And That's Why We Drink - E191 Modern Trash and the Pantsless Burrito

Episode Date: October 4, 2020

Episode 191 is coming in hot, just like the luchador in Christine's story today! But first Em takes us on a bloodthirsty journey through the story of Mercy Lena Brown aka the last American vampire. Then Christine covers the wild tale of luchador and grandma murderer Juana Barraza. And we've decided to start our own wrestling tag-team. From now on, we shall be known as The Red Surfer, The Burrito Without Pants and Spicy Hair... and that's why we drink!Please consider supporting the companies that support us!Take control of acne, dark spots, breakouts or whatever your unique concerns may be with a powerful skincare treatment made for YOU today! Go to curology.com/drink for a free 30-day trial, just pay for shipping and handling! See Curology.com for all the details.Check out all the amazing shoes and bags available right now at rothys.com/DRINK. Style and sustainability meet to create your new favorites!Right now, our listeners get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage AND a digital scale without any long-term commitment. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the top of the homepage and type in DRINK.

welcome to our second episode i'm ever ever uh the second episode that i'm sitting with my hair like you know how you guys like to listen backwards we like to record backwards and actually we've tricked you this is only episode two you know how when you play led zeppelin backwards and it's like demonic yeah that's what that sounded like if someone plays something if they play us backwards what do you think uh the track sounds like we've literally had this oh i love lemon what does that sound backwards because that's gonna be frightening oh um welcome it is a nice smoky day in california our eyes are stinging and i am i'm the unsub today i'm wearing my criminal mind sweatshirt i like your big hoops thank you i've been watching a lot of criminal minds they're trying

to get in character you know i like your your ensemble today is different than what you're what you're usually it's only this headband i guarantee you i don't know what it is the only thing i've changed this is meant as a compliment you're not gonna take it that way but i don't care it's meant as a compliment you look like classy trash thanks you look like you look like like what's the word that i'm thinking it looks cool clashy trashy no it's meant as a compliment i promise it look you look like like i could not pull that off. Well, I did move back to the Midwest and, you know, back to my roots. So maybe I'm pulling. I mean, really classy trash really was like the least, like, I'm glad I prefaced it first.

You're from Virginia and I'm from Ohio. We both get it. I get it. No, you look really, I'm very like, I can't stop looking at you. What's happening? When we were recording the last, apparently I'm into classy trash. Actually, we're learning a lot about you and your face. it's got to be something with the headband i think it's the hoops and the headband these are also uh we're like 5.99 at claire's so i'm pretty sure i'm really actually you just look like someone at a barbecue who like is really like comfortable with yourself

and that's like but it's also i've never ever ever been called comfortable with myself so this is a new i don't know what's going on the german kid who tried to be emo couldn't cut it i'm gonna think of the phrase later and then i'll be like that's what you're gonna text me that specific word i'll text you in like nine years i appreciate it i take it as a compliment um i do truly i promise you you've never been classy anything so i mean no one's more fashionable than this i was gonna say you look also that you're i understand if you feel jealous about my looks i think you're just trying to like overcome and say make me feel better because we know who's who's the upper hand in this scenario i'm still wearing their hair up in this lovely situation mushroom situation before we started recording i said christine it's called fashion never heard of it and i literally went i haven't thanks for asking look at me i'm gonna find that

because you were reminding me of someone you're giving off very specific energy today i'm gonna find that person and i'm gonna send you the picture and that person by the way is beautiful and you're gonna be like oh shit that's what i look like is it gonna be me what if it's like yourself you're like see i'm just looking in a mirror um what if it just turned out that you were really attracted to yourself and you were like i see you in me and that's why i'm so attracted to you know what i'm saying you know it would be convenient yeah um because i walk with me every day you know what i'm saying it's like something my mother would do where i like took a photo and she's like you look so great and i'm like thanks and she's like

you look just like me when i was like wait you're just complimenting yourself you know what i mean i think it's some i don't know it's like maybe again it's like the 60s thing of like this and the big hoops maybe you're helping that like but you're bringing it to a modern time yeah like it's a little modern trash who am i anyway take me out i wanted to say something after all of that elsa freeze i had something to say you've put me on a pedestal i just feel so bad someone's gonna be like wow classy trash is the shittiest thing to say oh for you for me yes do you really congratulations on being verified on twitter i'm so so bad for you happy for you i feel so bad for you i really i don't don't. This is like not a joke, folks. It's happened again.

It's happened again. If you thought Christine's world couldn't come tumbling down any further, it has once more. I was kicked while I was down by the social media gods. We, I still have not been able to get verified on Instagram. And a lot of people are throwing conspiracy around, theories around, which is so much fun for me to read.

Cause I'm like, maybe they're right, honestly. At this point, like i know like people like made jokes and stuff but now that i'm also verified on twitter and you haven't been verified on either now i'm also on board like something's wrong something's up because here's what's wrong it's because on instagram i'm like maybe there was a hold up with my submission or my account or something the fact that now it's on twitter which is a completely different company i don't even remember and the podcast and you got verified the same day on twitter and i you and i are both in the bio of the podcast so you and i were both in there and i just was like and we have the same amount of followers like there's no reason you have to be blacklisted on something

something right you have to like either i fucked something up which is entirely possible but i don't know what but also like here's the thing like and this is not going to make you feel any better um classy trash but i i didn't even ever once apply to there no but that's what it is because remember we were talking about i was saying like oh they're reopening twitter verification like i couldn't figure out how to do it no no like they're doing it like they're doing it on there and now for verified accounts they're like they did this for wine and Crime because remember Wine and Crime was like, we didn't submit. We just got verified. And all three hosts got verified when their podcast got verified.

And I was like, great. So when you would think by association, I would also be blacklisted then. You'd think, wouldn't you? I have no idea what's going on. I don't either. And it's almost like comical at this point. I kind of wish like even if you didn't get verified, I would want to i would sleep easier knowing why i just want to know why i kind of want to i kind of do and i kind of don't because i'm like now i feel like actually worried

i did something they're threatened by you because you're so pretty with your yeah yeah yeah i knew there was a reason you were trying to compliment me anyway point being i'm still very happy for you because i know how badly you want to be verified on Twitter. I have I have said like I felt I literally have no leg to stand on. But like very selfishly speaking, I like no leg to stand on compared to like you right now. Would you have me or me? My no legs. I'm on the ground being kicked. But I have been like if I'm verified on one, it feels off kilter to not be verified on the other.

So I have on my own very much wanted to be verified on twitter for a while now but i also knew like i really like shouldn't be talking about that considering like you should at least get instagram first and then we can both fight twitter together you know i'm i'm very happy for you i'm very happy for the podcast whatever i mean at this point it's like i'm just uh kind of laughing at it i'm happy but i'm happy for myself but at the same time it's like so bittersweet because i'm like i don't really want to jump up and down for joy no i want you to be happy but i i want you to be like i want you to be happy but i'm also a side eyeing you like but you better not marry someone else after my demise oh right right but i still want you to be happy

very no not that happy yeah very nelly of me no i i just i do i'm at the point too where i think you absolutely are blacklisted i texted our manager i was like hey this is like not urgent by any means and this is not a huge deal but like can we actually figure out what's going on because i'm worried that i've done something wrong and now it's like our listeners are on like the facebook patreon group and stuff like talking like what did christine do about like to get this to make this also it might be because so many people were trying to be helpful that's a lot we might have fear we might have overloaded instagram in general email or like and a lot of people have like people have sent us screenshots of them cussing out instagram yeah that's not helpful you're

gonna get me back on that list all you all they probably bury me upset instagram yeah a lot of people were like i got drunk and then i like you know shit posted instagram and all this stuff in your name and i'm like well that's not gonna help me they're not gonna want to verify me after that so um i do appreciate all the support on my behalf um in other news today anyway apparently uh someone either hacked zach bagan's profile or they someone made a fake Zach Bagans profile and a bunch of people were getting added and everyone thought Zach Bagans was adding all these people oh geez apparently it's not Zach Bagans but that's that's what I've heard maybe that motherfucker blocked remember when he blocked me he's got to know someone on Instagram and like

this fucking girl she is so the podcast and M can be verified but this chick it's too far i i like to blame zach or i like to blame most people actually that's the conspiracy most people live by in our listener group most people i'm like the 20 people that i've like read on reddit who actually talk about it but um anyway i don't want anyone to think i'm like being very petty and upset and whatever it's just like at this point i'm like what did i do it's only i don't think it sounds petty it's just it's it's just funny as megan would say because like why would it happen to one of us and not the other it's just a mystery in our podcast it's really strange and on two different companies you know the day eva gets verified and you're not my blaze was like is eva verified and i was like i can't i can't do

this i'm looking tomorrow and i was like you know why because she would never tell me she would probably like find a fucking she would find a hacker to hide it from me to make yeah if she got verified she would dm instagram be like can you take it off can you unverify me please this bitch is never gonna let me live this down oh my god no i mean listen and my brother was like christine this is not a joke i'm very serious like what if beach to sandy and zandy he was like i could actually he's like i this was used to be a funny joke he's like now i could legitimately be verified before you and i'm like now that will upset me if my brother gets verified and i'm like i'm in two of these and they're both verified

oh also that being said a lot of people for whatever reason are finding beach to sandy now and not knowing that i'm the host and being like she sounds just like you so side note i have another podcast people don't seem to know that called beach to sandy water to win since i'm not verified i'm just gonna plug that instead um so check that out because people keep dming me now and going this sounds just this chick sounds just like you and i'm like interesting you should go listen to that one episode with that other person who sounds just like me that was say spooky spots in salem featuring the m schultz who's verified by the way on instagram if you need how you had a verified person on your on your double verified show yeah i brag about it all the time wow anyway congratulations to you thank you that was my note and i think that's

all i had to say you don't have any other notes i think i have one that you're you that was my note and i think that's all i had to say you don't have any other notes i think i have one that you're you're gonna want to talk about oh yeah what is your myers-briggs oh yeah i finally took it again and then i found an old thing and it matched um it was i n f p t what does the t stand for christine turbulent what does that mean i've oh i looked it up because my mom is an infpa which is assertive and it means i feel like maybe i the last time that i took myers i used to take them especially like in college when i was like surrounded by other psych students like our favorite thing was personality tests i've taken myers-briggs probably a million times and never seen this like secondary a t i've only seen the four a lot and then i did a poll on

the close friends on insta or no it was just on instagram and had people guess and a lot of people guessed it right and i was like that's surprising um a lot of people didn't they were like e t whatever j and i was like literally the opposite of all of those i guess um but yeah the t's were turbulent which i guess means that i don't really have a grasp on reality myself or my goals which like shocker um and my mom's is assertive which is like you're more uh you don't care as much what other people think i think is the i see total and i want to find what mine is i want to find out what mine is take it again man i have to know and i took it on like i think it was called like 16 personality traits.com or something i don't know um so yeah

anyway so fun fact that's me now i may maybe that's i'm upset because i used to be enfj which apparently is like the most rare one and I was like oh shit no because everyone DMing was like I'm the most rare one and I was like you can't all be the most rare one well in that case then I don't feel too bad I thought ENFJ was the most common one I don't know I was

ENFJ for a long time and as I've gotten older the I keep getting INFP that's what I am right yeah oh so now you're upset okay isfj sorry is the most popular isfj oh i don't think i'm any of those i'm your eye introvert yeah and f and turbulent yeah wow i'm a fucking mess anyway so that's that uh all right anyway okay thank you for letting me talk about my personality test for a minute well it was it was funny because we're both infj infj infb yeah um what's p stand for perceiving right versus judging right well i'm surprised you're not the judgy one yeah you literally just

called me classy trash you know what that was a great judgment i agree with what i'm not saying it's a bad judgment i'm saying it's an accurate judgment and that's why you should be today i'm also perceiving you as trash but in like the best way apparently that i got weirdly makes my heart fuzzy and warm i hope you're not offended because i'm not offended look at me you know when i'm offended i tell in my eyes when i'm offended i need to find the the picture of what i'm talking about and then you're gonna see and be holy shit, that's a nice compliment. I'm literally too exhausted to even be offended that I'm not verified on anything. I'm just too I-N-F whatever to be.

You just look like someone I want to hang out with at the barbecue. That's what I'm saying. Literally, I've never received a nicer compliment than that. So I promise you I'm taking it very, very well. Well, OK, so let's get into this. Let's go to a barbecue. Oh, shit. I thought we were going to the very, very well. Well, okay. So let's get into this story. Let's go to a barbecue. Oh, shit. I thought we were going to the barbecue.

All right. Fine. Hold on to that because I'm going to get back to it and the answer is always yes. Great. Last episode I covered Nellie Butler, the apparently first ghost in America. She wants you to believe that, Nellie, and she's kind of full of it. She's like the mongoose all over again. I feel like she wrote the notes because like, of all your notes yeah nelly was from the 18th century but like we've

had ghosts in america for like another couple hundred years before america has like you know there were people here since the 1600s before nelly and her you know yeah european friends yeah exactly let's not like and i'm just talking about the european settlers like an asshole like no no but like i guess what you're saying like since america was colonized is not apparently even the word we're supposed to use now like oh really yeah i now i don't want to say because i'm gonna no no no this is good education but apparently apparently that's there's new phrasing i forget i saved it on instagram so i could read it later no wow okay good to know we'll have to look that up um but yeah no there's like hundreds of spirits before this one but apparently she's the first documented one in america and she's probably not

even real i have us believe a lot of things this nelly i think you and i confirmed for ourselves at least like she's probably a hoax i think you and i could pull off this exact haunting i can certainly in our apartment talk in a cellar like she did you and i certainly do talk in a lot of cellars yeah um okay so i this is new england instead of this being america's first ghost this is new england's last vampire whoa okay what's the record scratch sound something like that i can't do the scratch sound you just go to the barbecue okay i'm sorry so last vampire where the new england's last vampire okay got it didn't know there was one to begin with but apparently there were enough that this is the last one got it so uh up the rear her name is mercy lena brown it's a lady vampire lady vampire a lady vamp um and this is

mercy lena brown okay um so this is an exeter rhode island and uh which according to the exeter historical association is the town is described as rocks rocks and more rocks by the historical society oh my god i love when people can own their like own classy trash you know just like own it just like live it be it absorb it okay so in the 19th century exeter was dealing with um a lot of bad luck and the town was very quickly declining they lost like a thousand people right after the civil war because with the invention of railroads a lot of people left for industrial jobs okay i think so um and so instead of all their careers and rocks that they were having you know there was just they were there were too many rock people a lot of rocks um so one one guy there he was a farmer named george brown and he had a wife mary elizabeth and they

lived in exeter and with their three kids so george and Mary, oh no, not Mary Elizabeth, sorry, Mary Eliza. I just added the second half of that. So you got out of Beth. That's okay. Have you ever thought of how many nicknames come out of the word Elizabeth? I actually have. Elizabeth, Liz, Lizzie, Eliza, Beth, Betty. Libby.

Libby. Ellie. Ellie. You could literally have all like eight children named elizabeth and like we spent too much time together yeah and i will by the way oh well that's what thank god someone i mean maybe i'll have like two sets of quadruplets that's easier right that's that's definitely easier biologically um so also i'm trying to think like what's a name with even more nicknames than elizabeth i think elizabeth i think that

might win yeah i have actually thought about that maybe charles because you got like chuck chuck chip charlie chaz chaz is that a chaz is short for char. And, you know, it's wild, though. Charles might take the cake because it's one syllable of a name. Right. And Elizabeth has so many. Yeah. With Elizabeth, you've got a lot to play with. Charles, you really have to, like, stretch it. You've got to chip, chuck it, chip it.

Anyway, if you've got a name longer than Elizabeth that gets the award, let us know. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, George and Mary Eliza had three kids. Their names were Mary Olive, Mercy Lena, and Edwin. Okay. Um, so I know I said earlier, Eliza.

So it's Mary Eliza. Their kids are Mary Olive, Mercy Lena, and Edwin. I don't know why Edwin doesn't have two names but apparently back then um at least in early America the first name was usually honorary and usually like the name of a grandparent and you didn't actually use the first name you would usually go by your middle name interesting so the first name was just like oh and your name you're named in honor of this person but we go by this other name for you so mary eliza was probably named after like grandma mary but they called her eliza got it and then they had um kids mary olive

where like mary was honorary for something but they called her olive cute mercy lena so even though her name is mercy lena brown people knew her as lena brown and mercy was nice an honorary name that's a nice name yeah um and then fucking edwin so edwin is just named after nobody and then big ed um and so uh in 1883 there was uh mary eliza was 37 years old and she contracted and soon died of my favorite consumption so if you don't know what consumption is it is tuberculosis this is episode two so you might not know yet if you're playing this backwards consumption's my favorite truly because i didn't know it was tuberculosis i think that was literally episode two was it yeah because it was a clothesline cookies i think oh right too uh-huh because you were like oh it's

eating too much cake i was like i also have. I'm so hungry right now. And I kind of just stared at you for like eight seconds while I drank more. Like a dumbass. Okay. Consumption. So fun fact, tuberculosis. I didn't think we could have more fun facts about it, but here we go. It was actually coined in the 1830s from the Latin word tuberculum, which means small swelling bump or pimple. Uh-oh.

So now next time you have a zit, you actually have a tuberculum which means small swelling bump or pimple uh-oh so now next time you have a zit you actually have a tuberculum um bummer cons tubercula bummer tuberculum nope okay i'm gonna let you have that one okay so that's the fun fact about tuberculosis another fun fact about consumption is that that phrase was coined from ancient greek and the word pithesis, which meant to consume the life out of someone. Oh, that's where consumption. Dementor of them. Yes. Yikes.

So also, if you're reading Harry Potter, the dementors probably have consumption or they're at least going to throw consumption your way. They're going to infect you with some pimples. Play with it however you want. Yeah. with some pimples play with it however you want yeah um so consumption wasn't the only plague in new england because there was also a plague of vampires apparently named the collins no i'm kidding um but in the so from 1870 to 1900 new england was known fun fact again as the transylvania of north america yeah i didn't know this i didn didn't either. I'm just making it up. I'm like, yeah, yeah.

I was like, damn, you are smart. No, I'm certainly not. But yeah, apparently for 30 years. That's a really wild. The Transylvania of North America because of its hotbed of vampires. And rocks. And rocks.

Well, that's quite a personality they've got. They've got vampires and rocks. What more do you need, really? I'm trying to think of a fun pun that got vampires and rocks i'm working really i'm trying to think of a fun pun that involves bats and rocks no someone else someone's gonna tweet us and i'm gonna hit my head on against a wall with a bat or a rock wait a minute okay so uh the belief in vampires goes back to uh babylonian times um and they were spirits or demons who weren't buried properly and therefore they come back from the dead and try to suck the life from mortals

to to come back to life fully sure um and in 2004 it's at least since then it's still been like uh a belief in some families in 2004 there was one family who exhumed a body of a relative cut out his heart with a pitchfork and burned it because they apparently the their family member who died right before he died he had drank their blood and after he died all of them were sick so they felt like oh he'd become a vampire and like remotely was like killing us slowly and that's why we were getting sick maybe it's because he drank all your blood what i don't know i don't know the rest of that story i should have looked it up but that's something fun for you to google oh okay it was a really they were a romanian family um in 2004 maybe they were involved i mean they must have then been involved with he got all of their blood like did he i don't even know how much of each of their blood or if it was just one of their

blood or did they voluntarily give their blood i'm thinking like there's a lot of things i should have a lot of moving parts here and i chose not to so um allegedly uh yeah allegedly because he drank their blood so in 1784 was the first american scare because there was a letter to the editor and one of the local papers in connecticut where councilman moses homes warned people of a doctor who was urging people to dig up and burn relatives to stop consumption and the thought was because they were trying to come back to life remotely oh by taking by like you don't have to be in the spaces yeah or like sucking your life oh right if you if you burn them and get rid of them then no matter where in the world they are they can't suck the life away from you so you also die

of consumption so there is this weird but then also you're digging up dead bodies that had been infected with consumption so you're probably just like bringing the illness back. Probably so. Like I it's this is a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. But yeah, so there is a I'm trying to think of the word. There was an overlap, I guess, in the world at that time, or at least in New England at that time, where consumption and vampires meant the same thing so like if you had consumption a vampire might have been the cause of it um

or if you had consumption you might become a vampire later and try to come back because there were those theories too with like witchcraft where if people fell ill it was like oh it must be witchcraft someone is right a witch is making you sick like the cause of consumption for a while was thought to be vampires right yeah wow so so the guy who was warning people of a doctor who was digging up bodies and relatives to stop consumption the same man who was reporting that said that he had seen bodies being exhumed at the doctor's request and um so that was he said i think the public ought to be aware of being led away by such an imposter so he was one of the people who said like like we're we're really gonna go with this vampire thing like hello put the shovel down um so one of the bodies that actually was exhumed by this doctor ironically is also named nelly um and the guy's name is moses by the way which

we oh my god yeah i was gonna say i wasn't gonna say it until you said nelly um and the guy's name is moses by the way which we oh my god yeah i was gonna say i wasn't gonna say it until you said nelly and i went this is the second moses and the second nelly that we've like ever covered on the podcast ever okay so both moses i've ever mentioned and both nelly's were in each other's stories back to back someone's gonna be like literally eight episodes ago you talked about nelly oh my gosh yeah i don't remember if you're listening backwards get ready because the next episode has a moses and an ellie yeah wow is that weird right maybe it's just maybe because they're vampires they like they they just live forever and ghosts i don't know um okay maybe it was just the same time period right sort of yeah so maybe it was just those were

common names we're so stupid okay hey listen okay i'm i sort of thought that's what we were going with until you didn't even cross my mind so moses was saying look out for this doctor because he was exhuming bodies one of them happened to be someone named nelly vaughn um whose grave is supposedly cursed to this day because like no vegetation will grow on it even if they try to plant things in the area and at the bottom the inscription on nelly's tombstone says um i'm watching and waiting for you it well i wouldn't plant anything there super creepy don't plant your carrots there um so anyway that's all i have to say about that but it was a fun fact what a creepy thing to put on a headstone i hope i put something creepy i was just thinking i'm like i'm

a little jealous it's gonna be something that's like very you and i are gonna have the dumbest fucking headstones we're gonna be like it'll be so mysterious maybe we'll be buried together like next to each other and mine will say hi christine yours will say hi m and we'll think that's so clever what if mine says yours says and mine says that's why we then people are gonna go and why drink i don't get it it won't make sense to anyone but us that's all that matters mine will and the New Year's will be the other side of the country. That is funny. Oh, my God.

So by 1800, apparently 2% of New England's whole population had died from consumption. Because let's let me know if this sounds topical to you, because people didn't know yet, nor did they pay attention to the fact that it was spreading through the air. So if one person contacted it in your family, it didn't take long for every other person to get it. I love that you just said no one understood or paid attention to the fact that it got. Apparently, I just love that. It was like even if they knew they just it. Like, that is topical. History repeats itself, I suppose. So seven months after.

Holy shit, was his name also George? No. George Brown, who married Mary Eliza. That's right. So there's a George, a Moses, and an Elliot. Where's Abner? Bring him on right now. I need him back right now.

I miss him dearly. Where's Lydia Clemenia? She's always here. She's always here in spirit. where's abner bring him on right now i need him back right now i miss him dearly lydia chlamydia she's always here she's always here in spirit in our hearts he's always a little too nearby a little too close contact so seven months after mary eliza died who was george's wife uh their 20 year old daughter mary olive also got consumption um and died um geez what's weird is the whole town turned up for her funeral um but like as you'll see in the future like the town doesn't show up for the other family members like they like really gave a shit about mary olive well maybe when wait did she die first she died died second because i'm thinking like maybe at that point people were

like i don't want to contract it was so fresh and scary yeah or didn't they realize they didn't want it and they didn't want to be around or people didn't know it was spreading right and then by the time others died they they were like we're not leaving our house as you shouldn't um i say as i'm in another part of the nation yeah oh so what's interesting also is that so many people showed up to her funeral even though she had just joined the church like two weeks ago like she was pretty new like but everyone showed up for her funeral wow five years after her death her brother edwin um also uh was getting really sick from consumption um not wanting to risk losing any more of his family his father george who'd already lost two of his three kids.

Or no, he'd already lost his wife and one of his three kids. Right. He rushed his son to the doctor, and he did have consumption. And the doctor said, okay, well, we're going to send you off to Colorado, because back then they would send you somewhere to quarantine. Fresh air. To isolate from others okay yeah are you getting the hint are you inside right now am i getting the hint are they getting the hint i don't

think i'm getting the hint stay inside oh i thought there was like some like deeper clue to the story nope just very direct um yeah very direct and very clear so So they sent him off to Colorado to quarantine and isolate. But months later, apparently their middle child, Mercy Lena, also had tuberculosis. Oh, no. So hers apparently was called galloping consumption. Uh-oh. Which is a whole new phrase that I'm very in love with. That I don't know.

But I guess it meant that she had actually gotten it a long time ago when like her brother was still around oh and she had it she had it dormant dormant the whole time and galloping means like out of nowhere it just shows that's frightening it's like you could just have it and it's just like laying in wait exactly oh no um so she died almost immediately so she thought she was in the clear and then just like basically within a week was dead. That sucks. So she was buried in what was then called Shrub Hill, but now it's called Chestnut Hill or Historic Cemetery number 22. But because of the harsh temperatures at the time where she died, it was like super cold out and they couldn't dig into the ground. They'd wait for it to thaw.

Right. So she was in a holding vault. Uh and so that becomes important later during uh waiting for her to be buried edwin's condition got worse and george's family became the talk of the town of like holy shit everyone in your family is going to die from this um so local lore suggested that the more deaths you had in your family from consumption meant that there was more of a chance of a vampire like if you have five people in your family and four of them are dead like there's a reason it couldn't have possibly been because you're near each other and it's contagious but it's because there's a vampire um so people assumed that in george's family there must be a vampire and some people reported actually seeing a woman walking in the

cemetery through the fields and so as edwin got worse um he was also saying that he felt like someone was sitting on his chest and suffocating him oh no so even if it was a ghost they're like no it's not a ghost it's a vampire even if it was a ghost or like you just have tuberculosis or you just have tuberculosis so uh apparently back then the signs for a vampire were different than today were like afraid of garlic or can't see the reflection um vampires then were a blurry shape with no skeletal structure ew and they had snouts instead of noses that they sucked their victims that's like way scarier that's way scary right like yeah instead of just sharp teeth no skeletal structure and blurry and a snout apparently after

like a month of being a vampire or sucking the life out of people you slowly take more of a human form and because you become stronger and stronger life from them oh no yeah you're you're they're transferring their life or life into you and so you instead of being blurry you slowly like take more of a shape and a form and therefore you're stronger and therefore harder to kill um so another fun fact apparently in uh the balkans for uh regions that were uh that believed in vampires they said that fruit like pumpkins or watermelons could also become vampires oh my god none of us are safe your kitchens it's halloween coming up you've got to be nervous of your pumpkin cold brew oh my god you're drinking liquid vampire actually um pretty pretty spooky uh apparently they would become vampires if you left them out for more than 10 days or you didn't eat them by christmas i would be screwed

and a drop of blood on fruit so like even if it was like a bug or i don't know a person who wasn't very like hygienic or clean um well it's true if you're cutting fruit and you cut yourself right so if you had a drop of blood on fruit um apparently that was also a sign that it could turn to a vampire because now it's tasted your life this this peach is like this nectarine is out to get me um i want to be a human now what the fuck well apparently if you throw seeds or a fishing net outside your door it also keeps vampires away because they get compelled to count the seeds or the holes in the net i've heard of that and they it like distracts them until sunrise and

then you're safe i love these just like vampires that are like hold on let me count this it's a blurry shape but if you throw a net outside your watermelons will be fine it loves mathematics though so uh anyway so the townspeople are talking to george basically like a vampire intervention and they're saying like he's about to die you're about to lose every member of your family um like he's the last one to go we have to find out who the vampire in your family is that is sucking out the life of all of your relatives so they wanted to reopen all of his family's members coffins damn it and exhume them and if one of them happened to be a vampire and looked like it was no longer blurry or like it was like taking more of a human lively form they would

assume that was the vampire and then deal with it accordingly. So hopefully the corpses are blurry with snouts and then they'll be fine? Bingo. What? Bingo. This is the same logic of the science. This is so bad. So. This can't go anywhere good.

Well, telling signs to know whether or not this thing, the dead bodies were vampires, telling signs would be if they still had liquid blood on them uh-huh that hadn't dried or coagulated it would be fresh blood sure um and therefore it would have been recently or more alive than the i mean that makes some sense so others thought that the dead could come back unless once you exhumed the bodies you burned their organs or their entire body until they were until they were ashes don't take the time to remove all the organs uh just get the whole just toss them in so march 17th 1892 was the uh the grand old day that they decided to exhume these bodies um and it was held by chief medical examiner dr metcalfe uh it was 317 that's saint patrick's day

right yeah it is the lucky day look at the irish And so Dr. Metcalf, he even discouraged that they exhume all these bodies. He was getting paid. So he was like, I guess I'll do this. But like, I don't understand. This doesn't medically make sense. Like he was on board that this was not cool. But he was getting paid. He was like, fine, I'll do it.

And George didn't want to do it. But he was like, my neighbors won't shut up and like, just leave me in peace while my son dies everybody in my family is dying also there's that right so he was like he did it basically to like appease his neighbors which is an awful reason to assume your family he was just like probably sad yes and alone so um mercy they the middle one the one who died recently from galloping consumption sure um remember she hadn't been placed in the ground yet because or she had only recently been placed in the ground because the ground had just fallen in the tomb right okay so the mom and the oldest daughter they had been buried for a lot longer right and mercy had been preserved until she could have been buried, which was only a couple of weeks before this happened. Right. But so she had only been buried, I think, for a month. And some sources say that Mercy Lena's mother and sister, they were the first exhumed and they had decomposed in a natural rate. So like, OK, it can't be the wife or the daughter.

so you're like okay it can't be the wife or the daughter and uh basic oh hang on and then because and then they dug up mary mercy lena and obviously like she hadn't totally decomposed yet even though she died a while ago but she was still preserved by the cold outside in a vault so like she and also she died later than them like five years later than them so she looked less decomposed i see and therefore they thought she must be the vampire she's not blurry enough she's not blurry enough her snout is more of a nose more pronounced so real quick before i carry on in 2020 one of the primary vampire historians out there um which is a very cool job really um his name is dr michael bell and he wrote a book called food for the dead and it's basically this extensive interview with descendants of mercy lena and one of those uh descendants is still a resident of the exact

same town exeter rhode island and this in the book this is one of the excerpts from one of mercy lena's ancestors um or descendants sorry uh his name's everett quote everett heard the story from people who had actually been there the newspaper says they exhumed all three bodies but everett said they only dug up mercy lena he implied that there was some sign that Mercy Lena was the vampire. Everett said that after they had dug her up, she was turned over in her grave, but there's no mention of that in the newspapers or eyewitness accounts. So even if she was the only one dug up, I think they assumed that she must be the vampire because she clearly moved around in her coffin.

Oh, I thought they turned her over. No, she was found turned oh yeah what so they think they were that's really weird that they still can't come up with an explanation for unless like for all we know they were digging her up and like knocked her around yeah like the coffin but so i think they according to this descendant who has heard eyewitness accounts they only dug up one person but then it was suspicious enough they didn't dig up the others they were like we already found her right but one for one but the lore is that they dug up all three and she was the most alive looking which like again is not even lore because it's like probably true it's factual yeah because she

was the most five years less decomposed the less dead one snow right so uh when they opened her coffin her eyes were open her face was flushed apparently her lips were full of color her hair and nails had grown which the others didn't and when they prodded her she was still filled with blood more blood than the other decomposing people so they assumed it must have been her so apparently the townspeople they cut her chest cavity open because you're supposed to remove the organs and burn them um and this is a quote the newspaper said her heart and liver had blood in it it was liquid blood which they interpreted as fresh blood and therefore she was alive this poor dad is like oh my god i can't win i just wanted to fucking appease my neighbors and like prove that everyone was dead and now they're like my kids messing around with her body yes so they

um they removed her heart and her lungs and they burned them on a rock nearby which the local legend is that the rock that they burned her organs on still shows next to her grave and you can still go to her grave by the way it's still there um and apparently the rock next to it there's like a from what i heard there's some rocks that do have scorch marks on them like it could have been like just some like shitty teenagers like trying to make it look scary but that is creepy if yeah if it's true um but so they burned them on a rock nearby others apparently beheaded her oh goodness um and yeah remember like the dad did this to just

satisfy the neighbors yeah beheading his that's horrifying um and to cure edwin because he was still alive oh god um he's like no so they got just to make sure i think the idea was if she had been sucking the life out of him then he could get the life back from her. And so to cure Edwin, the ashes of Mercy Lena's heart and lungs were added to either his medicine or water and he had to drink it. His sister's? So he drank his sister. Ew! And then died anyway two months later.

Oh no! But he was the last to die from consumption in the town and therefore they thought that they cured vampirism he was just like because he was the last martyr for this cause oh my god so they think because he was the last one to die from it no more vampires were killing people because vampire equals consumption. If no one has consumption, there are no more vampires. So I think they stopped it by killing Mary Lena again. Right.

So anyway, this made the town think they solved the problem and there was never another case of vampires in Rhode Island. But Lena was put in a vault before before being buried and so she was probably just better preserved it had nothing to do with the fact that she was a fucking vampire um but no one to this day can't explain why her body was positioned the way it was when they found it although there are no records suggesting that maybe they just knocked her over right um her grave also wasn't that not even in the newspaper like it was just like yeah there's a guy said it was just eyewitness there's minimal accounts of

this so who knows what happened right um so mercy lena brown's grave has now attracted many visitors that are especially interested in vampires or spooky things like everyone that listens to this show um one visitor apparently was the stage manager for a theater company called bram stoker bram stoker is the guy who wrote dracula um and when bram died in the 1890s they actually did find in his personal files clippings from lena's case so they think that maybe there's a chance she helped influence his dracula script um and some think that she was the inspiration for the character lucy which is interesting because lena mercy sounds a little like the name lucy oh goose cam um today mercy lena um is said to haunt the cemetery people smell roses near her grave and

they get evps of her talking um people also say that they have been shoved near her plot if they get too close some she's like stop cutting my head off what else do you want god um some say that they have seen strange lights in the cemetery near her grave people report seeing particularly a bright blue light they've also seen mercy walking around town in the cemetery through the fields um apparently she also visits locals who are near death whoa many have reported talking to her right before passing oh that's nice she's like helping people yeah helping people cross over and people who aren't sick have watched their sick relatives talking to someone i mean like who are you talking to and they're like oh mercy or mercy lena or lena

right there oh god um let's see the grave now is a tourist hot spot and people will leave mementos for her including fake vampire teeth which is kind of fucked up but there is one that i appreciate it the people will leave like candy and flowers but someone left a note that says you go girl that was also one of our listeners i like like to believe. I like to think. And her headstone has since been tied down with iron straps because so many people try to steal her headstone. Some assholes trying to steal her headstone. There is a rumor if you knock three times on her grave, people and if you say, Mercy Lena Brown, are you a vampire? She'll appear before you in some way. And her surviving relatives reportedly save any local newspaper clippings and a family scrapbook

for her oh and i don't know if this is true but according to some travel sites there is a tupperware container next to her headstone that has a communal notebook for you to sign when you go there if you want to say something wow so that's the story of you go girl you go girl mercy lena brown aka new New England's last vampire. Goodness. What a story. What a story. What a case.

What a time to be alive. What a coincidence that there was a George Moses Anelli in that story. A little weird, huh? We really have to go back and look and see how many, like what the famous, famous, what the popular baby names of that time were. I bet you there. I mean,orge makes sense george george is pretty universal it's always there i wonder what names of today are going to be like now they've been created as baby names are going to be like universal probably give you

a whole list i'm not going to do that because i'm going to offend somebody so i'm just going to leave it at that the name is is M. Schultz. Hopefully this becomes a universal name. The classiest, trashiest name of all time. No, no, that one's Christine. Oh, right, right. My bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which literally.

Put them together and you get Kremit. That's classy trash. Wait, hold on. That's classy trash. Put that in a Tupperware notebook. Wait a minute. I need to save that forever. I have a tail for you.

And for you. Tall tail. It's a tall, tall tail. Oh, a tall, tall tail. Or is it just a tall tail? It's actually just a tail. Oh, okay. It's a pretty short tail oh a tall tall tail or is it just a tall tail it's actually just a tail oh it's pretty short tail so it's actually not short so a medium tail medium okay average tail average tail this is the story of juana barraza juana juana barraza fun name the old lady killer that's a fun name also mexico city again this is also not again because it's the first time

i'm saying it but you know the type you know what i'm thinking um i there are a lot of names here that i'm going to attempt to say out loud and i apologize for that oh are they are they gonna be hard to place in mexico okay let's just put it that way So right now we've got Juana Barraza. Yeah. Okay. So Mexico City, 2005. Mexican police are faced with an alarming slew of murders. Uh-oh. It was thought that since November 2002, 39 people had died at the hands of a cruel serial killer. Oh, no. Yeah.

With the same M.O. He would strangle his victims. But more interestingly, his victims were all the same demographic. They were all older women, most of whom were abuelas or grandmothers oh yeah so the media named him oh boy here we go el mata viejitas mata viejitas okay the old lady killer that's how i'm gonna remember el mata viejitas it's my attempt at it the problem was they were having trouble catching the guy so there uh i listened to an mfm episode on this um and apparently they even hired older women to bait him like they would hire older women not people dressed as older women like

older women to sit in the park i don't know about that victim right uh at least have young people that can run dressed as older yeah yeah don't pick people with bad hips and knees it's really not a nice idea um but it didn't work so they weren't able to catch him um even the chief prosecutor in mexico city at the time was quoted as saying we're dealing with a brilliant mind did you just say the cute prosecutor chief prosecutor oh my god i think even the q prosecutor couldn't do anything hot he's hot and that's about all of the good qualities he's super hot though um i was like okay christine maybe there's a picture coming super trashy super classy chief prosecutor is super cute was quoted as saying we're dealing with a brilliant mind

um so the murder streak was finally sorry that made me think of basically what i said to you after the space camp video which is what we're dealing with a brilliant mind a brilliant lunatic we're dealing with a brilliant lunatic uh emphasis on the lunatic part um so the guys the serial killer's murder streak was finally halted when on january 25th 2006 a landlord spotted someone running from his tenant's home when he entered he found his tenant anna maria de los reyes alfaro murdered oh um so as the serial killer fled the scene the landlord chased him until police arrived and apprehended him that's a landlord yeah that's a good landlord to be fair a couple sources said it was a tenant of hers some

said it was the landlord so it's unclear like if it was couple sources said it was a tenant of hers some said it was the landlord so it's unclear like if it was the landlord if it was anybody i want that one not the one that gives me cockroaches yeah yeah yeah you need to trade out i think yeah i want the one who's gonna chase if you're gonna get murdered like you might as well sure um so he chased down the serial killer until the police came to apprehend him. But when they cuffed him, they were shocked to discover that the serial killer was not the man they expected. In fact, it was not a man at all. It was a woman. Oh, no.

Was it an old lady? Was she just killing her own kind? No. Okay. It was 48-year-old Juana Barraza. Okay. A woman. Oh, the name you already said.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was hoping you wouldn't uh notice nope didn't according to an nyu paper when barraza was arrested the only thing she asked for was a phone call so she could let her daughter know she wasn't going to be able to pick her up from school that day that's sad but also you're a killer yeah that's kind of the entire story of this part of me wanted to go oh that's kind of the entire story right actually so juana was born december 27th 1957 in the hidalgo region of mexico she was born to justa samperio who is a sex worker who struggled with alcoholism

and had had juana at a young age um justa i don't know if that's how you say it but i'm going to try justa j-u-s-t-a that makes me think of justa which apparently means uh lips according to a veggie tale song justa i don't know that's as far as i get when it comes to knowledge i'm sure it's not just us so i'm just gonna try uh according to true crime all the time um she was willing to do anything to get her next fix and that comes into play with her parenting got it uh juana's father is a guy named trinidad barraza and he was a police officer and cattle rancher who was apparently known for raising goats and procreating. Sure. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.

In fact, in an interview, Trinidad claims to have fathered 32 children. So it was not fucking around. 32 children? Mm-hmm. Duggars. Duggars. I would say it. Juana's parents weren't married at the time

and had met at a nightclub when Justa was only 13. And she was living with her mother and her mother's stepfather. So okay, hang on, sorry. She had fathered she had mothered, she had not fathered anyone. She had parented. She had

birthed Juana when she was very young and then um trinidad the dad just kind of peaced like he had 31 other children running around i have some some other things i need to attend and some kids oh get it kids and goats both kids and kids both kids from kids and kids to attend to so uh he kind of peaced out. He wasn't like part of the picture. And so then Juana was raised. She was living with her mother and her mother's stepfather. And her mother's stepfather prevented Juana from receiving an education because he believed it was a waste of time for a girl to be educated.

And then Juana's mother started a relationship with her own stepfather. So that's great. And in general, she was not a great mother. She and by not great, I mean terrible. She would often abuse her. She would trade her for beer and alcohol and et cetera. Gotcha. To grown men um at one point in 1970 when juana was 13

justa sold juana to a 60 something year old man called jose lucho for three beers holy shit for good like for good sent her off with this guy for three beers yep wow so tragically juana quote lived as a slave in this man's house for five years um she was 13 so from 13 to 18 so can I guess now that all of her her her killings were a revenge ding ding ding trying to like like get it back at her mother ding ding ding yes exactly um so Jose raped Juana regularly uh would tie her up to a bed frame she became pregnant by him twice and lost both pregnancies at age 16 she became pregnant with his son and nine months later gave birth to him his name was jose enrique um and that was her oldest child it was around 1980

juana was 23 years old when her mother died of cirrhosis of the liver um apparently she felt nothing about her mother's passing at this point not shocking um so this was liberating enough for juana to pack up her things and leave jose with her son uh jose enrique and she didn't have an education was illiterate but she took whatever jobs she could find to try and like feed her kid um after two serious and abusive relationships that ended badly she married a man named miguel garcia he was also abusive but she stayed with him for four years and they had a child named erica so now she has two kids she was surviving off her wages working at a chocolate factory okay well that's the best part i've heard that was also there's also a chuck factory in the um what you might call it episode remember was it jeffrey dahmer yes it was jeffrey dahmer he's like nuts head bundy the

other one one of my bucket list things is i would love to be a chocolatier one day one of them well apparently it doesn't end well so yeah well i feel like maybe i'm a serial killer if i want to be a chocolatier so i think maybe i hope i can that I hope I can separate those two for myself. She lost her job working in clothing like delivery, clothing delivery when her boss slapped her one day. This is just like it's just she's having a really rough time. Yeah. She the saddest life of her. Sorry, the saddest moment of her life was in 1984.

of her sorry the sad moment of her life was in 1984 um she called it the saddest moment of her life when jose enrique her eldest son died at age 24 of injury sustained in a mugging after he was hit with a baseball bat wow she really can't just like not winning yeah so three years after that in 1987 um juana's step father slash step grandfather the one that her mom's stepfather who her mom had had a relationship with um also passed away and this was like the only other person she like felt close to in her life so she really had like a break nobody nobody um she did have her kid her other child erica but um you know she just felt like she lost a lot of important people she that same year met a guy named felix ramirez and they ended up living together for more than 10 years and had two more children together named jose and emma and um she alongside her jobs of cleaning houses and

working at the chocolate factory juana found another job which was probably the most like right turn left turn i don't know uh plot twist jobs of all time um she was a professional wrestler luchador luchadora hey now i now we're talking or you go from chocolatier wrestler bada bing bada boom she was selling popcorn and helping organize wrestling events for small town fiestas when apparently she was recognized um or not recognized she was like noticed selling popcorn and was like asked to she was discovered discovered yes exactly um her name is her hollywood story this is her hollywood story pretty true hollywood true uh her htwwd may be true hollywood story um her name was La Dama Del Silencio the silent lady that was her

like stage name um and so there's this thing called gangsta name.com where you can get your Mexican wrestler like your luchador name so do you want to know your do you want to know ours surely cool so mine is Surfer Rojo the red surfer which sounds like i'm just on my period but fine i'll take it and then wait so is your is your alias aunt flow wait a minute then eva's is halo picante which is like spicy hair which actually like she's literally a redhead so yeah that's fun then m schultz is el burrito seat pantalones the burrito without pants you know i've never felt more seen that's that kind of is how my life has been during all of this quarantine just burritos and no pants yeah i'm like jealous i'm like i'm just on my period which is also sort of like how this whole quarantine

has been i'm just like in pain all the time on the couch wait how do you say it again el burrito el burrito sin pantalones i love it yeah i mean i love it i'm probably about i'm about to get that spicy hair red surfer in the burrito without pants i'm gonna change my name to that legitimately the funniest thing i've ever read um so she was just a fan of wrestling and she used it as like an escape um and then what has it had to feel really liberating yeah well so but originally she just used like watching it and like like watching it as an escape and she was a big fan so then when she started selling popcorn and helping um it was like organized events she was spotted by a lucha libra promoter when he saw her selling popcorn and uh that's when she started training and

actually like participated in the sport um she was short but she did weight training twice a week and had tremendous upper body strength and was able to lift 220 pounds same yeah only in burritos though yeah while i'm like selling popcorn and not having pants on damn she could just lift that yeah so when asked why she chose the name La Dama del Silencio, she said the reasoning was because I am quiet and keep myself to myself. So she would fight in these Lucha Libre matches, which relies on a lot of like performance. It's sort of like WWE where it's like scripted and like they have characters and there's like soap opera style plot lines and they wear masks um i'm gonna show you a picture of her and her mask it's pretty but that's gonna be made out of tortillas yeah there you are oh there there she is there i am that's not you that's an amazing right amazing outfit she is wearing the purple like stripy spandex

with a butterfly like a power ranger like a power ranger and this is a butterfly mask is it yeah hold on oh that's fun she's kind of scary so um anyway so it's this like soap opera style like really dramatic and uh she identified as a villain and uh said she was rudos which is like the villains um to the core which like yeah we learned that pretty quickly um after that uh she'd compete wearing a pink power ranger style outfit with a oh my god did you say power ranger yes look at me go i just somehow thought you like knew i was like no i'm mighty morphin gets my nose um it was seen as an incredible dishonor for a mexican wrestler to be seen without their mask.

So she'd often wear it out and about in her daily life. That's so cool. Yeah. I know she becomes a serial killer, but like I'm embracing this right now. In her fighting career, she fought famous fighters such as La Parca and Charlie Manson, which was, I looked him up. He's one of the guys. Charlie Manson. Yeah.

Doing this, she'd earn around 300 to 500 pesos per fight, which is around 15 to 25 dollars. And so in 1995, she had two young children to feed. I think Erica was older at this point and she had to think of a way to earn more money as wrestling wasn't really paying the bills. So she started stealing from shops out of necessity to support her family. And then that evolved to burglarizing homes. necessity to support her family and then that evolved to burglarizing homes so ultimately juana and a friend named araceli in 1996 they decided they were going to come up with this plan to steal money from elderly women as well as trophy objects such as ornaments religious items including crucifixes rings and bibles and they targeted older women because they were easy

targets often alone more trusting especially of two women and they were easy targets, often alone, more trusting, especially of two women. And they like they wouldn't fight back, especially when she could fucking lift 225 pounds. Right. Like they wouldn't fight back. And even if they did, she would. They wouldn't win. Yeah. So they would both dress up in white clothes and pretend to be either nurses or social workers and would come in, like, offer help to these older women. And one of them would keep the elderly woman occupied while the other would steal the objects um and they wouldn't even realize what had happened until long after the two of them had left i see so at this point juana was like burglarizing people by day um and a wrestler by night just a wild story line what a story right i really wish i

didn't have to hate her because so far that's what i'm saying the whole thing is like you're like so far i really like you feel pity everything that she's had to go through and then like what like a an underdog story yeah great career it really goes south so juana had met another untrustworthy and disloyal person in her life unfortunately she got kicked again rsle was in a relationship with a guy named Moises. Almost Moses. Holy shit. I know.

That's weird. I didn't even realize that until just now. Named Flores Dominguez, who is a police officer. Moises Flores Dominguez, who is a police officer. And Araceli and her boyfriend conspired to extort Juana because they had now this dirt on her. At this point, Juana had started doing solo missions where she was basically she was apparently a very good mother to like she was very loving, very kind, never laid a finger on her kids. Basically, all she did was to, you know, get money to feed them.

So after one little Robin Hoodie, so little Robin Hoodie. Yeah. OK. And that actually kind of comes back. So at this point, Juana had started doing these solo missions after one solo burglary. Police officer Dominguez was outside and he demanded 12,000 pesos, which is $555 in return for not arresting her. So he's extorting her now. Got it.

So now she's like, shit, I need 500 bucks to pay him off. But now he's keeping an eye on her. So she's like, now the risk is higher she can't rob right to yeah exactly so they're like the risk is so much higher now um but she kept going she would target the the woman whose house she was going to burgle then she would offer support in either carrying groceries or offer cleaning services um or she would dress up as a social worker with like actual legitimate paperwork that she probably had stolen and like they never stood a chance she had like the actual paperwork she would come to the house um so in when she was 42 in 1999 um she and felix ramirez split and then the following year

she was injured and had to quit wrestling so double whammy yeah she is not in a good place all over again um so this all everything kind of culminated when on november 25th 2002 when after intending to burgle a house she strangled maria de la luz gonzalez an older woman to death um apparently she didn't go in intending to kill maria but just snapped maria had insulted juana who later said quote when i saw them i felt much anger and more when they acted out of the ordinary because of their money they could humiliate me so she was just like she snapped yeah um the event the event like obviously shook her because

she didn't really she probably never planned to kill anything yeah it wasn't the plan at all but then once she did basically four months later she's like i'm gonna keep doing that it's like once she's maybe one i'm assuming but once she hit that high she like she's like she's like the peach she's like the pumpkin that tasted human blood and now she's just coming out of the ground to eat us all you know you know that's what i that's what i was thinking so march 2nd 2003 she murdered her second victim guillermina leone oropeza she then went on to murder seven other elderly women that year between the ages of 76 and 87 she went from zero to 60 yeah real quick yeah actually zero to seven but yeah well um she gets to 60 though don't we oh my god really it's a lot i don't think it's 60 but maybe it's close the fact that it's almost that it's a lot it's over a dozen let's put it that way wow um so in 2003

she was spotted and without her mask she was spotted without her mask and you're right police began to take things more seriously at this point and believe there's actually a serial killer. So in one of these murder burglary instances, Juana had entered the house believing she was alone. However, her victim's son was in the house and he spotted her. Another little Justin. Another little Justin. That's right. So they were able to draw a they didn't draw.

I'm sure they did draw it it but they also created a bust like a clay bust of her face okay but remember they think it's a guy at this point remember they kept thinking they were looking for a dude so um they got fingerprints because because how many sorry but like how many women can look like 200? Right. And like, you know, and there's a whole thing here where the Mexican. Well, it gets bad. So from the son's description, police released a wanted poster and then a bust of El Maravillitas. And interestingly, the use of L again indicates that they thought it was a man. Sure. And to be more precise, according to a paper called Performing Mexicanidad, Criminality and Lucha Libre by Susana Vargas Cervantes, a man between 35 and 45 years old with homosexual preferences is who they thought. Because the son said that he was dressed as a nurse. So they were like, oh, well, it's a man posing as a woman. So he must be a homosexual, quote unquote. Must be a raging, raging homosexual.

So the police couldn't fathom that a woman could do these crimes, but they knew that the killer was dressed as a female nurse. So the police had these sketches. One was feminine, one was masculine looking, and they believed it was a man wearing women's clothing to gain access to the victim's apartment um other people came forward with vague descriptions like saying he was tall some saying um he was wearing a red blouse like there were all these wild uh things they added so she killed in 2004 alone killed 14 more people so wow at least one a month um juana was building up her mo like at this point exactly what you said the psychology is wild like she's literally offering to help these older women who are all over 60 they range from 60 to 92 um people who reminded her of her

mother and she believed they were a hindrance to society and uh they really line up to kind of her mother's own persona like she literally pictured them as her mother and was seeking revenge after her tumultuous upbringing and there was like a strange coincidence that was sort of a red herring all uh three of her victims had the same painting it was called boy in a red waistcoat and it was like this painting that they all had so they were like maybe somebody targeting this the artist popular painting yeah and like georgia and my favorite wrote or something like they probably all like went to the same market and like all these old ladies like the same painting you know like it's just all had like the same subscription to the same magazine exactly exactly um and apparently also she tended to uh target like wealthier people so it might

have just been like they had these fancy paintings they all had a baby grand piano it's not that's gotta be they all had mother of pearls they all had teslas they were just parking themselves when we got there ah oh and um she would then strangle them either with a stethoscope pantyhose stockings phone cables or scarves. Oh, so anything she could find. Anything she could find. In mid 2005, she started dating a taxi driver called Jose Herrera, but he was known as El Frijol the Bean. I was going to say.

He's nicknamed. I was like, I know that word. Frijol it is. Since I am the burrito without pants. We eat a lot of burritos. In April alone of 2005, she killed four people in seven days from the 13th to the 20th of april killed was a busy week four people wow she must have been in a bad mood so total now is 35 people yeah she's getting up there then september 28 2005 police found the body of carmen camilla

gonzalez miguel who was 82 and extremely wealthy and the mother of noted mexican criminologist luis rafael moreno gonzalez so now mother wealthy mother of a criminologist now the police are like okay we're actually gonna launch an operation and figure this out finally one of these grandmas matter i guess yeah so they finally this is when they started paying elderly women to act as bait in parks um they started he like brothers with the cop who like probably knew how to be a head minister or something sheriff thomas yeah um now this is where things get really fucking dark in october i mean they already are but in october of 2005 the police arrested 49 trans women who

worked as sex workers um as they strongly believed this was the demographic of the killer because it was a man dressed as a woman quote unquote god forbid first of all that a man be a nurse let's like god forbid yeah first of all uh right but yes also this is like on its own fucked up like and they couldn't even like conceptualize the fact that this could have been a woman to begin with like right there just couldn't be so during this time she got away with one more murder on october 18th um and interestingly a week before her next murder she did a tv interview about wrestling so she's still like in the wrestling world on tv so was this like a celebrity scandal that i've just never heard of sort of because like if like the

rock did this like he would never he would never he would never he's such a little gem um on october 25 2006 juana was going about her normal business you know strangling people yeah um as you do as you do according to banderas news she was targeting a woman named Ana Maria de los Reyes Alfaro, and she strangled her with a stethoscope. And that is when either the landlord or the tenant or whomever saw her leaving the apartment chased her down. Police apprehended her. Now they knew who their guy, quote unquote, was. um so she was picked up by a passing police patrol she was carrying a stethoscope a sphygmomanometer sphygmomanometer oh those i have five of those yeah i know in your burrito in my pants but they're in the other room that's why you don't remember yeah uh they measure blood pressure fun fact blaze you listening no okay he was like yeah i knew that he's like i told you how to say that um she was also carrying pension forms a social worker id card she was not

a social worker and the names and addresses of elderly women who received monthly relief checks once arrested she yelled yes i did it the police yeah well yes but she only admitted to that particular one interestingly enough the police obtained a search warrant for her address found newspaper clippings of all her crimes methodically stored as well as trophies from her victims they also found an altar in her home with figurines of the folk saint jesus malverde who's often referred to as the angel of the poor and a sort of a robin hood type figure i see interestingly enough i guess power you really and robin hood you're really like quarantine has been doing favors for me in my cartoon knowledge your burrito um so also to santa muerte who within

mexican folk catholicism is a personification of death and is often looked up to um when walking up to her trial a reporter asked how many elderly women she had killed and she supposedly said this is the first, according to LA Times. So she was like, I only did one. She was tried for 30 murders. She pled guilty to the one where she was caught saying, I only killed one little old lady, not the others.

It isn't right to pin the others on me. You can't possibly think it's me when I only have one murderer. By the way, she looks just like the bust. Really? Yeah. I hope I have a photo of it let me see it might have gotten covered up um but i'll show it to you afterward we'll put it in the oh no here it is whoa isn't that creepy that's oddly it's like unsettling someone did a really good job with that bust someone is a uh a sculptor extraordinaire yeah yeah so uh she only admitted to one even though like she definitely did more um she was found guilty of 16 uh and 12 bank robberies according to the guardian when she

heard the verdict she said may god forgive you and not forget me oh okay i mean like if this were like a strong powerful confident feminist who had done nothing wrong exactly just like your tagline i'd be like okay if that were like a witch at the witch burning thing like may god forgive you and not forget me i'd be like hell yeah that is a fucking you go girl what's what's that now no mary what's the one under mercy lena mercy lena you go girl go girl um but this is her saying it now i'm like yikes yeah like i really wish i could respect you so i could empower you with yeah but like we're not gonna um according don't kill people's grandmothers please um according to the guardian yep she said that sorry i said that already so juana is currently currently imprisoned in a Santa Marta Acatitla prison on a sentence of 759 years, but only has to serve 60, which is the maximum sentence in Mexico, and is currently on her 12th.

She's very popular. She prepares tacos, sells them in the courtyard Monday to Wednesday. So, you know. She also started courting a or was courted by another inmate named miguel on hell who uh courted her through letters and they began a relationship over writing and slowly uh she fell for the guy and in 2015 58 year old juana wed 74 year old inmate miguel who was being held for murder they had never set eyes on each other before the wedding they'd only written love letters to each other.

Love is blind. Love is blind. It's like the original. Oh, my gosh. But their ceremony included food, music and cake provided by prison officials. Wow. So apparently 48 other couples have gotten married in the same prison, which the Mexican government promotes in a program called Lazos and Reclusión, which is bonds in confinement to help inmates forge personal relationships that's nice however they didn't last very long uh in 2016 a mere year after being married to miguel they divorced they had only seen each other three times for a cumulative total of 40 minutes

during their marriage but that was i guess enough for her to be like nah i'm done she was like okay if i hit 45 minutes i'm gonna kill you yeah true it's like get out of here listen you don't want to screw with her um since her sentence in 2008 juana has since admitted to killing four other women so now she's like well i killed five so like she definitely killed more um martine barone who interviewed her in 2006 for his book which is in english English called The Knot of Silence on the Trail of a Serial Killer, deduced that, quote, aside from the excitement that came from robbery and homicides in the history of Barraza, additional excitement is found in the fact that at age 30, she started to practice lucha libre. So if you're like, I need to know more about this Juana,

which like I think we all are, there is a song called la maravilla hitas by a mexican singer oh my goodness uh um um i hear people laughing at me i'm so sorry everybody amanda titita which features the lyrics i'm not gonna sing them but i will read them you want me to hold your hand no okay nope that's enough of that too much already la maravillitas wants to get rid of your grandmother no one can stop this shameless person she is a professional wrestler she used to call herself la dama del silencio no one suspected or could have imagined such a thing this killer could be your neighbor and that is the story of la maravillitas la dama del silencio the old lady killer juana barraza wow it's a good story it's pretty wild huh there's a lot of ups and a lot of downs a lot of ups and a lot of downs

in that costume um yeah so anyway that's the uh that's the story morning glory that's it that's the one wow thanks for listening well uh good job thank you i really like that one it's good right yeah it's pretty weird i was allowed to emotionally uh be attached to parts of that story yeah yeah yeah we could feel for her while also condemning her actions uh-huh like you can feel for someone and like understand where they come from but also like yeah not approve of their behaviors yeah i don't condone it but i get it yeah it's at least like listen i've been watching a lot of criminal minds as i said and i'm wearing a sweatshirt that says unsubbed for anyone just listening on audio but um yeah you know mind of a killer sometimes you just got to trace it back to childhood yeah i think actually there was an episode based on her on criminal minds because

really they there's a criminal minds like page bio on her on the criminal minds wiki so are you i'm a i've been i i am me i am the wife of um matthew gray goobler mgg every time you say his name i realize that i say it wrong in my head because i think say it say it well i'm i'm trying to remember what you just said so i don't say the wrong one mgg matt matt gubby gubbler gubby gubbler matthew gray goobler goobler I don't know what you're saying. Anyway. I just think of Matt Gubby. There's also Shamar Moore. There's a lot of people on that show that I'm just very attracted to. Well, I'm sure you're not alone.

No, I'm not. Because I once mentioned the quote I literally said on the show. All I want to talk about is Matthew Gray Goobler. And all the freaking Gen Z youth came at me on Twitter like, I talk about him with you and i was like great i'm glad i'm not alone it's all i want to talk about so thank you guys for listening uh we're probably gonna go eat some cheesecake okay we love you uh we love cheesecake more love you and cheesecake double mean it um if you would like to know more about us uh we have a website and that's why we drink.com we also have social media uh at wwd podcast which is verified on twitter and instagram as am i christine the end

and that's why we drink.