next, the police head upstairs toward the dissecting
00:42:13
room, but the door is locked. Dr. Webb tells the officers to hang tight while she goes to find her
00:42:18
key. When she doesn't come back, the officers become impatient. One of them will later testify
00:42:25
that, quote, we picked the lock and passing through a hall, found another door also locked,
00:42:31
which we opened and found on one of the four tables, the body of Clara Loper. Oh my God. So like they didn't even try to hide it really.
00:42:39
No. Well, they, they locked two doors and thought that would be good enough where it's like,
00:42:43
we're the police. We know how to pick locks. Like this is what we do. According to the officers,
00:42:48
Her body had not yet been dissected. However, her hair had been cut off and she reeked of chemicals suggesting that she'd been embalmed.
00:42:57
So Clara's body is taken back to Mountain View Cemetery and reinterred. And according to Erica Mailman, an armed guard is hired to monitor her grave site until, quote, enough time had passed to render the body unusable for science.
00:43:13
So one thing is clear here. a crime has been committed, but it's hard to say who's responsible for snatching Clara's body.
00:43:20
And so far, no one at the Eclectic Medical College is taking responsibility. So before long, detectives learn that there are only a handful of people that have a key to the
00:43:29
dissecting room, including Dr. Webb, Dr. Crowley, and David Rand. But this lead is immediately
00:43:35
complicated by statements from people affiliated with the school. One student tells investigators
00:43:40
that David Rand often made his key widely available to anyone who needed it by leaving
00:43:45
it underneath a bell near the dissecting room. And then on top of that, the school is very
00:43:50
accessible to the public. Its front entrance is always open and anyone can come inside.
00:43:55
Yeah. So someone just came in and dropped off a body. Yeah. Doubt it. Yeah, exactly. They came in, they opened one door, then they unlocked a second door and they're like,
00:44:06
this should go here. I'm a stranger. So now knowing they need more information to whittle
00:44:11
down their suspect list, the detectives head to Mountain View where they find the cemetery's
00:44:16
director, D.E. Collins, who tells the officers that he'd seen Dr. Crowley in the graveyard
00:44:21
around 2 p.m. on the day of Clara's burial, hours before she was taken from her grave.
00:44:27
One of the officers also makes note of wagon tracks on the road near Mountain View. They
00:44:32
seem strategically positioned to quickly access Clara's grave, which is only 140 feet away.
00:44:39
The cemetery gardener E.P. Smith, it just keeps happening where everybody in the 1800s had two
00:44:45
initials for their first name. It was a really big trend back then, it seems like. All the rage.
00:44:51
So the gardener E.P. Smith reports seeing three men in a wagon, which was led by a gray horse near
00:44:56
the cemetery around 11 o'clock that night, the night of Clara's burial. And it turns out Dr.
00:45:02
Crowley owns a gray horse. So now detectives talk to Clara's doctor, F.S. Rudolph. Jesus.
00:45:09
It just keeps happening. J.C. Christ. That's a lot. Yeah. J.C. Christ is right. F.S. Rudolph in
00:45:17
a statement show a lack of respect for Clara's humanity. Of course, he refers to her as it
00:45:24
saying that ahead of Clara's death, he quote, spoke to Dr. Crowley about obtaining the body.
00:45:31
I told him that I was interested in the case and asked him whether he would take it and dissect it.
00:45:36
And he said that he would if I could get it for him, end quote. But Rudolph denies taking Clara's body from her grave himself.
00:45:46
And that's good enough for the police. They never consider him to be a suspect. I think that point, though, it is important to say medical students have to go through a kind of detachment process or there's probably actually terms for it, medical terms for it, where you cannot be seeing these bodies that you're working on as the individual human beings that they are so that you can get your work done.
00:46:12
Totally. And I think it reflects that that doctor is like doctoring at that point.
00:46:19
Right. And really the only, I would say, bone of contention is, hey, you don't just get to do this if you want to.
00:46:26
There's a consent issue that is very important, no matter what century it is. Okay, so now they're zeroing in on Dr. Crowley until they learn he has an alibi.
00:46:38
Dr. Jenny Webb, who was also never considered a suspect, claims both she and another eclectic medical college physician named Dr. George Harrison.
00:46:47
no initials on that one but he is a beetle he is a loud and proud beetle george harrison
00:46:53
they were treating dr crowley for an unspecified illness the night at claire's body went missing
00:46:58
from mountain view so the doctors have circled up and basically given each other alibis with
00:47:04
illness only the thing that they can figure out if it's real or not right dr webb claims that quote
00:47:11
after 10 o'clock on thursday night dr crowley was confined to his room and dr harrison and myself
00:47:16
for attending to him administering opiates under the influence of which we left him at two o'clock
00:47:22
Friday morning. So regardless of all that, three eclectic medical college staffers are soon charged
00:47:29
with stealing Clara's body. And it's Dr. Crowley, David Rand, and Dr. Harrison. I also think David
00:47:35
Rand's getting the short end of the stick because he's a medical student, but he's also the janitor.
00:47:39
And this is not factually based, but my guess is he is like a medical student that doesn't have the money to just be straight up going to medical school.
00:47:50
Totally. So he's now doing people's dirty work to get these bodies and to make this happen so that people can study.
00:47:57
Right. He's like kind of caught between the two. Yeah. Maybe he's even paid off for it or paid to do it, something.
00:48:04
But it's not, it doesn't seem like it would be his idea and his like master plan since he's a student and a janitor.
00:48:10
A student and a janitor. He's basically absolutely being told what to do. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell from primary sources what evidence authorities had against David Rand and Dr. Harrison in particular.
00:48:22
So basically it seems like they're getting lumped in with everybody else or it might just be circumstantial.
00:48:26
Then in front of a quote assemblage of medical students, physicians, policemen, attorneys and newspaper men, they all appear in court.
00:48:36
All three men deny the charges against them. And the case the prosecution presents is entirely circumstantial, which gives the defense a huge advantage.
00:48:46
They're able to write the most suspicious elements off as pure coincidence, including the dirty clothes, the tools and the box found hidden away in the college's closets.
00:48:55
And as for that sighting of Dr. Crowley in the cemetery on the afternoon of Clara's burial, the defense essentially argues that Crowley is always at the cemetery, which might work for the defense, but it doesn't seem like a great argument in the era of med school driven body snatching.
00:49:13
You should probably be there the least amount possible, not the most. So meanwhile, the trial is gut wrenching for Wilhelmina.
00:49:21
Of course, this woman has suffered. She's only suffered, it seems like. She reportedly weeps as her daughter's battered coffin along with the box found at the medical college are brought into the courtroom as evidence.
00:49:34
The court ultimately decides that there's simply not enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Crowley, Rand and Harrison are guilty.
00:49:42
According to an article in the Oakland Tribune from 1883, they say, quote, the court ordered the defendants discharged and they were immediately surrounded by their friends
00:49:52
who heartily congratulated them upon the issue of the case. The mother of the dead girl, however,
00:49:57
was grievously disappointed. The tears flowed from her careworn cheeks and she wandered about
00:50:03
the courtroom exclaiming, it's too bad, too bad, too bad. They stole my child. They stole my child.
00:50:11
end quote i feel like it's pretty obvious that they're guilty like there's so much evidence i
00:50:17
don't including her body being at the fucking location yes and that's not circumstantial no
00:50:25
that's not but everything else is and i think in the system that existed back then right all those
00:50:34
doctors, I would guess, are 96% white men. So they're all going to be like, well, this is good
00:50:42
for doctors and we have to do for doctors. And they're all kind of like high powered. It's just
00:50:47
all that. Judges and doctors, they golf together. They go out to the old golf course that's by the
00:50:53
ocean in San Francisco. And then they're like, all right, so let's clear us all of our charges,
00:50:57
please. The aftermath of this trial sounds like a nightmarish circus as members of the public,
00:51:03
gather around the coffin and the boxes, gazing eagerly into the college box to discern the
00:51:09
imprint left by the form of the resurrected girl. Wilhelmina approaches the three doctors to confront them directly, but she's held back
00:51:18
by her son. And then someone in the courtroom asks what he should do with the evidence, including
00:51:24
the box, the shovels and the dirty clothing. And he's told that he might return them to the eclectic medical college.
00:51:33
So here are your tools of your crime back. Here's so you can do it next time. Yeah.
00:51:39
This won't be the last time the Bay Area campus of the Eclectic Medical College is in hot water.
00:51:44
The year after the trial, a child under Dr. Crowley's care dies and another doctor unaffiliated with the college puts, quote, eclecticism as the cause of the child's death.
00:51:57
This is a clear dig at the school's homeopathic practices. and it's reported that Dr. Crowley asks this other physician to change the cause of death
00:52:06
and when he refuses Erica Mailman reports quote Crowley punched him in the face multiple times
00:52:12
until another doctor intervened. So they're fucking fighting for homeopathy back in the day
00:52:20
where they're like holy shit no and in some ways they were right yeah in some ways they were wrong.
00:52:26
so will amina and her surviving adult children clara's brother and sister have a hard time
00:52:32
getting past this traumatic experience of course will amina will later say just days after clara
00:52:37
was returned to her grave that a stranger stopped by the loper house and offered a hundred dollars
00:52:43
for her corpse oh god yeah now that would have been worth three thousand dollars in today's money
00:52:51
And for a struggling family, that's a hefty sum. But of course, Wilhelmina declines.
00:52:58
And this only feeds her fears that people are still after her dead daughter's body.
00:53:04
It's not clear why this person would do that. If it's because Clara's medical condition was being treated as a medical oddity and they wanted to look into it, making it like more valuable for dissection.
00:53:16
but it's also possible that it was just, she was famous now, basically. So the family's anxieties become so overwhelming that in 1883,
00:53:25
the San Francisco Examiner reports that, quote, a brother of the dead girl who is a brass smith is said to be at work on an electric bomb,
00:53:34
which he proposes placing in the grave in a manner known only to himself, which will explode upon being disturbed.
00:53:42
Whoa. I mean, even if it's not true, it's a great rumor to start. Yes, it's brilliant.
00:53:46
Yeah It unclear if Clara brother ever went through with this plan What we do know is that six months after her daughter is reburied Wilhelmina asks Mountain View director D Collins to dig up her grave yet again Wilhelmina wants to know for sure that her daughter body is still there And according to reports she quote
00:54:06
wept hideously on the brink of the grave as they discovered that Clara's body was, in fact, still interred.
00:54:13
Oh, my God. That's just the anguish. Horrible. And also, I mean, their right to, like, give it up to D.E. Collins
00:54:21
because he's basically like, I'll do what you need me to do in this situation. Because I thought maybe they would be like, okay, that's, we know she's down there.
00:54:30
It's fine. But they did it again for her. Clara Loper was treated with a total lack of dignity by doctors.
00:54:37
But over the years, many people who have heard her story are horrified by what happened to
00:54:42
her and care about her story. Which brings us back to the beginning, 2021, when Mountain View docent Dennis Evanosky
00:54:50
and reporter Erica Mailman search the cemetery grounds for Clara's grave site. Even with the information that they've gleaned from the cemetery's threadbare map,
00:55:00
it takes the pair multiple outings to track down Clara's grave because of its remote location and the fact that it hasn't been well maintained.
00:55:08
There's like corners, I guess, of this cemetery. For the most part, it's really beautiful and park-like,
00:55:14
but there's corners that are less maintained. They eventually find it and Erica writes, quote,
00:55:19
As I stared down at Clara's shared plot of Earth, I thought about how to the men who stole her body, she was more of an object of fascination than a person whose life mattered.
00:55:29
End quote. Ewanowski, who wastes no time adorning Clara's resting place with eucalyptus leaves, has since petitioned to get both Clara and her father proper headstones.
00:55:40
So they found this grave without headstones, which is pretty amazing. Wow. He says, quote, it's a respect thing for me to rediscover these people and let others know where they are, end quote.
00:55:53
And meanwhile, Erica Mailman writes that, quote, Clara will get a bit of kindness over a century later.
00:55:59
That's already happening. Evanovsky noticed that after her gravesite was made apparent, passersby left stones behind to show they had visited, end quote.
00:56:11
So to this day, body snatching still happens around the world. But of course, we're far from the 18th and 19th century peak of the practice here in the United States.
00:56:19
What finally helped curb the issue were state governments legalizing the dissection of unclaimed corpses.
00:56:26
And over the years, more and more people have consented to donating their bodies to science, knowing how helpful it is to our understanding of medicine, anatomy and disease.
00:56:36
And that is the story of Clara Loper, who, after all these years, has finally been laid to rest with the respect and dignity that she deserved.
00:56:44
Wow. Wow. Good job. Thank you. And thank you, Jackie LaCroix. Oh, man, that is a good one. I've never heard that before.
00:56:55
Me either. It's so heartbreaking. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club.
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This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project Hail Mary,
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00:57:25
I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections.
00:57:33
And it's like, OK, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it.
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I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it.
00:57:45
But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me. And I left it on the mic.
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That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end.
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I'm going to make a left turn and I'm going to tell you about one of the most famous con men of the early 20th century.
00:59:49
Sounds good. people tend to know him as the man who sold the Eiffel Tower Oh but he also the man who conned Al Capone escaped the Secret Service and almost undermined the entire U economy This is the story of Victor Lustig
01:00:07
Nice. So the main sources for the story are an article in Smithsonian Magazine by Jeff Mache and an episode of the podcast Con Artists.
01:00:16
So the details of Victor Lustig's early life are very fuzzy. He's born in 1890, probably.
01:00:24
we don't know his date of birth. We also don't know his actual given name, but we know it's not
01:00:29
Victor Lustig. We're also only pretty sure that he's born in a town called Hostinay, which is in
01:00:36
what was then Austria-Hungary and is now the Czech Republic. We know basically nothing about
01:00:41
his parents, only that Victor claimed his father was the town's burgomaster, which is like the mayor.
01:00:47
But this is probably not true either. And more recently on Covered Records, Victor says his
01:00:52
family were very poor peasants and that they lived in, quote, a grim stone house, end quote.
01:00:59
I mean, I love this beginning because any good con man, you're not going to know anything about
01:01:04
them. They're just going to tell you what they think you want to know about them.
01:01:07
Right. They're going to tell you stories that match with what you need their story to be
01:01:12
to con you. To buy the Eiffel Tower. Exactly. I'm either this like rich guy or I'm this poor guy. Like what works better?
01:01:19
I'm from Eiffel, France. That's my hometown. My dad was the burgermeister there.
01:01:25
Yeah. And he built the tower that I'm selling you. Articles from pulpy detective magazines from the first half of the 20th century say that Victor spent his childhood and teenage years perfecting various criminal skills, starting with stealing and pickpocketing, which is kind of an art.
01:01:41
Pickpocketing, like if you get pickpocketed and don't know, that's like so hard to do, I'm sure.
01:01:47
Yes. Also, were you on TikTok long enough to be there for the attention pickpocket Italian lady?
01:01:54
Yeah. Well, she was telling people. She was basically warning people because she could spot pickpockets.
01:01:59
So they would get on to like boats and ferries with people or be in big groups. And she knew. So she'd just go attention pickpocket and start yelling.
01:02:10
And then people started using her voiceover for like when dogs would steal like a treat off the counter or something.
01:02:16
It was like a little trend. And then that trend stopped when they were like, oh, like, I think the unsubstantiated rumor was she was like, had fascist tendencies. And people are just like, oh, no, no, this goes away. And then immediately stopped.
01:02:30
We loved you. And then you ruined it. That's how it always is on social media. Then he moved on to playing rigged card games, which is also a skill.
01:02:39
He learns all sorts of sleight of hand card tricks, which is so cool. One magazine says that by the time Victor is an adult, he can make a deck of cards, quote, do everything but talk.
01:02:50
So according to some accounts, despite his very modest upbringing and early interest in crime, Victor's grades in school are so good that he's able to attend a boarding school in Germany where he learns English, Italian and French.
01:03:03
Oh, he's a smarty. He's a smart guy. For reasons we don't know, Victor leaves school early at the age of 16 and moves to Paris.
01:03:11
And this is at the end of Paris's Belle Epoque period, where it's still a big hub for artists and bohemian types.
01:03:20
Like maybe the best time to be there, right? Hell yes. So while he's in Paris, Victor starts gambling to make extra cash.
01:03:27
And through a combination of skill and cheating with all those tricks he's learned, he's able to support himself this way.
01:03:34
I mean, I don't mind it. It's like old timey. So it's kind of like classier than if it was like now.
01:03:39
Yes. And also back then, those people would get caught and then they would have the living shit beaten out of them.
01:03:45
So it was high risk, high reward. Right. Right. That's a good point. When he's 19 years old, Victor is in the middle of one of these card games when he starts flirting with his opponent's girlfriend.
01:03:56
and smart uh-huh the opponent whips out a knife and slashes victor across the face oh shit like
01:04:04
you just said exactly all the way down his cheek and this leaves a distinctive scar for the rest
01:04:09
of his life which you gotta think is bad for a con man to have a distinctive characteristic like
01:04:14
that you know kind of fucked him up for life but he did okay victor leaves paris sometime shortly
01:04:20
after the slashing incident and spends the early 1910s going on constant transatlantic journeys
01:04:25
this is actually where he settles on the name Count Victor Lustig. So he calls himself a count.
01:04:32
Smart. So Victor quickly sets his sights on the new rich because he doesn't want the old money.
01:04:40
The new money passengers often want to prove themselves in wealthy social circles. So they
01:04:45
want to demonstrate that they have money to burn, right? They're more like flashy with it than people
01:04:49
who have had money for generations. They're more likely to gamble, especially in the presence of
01:04:54
someone they think comes from an old noble European family. And in this setting, Victor
01:04:59
is able to employ his old car tricks to swindle those passengers out of their cash.
01:05:03
Nice. Victor prefers to travel on older ships, which means longer journeys, but he doesn't spend
01:05:09
every night of a two week crossing winning people's money. Instead, he does that thing
01:05:14
where he plays games with them every night, loses some, wins a little. It's all modest
01:05:20
amount. So they like think that they're winning. And then on the last night of the journey,
01:05:24
Victor manages to win the big pot. So, you know, he knows what he's doing. He's playing that long
01:05:30
con. Exactly. But then the ship docks and he's fucking out of there with the money. So Victor
01:05:35
meets a fellow con man on one of these journeys. This man's name is Nikki Arstein. This guy,
01:05:41
Nikki would eventually go on to marry Broadway star Fanny Bryce. That's right. Hey, Mr. Arnstein.
01:05:47
yes exactly and she her life is based on the musical funny girl no no no funny girl is based on her life that right well she later she based her entire life Which is which she lived it so that it could be a musical That right I didn realize Nikki Arnstein was a con man
01:06:08
Isn't that wild? Yeah, that's hilarious. Victor learns a new approach from Nikki. He befriends
01:06:14
a mark, always a new money, first class passenger and waits for that person to bring up gambling
01:06:19
because they always fucking do. It's like, you know, that's what you did back then. Yeah. And
01:06:24
instead of saying yes to a game of cards immediately, Nikki or Victor will instead tell
01:06:28
the new friend, I'm not going to play you. I'm professional. And of course that makes the fucking
01:06:31
person go out of their mind with their ego and they want to play them. Person? Were you going to say person or you say man?
01:06:39
Man. Man. Thank you. So of course they play. And then on one occasion, Nikki won as much as
01:06:46
$30,000, which in today's money would be about, you want to guess? $30,000 in like the first
01:06:55
quarter of the night of the 20th century. Are we in the millions? Close. $900,000?
01:07:02
Yeah. Was it? Yeah. Shit. $900,000 on a hand of fucking, not a hand, I'm sure it's a whole game,
01:07:11
poker. Yeah. Like that's, you're set for the rest of your life, especially back then. Shit's cheap.
01:07:16
Yes. Especially if you're a con man on a boat. You're all set. You just shove that into your
01:07:22
little shaving kit and you're good to go. Wild. Yeah. These scams come to a hasty end in 1914
01:07:28
at the outbreak of World War I, of course, and suddenly transatlantic travels off limits to
01:07:34
civilians. Victor, who's now about 24 years old, winds up back in Paris for the duration of the
01:07:38
war. We don't know how he avoids serving in the military. I'm sure he fucking conned his way out
01:07:43
of it. But he mostly spends his time living off of his winnings from his time at the sea and doing
01:07:48
some minor gambling at his old haunts from his late teenage years. So he just wiles away the war
01:07:54
all casual like. I do think people like that are really, really smart. It's like they must have
01:08:00
really, really high IQs to be able to kind of hold all of that down and get away with it. So then
01:08:07
there's part of me that just goes, well, then they get that. Yeah. Cause they can. Cause they
01:08:13
play on men's egos and take advantage of them. And it's like, you know, you probably don't even have
01:08:20
to cheat at card games if you're actually good at it, if you play all the time. Yeah. And as long
01:08:24
as you're not some malicious creep, whereas these guys are like, they're doing it so they can kind
01:08:29
of live the high life and like have good times and fun and like good food. Totally. Totally.
01:08:36
Sounds like my dream life. Yeah. So Victor goes back to New York at the end of the war, just in time for the Roaring Twenties
01:08:42
and for Prohibition, which we know leads to a rapid increase in organized crime, of course.
01:08:47
Victor gets back in touch with old Nicky Arnstein, who connects him with a lot of other criminals.
01:08:54
Because, like, I think fucking Nicky's thriving in New York at this time. Yeah. Among them is Arnold Rothstein.
01:09:01
He's, of course, the crime boss. brings Victor on in a scheme to steal wartime liberty bonds.
01:09:07
So these are securities that people bought from the government to fund the war effort.
01:09:12
The bonds are then paid back with interest after the war. So the group steals about $5 million worth of bonds, which is worth $90 million today.
01:09:23
Oh, shit. Yeah, $90 million. Nikki Arnstein is actually arrested for the liberty bond theft and goes to prison.
01:09:31
but Victor's already fucking taken off at that point. In 1921, he shows up in Salina, Kansas.
01:09:39
He had previously spent time in the state and married a woman from there in 1919. They have a
01:09:44
daughter, but the wife and daughter kind of never play into his life at all. He's just scamming and
01:09:50
traveling. It's a long story, but he scams a bank president in a similar way with the bonds and
01:09:56
pretends like he's going to buy some farmland there and ends up running off with his money.
01:10:00
Victor's actually tracked Kansas City when he takes off, but somehow manages to talk his way out of being indicted.
01:10:05
He's probably a good talker too, right? I would imagine, yeah. By 1925, 35-year-old Victor is pretty well known to law enforcement because he just keeps pulling shit.
01:10:15
He becomes known to detectives across America as the Scarred because of that scar down his cheek that he got in Paris.
01:10:22
And so with all that heat on him, he's like, got to go back to Paris. Let's get out of here.
01:10:27
so he goes back to Paris and he's reading in the newspaper that the Eiffel Tower has fallen into
01:10:33
critical disrepair this is so interesting I feel like historically the tower had first been built
01:10:38
as a temporary installation for the 1889 Paris exposition so it was not supposed to be this like
01:10:46
monument in the city it was just a temporary tower and then it hadn't undergone any repairs
01:10:51
and so it was now considered a nuisance. Like people were like, get this fucking old ass eyesore out of here.
01:10:59
Yeah, it's like falling apart. Some Parisians are arguing that it should be torn down
01:11:03
and this gives Victor an idea. He forges credentials that said he is a government official.
01:11:09
He calls himself a deputy director of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, which is completely made up position.
01:11:16
Yes. We just gotta keep adding words, you know, and then people fucking buy it. And also kind of plain words where it's like posts and telegraphs.
01:11:22
It sounds governmental. It sounds like a weird department of the government that you'd be like, oh, I didn't know there
01:11:27
was one of those. Totally. What do they do? I don't know. So he takes a meeting in the lobby of a hotel with five scrap metal dealers and says that
01:11:38
the city wants to sell the tower for scraps, but that city officials want to keep it quiet
01:11:43
because there's a bunch of people, Parisians who want to keep the tower and they don't
01:11:47
want the backlash. So they're just like quietly under the radar selling the fucking Eiffel power for scraps.
01:11:53
It's genius. I'm sorry. It's genius. The scrap metal dealers aren't completely...
01:12:00
convinced immediately. So Victor takes them on a tour of the tower to see all of that iron up close.
01:12:05
And by the end of the tour, all the dealers want to submit bids to dismantle the tower and scrap
01:12:10
the metal. They're all on board, but he's somehow convinced them by the end of it.
01:12:15
Victor selects the one who comes from new money, who wants the most to prove himself in Paris's
01:12:20
elite business circles. So the most gullible and the most eager, probably, right? Like,
01:12:25
this is my opportunity when the other ones don't need it as bad. This scrap metal dealer is thrilled to have won the bid and unfortunately mortgages his
01:12:34
house to put together the cash he has promised Victor. Don't, don't do that. Don't do that.
01:12:41
Not cool. This man buys the Eiffel Tower from Victor for about $50,000 plus a $20,000 bribe, which
01:12:51
in total would be worth more than a million dollars today. he buys the Eiffel Tower. Victor takes off to Vienna and waits for the news of the con to hit
01:13:02
the papers, but it never does because the scrap metal dealer is so ashamed of like having been
01:13:08
conned by Victor that he doesn't go to the authorities. I mean, that is really, it's so
01:13:13
embarrassing. Yeah, it is. It's very much like when people would sell swampland in Florida,
01:13:19
That was a big con for a while. Really? Yeah. Or selling bridges. That was a big thing.
01:13:25
I think probably people were copying this guy. Yeah. This gives him another idea.
01:13:30
He has lots of forged stationery leftover from him being the deputy director of the
01:13:35
Ministry of Post and Telegraphs. He goes back to Paris to conduct the exact same scam again.
01:13:42
Oh, shit. He almost succeeds. But the second Mark asks around and realizes that it's a scam.
01:13:49
So he reports Victor to the authorities and Victor fucking skedaddles to America.
01:13:55
So though Victor has made what today would be millions of dollars with his scams, he
01:14:02
also is constantly staying in very high end hotels, gambling, going out to fancy restaurants
01:14:07
and generally living a very expensive lifestyle. Sounds fun. In addition to needing the thrill of a scam, it's a lot to maintain, though he has a wife
01:14:18
and daughter. He also has many affairs. Some people claim one of them was with Joan Collins.
01:14:23
Oh. So he's spending money a lot. And so he does need to keep making money. But he is also like a scam artist and loves to fucking scam.
01:14:34
Scammers gonna scam, aren't they? Scammers gonna scam. Don't hate the scammer. Hate the game.
01:14:38
Back in New York, Victor concocts a brand new scheme, which he calls the Romanian box.
01:14:42
He hires a cabinet maker to fabricate a mahogany box with lots of wheels and rollers and elaborate levers and cranks.
01:14:51
Victor then finds his mark. And after a few drinks, he confesses to this dude, this rich person, that he has a box that can create perfect counterfeit money.
01:15:01
So he says the box uses radium, which at that point is a new and little understood chemical.
01:15:06
and he says that it can remove some of the ink from one bill and transfer it onto a piece of
01:15:13
paper the same size and shape. And the only problem, he says, is that it takes six hours to
01:15:17
work. The guy wants to know how it works. So Victor demonstrates the box. He inserts a real
01:15:22
$100 bill in it and he and the Mark wait together for six hours. And then Victor pulls out the
01:15:30
original $100 bill and the new counterfeit $100 bill. And then he tells the Mark to take both
01:15:36
bills to the bank to verify they're real. And he had really just like doctored the second $100 bill
01:15:43
and changed the serial number to be the same as the other one, you know, just kind of forged it all.
01:15:48
So then Mark successfully cashes the bills and then rushes back to Victor. He's like,
01:15:51
I gotta buy this box, even though Victor never said it was for sale. But the guy was like,
01:15:55
I need this. So he pays Victor $10,000 for the box or $177,000 in today's money.
01:16:02
because the box takes six hours to work victor is already long gone by the time the mark realizes
01:16:09
the box is a fucking phony yeah so there's the scam it's the perfect window of time to get away
01:16:15
right and also that's a thing that scammers do sometimes when they're trying to scam you
01:16:22
is they pull you into something that's kind of dishonest so that you yeah like basically it's
01:16:27
like so what he's gonna go to the cops and be like i tried to counterfeit money and he was lying
01:16:33
a drug dealer rips you off it's like well what are you gonna that's right you're stuck you sorry
01:16:38
yeah okay over the next couple years victor's scams start getting wilder and more outlandish
01:16:45
right after he gets back from paris in addition to his romanian box scams he also decides he wants
01:16:51
to try his hand at scamming Al Capone. Sure. Which everyone else would be like, don't fucking do that.
01:16:59
Right Like why No I think most people would be scared to be in the same room as Al Capone Yeah But that kind of the idea with scammers is they don care The thrill They want the thrill Like it not
01:17:11
enough just to play cards. In 1926, Victor approaches Capone's associates in character as,
01:17:17
you know, Victor the Count. He gets a meeting with Capone. He tells him about a vague business
01:17:22
opportunity. Victor is very confident. And so Al Capone is like banking on the fact that he seems
01:17:28
account. He acts confident. And also Capone thinking that no one would ever dare to try to
01:17:33
fucking scam him. You know what I mean? Yes. You'd have to be insane. Yeah, exactly. And it works.
01:17:40
At the end of the meeting, Capone gives Victor $50,000 for this business opportunity, but tells
01:17:45
him to return the loan in 60 days. And this would be $378,000 in today's money that Capone just
01:17:52
hands over after meeting him. Yeah. This guy must have had insane charisma. And like maybe like the
01:17:59
German accents kind of also like, oh, he's a count. He's probably comes from money. He just like
01:18:05
has an air of respectability. Yeah. And like he's like a big status guy. Yeah. If you're American,
01:18:11
you always feel lesser than a European that you're supposed to. Right. And he probably buys
01:18:16
expensive clothes with all that money. So after the 60 days, Victor doesn't show up and Capone
01:18:22
sends his foot soldiers out to find him, which isn't hard because Victor doesn't leave town.
01:18:27
He's actually hanging out in a Chicago bar that Capone's men frequent. And then Victor's brought
01:18:33
before Capone and he produces the full $50,000, explains that the business venture hadn't worked
01:18:40
out and says he still wants to turn a profit for Capone. So Capone is impressed with his honesty.
01:18:46
It's like, this guy didn't leave town. He wasn't hiding from me. And he gave me back my initial investment.
01:18:52
He just didn't make me any money. So like, oh, you know, that switcheroo of like, oh, he's trustworthy now.
01:18:57
Now Al Capone's in all the way. Now he's fully being scammed. That is exactly. So Capone gives him $5,000 to try to make the business work and permission to keep operating
01:19:10
in Chicago. And it turns out that that's actually all that Victor had been after was like the OK to operate in Chicago.
01:19:20
But I guess he wasn't even trying to profit from Capone's money. He wanted to prove to himself that he could get it.
01:19:27
And he wanted Capone's blessing to operate in his territory. I mean, OK. So he scammed him by making it seem like he didn't scam him.
01:19:35
Yeah. The goal was something else. He tricked him into thinking it was money. Right.
01:19:40
And then basically got credit he shouldn't have gotten and then was like, sounds good. See you soon. I'll be over here scamming the hell out of everybody.
01:19:49
Right. So in 1927, when Victor's 37 years old, he scams a Rhode Island businessman at a $34,000 under the pretense that he's a Broadway theater producer this time.
01:20:03
Unlike previous marks, this businessman doesn't keep quiet, immediately reports Victor to the Providence police, and Victor briefly goes back to Paris, but he wants to go back to America.
01:20:13
And he knows that as soon as he gets off the boat in New York, police will see his name on the passenger manifest and bring him back to Providence.
01:20:19
Like he knows the jig is kind of up in New York. So he decides that the way around this is to turn himself in not to the police, but to the Secret Service.
01:20:29
Oh. Thus circumventing the New York Police Department. The Secret Service is now known, of course, mostly for protecting the president.
01:20:37
But when it was founded, fighting financial crimes was a central part of its mission.
01:20:41
And this lasted through the early days of the FBI. From the ship when he docks in New York, Victor calls the Secret Service and offers them information about other con artists and counterfeiters.
01:20:52
So the ship gets to New York. The agents board before docks. They escort Victor past a line of police that are there to arrest him.
01:21:01
And ultimately, Victor doesn't give them any information of value. But they're not aware of Victor's other warrants.
01:21:07
And so they let him go. thus he's like free in New York without having met them at the dock. And over the next several
01:21:15
years, Victor is arrested numerous times, but always seems to talk his way out of being charged.
01:21:21
So in 1929, the stock market crashes, of course, and the Great Depression begins. And suddenly,
01:21:26
there are very few marks left for Victor to take money from. So he moves into his counterfeiting
01:21:32
era. Do you remember your counterfeiting era? Yeah, back in 97. It was just to get by. Nothing
01:21:39
big. Sure, sure. Pay rent. He teams up with a renowned counterfeiter named William Watts,
01:21:45
and they create money that is so realistic it fools bank tellers. Always ambitious,
01:21:51
Victor produces $100 bills, which are inspected the most closely. One currency expert calls their
01:21:58
bills the super notes of the era. Oh, this counterfeit money almost immediately catches the attention of the Secret Service.
01:22:05
The bills pop up everywhere A Texas sheriff is arrested for trying to pay with one of them It turns out that he not only got it from Victor but that Victor had also run the Romanian money box scam on him as
01:22:19
well. So this poor dude gets, well, I mean, not poor dude, but he gets arrested for that.
01:22:25
I'm sorry, but even back then, falling for the Romanian money box, sorry, you're dumb.
01:22:31
So someone just came to you and said, because this little wooden box has levers on it, we can make money and I want to get rid of it.
01:22:39
I want you to have it. Yeah. And an element radium that you don't really know that much about.
01:22:44
So you're like, OK, that's got to be what radium is for. This is literally the OG Bitcoin.
01:22:49
It's exactly the same. It totally is. The sheriff provides a Secret Service agents with a description of a European man with a scar on his cheek.
01:22:58
and now they know they're looking for Victor, but they can't seem to get their hands on him.
01:23:02
In the meantime, authorities worry about the amount of counterfeit cash in circulation
01:23:07
from Victor and William Watts' cons. There's so much of it and it's so well-made
01:23:13
that they fear will undermine the value of the U.S. dollar. Wow. So they're fucking with the economy at this point.
01:23:20
Some reports say that the total amount in circulation is about $2 million, worth more than $44 million today.
01:23:27
So they were churning the shit out. They were doing it. In Smithsonian Magazine, Jeff Mache writes, quote,
01:23:34
Catching the Count became a cat and mouse game for the Secret Service. Victor traveled with a trunk of disguises and could transform easily into a rabbi, a priest, a bellhop, or a porter.
01:23:45
What? Dressed like a baggage man, he could escape any hotel in a pinch and even take his luggage with him.
01:23:51
It's like a rabbi, a priest, a bellhop, and a porter. It's like, so you had a jacket you can turn inside out and fuck around with the collar and you had some sort of a hat, some sort of a changeable hat.
01:24:04
But the rabbi, that's smart because if you have a fake beard on, you won't see the scar on his face.
01:24:09
Yeah, that's right. Yes. So it ultimately takes until May of 1935 when Victor is 45 years old for him to finally get caught by the Secret Service.
01:24:19
It's his womanizing that brings him down. actually victor's longtime mistress finds out he started seeing another woman and in a jealous rage
01:24:28
she gives the police an anonymous tip telling them where they can find victor come on fucking
01:24:34
don't try to con your mistress dude yeah and also that's like of all the ways that i'm sure most
01:24:41
con men protect everything they're doing that's the dumbest mistake where it's like totally you're
01:24:46
going to break someone's heart and then basically sign her up to be dedicated for the rest of her
01:24:52
life to end you. Totally. Totally. Then you did it yourself. You deserve your winnings and you
01:24:58
deserve your losing. Exactly. They arrest him on the street in New York City and take him to the
01:25:04
city's federal detention center, a building that is supposed to be inescapable. He stays there
01:25:10
awaiting trial for several months. In that time, Victor manages to cut the bars on his cell window
01:25:17
and fashions a long rope out of bed sheets. And using the rope, he climbs out of the window.
01:25:23
At first, onlookers below gawk up when they see him climbing down. But then Victor takes a rag and begins wiping the window.
01:25:32
And the New Yorkers below accept that this is a window washer and go back to their business.
01:25:37
I'm sure he started going, do do do do do do do do do do nothing to see yeah whistling maybe that's where he put on a big
01:25:45
fake mustache kind of like you know this is my window washer outfit yeah this guy he just didn't give a shit he goes down to the sidewalk and he sprints away yes earned
01:25:59
authorities track victor down in pittsburgh and after a breeze car chase they arrest him
01:26:06
He's found guilty of federal counterfeiting and is sent to Alcatraz in April of 1936 at 46 years old.
01:26:14
He's sentenced to 20 years, but his health starts failing almost immediately after he's brought to the prison.
01:26:21
In his first five months at Alcatraz, Victor submits more than a thousand medical requests and fills more than 500 prescriptions.
01:26:30
So he's not going quietly. He's going to be a fucking thorn in someone's side. at the prison. And also he's going to be a little high as he goes, it seems to me.
01:26:39
Morphine check. Guards think he is faking and playing another attempt escape, but he's ultimately
01:26:45
transferred to a medical facility in Missouri. And there about a year after he was first in prison,
01:26:51
he dies of complications from pneumonia. For years after authorities will continue to find
01:26:58
his counterfeit bills in circulation. And that is the story of notorious con man, Victor Lustig.
01:27:06
Oh, perfection. Do you love him Are you going to start going by Count Karen Lustig I mean I definitely want to read whatever books there are out there about him Yeah Because I really do love I do love a con man story so much It sounds like he like the OG
01:27:24
And it's so sad he died so young. I feel like the Secret Service and the FBI could have like learned stuff from him.
01:27:29
You know what I mean? Like how it's like, show us your ways so we can catch other people.
01:27:33
Right. Like he had more, I don't know, such an interesting character. Yes. But it feels to me like his way is like, oh, good luck, Secret Service, making a Romanian box.
01:27:43
You won't be able to sell it. It's like a smart person's charm and like understanding what people want and need kind of.
01:27:51
Yeah. You got to wonder, like he had a daughter. So like, this is great. Or does his granddaughter know about her grandfather's story or his grandfather's story?
01:28:01
I bet she does. Do they talk about it at like Thanksgiving? How could you not? I know.
01:28:06
Because imagine what that guy's like just is around the house stories were like.
01:28:11
If he almost sold the Eiffel Tower two times, what kind of bullshit does he have?
01:28:16
Like stories of stuff that happened to him around town in Salina, Kansas? Yeah. Check your DNA, everyone.
01:28:25
23andMe, who's from Salinas, Kansas, and see if you're related because we want some stories.
01:28:31
That is good. That was a true delight. I like that one. Good. That was great. Thank you.
01:28:36
Well, great job. Thank you. You too. We've done it again. We've done it again. It's a classic episode with two full stories, as we've promised you since 2016.
01:28:47
Free, now professionally researched, not always. That's a growing edge that we have really refined in these last couple years.
01:28:57
Yeah, definitely. You guys, we've said this 399 times and we'll say it 399 times again.
01:29:06
Thank you so freaking much for listening to us talk for 400 episodes. You've changed our lives.
01:29:15
This podcast means so freaking much to us. And we are so grateful to you guys for being the backbone of it.
01:29:20
It's amazing to have kind of like grown through the years with everybody and all the people that are kind of out there that are the loud and proud Murnarinos.
01:29:32
You just make us so happy. It's such an amazing thing. It's like we started it, but then you guys took over and ran with it.
01:29:41
And it is yours as much as ours. And we really have loved sharing this show with you for almost eight years.
01:29:49
eight years. We're the regional representatives, but you guys are the heart and soul.
01:29:55
We're the West Coast office, but you guys are covering us globally. Globally, yes. We can't thank you enough.
01:30:04
Thank you. And stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie?
01:30:19
This has been an Exactly Right production. Our senior producer is Alejandra Keck.
01:30:25
Our managing producer is Hannah Kyle Creighton. Our editor is Aristotle Acevedo.
01:30:30
This episode was mixed by Liana Squalache. Our researchers are Maren McClashen and Allie Elkin.
01:30:35
Email your hometowns to myfavoritemurder at gmail.com. Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at myfavoritemurder and Twitter at myfavemurder.
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