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00:01:49
That's Georgia. Hard start. That's Karen Kilgariff. You're welcome. And we're here to podcast with you once again.
00:01:57
Yeah. week after week we do it. Week after week. I think that they don't, they should know and don't know
00:02:02
that right before we start, there's like a moment of quiet while we get ready. And then the most
00:02:06
insane hand gestures happen between the two of us. We're pretending to be classical music conductors
00:02:14
trying to cue the other one that, yes, I'm ready to start. I'm going to say it now. Yes.
00:02:19
Because we're still strangely obsessed with the unison concept. it just works for us it works for us it's a great way to start out you know as one yeah and uh i
00:02:32
think so like if we are cracking up in the very beginning of the episode it's because of just
00:02:37
you just had you just had some really great ones so that's why i was cracking up yeah i was trying
00:02:42
to put a little extra spice into my opening you know like let's do this yeah let's do this
00:02:50
kind of energy. There was a lot of wrists. Just with the wrists. Yeah. It's like I like to speak.
00:02:56
You know this about me. I like to speak through my hands. And then, of course, connected to that are the wrists. That's right. That's just they get involved. Yeah. Part of the
00:03:07
hand gesture. You can't have one without the other. Talk to the wrist. You know, I say that
00:03:12
all the time throughout the 90s. You do. You do. How was your Thanksgiving? Oh, thank you for
00:03:18
It was surprisingly well and non, you know, dramatic. Great. Yeah. How was yours?
00:03:28
Fun times? Yeah, fun. It was great. And you hosted and Vince cooked. That's right.
00:03:33
Oh, my God, man. Amazing turkey. And this year we didn't spill the turkey juice all over the rug like we did last year.
00:03:41
There's always got to be something, though, right? Yes. I'm trying to think of what happened.
00:03:45
Well, it was a pre Thanksgiving, you know, drama with my mom that ended up being she ignored it like it never happened.
00:03:53
And like she likes to do. And so everything was fine. And I did the same. You know what? It's like that's the senior improv with her. So you have to match what she's giving you and go with it.
00:04:04
Which is nothing. No, I mean, which is zero, zero. No, it was really it was lovely.
00:04:11
And I'm done with the holidays for like family stuff. Hosting is hosting is big.
00:04:18
Hosting is suddenly there. For me, my family was down. All of a sudden, it's like, how come I don't have that many blankets?
00:04:27
Like suddenly I'm judging myself in the weirdest ways. It's like my couch isn't that comfortable.
00:04:33
Right. And I don't have very many blankets. So, yeah. Who am I to even invite anybody over?
00:04:38
Your dad. So I came up, women's and I were and cookie were so generously invited over a couple of nights for Thanksgiving for to celebrate just life with your sister and your niece and your dad. And your dad got so bad at you for not having a pizza cutter that I have. And then he got mad at me for not using it. I was using a fork to cut my pizza and it like really bothered him.
00:05:05
And at one point he goes, Georgia, I used that night. Like got mad at me, which is I realized how annoying I was being because the pizza wouldn't cut, you know.
00:05:13
But but this is what makes me laugh is that to a normal person. Yes, it seems like he's mad.
00:05:22
But literally that or doing a funny voice are the only two choices you get. So, yeah, there's no other way he would say like, oh, I'm sorry, you can't cut that very well here.
00:05:32
do that. Like, there's a whole process going on in terms of like, it's a shame on our
00:05:38
ancestors that you can't cut your pizza correctly. So he's not mad at you. It's just, it's
00:05:46
the insanity. Also, he cannot hear. Oh, right, right, right, right. Of course. Everything seems a little bit
00:05:53
more ratcheted up than if he had fully attuned hearing Yes Okay It would be much lighter But then I think he like a couple beats behind and it an irritating position for him to be in
00:06:08
But when he, yeah, the way he yelled at me about not having a pizza cutter, a pizza cutter.
00:06:14
I don't own a pizza cutter. I'm not Gwyneth Paltrow. What are you talking about?
00:06:20
First of all, they cut mine at the fucking pizza parlor. Right. where I as any other red-blooded American get my pizza like my sister's the one that took it upon
00:06:30
herself to make homemade pizza for all of us god bless her soul it was really good she's such a
00:06:35
good cook she's a really good cook but yeah it doesn't mean I have the tools like she had to
00:06:41
bring most of the stuff that she was cooking with with her she had to bring so much shit
00:06:46
including a turkey pan for Thanksgiving who the fuck has that if you don't ever cook an entire bird we just happen to have no vince enjoys doing that thing yeah but i mean and
00:06:58
i it's good to have yeah it's pointless you know what a pizza cutter is what's that a knife
00:07:04
you know what a knife is a pizza cutter a fork for you it was embarrassing because i was like
00:07:12
oh yeah i have been sawing away at this fucking slice of pizza for like an hour with a nut with a
00:07:17
fork and he probably also was like who what who the what kind of like princess eats a fucking pizza
00:07:22
pizza with a fork but no chances chances are what was happening was whatever this sound was
00:07:29
that your that your fork was making was like he could hear because that's the other thing is
00:07:34
hearing aids you can hear certain things way louder than other things especially if they're
00:07:39
high-pitched yeah it doesn't like it doesn't it's not selective of like oh man so if you're making
00:07:45
like to you a kind of quiet squeaky fork noise on your plate to him it's like blowing his ears out
00:07:50
i mean who knows that man is in hell all i will say is every night so he would watch sports in
00:07:57
like the afternoon the evening but then every night around like 7 30 he'd be like what movie
00:08:02
are we watching so then you had to like play it really carefully because norah's there so he it
00:08:07
has to be like a family movie right but you still want everyone to like it yeah into it so nobody
00:08:13
likes it and nobody gets to watch what they want to watch. That's normally what happens.
00:08:18
But I will tell you that we night after night picked winners. So the first night we watched King Richard, which is the Will Smith movie about the Williams
00:08:27
sisters and the way their dad basically raised them to be tennis champions. It's an unbelievably great movie.
00:08:33
If you ever watch the Williams sisters, which my roommate in my college and then young life
00:08:41
roommate, Dave, who I talk about all the time, played tennis, very intense about tennis and
00:08:47
watched tennis obsessively. So I knew about those girls as they were coming up. Basically through
00:08:54
him. He would be like, you have to watch this girl. She's amazing. So to watch the background
00:09:00
of how Richard Williams basically got his girls from Compton to like, you know, Wimbledon. Is that
00:09:09
what it's called to Wimbledon. Exactly. It's amazing. It's amazing. And it's really inspiring.
00:09:16
And they were executive producers of the movie. They got to tell their father's story. There's
00:09:21
times where it's super intense, but it's just it's so well done. It's so it's great. Really good. So
00:09:27
we all loved that. Okay. Then Jungle Cruise, which nobody thought was going to be good. But we were
00:09:33
like oh it's just a disney movie it'll be fine completely delightful okay cute so good the rock
00:09:40
and uh everybody's best friend emily blunt yeah a magical combination the darlings so good
00:09:47
really good and our friend paul giamatti makes a special uh italian cameo yes paul giamatti
00:09:54
then one night we watched moana which we i cry the whole time in that movie i love it so much
00:10:02
have you seen Moana I haven't take the time please okay I'll get a nephew over I'll put it on
00:10:09
then on the last night School of Rock and we were like I was like my sister and I were like
00:10:15
whispering in the kitchen like is there gonna be swearing is he gonna get mad or blah blah blah
00:10:19
it's the most perfect family movie it's adorable Jack Black is just giving his all in the most
00:10:26
wonderful hilarious musical way and then those kids are magical out of control so it's the best
00:10:32
those are good christmas movies i think like around the with the family because yeah because
00:10:37
i've only been watching game of thrones so that is not family which i am in by the way now okay
00:10:44
where are you i'm in like the end of season three i think oh shit fucking dragons are happening
00:10:51
fucking just so much going on the little boy kings being such a douche and playing it so well
00:10:58
he's scary right oh he's so cocky i hate him and then i'm always like wow i hate him he said he's
00:11:04
a great actor as a douche yes uh as i'm in it is aria gone to training aria like they escaped
00:11:13
and then the man who helped them escape is like a different man's face and he and they're like yes
00:11:20
And she got a coin that's going to mean something one day, probably. OK. And yeah, I'm into it.
00:11:26
I'm into it. And then the older sister, what's her name? Sansa. Sansa. Like she she's getting away from him.
00:11:37
I'm so bad at this. Let me read you my review I wrote. She's getting away. And is she?
00:11:45
But or is she? And I really love her nursemaid or whatever it's called. is really the girlfriend of
00:11:53
what his name character No you just holding up her hands almost like hand puppet I am Like when she puts up a different hand i can see the people that she thinking of this is this character on this hand and not
00:12:08
this character i should do like a puppet show of uh my my interpretation of game of thrones
00:12:13
yeah you absolutely should with the you can just do the real simple um lunch bag puppets oh yeah
00:12:19
put your hand in and how about one lunch bag is for like this family and then the sock is for this
00:12:25
other the other family the landsberries or whatever their name is and then then graystone
00:12:31
comes along and graystone is what a shoe that's that's where he man's who's the guy you know i'm talking about theo theo gray joy
00:12:43
gray joy sure he's turned out to be a jerk yes many of them are jerks i kind of at this point
00:12:52
i'm not sure where wait is um the super tall lady knight the one who's guarding sansa you're
00:12:58
talking about her okay no so that was a spoiler i think i'm only in season two but the super tall
00:13:03
lady knight who's the coolest is taking the brother what are they called yes no I know what you mean
00:13:13
who are they it's the incest twins the lanthiums who are they called the lithium battery family
00:13:25
that's right taking the brother over back to the king's castle yeah because he's in trouble
00:13:31
right yeah she has to take him okay but prisoner now i know that she's gonna guard sansa so that's exciting to know uh
00:13:39
okay don't hold me to that because i thought that's what you were telling me i'm like oh i
00:13:43
remember that but it could be any number of variations of because she's on behalf of lady
00:13:49
stark right taking what is he's the hottest guy um no you don't think classically hot guy that
00:13:59
sleeps with his sister is hot he's a little too surfery for me like that's not you know what i
00:14:04
mean like he's very orange county and i'm even though he's from england clearly i'm just not
00:14:08
interested in that he's so orange county but he's but he's in king's landing or that's right
00:14:17
crow's net the crow's nest no that's a that's a comedy club in santa cruz um but it's a delightful
00:14:25
full journey right i'm having fun yeah having a good time so far yeah uh what else um oh well
00:14:34
if we're going to do some recs i am so thrilled that on hulu the tv show the great is back did
00:14:42
you watch the great no with l fanning and nicholas holt no i saw it just now though on on like the
00:14:49
channel changer okay well guess what and i can't i'm pretty sure i must have recommended this and
00:14:55
season one but but it also was i think the last time i was visiting my sister so she and i were
00:15:01
binging it may have been last christmas but anyway it's now season two so there are two seasons to
00:15:06
watch of this insanely excellent show the great and it's based on the life of catherine the great
00:15:13
who took over russia yeah when she married her husband mr the great king yes king the great
00:15:20
king he's all right um he was also kind of a surfer of the time but no um you have to watch it
00:15:30
it's so they're such the two of them are carrying this show the whole ensemble cast is mind-bogglingly
00:15:39
great and usually if a show is so good you binge it and you never stop watching it for season one
00:15:46
then when season two comes around some snob like me is always like hmm we'll see yeah it's
00:15:53
falling down in this way and that way and that's the thing we love to do is be we're so good at TV that we can spot
00:15:59
when something isn't as good can't do it on this show it is solid as a rock my fave you gotta find something else to be smug
00:16:06
about I guess yeah because this thing is just giving their in all the outfits it's like the richest Russians
00:16:15
So like, yeah, the whole place they're in the outfits they're wearing, the food they talk about eating.
00:16:22
It's hilarious. It's amazing. It's all right. Oh, I meant to apologize to you because Cookie peed on your rug.
00:16:30
That's OK. Brand new rug. But also wanted to say that Frank and Cookie got along so freaking well.
00:16:38
And their best friend, the best time. And Cookie ran Frank around that house. he was like, oh, are we doing this? Okay, great. I guess I'm not elderly anymore. He had the time
00:16:48
of his life. And I it doesn't surprise me because I think Cookie needed to find a corner to just
00:16:54
very lightly make her mark. Yes. And, you know, that's what I'm doing for. But your rug held up.
00:17:00
It was like, oh, I'm not taking this on. It's like how we should be how our therapists are
00:17:04
always taking us telling us to be is like, don't take that on. No, Scotch guard yourself against
00:17:10
It's the pee of life. That's right. That's right. Listen, puppies will pee on you.
00:17:14
That's just how life goes. We know it's coming. Therefore, we put the Scotchgard around us.
00:17:19
That's right. Self-care, of awareness, of presence. Everyone remember that this holiday season when you're hanging out with family members
00:17:27
and it's hard and they're getting to you that you are a rug. everything that happens that your mom says uh is puppy pee and you're not gonna let it you're not
00:17:41
gonna absorb it no you don't have to absorb it and you're not seven years old anymore so what
00:17:47
so it is a different track you can change brain tracks and be like oh that's right none of this
00:17:54
is actually coming in here right it just reminding me of things that are already in here Yeah But that okay But I a grown up now I a grown up I don have a fucking pizza cutter Then I guess
00:18:07
that's fine. I haven't failed in this life. You haven't. You haven't. Just because you don't have
00:18:12
a utensil that does one thing, which nobody even wants that. My dad has the kind of kitchen where
00:18:19
you would be you could go on like a scavenger hunt and name any obscure thing and of course
00:18:25
it's that kitchen's been sitting there for 40 years so everything's in there once you live there
00:18:30
for for 40 fucking years you're gonna have like skewers for fucking kebabs and shit like of any
00:18:37
size of course you don't have you don't have chopsticks yeah well uh i might left over from
00:18:42
but no you don't have your own chopsticks right yeah it's that yeah it is that it is that it's
00:18:49
just Jim going, how is your house different than my house? Sometimes that makes parents upset.
00:18:55
Sometimes it makes them infuriated. How much do you think, how much you want to bet you're
00:19:00
going to get a pizza cutter from either your sister or your dad for Christmas this year?
00:19:04
We literally bought one the next day and then held it up in front of him. Oh yeah, because
00:19:08
this is the thing about our family is then that becomes the joke of like, Oh, we better get a pizza cutter.
00:19:19
Dad's going to be mad. Should we do some exactly right corner time? Yeah, let's let's talk through a little business.
00:19:28
We've got some exciting stuff. Our friend Kate Winkler Dawson over on Wicked Words is talking to guest author Aisha Sasseh to discuss the hashtag Bring Back Our Girls.
00:19:40
that was a social media campaign that alerted the world to the kidnapping of 276 school girls
00:19:47
so they'll be talking about that and on lady to lady we're having a little another exactly right
00:19:51
crossover with guest dave holmes host of the exactly right podcast waiting for impact and
00:19:58
so those are so many funny people you should check that out also um because it is uh it is
00:20:05
basically the beginning of the holiday season happy hanukkah to everyone who celebrates thank
00:20:10
Georgia. Yes, you included. So we decided George and I decided we wanted to give back
00:20:17
this holiday season. We know it's hard for a lot of people out there. So we thought it'd be a good
00:20:22
idea to focus on some of our favorite charities to give through all throughout the end of the year,
00:20:28
basically. Yeah. So this first week, which is the first of five, we will be donating 10 grand to
00:20:35
Toys for Tots, which of course, everyone knows and loves and we're so excited. about. Just a great kickoff for the holiday season, helping people get toys, you know,
00:20:47
for kids in need, families in need, providing a bigger and better Christmas. If there's any way
00:20:53
that you can give back in your community, then yeah, you should do that too. If you can. Yep.
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Terms and conditions apply. See Pandora.net for more details. Goodbye. Are you ready?
00:23:08
I am ready. All right. Well, this week, I'm going to tell you, Georgia, about the deadly green arsenic dresses of Victorian England.
00:23:17
I love it. Do you know? Have you heard anything about these? Vaguely, but this sounds fun and I'm really freaking excited about it.
00:23:27
You know, I love a good poisoning. So the sources used for this story this week, the history of green dye is a history of death by Jennifer Wright for Racked.com. The Arsenic Dress, How Poisonous Green Pigments Terrorize Victorian Fashion by Alison Matthews David. That's on Jezebel.
00:23:46
There is a article by Jessica Charlotte Halsam for ResMedica, the Journal of the Royal Medical Society. There's a National Geographic article by Becky Little. There's some quotes from...
00:24:00
from the British Medical Journal of 1862. Whoa. And there is a bust magazine article called
00:24:08
These Dresses Could and Literally Did Kill by F.E.A. History. I guess that's a byline.
00:24:14
Okay. So we're going to start in 1861, and a 19-year-old woman named Matilda Schurer
00:24:22
is working as an artificial flower maker for a man named Mr. Bergeron in central London.
00:24:28
So artificial flowers, I guess, were like all the rage. They were on hats and they were on head pieces and headdresses that women wore because, you know, back then hats were. There's way more hats and gloves in the mix.
00:24:42
Yes. Proper ladies wear hats. proper ladies you were required to. You had to have all those accoutrements. So Matilda's duties
00:24:51
include arranging the flowers and leaves to look their most realistic, as well as painting the
00:24:56
arrangements with various colors, including a very vibrant green that had very recently become
00:25:03
popular throughout Great Britain. So Matilda does her job diligently with thorough attention to
00:25:09
detail, hand painting these flowers and then hand arranging these flowers. But by fall of 1861, she begins to fall ill and her symptoms are not normal.
00:25:23
So her finger, her fingernails turn green. Then the whites of her eyes turn bright green.
00:25:29
No. Mm hmm. She also begins vomiting green liquid. What? And then when she goes to see her doctor, she admits to him that her vision is completely green.
00:25:43
Everything she sees has has become green. Holy shit. So as the doctor tries to diagnose this problem, Matilda's illness progresses.
00:25:52
She starts convulsing every few minutes and filming at the eyes, mouth and nose.
00:25:57
Filming at the eyes. I don't know. I don't know. Well, but you know what? I would normally argue that.
00:26:03
Yeah. but if her eyes are green yeah we don't know what's going on no so i won't argue we are not
00:26:10
victorian doctors no uh but she's filming at the mouth and nose and something horrible is happening
00:26:16
in her eyes and on november 20th 1861 matilda dies so when the autopsies performed on her it's
00:26:25
revealed that she's been poisoned with massive amounts of arsenic to the point where it has
00:26:31
saturated her stomach, her liver, and her lungs. It doesn't take long to figure out where the
00:26:36
arsenic exposure occurred. The green dye she's been using to make the artificial bouquets look
00:26:41
realistic with is made of a deadly combination of copper and arsenic trioxide, aka white arsenic.
00:26:50
So basically, we'll talk about how this dye got invented. In 1778, a Swedish chemist named Carl
00:26:58
Scheel, formulates a new green pigment made from copper arsenate, which is the copper and the
00:27:05
arsenic trioxide. And it's officially dubbed Scheel's Green, and it's hailed for its beauty
00:27:10
and its relatively low production cost. So in 1814, a manufacturing company in Schweinfurt,
00:27:18
Germany, named the Wilhelm Dye and White Lead Company, becomes the first to mass-produce
00:27:25
Shields green dye for use in clothing. So the resulting garments are dyed a rich, vibrant
00:27:31
emerald green, and these dresses and gowns become fast favorites for the women of Great Britain's
00:27:37
high society. So what's interesting about this is part of the reason these green dresses got
00:27:44
so popular was because it had very recently happened that they had switched to gas lighting,
00:27:50
indoor gas lighting. So instead of the usual dim candle lighting at night, that people would go to
00:27:58
dinner parties or balls or whatever, and it would all be candlelight. Now it's gas lighting. And so
00:28:05
there's, you know, it's much brighter in the room. And so anybody wearing a Shields green dyed gown
00:28:12
has an even more eye catching and dazzling kind of effect on the room. So this becomes like all the
00:28:19
rage. So women are buying these new boulder dyed gowns whenever they can. And this green color
00:28:26
becomes so popular that people start using the dye in wallpaper, on carpets, in home decor,
00:28:32
and of course, in these artificial flowers. And soon Victorian Britain becomes bathed in
00:28:39
shields green. But it isn't long before the dangers of wearing these garments show themselves.
00:28:45
So the earliest known report of suspicion about the green dye emerges in 1839 when a German chemist named Leopold Gmelian notices a mouse-like odor coming from rooms decorated with green wallpaper.
00:29:03
Did you just say mouse-like odor? Mouse-like odor. Eee! Yeah. So he's like, there's this is a very distinctive smell that like I'm sure, you know, rat catchers or vermin hunters or whatever.
00:29:19
There's like a very certain smell. And he could smell that with this green wallpaper because the, you know, the the dresses were really popular for the upper class.
00:29:29
But then suddenly you could buy wallpaper in the Shields green color and put it in your house no matter where you lived around London town.
00:29:39
But this chemist is like, this don't smell right. And this isn't good. So he believes the odor is caused by dimethyl arsenic acid contained in the wallpaper.
00:29:49
And he expresses his concerns about that acid presence to a local paper in Germany The paper publishes Gamelion warning but it does not affect the production of that wallpaper And then just a while later four
00:30:05
kids in the working class district of Limehouse in London make the news for mysteriously coming down with
00:30:10
sore throats and having trouble breathing. When the doctors diagnose them as having diphtheria,
00:30:17
the kids' families don't understand how they would have gotten it because the disease, which is normally
00:30:22
highly contagious, hasn't spread to anyone else in the neighborhood. No, no one has heard of anyone around having it. And yet
00:30:30
suddenly all four kids have diphtheria. But as the children are recovering, a public health officer
00:30:37
named Henry Letheby examines their bedrooms and finds all of their bedrooms have the green
00:30:44
wallpaper inside. So when he tests the paper in each room, he finds that it contains three grains
00:30:51
of arsenic per square foot. So the grains is like the way they measure arsenic. And it's like a grain per blah, blah, blah,
00:30:58
milligrams or whatever. I cut that part out because it's so specific and hard to relate to.
00:31:05
But essentially, three grains of arsenic per square foot of wallpaper is enough to kill a child,
00:31:13
one child of this children's size and age. So the evidence against the poisonous wallpaper
00:31:20
starts to mount in the winter of 1856 when a couple and their pet parrot start feeling weak.
00:31:28
The couple has sore throats, eye swelling, terrible headaches anytime they're inside the home. But then
00:31:34
when they leave and go take in the sea air and go for a walk, all of their symptoms go away.
00:31:41
So they realize the wallpaper is to blame and they remove it. And within a week,
00:31:46
all of their symptoms go away. Damn. And because it's winter, they probably had all their windows closed and were indoors a lot more. Right.
00:31:52
Yep. And the heat probably and like stuff pulling out. You're just like poison sitting in the wallpaper, just like whatever might you.
00:32:00
Somebody puts on some water to boil. Yeah. And it's drawing stuff out of the air.
00:32:04
I mean, it's horrifying. Yeah. Also, imagine there's four kids. How much kids touch the wall? Oh, right. Like, especially if they're if they just put up the wallpapers like that's new.
00:32:16
No, don't touch it. They would be all over that. Totally. So as for this green dyed clothing, the artificial flower wreaths worn as ladies' headdresses are starting to leave rashes and even scabby sores on the heads of some of the women who are wearing them.
00:32:32
Dresses, shoes, and gloves sometimes are having the same effect, causing blistering sores and even hair loss.
00:32:39
In some cases, the green dyed clothing has been treated and sealed so that the arsenic is not bleeding out onto the skin and the customer doesn't experience any poisoning symptoms.
00:32:50
But in other cases, when the green dye is just brushed or dusted on with no sealant, the buyer is fully exposed to the poison.
00:32:59
So the people who are most severely affected, though, of course, are the laborers who are making these pieces and this clothing.
00:33:07
In addition to the blistering, scabby, sores, and the ulcers, the powder form of arsenic is so fine that when coating an object with it, the laborers are unwittingly inhaling it as they're coating it.
00:33:21
Or if their hands are covered in the dye, when they go to eat their lunches, they wind up ingesting arsenic, and then they have internal as well as external poisoning.
00:33:31
And for male workers preparing the dye using the restroom, then it's on their hands.
00:33:39
They go to urinate. The sores appear on their genitals and their inner thighs. They're misdiagnosed with syphilis.
00:33:45
They're not treated properly. That can lead to gangrene. And recovery can take up to six weeks of bed rest at a hospital or lead to death, especially if you can't afford to be in a hospital for six weeks.
00:33:57
and then the women who use the dye to paint garments or um the artificial flower arrangements
00:34:04
experience a wide variety of terrible symptoms themselves they include feeling a lack of appetite
00:34:09
as well as nausea um diarrhea anemia pallor in and consistent headaches that made them feel as
00:34:17
if their temples were being pressed in a vice oh god that was a quote from the jezebel article
00:34:23
Yeah. Horrifying. The telltale sign of arsenic contact on the skin is the sores. And as they
00:34:30
worsen, they become open wounds that allow more arsenic to get into the bloodstream of the
00:34:36
laborers. More and more workers start experiencing symptoms like hair loss, headaches, vomiting,
00:34:42
blood, and liver and kidney failure. At one London textile workshop, a young girl quits her job after
00:34:48
conditions there grow worse and worse. The women she works alongside are always bleeding from their
00:34:54
open sores. And she herself has handled the green dye so much that her face has become,
00:35:00
quote, one mass of sores. And it's caused her to nearly go blind. Holy shit. Yeah. So arsenic is cheap and it's easily accessible substance used for many things
00:35:14
besides green dye. And people are very aware of its poisonous properties because it's commonly
00:35:19
used as rat poison in many British households. It's very common to just have a box of arsenic
00:35:25
around. But it's also used for ingestible items like food, beer, and medicine. It's so accessible that any child can go buy it at their local pharmacy over the counter.
00:35:36
Right. So it's just kind of around. Yeah. So as the side effects of the green arsenic based dyes become apparent, countries like Scandinavia, France and Germany ban the arsenic containing dyes.
00:35:50
Great Britain passes a couple of regulations to limit the amount of arsenic an individual can buy But these initiatives only apply to private citizens There no regulations of course that restrict large scale arsenic usage for commercial industries in Great Britain So
00:36:09
the rules are only for the small guy that they're not the ones responsible for everybody being
00:36:15
poisoned. Right. Despite the news of poisoning throughout Great Britain, which one British doctor
00:36:20
Arthur Hill Hassel calls wretched in the extreme. Heads of manufacturing companies argue that
00:36:27
there's no reason to be concerned about the dyes. Their businesses are booming, and as long as their
00:36:31
profits are high, they'll fight tooth and nail to keep green-dyed products on the market.
00:36:37
A famed designer, William Morris, goes so far as to say, quote, as to the arsenic scare,
00:36:42
a greater folly is hardly possible to imagine. The doctors were bitten as people bitten by witch
00:36:49
fever. Damn. Denial. Yep. That's flat denial. Yep. So it's also easy for Great Britain to not
00:36:57
take action over these deadly arsenic dyed products because arsenic is one of the many
00:37:02
poisons that consumers were concerned about in this era. Of course, we've all heard of the lead
00:37:09
based makeup that damages the nerves in women's wrists, disabling them from being able to raise
00:37:16
their hands. So we've right. We've all heard about that where it's like the makeup that,
00:37:21
you know, like people were piling on and then the scabs were making them need to put on more makeup.
00:37:27
Horrifying hair combs made of celluloid that would explode when it got too hot. What? Yeah, I never heard of that one. No. Aniline dyed socks that caused swelling in men's feet
00:37:41
and bladder cancer in the laborers who made the socks. Oh, my God. And most notably, there's mercury poisoning caused by men's hats.
00:37:51
Hence the Alice in Wonderland character, the Mad Hatter. That's actually based on facts.
00:37:57
So the felt hats commonly worn by men back in Victorian times are primarily made of rabbit fur.
00:38:03
And in order to slick the fur down and hold the hat together, the hatters would brush the fur with mercury.
00:38:09
And the lining of the finished hats usually prevented the wearers from experiencing any negative side effects.
00:38:16
But the hat makers had no such protection. So when mercury poisoning sets in, the first sign is usually neuromotor issues.
00:38:24
So longtime hatters would lose control of their motor skills and very often tremble.
00:38:30
This symptom becomes so common in the American town of Danbury, Connecticut, which was known for its hat making,
00:38:36
that tremor afflicted hatters are said to have had the Danbury shakes. Fuck, that's terrible.
00:38:45
And the next most common side effect of mercury poisoning is extreme paranoia. Alison Matthews David, who wrote the book Fashion Victims, The Dangers of Dress, Past and Present,
00:38:56
says that when doctors examined these poison hatters, the hatters began to think that they were being observed
00:39:02
and they would throw down their tools, get angry and have outbursts. Like they would just freak out when doctors would come and say something is going something wrong.
00:39:11
Oh, my God. As the illness progresses with increased exposure to mercury, the hatters would start experiencing cardiorespiratory issues.
00:39:20
They would lose their teeth and sometimes their lives. But because the demand for fashionable hats remain high, the mercury use continues.
00:39:28
The combination of capitalist greed and the fact that the wealthy men actually wearing the hats aren't really affected leaves the lower class laborers desperate for money to accept the known dangers of the job and continue exposing themselves to the mercury.
00:39:44
What ultimately saves more laborers from suffering this fate isn't government or legal regulation, as mercury use for these products is never banned in England.
00:39:56
Instead, it's the simple fact that wearing felt hats goes out of style. And that doesn't really happen until the 60s.
00:40:05
Oh, my God. Mad hatters, man. Mad hatters, right? Okay, so back to the death of Matilda Shore in 1861.
00:40:13
So once this young 19 year old girl dies and very horribly and violently with such horrible side effects, an organization called the Lady Sanitary Association decides to fight against the harsh working conditions that have been harming these laborers and green dye product consumers for so long.
00:40:33
One of the association members, a Miss Nicholson, has already been following similar cases at other businesses for a while.
00:40:42
She even previously published a piece about workshops where she witnessed young girls who looked half starved, working long hours with their hands wrapped in bloodied bandages.
00:40:52
Upon closer inspection of the skin, it appeared to Miss Nicholson that many of these girls had been suffering from some cutaneous disease, leaving them riddled with open sores.
00:41:02
So the members of the Ladies Sanitary Association hire a highly regarded analytical chemist named Dr. A.W. Hoffman to test the artificial flower and leaf arrangements for toxin levels at that specific place where Matilda worked.
00:41:19
And they hope his report might bolster their case for safer working conditions. The doctor's findings are alarming.
00:41:25
For scale, so just four or five grains of arsenic is considered lethal for the average adult.
00:41:33
Dr. Hoffman finds that the typical headdress containing artificial flowers dyed with shields green dye contains about 80 grains of arsenic.
00:41:42
That's enough to kill 20 people. Holy fuck. and a full gown using roughly 20 yards of green dyed fabric contains about 900 grains of arsenic That too many It so poisonous It like a poisonous dress It so crazy and
00:42:05
horrifying. So Dr. Hoffman publishes these findings in a London Times article entitled
00:42:10
The Dance of Death. And one week after the article's publication, the British Medical Journal
00:42:16
publishes its own piece recounting Dr. Hoffman's conclusions and echoing his concerns. So finally,
00:42:22
like the medical association is behind this. But of course, it takes some nosy bossy ladies at the ladies sanitary association to be like,
00:42:33
enough already. As they put it, based on Dr. Hoffman's findings, a woman wearing one of these dresses, quote,
00:42:40
carries in her skirts poison enough to slay the whole of the admirers she may meet within
00:42:46
half a dozen ballrooms. Damn. But here's what I would like to say to that. The woman is not the maker of those motherfucking skirts.
00:42:55
So she's not killing anybody in those ballrooms. That's right. These fucking companies who know full well that they're using arsenic and they're the ones killing people are the ones killing people.
00:43:05
That's right. And she's dying as well as those motherfucking admirers, too. Yeah.
00:43:09
Let me just talk about her. How about the poisons on her? So let's not start talking about, oh, that slut that keeps going to all the different ballrooms.
00:43:17
Fuck you, man. as the news gets around about the dangerous and sometimes even fatal side effects of arsenic
00:43:25
dyes people begin to avoid these emerald green products that they once loved but not everybody
00:43:33
some take the stance that as long as they don't lick their wallpaper they won't be affected by
00:43:38
the poison that's like absolutely something my dad would say just don't touch it just don't lick it
00:43:43
But why are you looking wallpaper? And of course, there are women who don't want to give up their beautiful green garments.
00:43:51
And so they just decide to take the risk with each purchase. And one lady in 1871, for instance, who, quote, purchased a box of green colored gloves at a well-known and respectable house, end quote.
00:44:04
She develops chronic cuts and sores around her fingertips. She's completely stumped about the cause until arsenic salts are detected under her fingernails.
00:44:14
So these gloves, it turns out, were not dyed and sealed. They were just dusted with the green dye.
00:44:20
So she was completely exposed to that poison. So I think that anecdote is about how the rich people assume, oh, not my gloves, not my dyes.
00:44:29
Of course, they wouldn't do that to me. Right. By 1879, the perils of this green dye reach as high as Buckingham Palace. On one occasion, a foreign dignitary who is visiting the palace tells Queen Victoria that he's feeling sick after spending the night in his guest room. And it turns out it's decorated with green wallpaper. He survives. He turned out to be fine. And Queen Victoria has that wallpaper removed. Too sweet.
00:44:57
So now with Queen Victoria herself expressing concern over the dyes, more Brits start to take the horror stories seriously and the sale of green dyed items begins to decline.
00:45:08
But Parliament still fails to pass any sort of regulation that might stop or even slow the use of arsenic-based dye.
00:45:17
The British government's failure to act forces activists to spread awareness through the newspapers, urging the people of Great Britain not to buy these products, and even giving them tests they can run on their belongings at home to see if they contain arsenic.
00:45:31
The first of these tests is to burn strips of cloth or wallpaper. And if a garlic smell comes out of the smoke, that's a sign that arsenic is present.
00:45:42
Light it on fire and inhale it. And what does it smell like? Is there fucking solution?
00:45:48
Maybe somewhere in there it's like take it out into the alley or something. But yeah, it's basically like, yeah, let's get let's get, I don't know, 10 to 15 grains of arsenic on fire.
00:46:00
It's like, hey, does this smell like arsenic is essentially what they're fucking to say.
00:46:05
Right. The second way you can do it, you don't have to light it on fire. You can also dilute it with hydrochloric acid.
00:46:12
And if the item turns blue, there's arsenic present. I thought you were going to say, put it in your mouth and chew on it.
00:46:18
And if it's a mouse like taste. Oh, I can't get that out of my head, that visual.
00:46:25
At the same time, more manufacturing companies work on synthesizing new dye formulas to be made without arsenic.
00:46:34
Imagine. Can you imagine? And as these techniques improve, the quality of the colors that they produce are just as good, if not better, than the arsenic based greens that were so popular when they first arrived.
00:46:46
And Jay included some pictures. This is a picture of two skeletons at a ball, like a skeleton asking a skeleton to dance.
00:46:56
Hi, I can only see your nails. Oh. There we go. Oh, dear. That's eerie. And it says the arsenic waltz underneath it.
00:47:05
That's from Punch magazine. And then at the bottom, there's a wallpaper stamp that they had on a product that says guaranteed free from arsenic in the little sign for it.
00:47:16
Can you see that? Oh, my God. So that would be like, that's almost like your tag on your pillow that says don't remove under a threat of government infringement or whatever.
00:47:25
It's the same thing of like, no poison here. Don't worry. Right. In 1895, a law is finally passed that regulates the working conditions for any laborers who have to handle arsenic.
00:47:37
By this time, though, the arsenic based dye has been mostly phased out between people finally heeding the public warnings and not buying it, which then leads retailers to end sales of these products.
00:47:48
So, yeah, obviously just demand goes down and it goes away. But as for direct legislation banning the use of arsenic based dyes, Great Britain never passed such a ban.
00:47:59
Sure. Not once. Now, without the power of public newspapers, the will of activists and the sway of the consumers opting for safer products, arsenic based dyes would have never been eliminated.
00:48:11
And that is the crazy story of the deadly green arsenic dresses and wallpapers and assorted flower arrangements of Victorian England.
00:48:22
And that is why I love Victorian England. What a hell hole. Oh, my God. Just the smells, not only the mouse fucking smells.
00:48:35
And then the clothes are going to kill you. The clothes will kill you. The clothes will kill you.
00:48:40
Also, that was back when, say, if you were like middle class, maybe. And I'm, you know, again, I think we all know this about me, but I'm basing all of this on period pieces I've seen on Acorn TV.
00:48:52
Yeah. So I could completely be inaccurate about this. But you would get a dress like if you had a nice dress.
00:48:59
You would wear that one dress all the time. Totally. I was thinking the same thing.
00:49:03
Right. So it wasn't there is a good chance there are people who. It's like you that was your good going out dress.
00:49:11
Totally. Totally. It wasn't like it was in rotation. Yeah, exactly. You didn't have a closet full of clothes like us consumers of fast fashion do now.
00:49:21
If the whites of your eyes ever turn green. Oh, my God. Can you imagine how scary that would be?
00:49:27
Terrifying. And you're just trying to get your like three pence for the week or whatever.
00:49:33
Totally. Six shillings, please. Yeah. For some poison. Oh, my God. Hi, my eyes are green.
00:49:41
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00:51:45
Okay, so this week, my story, I think I've heard about it throughout the years. It was a cold case for more than 30 years.
00:51:53
And over the summer, when we were on break, I was doing my usual late night cold case news scrolling and found out that there has been an update on this one, a big one.
00:52:06
This is one of the most notorious cold cases in Albuquerque history, the murder of Caitlin Arquette.
00:52:11
So I got information from krqe.com by an article by Courtney Allen, a Rolling Stone article by Andrea Marks, realcrimes.com, the katearquette.com website, the Albuquerque Journal by Jolene Gutierrez Kruger, a BuzzFeed article by Tim Stello, koat.com by Maggie Krijuski, Wikipedia, of course, and the Reddit.
00:52:41
forum Unresolved Mysteries. So, okay. In June of 1989, 18-year-old Caitlin Arquette from
00:52:51
Albuquerque, New Mexico had just graduated from high school. She had a promising future.
00:52:57
She was a popular honor student and described by her sister as shy and bookish. And she had
00:53:03
been accepted to the University of New Mexico. And she planned to attend medical school one day.
00:53:08
So she was a manager at an import shop and had just moved into an apartment with her boyfriend of a year and a half.
00:53:16
I'm just going to say his first name. His name was Yoon. And she had met him at a coffee shop.
00:53:22
She told her parents he was just four years older than her, but he was actually eight years older than her, which was an age difference she knew her parents would disapprove of.
00:53:30
But they really liked him. He spent the holidays with them. You know, they were together for a year and a half, which is a long time, I think, for an 18 year old.
00:53:38
But the couple started having issues pretty quickly after moving in together. And six weeks
00:53:43
into moving in together, on July 16th, 1989, Caitlin goes to her mom, Lois's house and tells
00:53:51
her that she plans on breaking up with Yoon and asked her mom that if he called to lie to him about her whereabouts So that night was a Sunday She goes over to her friend house for dinner She leaves there at about 1045 heads back to her parents house
00:54:06
She's driving alone in her 1984 red tempo, Ford Tempo. And being a Sunday night, and it's also
00:54:14
raining, there's little traffic out. So just blocks from downtown Albuquerque at approximately 11pm,
00:54:21
she reaches an intersection. I think she stops. There's some weird information here. Just then another
00:54:27
car pulls up next to her and the occupant or occupants pull out a gun and begin shooting
00:54:33
at her car. One bullet enters the driver's side window shattering the window. A bullet enters Caitlin's left
00:54:40
temple and a second bullet punctures her cheek. I know. So having been shot her car then
00:54:47
drifts from the road approximately seven feet from where she had been shot and crashes into a light pole. So cut to shortly before midnight, Caitlin's mother,
00:54:57
Lois, is notified that her daughter's in the hospital. She rushes to her side thinking she
00:55:01
had just been in a car accident. But let me tell you a little bit about Lois. So Lois Duncan was born on April 28th, 1934. She's a bookworm from a young age and started
00:55:14
writing and submitting her stories to magazines at the age of 10. She sells her first story at
00:55:19
the age of 13. She dropped out of Duke University in 1953 to get married and start a family.
00:55:25
She then divorces, supports her three kids by writing. She then remarries a man named
00:55:31
Don Arquette and in total had five kids with Caitlin being the baby. Lois continues to write and publish magazine articles. She wrote over 300 articles published
00:55:42
in major magazines and then published her first novel, Love Songs for Joyce, in 1958.
00:55:49
She went on to write a bunch of books, do a bunch of badass things. She pivoted to writing young adult suspense novels, most notably I Know What You Did Last
00:55:58
Summer. Oh, wow. Yeah. And supernatural horror novel Summer of Fear, which was adapted into a movie directed by
00:56:06
Wes Craven in 1978. So she becomes this really popular YA suspense author and spends her life writing.
00:56:15
Essentially, she's an award winning, well-known pioneer of the genre. And she is dubbed the queen of teen thrillers.
00:56:24
Wow. Yeah. So when she arrives at the hospital and learns her daughter had actually been shot, not in a car accident,
00:56:30
she, of course, is immediately suspect of her, of Caitlin's boyfriend, whom she knew Caitlin planned on breaking up with that very day.
00:56:38
Obviously. So when the police go to the couple's apartment to question the boyfriend five hours after the shooting takes place, he at the time claims to be completely unaware that she was even in the hospital.
00:56:51
Hadn't heard from anyone, didn't know about it. He tells him he had been out with friends and he also showed the investigators a note that Caitlin had left him, basically apologizing for the fight and telling him that she would be home later, which totally contradicts what she told her mom.
00:57:08
He admits to investigators that he had argued, but said he didn't know that she had been planning on breaking up with him or that she even didn't plan on coming home that night.
00:57:16
Later, he joins her parents at the hospital, where just 24 hours after being shot, Caitlin Arquette passes away.
00:57:25
Six months after Caitlin's murder, investigators announced that she had been the victim of, quote, a random act of violence.
00:57:33
So in Lois's opinion, her daughter knew her killer. It was like clearly to her a targeted attack.
00:57:39
Why just randomly shoot at a loan at a girl on her own in a car? Right. You know, so then Lois starts looking into Caitlin's life.
00:57:51
She learns that two months before Caitlin's murder, Caitlin and her boyfriend had taken a trip to Southern California where they had allegedly become involved in a car insurance scam.
00:58:01
in which the boyfriend staged a car accident using a car that Caitlin had rented with Lois's credit card.
00:58:09
So this gets very speculative and also talks a lot about Vietnamese, like Vietnamese organized crime.
00:58:17
So to me, and Lois kind of hones in on this and it's, you know, got some tones of racism to it.
00:58:24
The accident was allegedly orchestrated by an organization of powerful members of Southern California's Vietnamese community.
00:58:32
There's a shady doctor who is apparently in on it, you know, with insurance claims.
00:58:37
There's a shady insurance adjuster. And in the end, Caitlin and her boyfriend are given fifteen hundred dollars for their part in the scam.
00:58:46
And they use that money to move in together into their apartment. So Lois believes that since she was breaking up with her boyfriend, the other Vietnamese gang members feared that she would go to police about this huge multimillion dollar scam they were running and that they silenced her.
00:59:03
Lois is convinced that Caitlin had been killed by a hired assassin because she knew too much about the criminal activities.
00:59:10
activities. And then five days after her death, her boyfriend attempts to take his own life by
00:59:16
stabbing himself in the stomach with a four inch knife. Oh, God, I know he survives. And when
00:59:21
investigators ask him about like why he did it, he said that he felt so much guilt over the fact
00:59:26
that he and Caitlin had fought that day or had been fighting. And if they hadn't been, she would
00:59:32
have never been out that night and out alone. And investigators also compared the note allegedly
00:59:38
left by Caitlin on the night of the murder to known samples of her handwriting. And the
00:59:44
investigator believes that the handwriting wasn't the same as Caitlin's. Doesn't matter
00:59:50
though Albuquerque police still believe that the boyfriend didn do it And then Vietnamese gang were not involved at all And they stick to their belief that the murder was a random act of violence But they have no leads And then six months after the murder
01:00:05
a man named Robert Garcia is brought to authorities after they're given a tip by an informant who
01:00:11
names this man. He's interrogated for two hours and then tells investigators that he'd been in a
01:00:17
car with three friends on the night of Caitlin's murder. And then he claims that one of his friends
01:00:22
who he was in the car with shot a woman in her car on a dare. Police arrest Robert Garcia and
01:00:28
the two friends he named based on this confession. So based on Robert's confession, three men are
01:00:34
arrested and they find out one of the men had recently sold his car. They connected to an
01:00:40
eyewitness who had seen one of the men chasing a young woman in her car in the night of Caitlin's
01:00:44
murder an hour before it happened. But essentially, authorities discover that the dude who confessed,
01:00:51
who said he was there that night had been in jail on the night of Caitlin's murder.
01:00:56
So, yeah, so it wasn't it was a false confession. None of them were there. They all these other things fall apart, like the gun he says they use couldn't have been
01:01:04
used. It was broken. The case goes back to being cold after all the charges are dropped.
01:01:11
So critical of law enforcement's progress, Lois spends decades investigating a case with
01:01:18
her family. She enlists the help of psychics and also a private investigator named Patricia Caristo.
01:01:27
So Patricia, Pat, discovers that Caitlin's car had damage to the left rear bumper and side panel.
01:01:33
So it had hit the pole in the front, but also had damage to the back, which led Pat to believe that it had been hit by at least one other car before it crashed, which are details police never released to the public.
01:01:48
Lois even suspects there's a police cover up and there's all this information about that.
01:01:52
But it's not that far fetched because the Albuquerque PD does have some shady shit going on back then, which included them surveilling attorneys who were suing the department and also the reporters who investigated those claims.
01:02:07
So they're doing some weird undercover corrupt shit. When the American Civil Liberties Union tries to get the police department to hand over the files about these cases and about these people being surveilled, the police department burns the fucking files.
01:02:23
Oh, yeah. That's an option. Yeah, that's one. They don't exist because we burn them.
01:02:29
We burn them. Also, another police officer is convicted of murder and bank robbery.
01:02:35
Oh, yeah. All right. So and I mean, there's like decades of police corruption we could talk about in Albuquerque, but we're not going to have alleged.
01:02:46
But it is alleged. And also it just immediately put me back to the story. I think it was like a month or two ago that I did where the the cops in this story that took the false confession from the guy were also bank robbers.
01:03:01
That's right. Like in their free time. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Twist. mm-hmm um okay this is horrible at the time new mexico had a 15 year statute of limitations
01:03:13
for murder 15 years 15 years so if you can skedaddle yourself for 15 years after your
01:03:21
murder you're off the hook that sounds like it's leftover from the wild west days
01:03:26
doesn't it it sure never got updated yeah oops and at the time the albuquerque police department
01:03:33
cites this reason as the reason they they're not going to further investigate Caitlin's cold case.
01:03:39
In 1999, Detective Don Mayhew of the cold case unit told Jolene Gutierrez Kruger,
01:03:45
the the the investigative reporter that he considered the case closed. He said, quote, we're not going to look at it.
01:03:54
Oh, OK. Yeah, that's that's that then. Yeah. They just think it was a fucking random shooting.
01:04:01
And at the time. Sorry, go ahead. No, I was just going to say that's a heartbreaker, because usually when we talk about cold case detectives, they're the ones that are interested in opening things back up and getting their hands dirty.
01:04:12
Exactly. That was a bit of a like, oh, they usually that's not usually the person that says that.
01:04:19
That's right. That's right. They're like the dogged ones. Right. Well, especially because I think in Albuquerque was a pretty lawless or was a pretty dangerous city at the time.
01:04:29
So, you know, it's the cold case detectives who look at the old ones and have time to concentrate on them because there's so much crime going on that the current investigators don't have time to look into it.
01:04:39
Whatever, whatever. Right. OK, so another nod towards Lois's police cover up theory are the facts regarding how the scene was initially handled.
01:04:49
So the first officer on the scene was a violent crimes detective who happened to be passing by the scene at the time. He was off duty. His name was Ronald Merriman. Pulls up to the scene and had seen the car accident. And there was another car there at the time, a Volkswagen Beetle. So he assumed it was just a regular car accident.
01:05:12
it. So he calls in the scene as an accident with no injuries. When he when he pulls up and sees that
01:05:19
her car had there was like bullet holes in the car and a bloodied girl in the front seat, he
01:05:25
doesn't change that call in. He also lets the witness and the VW bug who's at the scene, he
01:05:33
lets him leave only getting his name and phone number, which the phone number turned out to be
01:05:38
fake. And then he and the second officer at the scene fucking leave. Everyone, of course, has a
01:05:45
different story. But the ambulance drivers who showed up in an affidavit say that they fucking
01:05:51
showed up and there was nobody there That insane It insane They left a girl dying in the front seat of this car So after her daughter death Lois begins writing children picture books saying she couldn write about young women in life threatening situations anymore after her daughter death
01:06:09
In 1992, she puts out a book called Who Killed My Daughter, a nonfiction account of her daughter's unsolved murder, and then follows it up in 2013 with a book called One to the Wolves, which has a forward by Ann Rule.
01:06:22
on June 15th, 2016, sadly, at the age of 82, Lois Duncan dies in her home in Florida of natural
01:06:30
causes. Her husband notes that she had suffered a series of strokes in the years prior, and she
01:06:35
never got to find out who killed her daughter, her youngest daughter. And in July of this year,
01:06:43
so just a couple months ago, 32 years after the murder of Caitlin Arquette, police bring in a 53
01:06:50
year old ex-convict named Paul Apodaca, he had been picked up on parole violations and tells
01:06:56
police that he had information on, quote, murders from a long time ago and wanted to talk about them.
01:07:03
And that's when he begins to confess, not just to Caitlin's murder, but to two others from the
01:07:08
same time period, as well as a series of rapes that he committed in the early 90s.
01:07:14
Oh, my God. I know. The first murder was of 21-year-old Althea Oakley, a University of New Mexico student who he followed and fatally stabbed to death in June of 1988 as she walked home from a party near the university.
01:07:30
He also confessed to the murder of a 13-year-old girl in 1988 who he shot while she walked with a friend.
01:07:37
Her name was just released a couple weeks ago as Stella Gonzalez. I know he confessed to several rapes that took place in the early 90s and he confessed to the shooting death of Caitlin Arquette.
01:07:50
He was the man on the scene that violent crimes detective Ronald Merriman got a name, a false phone number four, which detectives never, ever fucking questioned for 32 years that the case was called.
01:08:04
So he's in the Volkswagen. Yep. Holy shit. shit. Then in his early 20s, he had been driving a primer gray Volkswagen Beetle on the night of
01:08:13
the murder, which was mentioned as being seen by witnesses throughout the investigation.
01:08:18
There's so many little details about this that it's hard to name everything. And, you know,
01:08:23
every article has some new thing. But had the investigators looked into this piece of shit,
01:08:30
the first guy on the fucking scene, they would have found that he had multiple convictions
01:08:35
at the time already had a history of violent crimes against women and girls, and that throughout the 80s, he was charged with committing multiple violent attacks against women.
01:08:47
And if the cold case detectives who later investigated the murder looked into him,
01:08:51
they would have found that a few years after Caitlin's murder, he was convicted of raping his 14-year-old stepsister.
01:08:59
Oh, my God. And when he tried to give a reason for why he did it, He said he did it so he could be in prison with his brother who was serving 45 years for murder.
01:09:11
So just completely heartless and disgusting. And allegedly, Patricia, remember Pat, the private investigator, had focused on Apodaca as a suspect.
01:09:22
She had even located him in prison for the rape that he had committed and interviewed him in jail in 1995.
01:09:29
and Apodaca was mentioned 26 times in Lois' book about her daughter's murder so they always suspected
01:09:37
him. Pat had given the Albuquerque PD like a 75 page book of her findings definitely focused on Apodaca and
01:09:48
they never heard back from the PD about it. They probably burned it. They probably burned it.
01:09:57
Just as of a couple weeks ago Apodaca has only been charged with murder in the first degree of Althea Oakley's murder.
01:10:06
He stated that he chose his victims randomly as victims of opportunity. But hopefully more charges will be pending.
01:10:16
Caitlin's sister Carrie told KRQE.com's Courtney Allen that Caitlin's death shattered her family.
01:10:22
She said, quote, when Paul Apodaca shot my sister, he murdered my family. And she actually became a criminologist and she works in Denver now and says that she got into the profession largely because of her sister's death.
01:10:35
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Lois Duncan, before her death, also founded a research center to help investigate cold cases, which later became the nonprofit resource center for victims of violent deaths, whose mission is, quote, to help the survivors and co-victims of homicide deal with the aftermath of a violent death.
01:10:54
of her mother, Carrie said, she's here and she is looking down. And that is the longtime cold case now solved of Caitlin Arquette.
01:11:06
Holy shit. I know, right? I mean, thank God it's solved. But what a horrible mishandling and bunch of bullshit that what a nightmare.
01:11:22
Yeah. And what a disappointment that it's only solved because this piece of shit confessed.
01:11:26
Yeah. It was right there for them if they had interviewed him for a couple hours and had gotten just his statement on fucking on record and then looked at his past, which had violence against women.
01:11:40
Yeah. No, he didn't just have like a record or rap sheet. Yeah. But that would have been it should have been he if they had looked it up, that would have been a humongous red flag of this is not just your average Joe on this scene. No, I just don't. I want I wish there was video for.
01:12:00
footage of like how i just don't understand how that detective came upon a scene like that
01:12:05
and just kind of like oh are you leaving oh that's cool or whatever right i mean and then
01:12:10
then comes upon the bleeding dying girl or no i think before that before that was like no you can
01:12:20
go i got your info you can go no you take them directly to the fucking station it's like police
01:12:25
work 101. I mean, it's just, yeah. Yeah. It's, that's horrifying. It's horrifying. It's horrifying.
01:12:33
And they, you know, are saying he's a serial killer and looking into and serial rapist and
01:12:38
looking into any connections he might have with more cases. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Rough one. I love a
01:12:47
solved old cold case. Absolutely. Well, maybe we should do a couple of fucking harays to end on a
01:12:53
positive note. All right. My first one is from the Gmail and it's the subject line is 15 year
01:13:02
overnight success. It says, hi, ladies. After over a decade of winging it and faking it until
01:13:08
I made it, I realize I'm no longer faking. I've quadrupled the size of my company this year,
01:13:14
spanning from East Coast to West and show no signs of stopping. I wanted to write in in case
01:13:20
There's others that need to be reminded to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
01:13:25
Best, Emily. Amazing. I love it. I love it. 15 year overnight success. That's exactly how it goes.
01:13:34
I love that. You're going to be somewhere in 15 years. So you might as well work your ass off to get where you want to be.
01:13:39
This is from Twitter from Megan Lee. My fucking hurry is that I went back to school for my second bachelor's degree after being a stay at home mom for the past.
01:13:50
decade. Just finished my first term and I got all A's. Wow. Yay. How do you do that?
01:13:57
How do you get one bachelor degree at one fucking two? How do you get one A? This is from Twitter.
01:14:05
It from Camille at CHR underscore CAM And it just says to me I saw my first in real life sinkhole And I just had to tell you about it Hashtag fucking hooray
01:14:23
That is special. Nothing like a sinkhole in real life. I'm proud. So deep. So deep.
01:14:28
I'm proud of you, Karen, for finding something you love and making people tell you about it.
01:14:32
I think it's I have to say it's one of the most satisfying things about this show for me is when you and I sit here and we're just racking our brains trying to be interesting or tell some sort of anecdote, something to fill the air.
01:14:47
And then those are the things where I just go, oh, I, I always think like this, like I can tell you what happened in the half an hour that led up before my friend Lauren.
01:15:00
I went to look at that sinkhole in San Francisco. I know everything about that day because it was so such a massive experience and such a like a like an unbelievable like like feeling, which I understand some people get when they're like, I went to see the Rolling Stones in real life or whatever.
01:15:20
And that's how I feel there. It's like for me, this sidewalk was 30 feet in the ground.
01:15:28
That's the Mick Jagger of Karen. That's my Mick Jagger. For real. And now other people understand. Like, you got to slap your eyes on it to really appreciate it.
01:15:38
Slap your eyes on it. That's disgusting. All right. Here's the one from the email.
01:15:42
Hello. My fucking hooray is this. After two plus years of paperwork and waiting, I finally had top surgery and I love my sexy new body.
01:15:52
And by sexy, I mean my flat chested pandemic belly body. Even though I now have the physique of a well fed four year old, I couldn't be happier.
01:16:02
So hooray and cheers to no tits. Abby from Baltimore. Congratulations, Abby. Abby, you did it.
01:16:11
That's awesome. That's awesome. That's great. Yeah. So much to celebrate. If you have a fucking hooray little or big you can have you can have gotten all A haven gone back to school You can you can just witness a sinkhole in real life for anything and everything in in between that right hear about it we love it we happy for you guys fucking hooray um thanks for listening
01:16:37
once again and guess what else it's the holiday season you know when i first heard a christmas song over the weekend i got legit excited yeah that's i need
01:16:52
it yeah we need it this year yeah that's great there's a there's a way you know sometimes um
01:16:59
the holiday season immediately makes you think of like what you have to do or what you can't do or
01:17:05
what you should do or blah blah blah yeah i think this year especially because this 2021
01:17:10
has been hard it has been hard for everybody in all different ways all different contexts
01:17:18
but genuinely human for the human experience we don't even understand how fucked up we are
01:17:25
because of how fucked up we are from zoom alone um so this holiday season take care of yourself
01:17:34
be your own santa make sure you're okay do the things you can do and do not fucking engage with
01:17:42
the shit you can't deal with because you don't deserve it you deserve to have a nice holiday
01:17:46
season, whatever that means for you personally. And I love that. So that's a really great message.
01:17:52
Definitely. Definitely. And stay safe out there, everyone. Oh, and also stay sexy.
01:17:58
And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Oh, Dottie, why are you sitting down right now?
01:18:03
Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an Exactly Right production. Our producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton.
01:18:12
Associate producer, Alejandra Keck. engineer and mixer Steven Ray Morris researchers
01:18:17
Jay Elias and Haley Gray send us your hometowns and your fucking hoorays at myfavoritemurder
01:18:23
at gmail.com and follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at myfavoritemurder and Twitter
01:18:28
at myfavmurder and for more information about this podcast or live shows merch or to join the fan cult
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go to myfavoritemurder.com rate, review, and subscribe If audiobooks are your thing or if you been meaning to listen to more of them you should check out a podcast called Earsay
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