374 - Emotional Money Booth | My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

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My favorite murder Hello! And welcome to My Favorite Murder. That's Georgia Hartstark.

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That's Karen Kilgariff. And we're just here to tell you two relatively horrible things,

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and then we're going to go or get out of your hair. We're going to drop in. Going to drop some terrible news on you.

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Quick seek. A couple quick seeks. Secrets. I have my hand up. A couple secrets. Hand up in my mouth right now.

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She's whispering into the microphone. And then we're going to just like later days.

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And then we'll just be like Irish goodbye right out of this podcast. Yes. Going to moonwalk out of the scene.

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Georgia, is your life different now that season four of Succession has begun? Yes.

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It's just, it's a place I want to live now, my life. For real. It's a beautiful, cozy.

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I again haven't watched the new episode, so don't tell me what happened because Vince was at WrestleMania all weekend,

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so I couldn't watch it. Yeah. So don't tell me. I'll tell you nothing, but I love it.

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Except that exact, it's weird that you haven't seen it because that was the feeling I had

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watching the second episode was like, it's just the quality of a show like that.

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It makes you want to be there and live there And when the show ends after 53 minutes or whatever it is, you just are like upset.

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And it's the best kind of TV watching. The Disgusting Brothers is just absolutely the best writing I've ever heard in my entire life.

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When he described her purse as it was so big you could slide it across the floor during a bank robbery.

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It's just like, yes, that's it right there. I love it. What else are you watching?

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So good. Well, I watched Succession with my friend. And then I was like, have you ever watched Peep Show?

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Because it's by the same guy. I love to reveal the Peep Show connection. Yeah, it's Jesse Armstrong.

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Oh my God. Peep Show is one of the best TV shows that has ever happened. It's so goddamn funny and one perfectly written and executed.

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And I just love that. Like, look where he starts. I don't even know if that's where he started starting.

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Yeah, it's so crazy. The first work I ever knew of his. So if you haven't seen Peep Show,

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and I'm sure we've talked about it before, but it's available to rent or buy on Prime, I believe.

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Is it? Cool. Okay, because we used to have to watch YouTube. Oh, yeah. And it also was on, I think it was on Hulu for a while,

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but then they took it off and said, you will pay. Yeah, and you should. I've had this issue with shows lately

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because I'm doing this brain thing, this brain magnet treatment where it's called TMS

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and you sit and have these magnets tap, tap, tap, tap, tap on your brain. It's supposed to stimulate neurotransmitters

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and make you less depressed. But then you can watch TV. You don't have to do anything.

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So they're like, you can watch TV during it, but don't watch anything depressing.

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So I realized that all I want to watch is depressing shit. I started watching Emily in Paris, and the amount of eye-rolling I did was detrimental to my health, I feel like.

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So I couldn't watch that. I tried Grace and Frankie. There's nothing I want to watch that isn't depressing.

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Here's the thing. There's more out there than just those two examples, and we got to find some for you.

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Truly, season one of Arrested Development is such a standby. I've watched it 10 times.

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You know what I mean? Yes, I do. For sure. But something along those lines. They only have Netflix and Hulu.

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That's the other thing. It's the place I go to. You can only watch on Netflix and Hulu.

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Oh. So I watched Somebody Feed Phil. It's a joy. I like that. But I've seen them all now.

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And I just don't know. I started watching this thing about LSD treatment in the 60s and how it came about.

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I was like, this is great. And then it started getting into Nixon and the presidency and how fucked up it is.

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And I'm like, I can't fucking watch this. This is terrible. I wonder if people listening should suggest to Georgia things that are not depressing but worth watching Yeah That your challenge Sorry to all you Emily in Paris heads but wow

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Wow. Well, I feel like Emily in Paris was only supposed to do one thing, which is Emily goes to Paris.

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There's no levels. There's no, you're not going to find anything there. No, there's like a lot of bright colors

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and a lot of like flashy things happening all the time. But that's about it. Yeah.

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A lot of high heels, a lot of expensive purses. You know what I'm realizing is that like

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a lot of people's definition of what's depressing are different. And it's not...

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That's true. We're very inverted in that way where like what others might seem to think are horrifying

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are things that actually bring us great comfort. Well, I think that's this. Our podcast listeners are on the...

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We're all the same. Right. Genre. So then it's like Emily in Paris is our horrifying true crime to others, to the outside world.

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Violent and depressing as this named it. Violent and depressing. Yeah, that's all.

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It's a real challenge these days. It's tough. I actually been, I wanted to recommend, and I think I started listening to this podcast because other people recommended it to us.

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And I've heard about it a bunch from our listeners, but I finally started listening.

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It's a podcast called Maintenance Phase. Oh, yeah. Have you listened to it? No, but I've heard everyone's suggesting it.

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It's incredibly great and well done. And they're both so smart. It's Michael Hobbs and Aubrey Gordon are the hosts.

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And they basically just debunk health fads and wellness scams and all that kind of...

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You know, it basically fat phobia and things that they just kind of analyze and very,

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just almost like scientifically break things down for each other and obviously the listener.

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And it is so addictive to listen to smart people take things apart piece by piece in that way.

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I was just listening to, they have done a couple episodes on different things happening over at Goop.

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and it's amazing. And because they're not, they love Gwyneth Paltrow herself. It's not a hate fest.

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They're incredibly fair, like incredibly fair. But then they talk about these things

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where it's like, this is a whole genre that's happening in our world that's wildly out of control

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and kind of like unwatched by anyone. It's just like if someone comes out and tells you that the celery juice diet

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is the best thing for you, you're going to be hard pressed to find like the reasons why you're even seeing this

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in the first place. Remember when the celery diet was like all that anyone was talking about?

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Yes, because, well, first of all, you just did the best pun that you just slipped right over.

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You'd be hard pressed to find something, something about the celery juice. I just wanted to point that out.

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It was excellent. Sure. Okay. But when our book came out is when this like number one bestselling

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celery juice book came out. That's right. So we were like neck and neck on the charts

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with the fucking celery juice diet book. So similar. It was just so, it was like almost, it was perfect.

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You know what I mean? Like there's nothing I would want to compete with more than a celery juice diet book in my life.

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For real. It's so true. But I mean, yeah, if you're looking, truly, I would just,

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if any of that sounds interesting to you, go look at the different topics that they have covered.

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It's just such a great way. They've gotten me to so many appointments in these past two weeks.

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Walking the dog. Like, just putting it in and just being like, ah, the comforting sounds of two smart people breaking shit down.

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Amazing. Maintenance phase. I'm into it. Yeah. Oh, you know what else I tried? Fucking Vanderpump rules, man.

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Oh. No, that's depressing and violent. No. My amazing hairdresser, Caroline, just talks about it all the time.

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And finally, she convinced me there was some scandal. So I put it on and it was so depressing.

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And it was like the jerky camera work. So I thought it was going to have a seizure too, you know?

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The thing I think, I think people who really enjoy and get into reality TV that's like on that kind of cringe factor,

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which most of it is, don't have the level of like hypersensitive mirror neurons that you and I have.

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Because I truly start watching and it's like, obviously these are some of the most beautiful people in Los Angeles

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working at a fancy restaurant, interacting with DJs and celebrities. It's like everyone's dream.

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And it fills me with a dread that I cannot explain. Me too. And I immediately like get bored,

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but I feel like I'm suffocating where it's like, if I had to be with these people all the time,

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I would go and say. Yeah. Or if I had to be one of these people, like what if my life was like that

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and suddenly I start spiraling about, and like my early twenties in LA wasn't that dissimilar,

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like going to clubs and going out and trying to date. And it's just like, I can't, I can't with this.

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Right. It's like going backwards in time. And it's like, they're saying this is the world.

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This is all that matters. And it's like, no, I've worked very hard to be in a world that has nothing to do with that.

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It actually doesn't. But no judgments to the people who I know, pretty much everyone I know, absolutely adores it, talks about it, enjoys it.

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Very smart, smart people who are very cool, really enjoy it. I just couldn't, I couldn't find that like, that little tug that made me want to watch more.

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Can I actually counter everything I just said only to say I found one time I binged what felt like 48 hours of the Kardashians You might want to give that a try because it like a low hum and that all that happening

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Is it sisters too? Or you kind of identify with a sister connection? Yes, but none of them, even when they're fighting, a lot of them, they don't have like loud reactions.

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They don't have big reactions. It's like, Kim, there are people that are starving.

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You know, it's all very kind of monotone one level. So nothing's- It's like ASMR.

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Yeah, it's not jarring. It's not, you don't clench up for anybody. Okay. They're all kind of doing great.

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And then lightly fighting over salad. It's really, it can be incredibly soothing

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as opposed to like- Lightly. You know, somebody just found out you were fucking their boyfriend or something.

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Okay. Fighting over salad. That's coming to you this fall. I mean, I wonder if that is on either of the channels that you're talking about.

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I don't think so, but I'll watch it anyways. It's pretty good. I have a listener letter about one of the things I talked about recently.

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So in episode 372, I covered the disappearance of the young girl, Antoinette Cayedito.

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So I got an email about that. It starts, I just want to write in real quick because in episode 372,

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you guys talked about the server in the restaurant that didn't know that Antoinette Cayedito was asking for help.

00:13:22

I thought it might make you feel better to know that servers and employees of the massive international company I work for

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have to complete a how to spot human trafficking and what to do course. She writes, then she says,

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we're also watching and judging everyone that comes in at all because people are scum.

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After many years of serving, I just think good people eat at home. Anyways, on the off chance, this gets read.

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Tell anyone that works with the public not to be afraid to make a scene. if you think someone is unsafe.

00:13:50

The Blue Campaign website has lots of good information on spotting it. Wow. And that's from Marina.

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It says, stay fresh cheese bags, Marina. Marina, thank you. That's great to hear.

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It's very comforting. I wasn't trying to in any way blame that poor server who was just in a bad situation, but that's great.

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I mean, it does feel like that kind of awareness is growing. Yes, absolutely. Wonderful news.

00:14:19

Okay, let's do exactly right highlights and then we'll get into it. In our network highlights,

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the fourth episode of Tenfold More Wicked's eighth season, The Morphine Murderess is underway.

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If you're always on the lookout for a great audiobook or just want help figuring out what

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00:18:19

All right, so I go first this week. So you go first this week. Okay. Hey man, you know I love an old cold case, right?

00:18:28

Absolutely. An old mysterious disappearance cold case. Well, this is the mystifying disappearance

00:18:36

of the so-called real life Little Red Riding Hood, Paula Jean Weldon. Oh. So the sources I used in today's episode

00:18:45

are several articles from the Bennington Banner, including one by Rebecca Robinson,

00:18:50

one by Helen Stock, and another by Marie Bailey, a bare Montpellier Times article by James Robert Saunders

00:18:57

and a Charlie Project entry by Megan Good. And the rest can be found on our show notes.

00:19:02

So it's December 1st and we're in 1946 in Bennington, Vermont. Our story centers around Bennington College,

00:19:10

which is a small liberal arts school that's known for being progressive and artsy, obviously.

00:19:16

Currently it's open to all genders, but in 1946, it was an all women's school. and Paula Jean Weldon was finishing up a double shift

00:19:24

in the dining hall where she works. She's an 18-year-old sophomore from Connecticut

00:19:29

who lately has been thinking about switching her major from art to botany. She's a young, I know, cool.

00:19:37

She's a young and vibrant person with lots of interests. She's physically active.

00:19:40

She's an experienced hiker. And today, even though it's early winter in New England,

00:19:46

she really wants to go on a hike. She asks a few friends if they're available to join her,

00:19:50

but everyone's busy studying, so she decides to go alone. Paula says a quick goodbye to her roommate,

00:19:56

but doesn't exactly say where she's headed. She just says she's headed out on a, quote,

00:20:00

long walk. Elizabeth knows that Paula is a spontaneous but responsible person, and reportedly just three weeks before, the two roommates went camping together.

00:20:10

It had been Paula's idea, and they ended up spending a miserable night in a tent in the rain,

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but it does show us that the roommate Elizabeth, that Paula can handle herself just fine

00:20:20

in whatever condition she ends up in. Outdoors. Outdoors-y, which I think I'm quite the opposite of that.

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I think if I told anyone I was going for a hike, they'd be like, what, are you okay?

00:20:33

Did you hit your head? We'd be like, take this apple tag, please. Sorry. So Elizabeth doesn't think much of it when Paula heads out.

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So Paula's wearing a distinctive red parka with a fur-lined hood and blue jeans.

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She has lightweight white sneakers on, which is fine for now because it's a relatively warm day.

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There's no snow on the ground. But she's leaving for her walk a little after 2.30 p.m.

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And it's winter in Vermont, which means that the sun will set around 4.15. That means it's going to get much colder very soon.

00:21:03

And they're calling for snow that night. So she walks off campus toward a gas station

00:21:07

with a gravel pit nearby. And the gas station owner, Danny Fager, remembers watching a young woman

00:21:14

matching Paula's description running around inside the gravel pit. He clocks this behavior as strange,

00:21:21

but doesn't think much of it. And from there, Paula heads to what seems like it might be her destination,

00:21:26

a nearby hike known as the Long Trail. This trail is 273 miles in total and covers the entire length of Vermont

00:21:35

from Massachusetts to Canada. Paula probably just wants to hike, obviously a small portion of it,

00:21:41

but she has to hitchhike to get to the trailhead for it. And it seems like hitchhiking, you know,

00:21:46

was pretty standard for the area and time. So it was no big deal. But it is beginning to seem like more than a casual walk,

00:21:53

which she had told her roommate about, you know? Right. A man named Louis Knapp picks Paula up on Route 67A

00:22:01

outside the college entrance around 245. She states that she wants to be taken to the long trail.

00:22:08

He says he can take her as far as his house on Route 9, which is about three miles away from her destination.

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They don't talk throughout the ride, and she just says thank you when she leaves.

00:22:19

Around 4 p.m., a young man named Ernie Whitman is walking with some friends out at an area called Bickford Hollow,

00:22:25

which is not far from the Long Trail, and he sees this young woman in a red parka walking towards him.

00:22:31

He's surprised that she's so underdressed for a hike given the late hour, but when she asks him about the Long Trail,

00:22:37

Ernie points her in the right direction near Glastonbury Mountain. There are a few unconfirmed sightings

00:22:43

of a woman on the trail after this encounter, including an elderly couple who report walking behind a young woman on a trail.

00:22:50

But what is confirmed is that Paula Weldon is last seen heading into the mountains

00:22:55

as the sun is setting and she is never seen or heard from again. So when Paula doesn't come back to her dorm room that evening,

00:23:04

her roommate Elizabeth just thinks she's like staying late at the library or something. And by the time she's settling in for

00:23:10

bed, she becomes very nervous. It's obviously not like Paula to not come home. And she decides to

00:23:15

wait until the next morning to alert college authorities about her missing roommate. But when

00:23:19

she does, the college is luckily immediately responsive. They check the logbook for students

00:23:25

who leave campus. Paula neither signed out or signed back in, but students only sign out and

00:23:30

when they're planning on returning after the 11 p.m. curfew. So they call Paula's parents to see if she might have gone home for a visit

00:23:37

without telling anyone. And Paula's parents say, no, she didn't come home. And they understandably begin to freak out.

00:23:45

The Weldens are a wealthy and well-to-do family. And her father, William, is a somewhat famous designer

00:23:51

of kitchen utensils and cocktail shakers. He has lots of resources to help in the search.

00:23:57

So he heads up to Bennington College as soon as he can. Paula's mother reportedly is confined to her bed

00:24:02

after she passes out when she hears the news of her missing daughter. So this is like totally out of character

00:24:08

and something is obviously immediately wrong. And just so horrifying, just like being in that particular situation,

00:24:16

parents being called like, is she there? I know, that's like the worst question you have to be asked

00:24:21

is have you heard from? Yeah. Terrible and terrifying. On December 2nd, the day after Paula's disappearance,

00:24:27

Bennington College shuts down. Everyone who's able volunteers to help with a massive search.

00:24:33

Other colleges in the area also cancel classes so students can help look for Paula.

00:24:37

So it is a big deal. Yeah. The search party starts by visiting various locations

00:24:42

that friends have heard Paula wanted to visit. They completely excavate the gravel pit

00:24:47

where the man said he saw, you know, someone matching her description. And soon, Louis, the man who drove her towards the trailhead,

00:24:54

and Ernie, the man who talked to her on the trail, come forward to report their interactions with Paula.

00:24:59

This is when the long trail becomes the center of the search And the trees are dense, lots of stream crossings and rocks to navigate

00:25:07

But by all accounts, this initial volunteer search is slow and thorough At the same time as the trail is being combed

00:25:14

A local taxi driver reports having taken a young woman Who vaguely matched Polish description to a bus station

00:25:20

And this information immediately expands the search area Now in addition to the Wooded Mountain area

00:25:27

investigators are looking into shops and stations along the bus routes. And possibilities of where Paula might have gone

00:25:33

expand as far north as Canada and as far south as South Carolina. And it's clear that this search

00:25:40

is starting to need more manpower and expertise in order to be effective. But the state of Vermont has no state police force

00:25:49

at this time. All the states' law enforcement is county-based and local sheriffs run the show.

00:25:56

Crime rates are so low that many Vermonters believe a state police force isn't necessary.

00:26:01

Remember, this is 1946. So they, you know, it's just like small towns. And they think it would be a waste of money,

00:26:07

but that means there's no agency in charge of the search effort for Paula. So things quickly become disorganized and uncoordinated.

00:26:15

Paula's dad in particular becomes so frustrated that he calls in some favors with both the New York and Connecticut state police who do their best to help in the search.

00:26:24

and that FBI is also brought in. Now there's a reward of $5,000 for any information regarding Paula's whereabouts,

00:26:32

which in today's money, you want to give it a shot? $5,000 in the late 40s, you said,

00:26:39

is in today's money $80,000. $81,538. Yes. Holy shit. Do I get to get into the cash grab closet?

00:26:54

You do. What is that thing called? Cash grab? I don't know. The cash grab. Money booth.

00:27:00

Money booth. The money booth. Thank you, Alejandra. The money booth. Money booth.

00:27:06

Okay. That felt so satisfying that it was like I was in an emotional money booth when you said 81.

00:27:12

That was, you grabbed that $81,000 right out of the air, for sure. So basically, there are no resources

00:27:20

that are centralized enough to even, all these searches that all these schools are doing

00:27:26

and individuals are doing, there's no centralized processing of the information they may or may not be getting.

00:27:32

Exactly. So her rich father has to come in and basically set something up himself.

00:27:37

Right. That's a nightmare upon a nightmare. Totally. So days pass and the search effort

00:27:43

is hampered by stops and starts. A tip comes from a waitress in Fall River, Massachusetts.

00:27:47

which is three and a half hours away from Bennington. She reports having served a young woman

00:27:52

matching Paula's description on the night of her disappearance. The waitress says this young woman

00:27:56

was behaving strangely and seemed agitated. This tip is so credible that Paula's father personally investigates

00:28:02

leaving Bennington for 36 hours without telling anyone where he went, but nothing comes of it.

00:28:09

And I just wonder what the phenomenon is of people thinking they have spotted a missing person

00:28:13

in states over, like when there's an Amber Alert. I think people are just so desperate to find answers

00:28:18

that they imagine something happened that didn't. You know what I mean? I don't think it's malice, I guess, is what I'm saying.

00:28:26

Right. No, no. But I do also think, like you just said, it was so credible that people went.

00:28:34

So there must have been some information that that waitress had that made them believe

00:28:40

it could have been her. Definitely. As the investigation into her disappearance deepens,

00:28:44

it becomes clear that Paula was not quite so happy-go-lucky as she might have seemed from the outside.

00:28:50

Just a few weeks before her disappearance, she'd refused to go home for Thanksgiving break,

00:28:54

choosing to stay at the college instead. And according to her roommate, Paula and her father had a recent falling out.

00:29:01

So Paula had seemed somewhat depressed recently. She was the oldest of four daughters,

00:29:06

and Paula seemed to think her parents preferred her younger siblings. And this caused a major conflict within her family.

00:29:13

And people started to speculate that maybe Paula has run away or taken her own life to escape the feeling of not being loved by her family.

00:29:21

So that's probably like another reason her dad is like freaking out and so desperate

00:29:24

is there had been a falling out, you know? Right. Yeah. The worst feeling, I'm sure.

00:29:30

Also that it is a slightly indicative and you might get to this later, but there is that kind of thing where if Paula had any kind of mental health issues at all,

00:29:41

That sounds a little bit, not that that isn't completely possible and it happens to people a lot, that kind of preferential treatment.

00:29:48

It also could have just been straight up paranoia. Totally. And that kind of like victim stance that people sometimes get with certain mental health issues So it is that kind of thing of like you know my own family doesn love me Because thinking about staying home for Thanksgiving is a big break I think

00:30:05

I think the mental health issue of being 18 years old, an 18-year-old girl, is a pretty big deal, you know?

00:30:12

Jesus. So by December 16th, just over two weeks after Paula vanishes, her father packs up her belongings

00:30:19

and takes them back with him to Connecticut. He lashes out at the state of Vermont in the press

00:30:25

for not having a state police force to provide an organized and united search effort.

00:30:30

And he has every right to be angry. There's been so little oversight that no records have been kept

00:30:35

for the first 10 days of the investigation. Oh, not a fucking record. And presumably the record keeping only started

00:30:43

when the out-of-state law enforcement got involved. That's ridiculous. Yeah. All of this negative press creates pressure

00:30:50

on the Vermont state legislature and ultimately leads to the creation of the Vermont State Police just seven months later.

00:30:58

Wow. So this story is the reason the Vermont State Police ever came to be. Wow. Yeah.

00:31:05

So this brings us to some theories about what might've happened to Paula. It's important to reiterate

00:31:10

that no trace of her has ever been found, no bones or no clothing, scraps in the snow,

00:31:16

nothing like that, no personal items. Despite some of those alleged sightings of Paula

00:31:20

in faraway places during the first few weeks of the search. All of them are looked into and none of them seem to be her.

00:31:26

And given the timeline of her leaving campus and being seen by Lewis, who gave her a ride,

00:31:31

and Ernie, who talked to her on the trail, and other hikers, investigators have every reason to believe

00:31:37

that she made it to the long trail that day in December 1946. So there are three main theories.

00:31:45

She might have gotten lost in the woods and died of exposure, which seems, I think, the most likely to me.

00:31:50

or she might've been attacked by a wild animal. In these two possibilities, her remains just got lost in the thick woods

00:31:57

around the long trail and were buried in the snow. But you'd think that when everything thawed the next spring,

00:32:05

some scrap of something would have been found, especially if there were a lot of people

00:32:08

paying attention to that, to her disappearance, you know? I always think about though,

00:32:13

like wolf lairs or bear caves types of things where it's like, I don't know if things are left out

00:32:19

if it's wintertime. Right. They might be brought back to like a safe, warm place

00:32:25

because everybody, all animals are kind of starving in wintertime and either hibernating

00:32:31

or like just getting by. So they, I don't know. This could be. Or maybe she, you know,

00:32:36

was lost and cold and found a cave and hid in it. And so there's no like animal dragging her back to their cave.

00:32:43

So there's nothing, like no, nothing left behind. So she's already hidden. Yeah.

00:32:48

Right. Investigators get what they see I think he's a lead in 1955 when a lumberjack named Fred Gaudet tells a friend that he knows what happened to Paula.

00:32:55

He lived in the area where Paula disappeared. And that December day in 1946, he had reportedly gotten into a fight with his girlfriend and stormed off.

00:33:05

And Fred tells his friend that he followed Paula through the woods. He even claims he knows where her body is buried.

00:33:13

But when he's brought in for questioning due to these awful confessions, he immediately retracts them.

00:33:20

And he says it was just a joke. Who the fuck? That's not a joke. It's not a joke.

00:33:26

It's not even close to it. It's not, aside from like being tasteless or not. It's too specific.

00:33:33

Yeah. And he told, if his friend knew him and thought he was a joker, he wouldn't have then called the police

00:33:38

and been like, yo. Yeah. This guy confessed. That's a thing somebody says and the person listening to it goes,

00:33:46

oh no, what I've always suspected about you is true. Yeah. Investigators let him go as they cannot confirm anything he said.

00:33:56

But this event renews interest in the case. And over the years, there have been little glimmers of hope that this case might be solved.

00:34:04

When skeletal remains are found in Adams, Massachusetts, which is just a 45-minute drive from Bennington in 1968,

00:34:11

people immediately speculate that Paula has finally been found. But when the bones are determined to be too old to be Paula's,

00:34:19

the hope for a resolution in this case just continues to fade. I feel like they should retest them though,

00:34:24

because 1968, you know, we didn't know jack shit. Right. True. Good point. Locals continue to stay fascinated with Paula's case,

00:34:32

hoping that someday it will finally be solved. But even though Paula is perhaps the most famous missing person case

00:34:37

in the Bennington area, she's not the first or the last. And here's what I want to tell you about something called the Bennington Triangle.

00:34:45

Paula Weldon's case is part of a string of phenomena in Southern Vermont. Between 1945 and 1950, so many people go mysteriously missing in the area that it's coined their Bennington Triangle.

00:34:59

By local Vermont author and folklorist Joseph A. Citro. In 1945, an experienced hiker and hunter named Middy Rivers,

00:35:08

which is a great name, disappears while part of a hunting party. He vanishes from the exact same area

00:35:15

that Paula would go missing from a year later. Middy is never found, and three years to the day after Paula goes missing,

00:35:22

on December 1st, 1949, a man named James Tedford is riding a bus home to Bennington from another Vermont town,

00:35:30

and then he just disappears as well. He's seen both boarding and riding on the bus

00:35:36

and his luggage is found above his empty seat on the bus. But somehow he just vanished during the journey.

00:35:44

Isn't that wild? How? Yes. I mean, did they all stop to eat or something or like gas break or anything?

00:35:51

Maybe. Then he would have just like called you know home and been like they left me behind But he just is never seen again He wouldn call home though if somebody took him away against his will

00:36:05

Right, right. Yeah. What? Yeah. James is never found. In 1950, eight-year-old Paul Jepsen

00:36:12

is waiting in his mother's truck while she steps out to feed some pigs. When she returns about an hour later,

00:36:18

Paul is gone. Even though he's wearing a bright red jacket, which investigators think would have made him easy to spot,

00:36:24

he's never found, which is weird. It's Paul and Paula and they're both wearing red jackets, right?

00:36:29

Red jackets, yeah. Lastly, just two weeks after Paul's disappearance in 1950, 53-year-old Frida Langer

00:36:37

is hiking with her cousin when she slips and falls into a stream. She's uninjured but wet

00:36:42

and decides to go back to the family's campsite to change clothes. And she tells her cousin,

00:36:47

you know, go ahead. I'm gonna go back. I'll catch up with you later. And when she doesn't,

00:36:52

the cousin returns to the camp and discovers that Frida never made it back. So she's the only so-called victim of the Bennington trial

00:36:59

whose remains are ever found. Her body is discovered eight months later in 1951,

00:37:05

about three and a half miles away from her disappearance, and no cause of death is ever determined.

00:37:10

Three and a half miles. That's too many. Because that means, so she could have gotten lost on her way back.

00:37:18

Definitely, yeah. stay out of the forest everyone this is around the time i start getting mad because i know you're

00:37:27

not going to tell me what like anything else that happened it's this it's this part of this

00:37:32

my story is that you want me to just fucking make something up and like tell you whatever

00:37:36

well i'm sorry to say no conclusive evidence ever ties these missing people together and

00:37:43

the mystery of the bennington triangle persists some people wonder if there was a serial killer

00:37:48

are active in the area at the time who was never caught. Others believe the area to be haunted or

00:37:53

cursed. And it's also obviously possible, though probably not incredibly likely, that at least some

00:37:58

of these people wandered off to start new lives. Which happens, I guess. The disappearance of

00:38:04

Paula Weldon and the surrounding mystery of the area have inspired a genre of literature,

00:38:09

specifically women-identified authors writing about missing women. Mid-century horror writer

00:38:14

Shirley Jackson, whose husband was a professor at Bennington College when Paula went missing,

00:38:20

wrote a whole, and we know Shirley Jackson, she's fucking famous. The Lottery. That's right. Wrote a whole novel inspired by the disappearance called Hangs a Man. And this

00:38:28

title is from an old folk band ballad. And supposedly Paula's story is also part of the

00:38:33

inspiration for Donna Tartt, who's one of my favorite authors. Her 1992 classic, The Secret

00:38:38

History, which is freaking incredible. Everyone should read it. It's a psychological thriller

00:38:43

about a fictional version of Bennington College in which a student is murdered by her friends.

00:38:48

And I had no idea about this, that that was the inspiration. Other books and short stories

00:38:55

add to the fictionalized accounts of Paula cycling through possibilities that a professor murdered her

00:39:01

or possibly her father or maybe another student, of course. Maybe she was running off to meet a secret lover

00:39:08

or maybe she was just going on a long walk to escape the pressures of her life and to prove she could go on an adventure alone.

00:39:16

Paula's story serves as an easy template for authors to speculate about what it means to go missing.

00:39:21

But Paula Weldon was a real person, not a character. Paula was 18 years old when she disappeared.

00:39:27

She would be 94 years old today. And that is the puzzling and tragic story of Paula Jean Weldon and the Vermont State Police.

00:39:37

Wow. I need more information about the gas station attendant who saw a woman in a red jacket running in the gravel pit.

00:39:46

Yeah. I mean, what is like... The parallel to me is the woman from that downtown hotel

00:39:54

that climbed up to the water tower. Mm-hmm. If, and not to constantly mention mental illness or whatever,

00:40:01

but if that is an element where there's a chemical imbalance. Right. And there's like, she needs to move.

00:40:06

She needs to walk. She's whatever. Mm-hmm. Like maybe she had a break from reality.

00:40:11

Like Elisa Lam is who you're talking about. Maybe she had a break from reality. Right.

00:40:16

Or that idea that she... But then also, okay, so that's just like one easy one, right?

00:40:23

A parallel. But then there's also the thing of like, if her dad was the rich one

00:40:27

and she felt like she wasn't loved by her family and they had a bunch of money, then maybe this was the only way she thought she could get away.

00:40:34

It's just kind of like disappear. Or she went to the trail. She was seen there. she went back, hitchhiked home,

00:40:43

and the person who picked her up killed her. Right, because she hitchhiked there.

00:40:49

Yeah. Yep. Good point. Yeah. Because it sounds like when you said the thing of the old couple that was hiking behind her,

00:40:55

I'm like, okay, so this must have been an okay, it must have, like the conditions were not so threatening,

00:41:02

but it was just immediately like she died in the elements. Yeah. I mean, you just think about how many people

00:41:07

you see throughout the day and like, would you remember any of them if someone or something like this person went missing?

00:41:14

Like the amount of people who did probably see her and never realized that they did see a missing person

00:41:19

never came forward. So she could easily have finished the hike and hitchhiked home, maybe.

00:41:27

Crazy. Yeah. We'll never know. We won't. We might. Are you happy now? We'll never know.

00:41:33

We might. That's the point. Oh, you're right. You're right. You're playing the long game with these cold cases, I see.

00:41:39

I am. In 20 years, when we're still doing this podcast, we'll have some answers.

00:41:45

When we're doing this podcast from Bennington College? Well, that was great. And also,

00:41:49

I never heard of the Bennington Tri... I mean, I've never heard of that Vermont Triangle?

00:41:53

Bennington Triangle, yeah. It is the Bennington Triangle I never heard of that Yeah Creepy I always always interested in those kinds of things where it like Mysterious yeah Orbs of light

00:42:05

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Terms and conditions apply. See pandora.net for more details. Goodbye. Hannah really nailed this combination of stories

00:44:00

because I'm going to talk to you today about a thing. I think, Georgia, you personally know what I'm going to tell you about,

00:44:07

but probably not the details. Because I knew of this person and the work that she did,

00:44:14

but I didn't know really much else about her. So today I'm going to tell you about someone who devoted her life to performing the way

00:44:22

deaths are investigated in the United States. She is considered the mother of modern forensic science.

00:44:29

It's Frances Glessner Lee, the creator of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths.

00:44:35

Yes. Oh, I'm excited. Here is what's great about having a researcher. I've wanted to do this story for so long, but every time I read an article, it was just

00:44:46

kind of like, oh, she just made these things and helped the police. And it was like, it doesn't fit.

00:44:50

It's not a full story. Yeah. And then here goes Maren digging in. And I was just, as I was reading, I was like,

00:44:56

how do I, why don't I know this? Why don't I know any of this? Oh, I'm excited. I don't know any of it. Yeah.

00:45:01

So yeah, it's very exciting. So the main sources for today's story are the book,

00:45:06

18 Tiny Deaths, The Untold Story of the Woman Who Invented Modern Forensics by Bruce Goldfarb,

00:45:12

a 2020 episode of C-SPAN's American Artifacts series titled Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths

00:45:19

and the website Death in Diorama. And then the rest of the sources are in our show notes.

00:45:24

So we start in my favorite time, 1878. Oh, here we are. American Gilded Age. We're almost to the turn of the century,

00:45:33

but we're kind of far away. But it's the American Gilded Age and Francis Glessner, also known as Fanny,

00:45:39

is born into an incredibly wealthy Chicago family. In fact, the Glessners owned the International Harvester Company.

00:45:48

They're the ones that make basically a ton of farming equipment and construction equipment.

00:45:54

So Frances grows up in an enormous stone mansion in Chicago and she spends her summers in a big house

00:45:59

in the New Hampshire countryside. She receives a thorough education from tutors and before she's 20 years old,

00:46:07

she is fluent in four languages and plays the violin. Damn. Yeah. So like most women of the time,

00:46:14

she's also trained in the domestic arts. She's excellent at all types of needlework

00:46:19

and she loves crafting and working with her hands. But as intelligent and crafty as Frances is

00:46:25

at the turn of the century, heiresses to huge fortunes are not supposed to have ambitions

00:46:29

beyond being a socialite and a homemaker. She's not supposed to need college or a career.

00:46:35

But Frances is different. As a child, her interests include mummies and anatomical drawings.

00:46:41

Oh. You know. One of us, one of us. And then in 1887, when she's nine years old,

00:46:49

she undergoes surgery for severe tonsillitis. She makes a full recovery, but now she has a new obsession, medicine.

00:46:55

So as she grows older, she fantasizes about attending Harvard Medical School like her brother, George.

00:47:01

And for Frances, there's no other option. Harvard's her dream school, and it's the only one she wants to attend.

00:47:07

but unfortunately Harvard Medical School won't be admitting female students until the mid-40s.

00:47:13

What? So yeah, so her dream of Harvard is out of the picture. So Frances does what's expected.

00:47:20

When she's 19 years old, she marries a lawyer named Blewett Lee, who is a descendant of General Lee.

00:47:27

He's also about 10 years her senior and he comes from high society as well. And together they have three children.

00:47:34

But Frances doesn't really settle into this lifestyle. She still has all this energy and ambition and drive,

00:47:41

but there's no outlet for it. And she's described as sad and frustrated. Her son, John, would later say that, quote,

00:47:48

his mother's dark moods were punctuated by flurries of activity. So Frances cycles through hobbies,

00:47:55

searching for something to be excited about. She gets into crocheting, beekeeping, even catering,

00:48:00

candy making. And then she discovers dioramas. So at the time, miniatures are a very trendy

00:48:07

hobby for wealthy women. Frances takes it and runs with it. In 1913, when she's 26,

00:48:13

she completes her first diorama. And it's a perfect recreation. Actually, Alejandra,

00:48:19

do you have this picture? It's in Maren's packet. Yeah, I'll grab that. Okay, cool.

00:48:24

Because I think Georgia should see this. It's a perfect recreation of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

00:48:30

And can you see it? Wow, that's beautiful. Right? The website Death in Diorama says, quote,

00:48:39

the model included 90 musicians, their instruments, sheet music, stands, and accompanying instrument cases, along with other minute details.

00:48:48

Frances actually even sits in on several rehearsals and sketches each individual member of the orchestra.

00:48:54

So the model's faces are true to life. Oh my God. It takes her three months to finish it.

00:49:01

And when she's done, she gives it to her mother as a birthday present. That's incredible.

00:49:07

When I first looked at the picture, it looks like you're looking at the Chicago Symphony.

00:49:11

It's really mind-blowing. Totally. And it was made in 1913. And she had three children, which is the craziest thing.

00:49:18

But she had a ton of money, so she probably had six nannies. That's true. But who knows?

00:49:22

I don't know her life. Here's what I do know about her life. Her marriage is falling apart.

00:49:27

When she's 35 years old, she divorces Blewett after what the New York Times describes

00:49:32

as, quote, 16 unhappy years. The two never really see eye to eye, and her son John attributes his parents' divorce in part

00:49:42

to his mother's, quote, creative urge coupled with high manual dexterity, the desire to make things,

00:49:49

which his father did not share. So it's unclear what other issues existed in the marriage,

00:49:54

but after their divorce, Francis destroys every single picture the couple has ever taken together.

00:50:00

Jesus. Which makes me think that maybe it wasn't just crafting that was the problem.

00:50:05

Yeah. So not long after their divorce, Francis bumps into an old friend named George Burgess McGrath.

00:50:12

George has been classmates with Francis's brother at Harvard, and he has known the Glessner family for years and kind of been around.

00:50:20

And he actually went on to become Boston's second ever medical examiner, consulting on major death investigations of the day.

00:50:29

His ability to get to the bottom of the most confusing death investigations earned George McGrath a reputation for scientific brilliance.

00:50:37

He's even compared to Sherlock Holmes. Wow. She's like, that one, please. Yeah, right.

00:50:44

So they meet up, like they both by chance are sick and in the hospital at the same time.

00:50:51

And they both are fine and recover fine. but then it's like this bizarre circumstance

00:50:55

that brings them together. And so Frances, of course, is instantly fascinated by George's career

00:51:02

and she wants to hear all about it. And with good reason. One of the cases George consulted on

00:51:08

was the great molasses flood of 1919. Oh my God, crossover. Right? So clearly he's fascinating.

00:51:15

Yeah. And George seems to genuinely respect Frances's intellect. So the two become very close platonic friends.

00:51:23

So George explains to Francis how he's earned the comparison to Sherlock Holmes.

00:51:27

And it sounds very obvious today, but back then it was groundbreaking. He uses science.

00:51:33

So basically in the early part of the 20th century, criminal investigations in the U.S. were a mess.

00:51:40

There were countless cases where crime scenes were trampled, evidence is mishandled, critical clues are lost or overlooked.

00:51:47

I mean, we've talked many times about stories where the police walk onlookers through the crime scene, you know, as they come by.

00:51:55

Or the fact that photographers used to go in with the detectives when they first walked into the room.

00:52:01

So very bad process. On top of that, the coroner system dominates death investigations at the time.

00:52:09

But this is an interesting fact. Coroners don't need any formal training. Yeah, that's wild.

00:52:14

To get the job of coroner, you just have to win a local election. Yeah, that's fucked up.

00:52:20

It's crazy. So George thinks this is totally backwards. Unlike most death investigators in the United States,

00:52:27

George actually went overseas to receive additional pathology training. So now he envisions a country

00:52:33

where science-backed medical examiners completely replace coroners and all law enforcement is highly educated

00:52:39

and intentional with their work. He admits to Francis, these big ideas seem like a pipe dream.

00:52:46

But Francis refuses to accept that. She genuinely believes George's vision could be put into practice.

00:52:53

In fact, she thinks it must be put into practice. Without having educated, highly trained investigators out in the world,

00:53:00

that would mean that murderers would walk free, victims might never receive justice,

00:53:05

and innocent people could go to jail for crimes they didn't commit. So for Frances, this is a cause she is ready to fight for.

00:53:12

And she devotes the rest of her life to changing what she considers to be a flawed investigative system.

00:53:18

In the 1930s, after the death of her brother, Francis inherits her entire family's fortune.

00:53:25

Holy shit. So suddenly a woman who's been boxed out of societies, basically with any kind of dreams or ambitions she might have,

00:53:34

suddenly has a large amount of financial power and personal agency, and she's ready to use it.

00:53:41

So she starts by establishing forensics-focused coursework at a prestigious American university.

00:53:47

where better than the place that once shut her out because of her sex, Harvard Medical School.

00:53:54

For France it a very obvious starting point While colleges in Europe offer advanced training in what known as legal medicine which blends science and law nothing like that exists in the U

00:54:06

So in 1931, Frances calls up Harvard and makes a very attractive offer. She says she will make an enormous donation to the school

00:54:14

if they start a department of legal medicine, a term for what we now call forensic science and pathology.

00:54:21

She says she'll pay the salaries of the department chair, his secretary, and a librarian in perpetuity. And if that's not enough, she promises to leave

00:54:30

more money to Harvard in her will. Wow. And she also makes a compelling argument for why it should

00:54:36

exist. Francis says that Harvard's Department of Legal Medicine could be a factory for medical

00:54:41

examiners. These Harvard-trained investigators would leave the school and rise to positions

00:54:46

of power in communities across the country. And there, armed with their Harvard-backed education,

00:54:52

they'd correct a broken system and improve the field of criminal justice. And it could be one more cultural and academic feather in the cap of this prestigious school.

00:55:03

And so Harvard, of course, is on board. Over the next few years, with Frances's constant input,

00:55:09

the school begins building a state-of-the-art legal medicine department. Wow. But as evangelical as Frances is about getting rid of the coroner system,

00:55:19

she also wants broad reform. Francis says that, quote, legal medicine may be likened to a three-legged stool,

00:55:27

the three legs being medicine, the law, and the police. If any one of these is weak, the stool will collapse.

00:55:34

So in the mid-30s, Francis begins touring the country and educating people on the merits of forensic sciences.

00:55:41

She speaks at women's clubs with physicians in their offices, and she makes an appearance at the 1933-34 Chicago World's Fair.

00:55:49

Oh, my God. Yeah, she even lands a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, who famously didn't care much for women's opinions.

00:55:57

In fact, after he became, I think we've talked about this, after he became the head of the FBI, he fired every single female agent at the Bureau.

00:56:05

Oh, what a piece of shit. But Frances clearly left an impression on him. An FBI official later writes in a memo that she, quote,

00:56:13

impressed me as being most intelligent, alert, and aggressive, and I believe that she will apply herself to her plans very energetically.

00:56:21

And that FBI staffer's not wrong. Frances stays very busy in the 30s. So along with all her efforts to promote forensic science

00:56:28

and push out the coroner system, she also starts thinking about ways to roll out police officer training.

00:56:35

And this is particularly important to Frances, as officers are often the first people at crime scenes,

00:56:40

and what they do there can inform everything that happens next in the legal pipeline.

00:56:46

This is so obvious now, and especially now looking back at all the ways things go wrong

00:56:52

and all the stories we've told of exactly the issues when it does go wrong. So with this in mind, Francis spearheads the annual conference called Harvard Seminars in Homicide Investigation.

00:57:05

They're later rebranded as Harvard Associates in Police Science Seminars. It's a week-long invitation-only conference where dozens of police officers from around the country receive training on the latest forensic tactics and techniques.

00:57:18

And they learn them straight from the experts in the field. So attendees observe autopsies.

00:57:23

They learn how to interview witnesses and handle evidence. They get tips on securing crime scenes.

00:57:28

And they hear lectures on how to best identify causes of death. And Frances organizes the entire curriculum herself.

00:57:36

Holy shit. Yeah. Without even the education. of it all. It's wild. With no education and basically

00:57:43

with the help of her friend George kind of seeing and understanding this huge problem that has to get, like,

00:57:49

she's like, this has to get solved. We have to do something about this. And like I was saying, like, the first

00:57:55

ever article I read about Frances Glessner Lee not only mentioned none of this stuff

00:58:01

like at all. They basically made it sound like she was a weird old lady with weird interests

00:58:07

that was kind of like kooky thinking back now, so reductive. Yeah. When you actually know what she did and what she like put

00:58:16

real force behind. It's crazy. Totally. So irritating. Okay. So then in 1938, the legal

00:58:22

medicine department at Harvard is finally up and running. I mean, 1938, it's so long ago.

00:58:28

Yeah. So ahead of this milestone, Frances has a few stipulations for her friends at Harvard.

00:58:33

She's in control of everything from picking the classrooms that she wants the department to be

00:58:38

anchored in to saying that George Burgess McGrath should serve as the legal medicine chair.

00:58:43

And they're fine giving her whatever she wants. Sadly, George McGrath passes away after a short

00:58:50

illness that same year. He was only 68 years old. Yeah. What a bummer. And although Frances is

00:58:56

bereft, she's now even more determined to put their shared dreams into practice. So new chairperson

00:59:04

is put at the helm, Frances continues to bankroll the department for years. She also supplies Harvard

00:59:09

with a collection of books on things like poisons, criminology, toxicology. All of that gets put into

00:59:15

what becomes known as the George Burgess McGrath Library of Legal Medicine. It's since been absorbed

00:59:22

by Harvard's Countway Library of Medicine. By the early 1940s, Frances is in her 60s

00:59:28

and living in New Hampshire full time. But she's now widely considered an expert in criminology.

00:59:34

She's so well-respected that the New Hampshire State Police often consult with her on complicated death investigations.

00:59:41

Wow. So in 1943, in recognition of her invaluable assistance, Frances is made police captain of the New Hampshire State Police.

00:59:51

And she the first woman in the history of the United States to earn this rank Holy shit Uh And to be very clear it not an honorary title Her biographer Bruce Goldfarb writes in 18 Tiny Deaths that Frances is handed quote general police power

01:00:08

to enforce all criminal laws of the state and to serve criminal processes and make arrests in

01:00:14

New Hampshire. Wow. Yeah, our stories totally overlap. That's so weird. Yeah, that is super

01:00:19

crazy. She never makes any arrests, but she does carry her captain's badge in her purse

01:00:24

for the rest of her life. And she does answer to the title Captain Lee, if people call her that.

01:00:31

Love it. So as she's racking up accolades, she continues her tireless work. Her Harvard seminars

01:00:37

become increasingly sought after by police officers across the country, but she's always

01:00:43

looking for new ways to improve her curriculum. So in 1945, she ingeniously dips back into the

01:00:49

domestic arts that she learned as a young aristocrat. And she creates her best known legacy,

01:00:56

the now famous nutshell studies of unexplained death. So if you, listener, have never heard of

01:01:03

these, at their most reductive, they're basically death-themed dollhouses. Each one is complete with

01:01:10

tiny dolls and all the things you would find in anyone's house, furniture, clothing, cans of food,

01:01:15

Newspapers, wallpaper, cigarettes. And every single element in these dollhouses has been dreamt up and handcrafted by Frances herself.

01:01:23

If any piece is any more involved, then she just calls a carpenter. So she makes 19 of these case study dollhouses.

01:01:31

Each one is different than the next. Some are a single room, like a bedroom, a bathroom, or a kitchen.

01:01:37

Others are an entire house, cabin, or a barn. But what connects these nutshells is that they're all loosely inspired

01:01:44

by a different mysterious death. So alongside all of the other details of everyday life,

01:01:49

you can see tiny shotguns, knives, and sprays of blood spatter. Some of these cases are based on the stories

01:01:57

morgue workers and police officers have told her, and others are inspired by the autopsies

01:02:02

that Frances has observed herself. So by fabricating the nutshell studies of unexplained death,

01:02:09

Frances creates an invaluable tool for police officers to study at her seminars.

01:02:14

The dollhouses are analyzed for a fixed amount of time. And Frances is often in the room with her seminar attendees while they work.

01:02:22

And she gives recommendations on what to look for and how. So she suggests they start at the outside of the room and spiral clockwise inward to the center,

01:02:32

which is something investigators still do at crime scenes today. Oh, I didn't know that.

01:02:37

That's so interesting. Mm-hmm. For each nutshell, Frances also has an accompanying report

01:02:42

that gives additional context to each scene. Some writers have compared these nutshells

01:02:46

to virtual reality, helping the officers at her seminars feel like they're observing a complex

01:02:51

and confusing crime scene. And they also subvert any preexisting idea of who deserves justice.

01:02:59

Frances's politics are all over these dioramas. Most of her victims are marginalized in some way.

01:03:05

They're not the elite members of society that she grew up around. The nutshells show the deaths of housewives,

01:03:11

of sex workers, of people struggling with alcoholism, even prisoners. According to Goldfarb,

01:03:17

quote, these are people who don't usually have their lives documented in art. Frances felt like

01:03:23

every death is important and every death deserves a thorough scientific investigation. It's easy to

01:03:29

imagine Frances having to work against the first impression that her nutshells aren't serious or

01:03:35

important work. At the time, dollhouses, dioramas, miniatures, they're all considered inherently

01:03:41

female as a pastime. So Goldfarb says that Frances, quote, knew she was dealing with

01:03:48

hard-boiled homicide detectives, so there couldn't be anything remotely doll-like about them.

01:03:55

No girls allowed. God forbid, God forbid your masculinity at a crime scene is challenged.

01:04:04

Yeah. Very fragile. That's where it's the most fragile. Yeah. Yeah. But nutshell dioramas are incredibly important and valuable creations,

01:04:13

not only for the advancement of forensic science, but literally, their literal cost.

01:04:19

Luckily, Frances is rich because these nutshells cost her between $6,000 and $8,000 each,

01:04:27

which is, do you want to take a guess of how much that is in today's money? And what year is it? 1940s?

01:04:33

I would say we're saying like, yeah, late 30s, early 40s. So $6,000, you said? Six to eight.

01:04:40

Six to eight. Okay, I'm going to go with it'll be in the 70s. $100,000 to $130,000 each.

01:04:48

Oh my God. That's wild. And that costly craftsmanship and the intricacy and all that attention to detail

01:04:56

are what make the nutshells so incredible. Francis packs each scene with tons of tiny items.

01:05:04

Some are relevant to the death, many are not. So observers have to take everything they see in the scene into consideration before ultimately deciding if the death was an accident, a suicide, or a homicide.

01:05:16

To get a sense of how tiny these elements can be, an Al Jazeera reporter named Nicole Johnson says that, quote,

01:05:22

Clues and details include a lipstick mark found under a pillow, a wall with a bullet, an overturned ashtray, ligature marks painted on dolls' necks, half-peeled potatoes near a sink, and old letters at the foot of a body.

01:05:38

Wow, weird. It's like a real little world. Oh my God. Every case does have a solution, but it's kept confidential.

01:05:47

Francis fears that if they're ever publicized, the nutshells would no longer be useful to police trainees.

01:05:53

Oh, interesting. Right? But the solution is not entirely the point Francis made the nutshells to be intentionally ambiguous They not whodunits with clear conclusions

01:06:05

Participants can't refer to things like autopsies or police reports, and they can't question witnesses to get closer to the truth.

01:06:13

The exercise is strictly about having an open mind, accepting that there are unknowns,

01:06:18

avoiding hastily made conclusions, and above all else, the importance of being thorough and methodical.

01:06:25

at the scene of a death. So if you haven't seen them, look online because the pictures of them

01:06:31

truly are mind-blowing. How real they look and how the incredible detail. It's amazing.

01:06:39

So cool. But for right now, I'm going to describe one to you so that we can have the satisfaction

01:06:45

in the moment. Let's do it. This one is called Three Room Dwelling. It's often said to be the most complex nutshell

01:06:52

in Frances's collection. From the outside, it looks like a small house with a front and back porch.

01:06:58

Inside, there are three rooms, a kitchen, a main bedroom, and then a nursery. And there are three victims, including a baby.

01:07:06

So this is the report Francis created to accompany this nutshell. Okay. Quote, Robert Judson, a foreman in a shoe factory,

01:07:15

his wife, Kate Judson, and their baby, Linda May Judson, were discovered dead by Paul Abbott, a neighbor.

01:07:21

Mr. Abbott was questioned and gave the following statement. Bob Judson and he drove to their work together, alternating cars.

01:07:29

This was Abbott's week to drive. On Monday morning, November 1st, he was late, about 7.35 a.m.

01:07:35

So when blowing his horn didn't bring Judson out, Abbott went to the factory without him,

01:07:41

believing Judson would come in his own car. Sarah Abbott, Paul Abbott's wife, was also questioned

01:07:46

and gave the following statement. After Paul left, she watched for Bob to come out.

01:07:52

Finally, around 8.15 a.m., seeing no signs of activity at the Judson house, she went over to their porch and tried the front door,

01:07:59

but it was locked. She knocked and called, but got no answer. She then went to the kitchen porch,

01:08:05

but that door was also locked. Looking in through the glass, she was then thoroughly aroused

01:08:10

by the sight of a gun and blood. She ran home and notified the police. The model shows the premises

01:08:16

just before Mrs. Abbott went to the house. So that's what they get to read. And then Frances's report also includes a couple more details.

01:08:27

She notes the sun rose at 6.17 a.m. that day. The weather was clear. All the lights were off in the house

01:08:35

and both doors were locked from the inside. Yeah. Here's some of the information we get inside the nutshell.

01:08:43

Bob and Kate Judson are dead in their bedroom. Their baby Linda May is in her crib in the adjoining nursery.

01:08:50

There's a shotgun on the kitchen floor. And that's the one that the neighbor saw through the window.

01:08:56

Kate is lying on her side in bed. There's blood on her pillow. There's also blood that seems to have been sprayed on the wall beside her.

01:09:04

On the opposite side of the bed, Bob is face down on the floor. He's on top of one of the bed's comforters.

01:09:10

There's blood all over him, but it's mostly on the back of his pajama pant legs.

01:09:14

There's blood in the bed, especially where Bob's face would have been if he were sleeping in it.

01:09:20

There are signs of disarray in the bedroom and nursery. One chair in the bedroom is toppled

01:09:25

and a lamp has been knocked off Bob's nightstand. One chair in the nursery has been turned over

01:09:30

and so have two decorative chairs sitting on top of the baby's dresser. There's a flashlight on Kate's nightstand.

01:09:37

There are bloody tracks leading to the nursery and inside the nursery, there's a large pool of blood near the door

01:09:43

that connects to the bedroom. The baby's in her crib and there's blood splatter on the wall above her head.

01:09:49

There is a teeny tiny shotgun shell on the floor near the crib. Oh my God. The window in the baby's room is open.

01:09:58

There are milk bottles outside the window on the back porch by the back door, but those milk bottles

01:10:04

don't seem to be disturbed. So a curator named Nora Atkinson, who recently held an exhibit

01:10:10

with Frances's Nutshells, says, quote, I think people come here expecting that they're going to be able to look at these

01:10:17

cases and solve them like some Agatha Christie novel. But when you look at them, you realize

01:10:22

how complicated a real crime scene is. Yeah. That's so interesting. I'm trying to like

01:10:27

rack my brain for what happened. You know, like why is there a puddle of blood in the baby's room?

01:10:34

Yeah. And did the husband get shot, but it only grazed him? So he got up and knocked over his

01:10:40

light or what, you know, that kind of thing. Also, if both doors are locked, that means that

01:10:46

the killer may have gone out of the baby's room window without knocking the milk bottles over

01:10:52

that were right under it. No, no, no, they were at the back door, I think. That's where the baby, so it almost is like this. Oh. And the baby's window opens up to the back

01:11:03

porch. Okay. And it faces like the stairs that go down. And to the right of that window is the

01:11:09

wall with the back door. Okay. So it's a weird, it's like a tiny little L shape. Yeah. I mean,

01:11:16

it's fascinating. So like the rest of Francis's nutshells, three room dwelling is incredibly

01:11:21

complicated. Viewers must use things like the presence of weapons, position of dead bodies,

01:11:27

blood sprays and splatter and information from Francis's report and other clues around the

01:11:32

rooms to come to their own conclusion. In his book, 18 Tiny Deaths, writer Bruce Goldfarb

01:11:38

explains that Francis's nutshells eventually catch the attention of reporters. But in their coverage,

01:11:45

they often, quote, cast Francis as a peripheral figure if she's mentioned at all,

01:11:50

a wealthy matron who made morbid dollhouses and understated her role as a leader in the field.

01:11:57

Wow. So basically, it's just like, oh, this... This old lady can't do anything except for like craft or what I mean, like so reductive.

01:12:07

When I first saw her, I got the impression that she had been like commissioned to make them.

01:12:13

Not that she had like, like she was an old crafty lady and they were like, hey, we need these things.

01:12:17

Will you do it for us? No, it was her fucking entire idea. Yes, completely from the start to finish.

01:12:23

Amazing. Those reporters are clearly oblivious to the fact that within the then tight knit

01:12:29

discipline of forensic science, Francis Glessner Lee was a bit of a rock star. The officers who

01:12:35

attend the seminars, who are all men until 1949, not one woman until 1949, they reportedly view

01:12:43

Francis as a mix of a mentor and a celebrity. And Francis's dear friend, Earl Stanley Gardner,

01:12:49

who wrote the Perry Mason books, describes an invitation to her seminars as, quote,

01:12:55

as sought after in police circles as bids to Hollywood by girls who aspire to be actresses.

01:13:01

Wow. So it's one of those, if you know, you know situations. Frances Glessner Lee's impact on our criminal justice system is huge.

01:13:11

And thanks to her seminars and educational resources, she's directly responsible for many of the best practices still used to process crime scenes today.

01:13:20

Her fight to dismantle the coroner system also has clear results. Although, of course, there are still many coroners out there,

01:13:27

according to Bruce Goldfarb, there are medical examiner systems in over 20 states and in Washington, D.C.

01:13:33

And some jurisdictions that have a coroner model now require them to be trained in forensic science.

01:13:41

Yeah, it seems like that's the way, right? Yeah. I mean, I think it's pretty important.

01:13:46

In 1962, Francis Glessner Lee dies in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, at the age of 83.

01:13:53

Just a few years later in 1966, Harvard's legal medicine department dissolves due to lack of

01:13:59

funding. But a version of Francis's original Harvard training seminar still lives on to this

01:14:05

day It now held at Baltimore office of the Chief Medical Examiner and it been renamed the Frances Glessner Lee Homicide Seminar And Frances nutshells are still a part of the curriculum

01:14:18

Sadly, one of them was irreparably damaged decades ago, but the remaining 18 continue to encapsulate Frances's brilliance,

01:14:27

talent, love of science, passion for justice, and a devotion to education, all in a nutshell.

01:14:35

Frances Glessner Lee always had the final word at her seminars. Here's an excerpt from a speech she once gave to a room full of police officers.

01:14:43

Quote, There is no place for guesswork in any sort of police work whatsoever, especially not in homicide investigation.

01:14:51

The investigator seeks out the truth, the whole naked, incontrovertible truth. Let it finish where it may.

01:14:58

He is not protecting or avenging anyone, but is seeking through patient, painstaking, accurate, hard work,

01:15:05

What happened? Never making a guess and then searching for evidence to support it.

01:15:10

Patience and infinite capacity for taking pains, absolute accuracy and thoroughness.

01:15:16

There is no substitute for these. If you cannot approach a case with these convictions,

01:15:21

you should resign at once. There is no place for you in police work. Whoa. End fucking quote.

01:15:29

And that is the story of Francis Glessner Lee, the creator of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,

01:15:35

the first female police captain in the United States, and an all-around icon in the field of forensics.

01:15:41

Oh my God, I want to applaud. But it's just one person, so it sounds sad. That sounds like just a nice light golf clap.

01:15:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just so mad. How dare these fucking, I mean, you know, that's my bad Googling and then my bad listicle habits.

01:16:00

But every time I've seen this woman's picture, You know, looking down at her little dioramas, it's literally exactly what you said.

01:16:08

Like, this lady helped the cops. And it's like, this lady taught the fucking cops.

01:16:14

What are you talking about? Got to be at one of her seminars I mean we wouldn have been allowed because we women but still That right Well in 1950 That true We had to wait till 1950 That true

01:16:26

Oh, that's so crazy. I know that they did a, like one, a museum, maybe it was in Baltimore,

01:16:31

did a show a few years back and they showed all her dioramas. If they ever do that again,

01:16:36

we have to go. Oh my God, we absolutely have to. Because there were some pictures

01:16:40

in Maren's research of people looking. So I think it was from that show. of them and people looking down into them.

01:16:49

And talk about like the, probably one of the most slow moving exhibits of all. I would never move away from whatever one I was looking at.

01:16:57

Well, you just did a cold case because now I want to know what happened to the family.

01:17:01

That's right. So thanks a lot for that. Now I know how it feels. Now you know how it feels.

01:17:06

Sucks. Great job. Thank you. Great job. Thank you. You too. She deserved all that respect.

01:17:14

She deserves it. Yeah. Well, we did it again. We did it. We did it. We're doing it.

01:17:19

We're going to do it in the future. We've done it in the past. It's who we are now.

01:17:24

Yeah. It's who we are. It's what we do. We're glad you support and or at least listen to us.

01:17:30

Yeah. Thank you for being, you know, part of this little journey. The season of our lives that we're on.

01:17:38

Thanks for living and loving and laughing along with us. Amazingly. Yeah. And all the necklaces.

01:17:46

Mm-hmm. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie?

01:17:53

Ah. This has been an Exactly Right production. Our producer is Alejandra Keck. Our senior producer is Hannah Kyle Creighton.

01:18:06

This episode was engineered and mixed by Stephen Ray Morris. Our researchers are Maren McClashen and Sarah Blair Jenkins.

01:18:13

Email your hometowns and fucking hoorays to myfavoritemurder at gmail.com. Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at My Favorite Murder and Twitter at My Fave Murder.

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