And That's Why We Drink - E202 Spiritualist Chippendales and the Murder Situation Show

Episode Date: December 20, 2020

Would we want to have our pants unbuttoned in a dark wardrobe by a bunch of spiritualists? We ponder this and many more hard hitting questions this week as Em brings us back to the booming age of American Spiritualism with the story of the Davenport Brothers and their tricky wardrobe. Then Christine takes us to 1996 and Christmas day in Boulder, Colorado for, you guessed it, the notorious JonBenét Ramsey case! Our orthopedic slippers are off on this one, so buckle up for all of our thoughts and theories. We also hatch a plan to convert our Blue's Clues wardrobe into a working Davenport cabinet... and that's why we drink! Please consider supporting the companies that support us! Right now, Embark has an offer on their Breed and Health Kit for our listeners this holiday season! Go to Embarkvet.com now to get free shipping and save $50 off your Embark Breed and Health Kit with promo code DRINK. Visit Embarkvet.com and use promo code DRINK to save $50 today.Finally, a pair of glasses designed for the 21st century. Go to FelixGrayglasses.com/DRINK to shop glasses that work as hard as you do. Free Shipping. Free Exchanges. 30-day money back guarantee. FelixGrayglasses.com/DRINK.Daily Harvest makes it easy to eat clean, undeniably delicious food, no matter what your day brings. Keep it simple with Daily Harvest! Go to DAILYHARVEST.com and enter promo code DRINK to get $25 off your first box!FabFitFun is the only subscription that delivers full-size self-care and wellness products straight to your door. Use coupon code “DRINK” for $10 off your first box at www.fabfitfun.com.

Christmas time is here. We are doing a gift exchange as usual. We are behaving pretty extra about it. And we decided we were going to do it the 27th of December. It's for Patreon. Yes. And that's the day our Christmas episode releases. So it's a little dual, duo, double action.

Double trouble, as I like to say. Double trouble. Yeah. So we will be on patreon we'll post the details there as far as time and stuff but it'll be a live stream uh on youtube so we cannot wait to see you there and hopefully uh yeah hopefully you can pop on and then watch the ridiculousness ensue because i definitely got christine some very weird presents and i'm assuming something odd will come my way likewise yes uh so go to patreon.com slash atwwpodcast and we will see you there.

Hello and welcome to And That's Why We Drink, a podcast with Emma Christine. Oh, that was fun fun i'm trying to make it more professional waited a little too long i think i try to do it we're too late to be who you want to be f scott fitzgerald oh oh wow my stepmother has that embroidered on a pillow so i memorized it okay what do i have on any i don't think i have anything fun on you have a picture of geo on a pillow so i think that counts. Okay, that's fair. I actually have inspiring. I have a lot of things with your dog's face on it who doesn't even live in on this side of the country anymore. Yeah, the embarrassing part is I buy them and then like make you put them in your home. So

it's quite embarrassing. But you know, and I graciously accept with open arms. So thank you. Anyway, how is Gio? Now we I'm sure a lot of people would like an update on him oh my goodness um he's well oh my god i haven't even told you this we literally hired a dog trainer uh here in wow you really are becoming a totally different person it's it's hardcore because i'm it's it's i'm desperate because i mean he's here right now because we're recording too late in the day to put him in daycare. So anytime anyone comes over, we have to put him in daycare. Even if it's like my dad, like he's just so bad with people. What does he do? He just like barks and gets territorial and like tries to get them out the door and like

loses his mind. Yeah. It's only people he like really knows he's fine with. But I think after moving to a new house, he's gotten like more sensitive. I don't know. I don't know. But it's gotten like more sensitive i don't know um i don't know but it's just like driving me crazy if anytime the mail comes as you know it's like you know mail was always a big a big moment for the whole house yeah and like now that we're getting packages for you know instead

of like instacart or whatever i'm doing like things are coming to the front door and like i'm like after corona how am i supposed to have like anybody over ever a or like how am i supposed to it's just a nightmare so we hired a dog trainer who came two days ago and today is the first day of like training and i'm already so bad at it because he's not allowed to be on furniture for like two months to kind of like establish uh they're like he's the alpha in this house and you need to reestablish i was like he is and blake's like christine well he's a scorpio so let's start there yeah i was like he's the alpha in the world so it's not like just me um but yeah so we're doing all this train we have like i have like a three-page notebook or three-page list of

um like every day we're supposed to do training doorbell training knocking training like i mean it is a whole like stranger training where i'm supposed to have my dad come over and like give him treats i mean it's just a lot so anyway he's fine but like if he barks during this please know that i'm trying my best to get rid of it's like having it's like having a toddler i get it it's okay yeah i people don't like when i say that because like i'm sure having a toddler is a whole different but i'm i know having in terms of volume they're the volume wise it's a lot okay in terms of interruptions of like recording a podcast they're they're probably similar so i uh i gotta tell you it's probably my fault i probably should chip in with your trainer i i think i

really i started the the curve with that popcorn oh yeah i sent you a uh a bill great okay i it's in a geo envelope with his face on it i gave it to eva and said get rid of this um that's probably what happened uh how how are you doing are you doing well oh i'm fine m thank you for asking i am finishing up all your christmas gifts and wrapping them and they're right behind the computer so i can't show you but i'm very excited i'm so close to seeing them oh by the way everybody this comes out uh december what like the week of christmas yeah so we decided to do we needed some extra prep time so we're doing like our quote-unquote real holiday special next week if you can even call it that um so i have something planned for that or like a fun story but um just in case anyone's wondering cool man how are you i miss you i miss you i i wanted

to tell you i if you'll indulge me um always so this uh and we're a lot we don't need to make this weird we're allowed just have casual normal conversation okay i'm gonna take my antidepressants while you tell a story just in case in case the camera comes back to me that's what's happening i just want to warn if people are like why is christine popping pills it's i was like damn christine what i'm about to say is not that bad i need to i need to like bolster myself for your story i appreciate that so uh for those of you who know by the time so this comes out on the 20th and as we're saying this had already happened a few weeks ago so probably like a month ago you probably saw on my instagram that i lost my gammy and uh so today and yesterday because it got split up uh yesterday

was the memorial service and then this morning at 6 a.m here thanks gammy uh it was uh keeping you on your toes it was the uh the wake or no yesterday was the i don't this was my first funeral i don't know what's going on but today that was the burial oh i see i think that's oh yeah i don't know forget it yesterday was like the open casket experience yesterday experience the trademark it was an experience you need to buy a special priority ticket and then uh today was like the open casket experience yesterday. Experience. The trademark. It was an experience. You need to buy a special priority ticket. And then today was like the mass and the burial. So three days ago, by the time you're listening to this, three days ago, December 17th would have been her 80th birthday.

Oh, happy birthday. For those of you, I appreciate everyone saying very wonderful wonderful kind things to me when i first lost her um she was the best woman in the entire world she was the best grandma if you're thinking in your head okay well you have my grandma you're still wrong my grandma this was the coolest gammy in the whole world i'm conceding this from day zero i'm conceding this to you. I know it. Well, she was just the, it was the thing that was the weirdest because it was, well, techno, hang on a second. Let me just get through this whole story. I like how Em starts yelling at everybody.

It's like, you have the stage and the microphone. I'm literally like, everyone calm the fuck down. Give me a minute. Jeez. Well, so she, just so everyone knows, because I don't know if anyone is asking this to themselves, but so she ends up passing from COVID. She had, she was the one that I've discussed before who had pretty gnarly Alzheimer's. And I'm really lucky that when we were in New York last year, I got to see her, or maybe it was two years ago now. I got to spend one last real day with her.

And that was very delightful. And so she was already, I think, on her way out. She had not been doing great, and then she got COVID. And the nurses called us and said, she's not going to make it through the weekend. So this is the time for everyone to call her through a speakerphone and say your goodbyes. And a lot of my family is still in New York where my gammy was. And me and some of my cousins are in North Carolina. So for those, because of COVID, we couldn't go to the funeral. I think they had like a limit to who could go. So we ended up doing everything through Zoom, which by the way, being a part of that through Zoom was wildly awkward.

that through zoom was wildly awkward yeah i bet it's such a weird new experience it was uh i kept trying to like make people feel better i was like emote or something like i was trying to like keep like energy high like because everyone was like obviously very somber um i'm one of the very lucky people when it came to my relationship with my gammy. Where like I, grieving was very easy for me. Because I got closure a long time ago with that relationship. And we both knew that we were each other's homies. Like I have nothing I never got to say to her. So I was trying to be in like what would be good spirits during her,

during all of this on Zoom. I really fucked up earlier today too. During the. What? During the. She too. Oh no. I wasn't going to say this part,

but I told Eva and then, and then I just. Okay. So. Tell me. So I was. Everybody else plug your ears. I'm so embarrassed.

And by plug your ears ears i guess you already have headphones in so like you're just gonna hear it louder gammy i'm so sorry if you can hear me i i was trying to like not necessarily keep things light and that like i wasn't taking this seriously i was just trying to be more jovial one of the things that everyone knew about my gammy is that she was just such like she walked in the room and she was always the smiliest, happiest, like her laugh. The,

the one thing I'm going to miss the most about her was her laugh. Cause it was just like, you'll never hear anything like it again. And the thing that was so weird for me at the, during this week was that like, she wasn't smiling. Like she didn't look like herself, not because she was dead,

but because she wasn't smiling. And so just, I was trying to like kind of keep spirits high because i know that's what she would have wanted and if it were a wake for someone else she would have or a mass or funeral she would have done the same thing so i was like okay for gammy i'm gonna try to be the more uppity person other people are grieving more than i am. So like, I'm going to be that, that energy. And my cousin came up to me on Zoom. I was on, I was on Zoom. And then my cousins from North Carolina were also on Zoom. And they, my uncles were doing a great job of like, kind of leaving the laptop, like on a pew in the church.

And then like leaning it against like something else during the memorial service and so uh they left it running so we were just kind of almost sitting with the audience or the audience yikes our family and uh oh my god and i didn't even realize i was like what about oh god we're the worst technically i was an audience member um but so uh one of my cousins came up who like isn't handling it very well and uh he was like hey how are you doing and like and i was in my room at six in the morning and uh i said i was like well if you told me a year ago that i wouldn't wear my i wouldn't wear pants to my grandma's funeral i would have thought you were crazy and then i thought he would laugh and like my aunt was also i thought she would laugh and no one laughed my other cousin who was on zoom with us i saw her go like cover her mouth like i can't believe you said that. This is a Gemini's worst nightmare.

Like literally being like that guy at a funeral. Oh my God. I'm so sorry. I wasn't trying to like come up with a- No, I know. I know that for a fact. So I'm just saying like- This happened to be a funeral where pants were optional, whether or not it was addressed

openly. I feel like I would have laughed in the church and then everyone would have been like, I would have been the asshole. So I mean, maybe they were like, well, maybe we're not supposed to laugh. Em's hilarious joke. You know what? I think my Gabby would have laughed. I was going to say, she probably laughed.

She was just such a happy, she loved like little pranks and being jokey and stuff like that. So I think she would have been very happy that someone said something like that. But anyway, I wanted to, I really went off on a tangent. Sorry, I was not going to address that I said that. That you but anyway i wanted to i really went off on a tangent sorry i was not gonna address that i said that that you didn't wear pants no ma'am this is a weird fucking year folks i don't know how that's like such a topper happy christmas i guess there it is but so uh one thing that i wanted to the thing that i wanted to say but i felt like i needed to you know zhuzh this up so i had some context um i wanted to officially tell everyone a very personal uh quote ghost story you already know this one and but uh but it's my one of my gammy's and so

is it the one yeah yes oh my god i was gonna say but then i was like i don't know if like that's the thing m wants to talk about so my my gammy i will say uh i don't she was always really really uh embarrassed about it because she didn't think people would believe her so um she didn't talk about it a lot but i think this is the exact platform she wished she had yeah um and i'm absolutely no shame gammy we will this is a safe space this is the exact platform she wished she had yeah um and i'm absolutely no shame gammy we will this is a safe space this is a safe space and uh so she uh one of the things that she always had with her growing up every time i was at her house i would look at her i would be in her bedroom and i would see on her nightstand on like you know how night

tables have like that bottom shelf for you to like put something there was always this shoe like a white shoe and i was like what what is the story to this totally and my whole family knows the story i'm very lucky that i inherited the shoe i'm very happy about that um and my gammy had this story i hope i'm not butchering it but the gist is that she got it back in like the 80ies, um, when her and my grandpa were getting divorced and they were gardening shoes. My Gami liked to garden a lot. So she put the shoes on. Oh, there's Gio. Sorry. I tried to warn you folks. And even Gami can't stop Gio's nonsense. I'm so sorry. Not even for a second, that one. I would also be so disrespectful at a funeral with this one. I'm so sorry. Not even for a second, that one. God.

I would also be so disrespectful at a funeral with this one. I mean, you and I would be just like a nightmare duo to have at a funeral. Like you forgot to mute and then like your dog. Yeah, exactly. And I would be screaming at my dog like, shut up. Well, so I will say one of my favorite fun facts about my Gammy, since we're killing time waiting for him to stop barking, my Gammy was in a barbershop quartet called the Afternoon Delights.

Ah, I mean, come on. Come on. She was the best. You can't beat that. You can't. So she was gardening and she had just had this like, I'm assuming a really nasty split. I know that her ex wasn't tops. Well, and I think it was so much harder back then to go through a divorce, even for a parent's generation.

And they got married real young. I think like when she was like 18 or something. Oh, wow. So she, even if it was like not the greatest relationship, it was all she knew. So I think she was really scared. And she had just gotten these like brand new gardening shoes to like make herself feel good. had just gotten these like brand new gardening shoes to like make herself feel good and while she was gardening she was my my gammy was more or less religious and you know would talk to her parents who had already passed on um kind of praying but kind of just chatting with them

and she christian she was catholic yeah catholic yeah so my uh while she was gardening she was talking to her mom who she was really close with um and she was like mom i'm just really scared i just really scared. I just want this to work. And, you know, I want to know that I'm going to be okay. And that you're looking out for me. And, you know, I just, I just need a sign that you're here with me and I'm not alone. And as she was doing that, when she was gardening, her shoes got all muddy because she had been hosing, uh, hosing, using the hose. And, uh uh so her shoes got all muddy so she left them out um she rinsed them off with the hose and then she left them on the uh like i guess like her front porch to dry out in the sun and she went to bed the next day she went to go get her shoes and in one of the shoes there in the dried mud that was left it embedded itself into her shoe it like the mud embedded in it but

in a perfect picture a perfect image of a woman that we think could be her mom or it's just like a guardian angel that something like that but when i tell you like it's not like a potato chip and you think you see jesus in the potato chip like so i brought the shoe you did okay i did so i've seen it in photos this is the shoe well i'm seeing it in photos again because i'm not there but you know so uh my only issue is i don't know how the can't what the camera sees so i'm just gonna post a picture so you guys can see what it looks like on the inside. But I know you, Christine, can see in there. It's I've really bad quality video on you right now for some reason. OK, but trust and believe.

I've shown it to you before, haven't I? Yes, I've seen it. Yeah. I mean, it's like it's no joke. It's like no, no, no, no. It's like a little portrait in there. And so and it's all ripped up in here. The soul is ripped up because my gammy was so freaked out about it.

She took it to like a bunch of churches and like priests were like, really priests. So all, all in here, you can't really see, but like the, the, the,

like the little padding it's like glued down for the most part where it originally was. But this whole part up in the shoe is like ripped out and barely hanging on because so many priests like didn't believe her. They were ripping it out to try to see what was behind it so it's like all messed up and no one can explain it but ever since that day this face has been here and so my gammy always kept it by her nightstand and would talk to it whenever she was sad and uh then when her alzheimer's got really bad and my

aunt was moving her into a home she had to kind of pick and choose what went with my gammy and what would start kind of getting handed out to family members and my aunt I had been begging for this one for a long time so yeah I got the shoe and now I keep it on my nightstand and when I want to talk to gammy I've got someone to look at but and great gammy and great gammy so uh anyway when it's a great story during uh when gammy passed a couple weeks ago i kept saying like you know what the coolest part is gammy like now you know who this person is like you got to meet that person recently yes yes you were probably like you're the you're the girl from the shoe oh i just got goose cam so i hope that they're singing in a barbershop quartet somewhere

to go i'm sure they are anyway i thought that was today was an appropriate day and three days ago would have been her birthday so um oh well happy birthday gami um oh i'm sure she's just like living living it up oh she's having a blast she was such a social butterfly she probably hasn't even caught up with everyone yet so yeah anyway oh she didn't visit me and i was like she has a lot of people to talk to she might come back later she'll she'll pencil me in in 30 years especially since you've had closure she's probably like there's plenty of people who didn't get closure with me i'll see that real quick also so by the time she was born her parents had had three other babies and they all died before she was born oh no so she's got like three whole brothers to like catch up with.

Oh, my God. She's got a whole slew of people that's like on a to-do list right now. So I'm okay with not getting a sign from her yet, but at some point I'm going to get impatient, Gami. So wherever you are, hurry up. Oh. Anyway, that's my thing. I'm sorry that went longer than I wanted.

No, no. It's a beautiful story and i'm very sorry again for your loss i know that you're okay but she's i'm doing fine she's doing fine and uh i love you and i love your gammy by extension even though i never got to meet her she would have loved you she would have gotten she would have gotten such a kick out of you uh she would have been like this one's a dynamo um what's wrong with this one she probably would have said my catholic grandma also said that a lot so it's fine well she i think she would have liked you a lot so anyway uh that was just a little shout out to her so um my story

this week uh i want to get through it because i know you said that yours is long. So I want to make sure that I give you ample time. So mine is kind of a connecting story to last week, the Fox sisters that I covered. Got it. So this happened within six years of the Fox sisters story. And this is the story of the Davenport brothers. Oh, gosh. I didn't know those people existed. They sure did so they were more siblings that were instrumental in uh spiritualism not as accidentally but uh i think it blew out of

proportion for them as well i think they didn't mean for it to get as wild as it did so um the davenport brothers there were two of them one's name was ira is that the name ira okay ira davenport brothers there were two of them one's name was Ira is that the name Ira okay Ira Davenport like Ira Glass okay Ira you're like uh Ira Ira Glass yeah why don't I know what that is oh he's uh sorry I didn't I couldn't tell by your face he's the host of This American Life works for NPR. Well, I said, I said, because I know that name. But then I was like, why can't I put a face? Yeah.

Oh, it's such like a feel like. Anyway, he did. He does. He's like an OG podcaster, basically. And he works for NPR and does This American Life. And he's a very recognizable voice, I guess. It's really telling that I don't listen to those shows, apparently. Okay, so.

Well, he's the only Ira I can think of, so. Ira and William. I know a lot of Williams. Okay, so Ira and William Davenport. And so their family, this is also weird, they were not too far away from Hydesville, New York, where the Fox sisters were. Oh. So a lot of people think that there's no way they didn't hear about the Fox sisters and maybe the Fox sisters inspired what happened with them.

Sure. So their dad was in the police force. He was a detective and he taught his kids. I don't know why his dad had this interest, but he taught them all about like, like kind of little illusions, like specifically rope magic tricks oh that's fun um i think they're a dad thing yeah or maybe it started with like here's how to tie a knot and

then it just became like the thing where you do like a quarter like like a little sleight of hand stuff yeah so he apparently was really into that stuff and taught his kids and um so the kids would try these tricks at home and apparently it's kind of it's kind of muddled but they ended up getting the kids ended up getting so good at these magic tricks that uh their parents believed they like there was no way they could have not been doing it without being powerful oh Oh, they got bigger than dad. They got bigger than dad to like kind of a wild point. Okay. Like, so Houdini himself referred to their mother.

Okay, fucked up Houdini. Called their mom a simple woman, easily misled. Okay. Then again, kind of, because she straight up just believed her children had magic powers so i mean you and i are going to believe our children have you and okay you're right you've literally said the second your future child says like oh there's a person or an imaginary friend you're gonna think it's like a full demonic force but you want to know why because i'm a simple woman who is easily misled. So you can back off.

Houdini, you asshole. So what I think the way that the story started was they were doing these illusions. They were getting better at them. And then I think they probably heard about the Fox sisters. There's also a different storyline that says that the father was kind of getting into spiritualism because of the Fox sisters himself. that the father was kind of getting into like spiritualism because of the fox sisters himself anyway they it influenced their house in some way where the kids were like oh we should try table wrapping and table knocking knocking and and see what happens so they started doing these table sessions and trying to do their own seances um and like as preteens like just little kids apparently they were accidentally really good at

it um that's like us in podcasting we're like what people people listen to us i would like that's also me with escape rooms apparently i'm like what is this for you in the escape room podcasting is the only one i've found so far that i've like accidentally been good at you you say that you just haven't tried to make an escape room i think you would be sinister if you decide to make them i think i would go in my own really bad path and nobody would ever follow me your spectacular mind they would study it one day spectacular mind okay uh so apparently they were really good at this there's like table turning wrapping sessions and on their first try with a seance their little sister levitated oh okay um yeah so now you're like what is real and what is not so um also the table started this is uh after that happened they were like wow we're pretty good we should keep

doing this so they started doing these seances pretty often. And soon tables were moving. They were hearing raps, just like knocking on with the Fox sisters. Ira started to be able to automatically write. And at one point, all three of the children levitated at once. And I think were thrown across the room by accident. Oh, by accident. Or very much on purpose. I want to think the ghost was like kind of nice

um so another time uh i don't really understand why he did this um but ira you know how kids were in the 1840s pulled out his gun and uh he shot at like a random corner. Apparently there was like a legitimate. Yeah. Look. He was like 12. I don't know. Oh, the child. Sorry.

I thought that was the dad. I was like, this is all I'm getting. No, the child's gun. This is how we know this is American spiritualism. Oh, the child pulled his own gun. I understand. Okay. Wow.

Now it makes a whole lot more sense. USA. So. Yikes. Whipped out his gun. And he and he i don't know why shot at the corner of the room an empty corner of the room apparently there was a reason to that for the reason is beyond me the reason is he was 12 years old okay like that might be it too period end of story uh and as he fired the pistol, the second that he fired and there was like kind of a flash from the explosion, all of a sudden the gun had,

was in that like not even a split second, like split, split second. All of a sudden the gun was taken out of his hands, almost like in slow motion. The gun was taken out of his hand and he saw a human figure in the corner holding his gun and smiling at him. And then when the flash left, all of a sudden that figure was gone and the gun dropped to the floor.

Oh, okay. That's weird. I don't even know what to make of that. I don't either. It was like an apparition that was like a millisecond away from like a menace um like millisecond away from like keeping you from firing a gun i guess yeah i was gonna say but it didn't work or or and also i'm smiling and why was he standing where the bullet was gonna go like come on now

yeah i feel like that would be an excuse like oh no i didn't shoot the gun my imaginary friend did but like he didn't even use that as an excuse he's like no i shot the gun it's like i shot it my imaginary friend pulled it away from me because he's a square what a rude yeah exactly exactly uh so apparently in that moment they also had this this realizing this knowledge this some sort of epiphany that the figure that they had seen was john king who was their self-appointed control so when we've talked about seances before a control is almost like a spirit who comes down and is like there to be the translator for all the other spirits oh right okay um so apparently i didn't know this i must just be like not hip with it when it comes to spiritualism but apparently john king like across the nation

became everyone's control like this guy went to every single person that ever did a seance and was like i'm your control i'm the captain oh wow bossy okay yeah so i don't i think he's just like the only control or something is this like any one famous or is this just like some random dude from if it's someone famous i don't know okay okay because i'm like we talked about ben franklin why couldn't he be the control right like why couldn't like someone you want to run into you know yeah uh so anyway so they knew they had this knowing that it was john king and he was their control so they started trying to speak to john king pretty frequently no no guns needed but they

were like now that we have this spirit control and this guide with us, then we can see what they want to say. And John King, who I guess he was sitting at the table with them one night and was like, damn, you're pretty good at this. You should perform in public. Oh, God. Okay. And so they decided because the ghosts told them or John King told them that they should now go and do public seances for people. or John King told them that they should now go and do public seances for people. And much like Leah Fox becoming her sister's, quote, momager, sisager,

their dad retired from the force and became their dadager. I see. A lot of similarities so far. He was probably just taking, he was like, I'm going to follow what that Leah Fox did. She really brought them something. Really brought them somewhere. They're making some buku bucks over there. He was like, I'm going to follow that hot trail. fox did she really brought them something really brought them somewhere buku bucks over there he was like i'm gonna follow that that hot trail so they started he they've been inspired to start

working publicly and doing their stuff so in 1854 which was only six years after the fox sisters the davenport brothers who were 16 and 14 at this point they began performing their illusions while also doing seances and so it was kind of a combination of like magic and ghosts which like is very sassy um love it love and they so mainly they were known for their seances and they were doing them locally at this point so early shows they started just like the fox sisters most of it was just wrappings on a table um it very quickly escalated which i'm going to get to in a second. But one of my favorite fun facts of this is one of their biggest fans was P.T. Barnum again, who loved the Fox sisters.

Okay, this guy is just like all over the place. He's trying to recruit them, I think. So after performing and working in some local seance circles, the Daven are like okay we're getting we're becoming big fish in this little pond so we're gonna go to uh new york city and they start doing this thing called dark seances which is not as scary as it seems it literally means that they're doing seances in the dark um sounds pretty scary to me oh wait so i'm sorry to be this this dumb but like so our normal seance is in the light i always thought so but i guess they just like now they're they're official they're like this one's not they were in the dark because like i don't know what the reasoning was but i just always assumed you

wanted to do it when it was darker right well i always assumed because it was usually fake and so they were like here uh not always but you know when they're when they were doing these like tricks they always turn the lights off i always thought at that well maybe because at that point if they were fake uh it seemed like it was more fake i don't know if they were fake it's i mean it's so far at least according to their father who like was willing to quit his like steady paying job that he had seen all three of his children literally fly across the room so like i think he was like this is pretty legitimate so i feel like it's usually by like candlelight makes it spooky but i don't know what do i know clearly not as much as the davenport brothers apparently not uh apparently these were dark stances but maybe maybe what you're looking for is this little

piece of information so um the brothers that specifically for their seances their quote dark seances this was the act i guess is the the event um they would tie themselves to chairs because remember they they knew this rope these rope illusions oh yes yes yes so they were mixing their knowledge of like rope rope magic tricks into their seance sure stuff um but so it was almost like it was more of an uh like they were trying to be uh a performance act chris angel my lover kinda yeah okay absolutely your lover i remember you telling me you'd love him i yeah won't forget it it's an it's an oft overlooked facet of my personality but also everything else you've ever said when you say chris angel is like my honey

i'm like well that checks out like just okay all right maybe it does fit maybe it fits uh so now i see db for davenport brothers and i thought david blaine oh well there's a lot there's a lot going on here so the davenport brothers they would tie themselves to chairs and that's when they would do their seances so it was almost to prove that they weren't doing anything they weren't messing with stuff and they would even have volunteers tie them as tight as possible to these chairs um so that was just kind of their shtick of like look we're legitimate so they would tie themselves uh or they would have people tie them to chairs and then they would summon the spirits and before the seance started they would show everyone like there's nothing going on like you can investigate you can look around in the center of the room we're going to leave a bunch

of instruments and then once we're all tied down we summon uh spirits by having them try to like play the instruments oh oh i thought you meant like oh an emf detector you're like no it's a tuba it's a trombone oh no it's literally like a musical instrument oh my gosh okay like a little like a little cowbell that's fun and so that was their way of being able to summon them was through music so they uh they would do everything in the dark and then what and they also would turn the lights off that was kind of the shady part of like okay why do the lights have to be off for this so the lights were off and by the time uh the seance started you could hear like the band drumming itself or the guitar playing and people

started feeling themselves kind of getting touched or something weird would happen they'd hear voices from other parts of the of the corners where no one was and when they would turn the lights back on they were still in their chairs completely tied down um so that was like what really got them popular um sometimes this was kind of funny too one of the things that they would do in their quote act is they would uh they would when the lights came back on they would be wearing each other's clothes like they would be like they'd be tied to the chair like they never got up but now they're in like fun their pants are down or something funny so they tried to make it maybe that's why pt barnum loved them because they kind of had like a circusy feel to it it feels like clowny almost like vaudeville like a lot of like showy stuff going

on so uh and to be fair like i'm saying this to you in kind of like a hindsight way of like what was going on but like people were freaking the fuck out like i want you to like frame this in your head of like even though i'm giving you the kind of the real parts of it people saw this and were like holy shit like they didn't know it was an illusion act oh yeah and especially if you're getting like touched or feel things like that must be terrifying in the dark and especially like whether it's a ghost or not especially when the people that are hosting you are strapped down and you know they are because you tied them down and now all of a sudden like they're wearing someone else's coat like what the banjo's playing you're like oh where did i end up here so uh one seance report said this uh or one they would have

regularly like the press would come and like make reports about them what a fun beat to have like you join a newspaper and they're like you're on the seance beat it's like being on like all sorts of magazines or all sorts of paragraphs everywhere paragraphs all over my room this is full of paragraphs good luck so stupid we're like i know we say this a lot but like we'd be the worst blank but like we'd i literally studied journalism but like we would have just been the worst like spiritualism journalist we would have been absolutely oh if we could have if they could have had like a this is just a bunch of paragraphs whatever that article was if if they had that but like ghost edition i'd be like here we go buckle up just make eva write that down the whole time it was

literally you don't even have to write it it was just eva's notes that's what it was we just talk right wait that's what's happening oh okay so in the room making a lot of sense one of the reports said quote one davenport boy was floated in the air above the heads of those in the room at a distance of nine feet from the floor next a brother and sister were influenced in the same way, and then three children floated high up in the room. Hundreds of respectable citizens of Buffalo are reported to have seen these occurrences. So as you can tell from that quote, they're also not just doing this sitting in the chair thing.

They're also now adding levitation to it. And then eventually they started putting, like, phosphorus chemicals or something they started painting items in advance with all this like uh glow-in-the-dark stuff basically so that you would see these items and like the musical instruments like floating on the ceiling and shit and so my gosh it was like almost like i think this is your answer to the dark sands thing it was almost like a light show so So because the lights were off, all of a sudden the music is playing

and now all of the musical instruments are glowing and flying around the room. And also like- This is so wild. Also children are like getting levitated. So- This is like Cirque du Soleil early beta version. Yeah.

It's a beta Blue Man group. It's the beta Blue Man brothers. Okay. So part of the show beforehand which like in hindsight we know that this was an act i usually don't start with telling you guys the truth but i just don't know how to frame this story properly without yeah i don't know how to give you all the information without just being direct so i'm sorry usually i like to tease you guys but here we go so part of the show beforehand was that they had this guy, Reverend J.B. Ferguson, where if you're from the South, he's a very famous person.

At least in, like, I think Nashville or somewhere in Tennessee. Oh, I don't know the name. So he loved them. And he was one of those people who, like, was a devout believer. Like, they were legit. Like, the Davenport brothers are not doing anything other than just tying themselves to chairs and now ghosts are here um so they asked him to be like a part of their show and he would basically like mc like he uh like he would never get on the stage or

anything but it was almost like they kind of planted him it was like they they found someone who really believed in them and so they used it to their advantage and they would always have him in the audience and and this reverend would just go around and just like like be like guys they're so real they're so real like you're about to have your mind fucking blown that's like when we tell our parents to come to or when our parents or friends are coming we're like laugh so hard that like everyone will think we're funny we have actually done that at our when we know someone we do that often when we know someone in the audience we will tell them in advance like please god laugh so at least we hear one laugh like even if it's not one person's laughing yeah we'll feel better you can text me as you're laughing saying this

isn't fucking funny but like i need to hear the laugh just if even if i know that's my stepdad just go with it if you're if you're uh if you're wondering what you should do at our in our audience, if you're like kind of bored and like trying to figure out what to do besides watch us, please laugh. Fake laugh. If you're so bored that you can't laugh for real. You know, what hurts my feelings is like Allison's fake laugh is like so much more believable than her real laugh, because there has been a few times where like i tell a joke and then she literally is just deadpan doesn't care and i and then i'll be like that are my feelings can you just like fake laugh so i feel good about it and then her real laugh i'm like that felt so hearty and real so now i'm nervous about when you actually laugh because you just taught me that you

know how to fake laugh very well i'm not good at fake laughing me either i go like that's a scary that's a scary power that she has because it is very powerful now i don't know um oh well so uh so the davenport brothers they had the reverend with them and he was like hyping everyone up he's basically like like a live audience hype man yes oh my gosh but he also like they weren't like paying him to like to trick anyone he was deadly believed it and so that was why they i think used him because they were like we don't even have to lie like this guy thinks we're legit um and so he went on tour with them for a while too like they brought him everywhere they could and so the brothers were actually eventually right

when they were about to get super big um they were caught one day okay one day uh someone came to one of their seances and snuck in a lantern and in the middle of the seance turned the light on and uh it was found out that uh the brothers were running around the room with instruments in their hands and what a sight to see like because one of their pants is off and they're just like i'm holding a banjo like it must be the strangest it feels like watching like dwight and moe's out in the cornfield or something like it's just like weird chaos explain this to your own mind i don't know oh my god so apparently they got caught like busted that like okay so you're the ones doing this and then before the lights come on you like ship like shimmy yourself back into the ropes

right um so they had been found out and then their reputation was kind of crushed so they ended up moving back home to buffalo what do you think the reverend felt he must have been like in that moment when he's like, no, this is crazy. And they turn on the lights. His heart must have just sank. Well, so I don't know about him. I would guess the only quotes I found from him, which, by the way, were a lot. And they were very in-depth and very flowery.

They were like love letters. He fucking loved them. I don't think he I think he was one of those people where like evidence had been thrown into his face and he was like not true fake news he was gonna find a way like yeah yeah yeah got it he was like he was like they just they're just jealous they just they just they wish they had powers or something so okay um so they moved back to buffalo and they continued to hold circles wherever they could like given that their reputation wasn't too damaged and they just kind of hung back for a little bit and regrouped and that's when they

were like okay we're gonna go back out there this time we're gonna really rock their socks off and that is when they created the davenport spirit cabinet so hey do you have a laptop near you or your phone yes can you can you google it and uh because i'm gonna try to describe it for you but i might need backup because i'm picturing a dibbick box is that not right imagine that but like for humans to be able to fit in what is it called sorry davenport a davenport uh spirit cabinet cabinet it was basically a massive wardrobe that they were able to hollow out for themselves so i'm gonna try to describe it and then just tell me if i kind of nail it let me see oh oh oh i see it yep okay got a photo so it's basically a giant armoire of sorts or like a a cabinet where the door like like fridge sized cabinet like a wardrobe yes like a wardrobe

and there are three doors to it so there's a left and middle on the right the left and the right sides um have benches on them so that from either end of the wardrobe the brothers can sit down on the benches facing each other so uh in the middle section because there's three doors right so in the middle section there's at the very top there's a little window with a curtain. Aha, okay. So from there, this was the spirit cabinet. So how it would work is volunteers would be called onto the stage from the audience, and they would tie up the Davenport brothers.

They were sitting on the benches, and they would be tied up on their wrists and their feet to the benches and then they would close the doors. And then the volunteers would go sit back down. So basically they were only brought up there just to tie them up, close the doors, and then go back to their seats. Get a little clap, get a little embarrassed. A little hee hee.

A little moment. A little clout for the Insta, you know. And so what would happen next was it was a series of the doors would open and now they're untied the doors would would be closed again they would open and now they're tied up and then open close open close they're untied they're tied they're untied they're tied but every time would be like a little more ridiculous so like it'd be like oh now they again like don't have pants on. They really like to close the stuff. Wow.

They like to take the stripping into the whole mix. Well, the main thing is in the middle portion, it was, I guess the way to describe it, it was, it was almost like they were taking their dark seance act on tour. So they made,

they had all the musical instruments in the middle part of the cabinet. So where they were tied down once they were closed in in theory they shouldn't be able to play the the music but uh when you were sitting outside you could hear music like going like crazy like you could hear like a million spirits playing a band and there's like three sections right so like they can't presumably can't access the middle section even. Exactly. And and so it was like, oh, you can hear all this music. But how they're tied down.

And then you would open the door and see they're still tied. And then later they would all of a sudden be untied, even though how could that be? So it was just kind of a back and forth thing like that. There was also a version where they for like the second part of their act, they would have a volunteer actually go into the cabinet with them oh and be in the middle portion okay and uh then usually it ended up being some sort of vaudeville thing where like their pants were down or they had like a but can you imagine you're like oh i'll get on stage and they're like hold on let me unbutton your pants in this dark at least at least i think it's like a ghost or something but like listen i went up to the chippendales remember i got called up to chippendales do i remember

christine that was i called a therapist i remember so did my brother i i watched christine basically in a porn it was yeah it was it was like next level intense uh they and i will say shower one right the shower no that was lisa got to do the shower bit i was in the 50 shades of gray sequence so right yeah a lot of uh devices yeah it was a whole thing and i want to add because every time i i feel like i should say this is that i got up there and they were like they were like you know we're never actually gonna touch you first second like this the moment you feel uncomfortable or you're like i don't want to do this literally just say you know no or stop

they were wildly respectful done yeah and they were like you know any anytime you feel like i don't want to do this anymore like just say the word and it's over they explain like every step of it and so i was like they're like and then we're gonna reach through your legs and i was like oh god i was like okay and i'm like my mom is in the audience they said something like oh we're gonna we're gonna blindfold you and like bend you over yeah they blindfold you bend you over reach through your legs and i was like my mom m uh brother lisa and are in the audience my eyes don't even know my eyes were on fire I remember it being like I I was I was having an out-of-body experience where I was like I can feel the trauma I can I can feel it like folding into the folds of your brain just like I could I could feel it going into the folds and then going even deeper where I won't be able to remember it until like

20 years from now in a violent rage yeah yeah repressed out of wake up in a nightmare yeah anyway so that's what eva was there oh poor eva when we we had just that year so she was like okay it was october and we hired her april right no it was july because this was a bachelor bachelorette oh my god so we knew her for eight weeks no no if we february we hired right around her birthday, March. It was April 18th, homie. Oh, April. Okay.

I get all our dates confused. April, May, June, July. Yeah, so like three months. That was the final test of her interview, actually. It was just see if you can tolerate this. Listen, she passed better than you did. The very first picture I ever took of her on my phone is when we got to go backstage at Chippendales and she's like holding like a leather crop.

And I was like, this is odd. I was like, Aviva. Yeah, this is. I just signed a document that says I'm your employer. This is like probably not. I was like, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. Oh, what a good sport.

I have heartburn. When you said that guy was in the wardrobe and they took his pants off, I was like, well, I've been there. So, yeah, hopefully they were as kind and respectful. I doubt it, but maybe. I'm glad you had a great experience because I had to watch it. I had a blast, especially because I was blindfolded. I was like, I don't know what they're doing. I'm just standing here.

Oh, they tied me up, too. This is very similar to the story. They, like, literally tied me up with ropes. Actually, wait a minute. Are they Chippin' Nails? Are they the original Chippin'endales are they wait a minute they're the original chippendales oh my god i thought there was a blue man group but but now sexy they're both in vegas i think they're actually the same people this is horrifying to me all of it i think the chippendales people just paint themselves blue and then go on stage again i would rather never see that happen i would rather never see you on stage with the chippendales but guess what happened well too late for that too late uh

hmm you owe me a lot of money because it's been going straight to better help and uh yeah okay well you owe me money for dog for dog therapy or for dog training so i guess we're even yeah call it even okay so they would have i i brought up the pants thing again just because i'm still like having my own like it's hilarious anxiety about the comment at the funeral about pants oh that's right oh my god this is all very fitting wow but so they they would do a lot of things like they would put like a like a tambourine on your head or your necktie would be on your leg or like something kind of goofy so they would sure they'd bring the volunteer in and then you'd hear a bunch of sounds and then all of a sudden the volunteer is like looking crazy but the brothers are all tied up so how

did that happen so um that was the second part of their act with the cabinet um so this is actually a quote uh from the book called the spirit world unmasked um and it says this was describing like someone this is the person who wrote this was actually an audience member who saw this happening um pandemonium reigned that's what this podcast should be called i love that pandemonium bells were rung horns blown tambourines thumped violins played and guitars vigorously twanged heavy wrappings also were heard on the ceiling sides and floor of the cabinet and then after a brief but absolute silence a bare hand and arm remember there's the window with the curtain oh yeah a bare hand and arm emerged from the window and rung a big dinner bell okay but it's also like okay so what they're hoping people will think is like

these can't possibly be their hands it's like a spirit has manifested in there and you're seeing a a ghost's hand a ghostly hand ringing time for din din yeah time to eat um uh and then after oh yeah and so that was uh that was the whole thing so it'd ring a dinner bell that's what the window was for so the the bros, sorry. The bros. I wrote bros to make my notes shorter. So everything says either bros or the DVs. The DVs.

Here's another quote about when the volunteers would go into the cabinets with them. I have at different times seen at least 300 people enter that cabinet, all of whom certified that there was no movement on the part of the brothers because that was supposed to be the other part where you're pulling a volunteer out from nowhere and they can confirm for you later like all this wild shit happened to you but we were tied down and we didn't do this so then it would almost be a word of mouth marketing where they were like i was in there and like i don't know what happened because they were tied down i didn't feel them touch me nothing happened i just all of a sudden had this my pants were down so um so now what convinced the audience uh that there wasn't any i guess um like the let's say the the final piece of evidence that they had not been doing anything

and they had been tied down this whole time the real to me trick to this was that the davenport brothers when they were getting tied down to the chairs originally the beginning of their act they would be given a handful each of flour okay and then they'd be tied down and then by the end of all of this we're like tambourine on the head necktie on the leg by the end of the whole act they still had flour in their hands so there's no way they could have touched anything that's funny what a random what a random thought i love that and what a smart way to like try to prove like my hands are closed i'm not doing any of this that's really clever so we'll get back to the flour in a little bit but i i wanted to make sure i said that because

i kept thinking like of course like for all you know like these ropes are like little magnets and they're just bracelets but they look like rope or something and sure but if you're if you have flour like if you even let go of that like your clothes are covered in it so like you would be busted right away it's everywhere um so they would then end each show still holding the flour in their hands so the audience obviously went fucking bananas for this so the new york daily tribune in 1869 reviewed their work and said this arm and these hands may have belonged to the Davenport brothers from like the one from the window. But if they did, the Davenport brothers are the cleverest jugglers of this age or of any age in which juggling has been known. Like, OK.

Wow. What a statement. It's like it's like us again with a term paper where they're like, it's 5000 words. And you're like, juggling has been known. I love juggling because juggling is fun. And juggling is spelled J-U-G-G-O. Do you know how to spell it? Do you know how many centuries it's been around?

Me neither, but I thought I'd ask. So after the cabinet act, the Davenport brothers would then hold a seance, like their old routine, where they now were using phosphorescent oils on the instruments so they were floating around so you kind of got an act where they were in the cabinet together then an act where a volunteer joined and then an act with this with the the music instruments everywhere wow so here's the real question that like if i knew how to have phrased the story differently we would be having a different conversation here's here's the big question i was going to ask you okay are the davenport brothers magicians or mediums what

do you think christine mediums i personally think they might have had a little bit of help with magic i think they're kind of like future tlc stars you know or like uh like a pen and teller kind of thing yeah yeah like some sort of uh tv show where they really try to trick you that they're you know that they're magical but they're just really good at actually isn't that a pen and teller show very like i think whether it's like pen and teller are very like upfront that they don't believe in anything supernatural or paranormal yes but i'm like specifically when with illusions i meant not the oh yeah like illusion wise yeah it feels very pen and teller they have because

they have like they're basically like america's got talent but it's just magic tricks and then they right right right right right yes it does totally feel like that i do know that pen and teller uh are wild skeptics and that's because I was very lucky that for undergrad, my senior thesis had to be in a class called like weird beliefs. It was literally just love that lucky. And it was literally my teacher who was a massive skeptic was just ripping apart ghosts the whole fucking time. Every,

every, every chapter was a different, like weird phenomena, near-death experiences or this is us debunking and he just debunked it the whole time but our entire class like when we had to watch like educational videos about like our we had to watch Penn and Teller oh because I like it's so funny because I have a weird connection to them too because when um so Lisa knows them really well. And so when I was in Vegas on the way, not for Bachelorette, that was a whole nother experience with Lisa.

But when Blaze and I were driving to LA, we were in Vegas for a night. And Lisa was like, here, I'll get you tickets to the Penn & Teller show. And we went. And the whole time I was like, because he was like, I want to be very clear that like, I think, you know, people are taking advantage when they're doing like cold readings. Like he was very upfront about being a skeptic. And I was like, oh, no, that hurts my feelings. And then afterward, I went up and was like, oh, I'm like, you know, we're Lisa's nephew and wife and stuff and talked to him for a little bit.

But I was like, this was before we had the podcast. So nowadays, I think I would have been like, I'm going to leave that fact out. Because I feel like he's going to be like, no, thanks. I'm not interested in that. But yeah, he was a nice guy. But yeah, definitely a skeptic. Well, now I can tell him that we work at the same studio as him. Oh, that's right.

He's on this network. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. She's probably like those people with a Ouija board on them. That fucking girl. Oh, OK. Oh, my God. She's putting Ouija boards on everything.

Thought I'd never see her again. Well. Nope. Well, I. Thought I never had to see her again. Well, Nope. Well, I, what was I going to say? Shit. I don't know.

I'm sorry. I derailed that. Oh, here's my thing. This was my favorite part of that class. So basically, you had to pick a topic that was like,

I quote, weird belief. And then you had to talk about it in any way you wanted. Based on your beliefs, you just had to back your argument.

Oh, okay. And that was your senior, it had to be like 40 fucking pages but like you could do it on whatever you wanted and like i ended up there was a like a practice paper beforehand that was worth like a very large chunk of our actual senior sim because he was like being very kind he was like if you do better on the practice paper like i'm gonna remember that come your actual thesis paper aha yeah yeah and i didn't have to write a practice paper because instead i said after this class i have to go to my shift as a ghost hunter so like can i believe can i just like bring equipment from my job here and like take it like take a whole class and do a presentation for everyone on the equipment and can we just call that my paper and he went yeah that's fine and i

got an a i pulled that fucking trick at all the time in college because i'd be in any class that wasn't journalism i'd be like well i know how to use a camera and edit so i'd be like how about i just make a video and a presentation instead of a paper if you got it and i learned how to code and make websites so i was like how about instead of writing like a 16 page paper i just make a website and they're like wow oh my gosh and i was like okay so i just like went on like squarespace didn't exist but i went on was like here's my cool it has a bunch of pictures and people were so pissed they were like what the hell and i was like i will avoid writing a paper any way i can i really well i really dug the fact that

it was like the second to most important paper i'd ever write in my undergrad life and he was like yeah you can just bring in your emf detector and call it a day smooth move and he is friends with me on Facebook now and he definitely knows what I do for a living and he probably wants to he's probably like I didn't do my job right have a big fat argument with me so uh okay so anyway the question was is he are they magicians or medium so uh surprisingly actually not really surprisingly because they didn't know what we know um or what you're about to know and i tell you how all this was done um but a lot of people thought that they were mediums and so they really did incidentally further the spiritualism movement

because so many people were convinced that they had these gifts and they were communicating with spirits right there were also dare i say equally the same amount of skeptics where they were like look no matter what it's a great show but like just be up front that like you're not talking to spirits and uh until they died they never confirmed nor denied either which was kind of part of oh that's fun i liked it a lot i thought it was like maybe they're doing it for like clout or like as their PR of like who's to say like it's whatever you make it, blah, blah, blah. But so.

I like that it's you get you get you make everybody kind of happy or, you know, you don't upset either party or like you can be a fan and you can be a fan. Yeah, it was a really diplomatic way to handle it. I guess. Yes. And they poked fun at it all the time. And they were like, oh, well, you know, maybe I'm a magician. Maybe I can talk to spirits. Maybe I'm a'm a magician like who knows um maybe i can play the

banjo so um so that being said their decision to neither confirm nor deny spiritualism uh because it would that question was always attached to like if you are all if you are a medium then you're confirming spiritualism is like a real movement we should pay attention to so it was not just that they were covering their own asses but they were like also making people question and consider this movement i see um and then the civil war hit yikes um it wasn't good for many people um no no certainly not and because so many people were out fighting or like you know they were are now you know nobody was around they ended up losing a lot of ticket sales because people weren't home anymore um and so or people like didn't want to go out and buy

tickets to this kind of stuff like they had other priorities they needed to pay attention to so since their numbers were dwindling they were like well where else could we go for spiritualism like people who are believing this kind of stuff and we could almost like kind of put the veil over their eyes and they're like let's go to europe because there's like sweden there's an opera singer remember there is she's waiting for you to say sweden i was like she's still over there that is actually very funny but uh this is where they went to england because they were like well, that's where the Society of Psychical Research is. Right. It really is like the Marvel Cinematic Universe every time.

I'm like, wow, so many overlaps. Yeah. It's like how many of these people knew each other? I love that. So they ended up going to England because spiritualism was over there. spiritualism uh was over there and while the u.s was preoccupied with civil with the civil war and after touring the u.s for 10 years they started their international tour so uh it went pretty well at first but i guess everyone over there were they were much more um confident or confident they were more uh willing to confront them about whether or not they were real um whether or not

they were really medium so people there were kind of taking their volunteer opportunities too seriously and when they were being told like here tie me to this chair and tie me as as hard as you can they were literally like cutting through their skin like they were like making them bleed because they were trying to tie them as fucking tight as possible and uh or that's at least what we thought was happening the davenport brothers were like oh you're hurting me and a doctor who happened to be in the audience was like they're not doing anything they can't cut off your circulation that bad just do the act like people were being real dicks about it whoa and so okay they're poor little like hype man reverend ferguson guy uh they were like they were

telling him to like cut them out of the ties and they were like we're walking off the stage like people are being mean to us like we're being heckled people are trying to hurt us because they like would rather hurt us than like just enjoy a show yeah um and so they started walking off of stages and they ended up in like causing riots because people were pissed that they weren't getting answers out of them because they're little dodgy like oh who's to say what we are england was like no no no we don't play this what the fuck is going on and also like i just bought a ticket now you're leaving the stage right some asshole doctor but also i love that the reverend like came overseas with them and i bet he bought his own ticket he was like i would happily sail the seas

with you they're like we didn't really invite him but i guess he can come he was like i'm taking this this job way too seriously obsessed so uh they ended up causing all these riots people in liverpool especially and then a couple other places in england um they started like destroying the spirit cabinets like they were like it's rude they were trying to fuck things up like they were just so mad and it ended up being so bad that their next stop was supposed to be france and then authorities like held them from being able to come in because they were afraid people in france were going to cause riots too and they were trust me i've been to france they were going to cause a riot and it was going to be a good time they're going to be no no no they're gonna be really fucking pissed uh so ira actually quoted saying this regarding the riots all of

england seemed to have gone mad on the subject of cabinet smashing and speculative sharpers reached a rich harvest selling bogus pieces of smashed davenport cabinets so people were breaking it apart and then trying to sell it on like basically like be like bananas i have one of the shards of a davenport cabinet give me 500 shillings i don't know um said the pirate i don't know um but so apparently all of these like fake davenport cabinet shards, people were like just going to a lumberyard and grabbing scraps of wood and saying,

here's a Davenport cabinet. I have a splinter for you. Yeah. So that was going on. They were getting like name called and heckled. So anyway, they tried going to France. They ended up being able to get in.

It just got halted for a second. There was another scandal right before they went to france where um another like practicing magician or like an upcoming magician um spread this news that he had actually seen through the curtain and saw that they were like fiddling around with shit and they weren't tied down so whether or not that was a lucky guess or he actually did see it he tried to spread it through uh like the gossip magic world i suppose oh yeah and um runs deep here runs real deep um and luckily it got kind of like hushed away where it didn't become like a true problem but it ended up at least in the magic world working really well

for that like whistleblower because he ended up seeing what they were doing or at least whatever story he made up he updated the davenport cabinet and then put it in his act like stole their act ah so he was just rude an evil one but there were some good magicians who really liked them because even if they were like i think it's kind of like icky that you're tricking people and making this a spiritual thing. But as illusionists, like you got something real good here. Yeah. And honestly, I think it's better than the people who were like, oh, I can contact your dead daughter for you. Like that stuff is so much more sinister to me than like, oh, come out. We'll show you a fun show on stage.

Maybe it's ghosts, you know? Well, so one of the people that really liked them um happened to be so his name was hamilton like he didn't have he was like known as like one word like hamilton oh got it apparently he was the son-in-law he was a magician too by the way he was the son-in-law of robert or jean robert who that who if you remember oh that's right the namesake of houdini yes yes yes so he was like one of the first ever like real illusion artists and when harry houdini was like eight years old it was like the only book he ever read yeah and so he that's why he calls himself houdini his name's like eric or something

but he calls himself houdini so um eric so hamilton who was i guess him and his father-in-law had a lot in common since they loved magic at least can you imagine if you like that was the thing you bonded up you met like your girlfriend's dad and you like are not like having like a magic war well i'm just saying the girlfriend definitely had a type where she was like i want to marry someone just like my dad no like like literally just like my dad i'm pretty sure she was pt barnum or something um and so uh anyway so hamilton he reached out when he found out about this like scandal about like them trying to get like outed for not you know being spiritual or have like summoning spirits and he basically wrote

to them being like that guy's fucking jealous like whether or not you're like spiritualists like you were still doing a great trick. And like, he broke the magician's code of like, so like we're still on your side. So it ends up not being too bad. And fun fact, Houdini also really liked them.

So I want to give you credit. Cause that's, that's one of the things that I was thinking of, like at least people like Houdini who wanted to like lambast all of these, uh, mediums and like who were damaging people. At least these people were like, we're not going to tell you what we are. We want you to, it's up to, for interpretation.

And I think Houdini was kind of into that. He was like, yeah, you're, you're doing your own thing and you don't care what people think, but you're also not hurting anyone. And not to be like that guy again, but to totally do it. Chris Angel, I feel like has the same uh approach where he's not like i would say so who knows how it's possible i feel like i i feel like that's why i always mix him up with david blaine because they both kind of have that vibe for a while of like obviously it's just magic but it is pretty unbelievable that you kind of question yeah like i feel like it's our brains

can't totally comprehend it like how are you walking on water what is going on i used to read blogs oh my god listen i was i had a problem for a while there did you like the chris angel tv show yes i used to watch it like obsessively and i when i learned that i guess he had dated britney spears and i had like a meltdown because i was like i'll never be as hot as britney spears and i wanted to marry him, you know? And so anyway, I had him, like, I had a lot of years of really questionable thoughts. Wait, he did? He dated Britney Spears? Listen, that's what was on a blog. So I could very well have just read some random user on the internet saying that.

But I think so. If that's the case, I really feel like it explains so much. About ZB? Hmm. I don't know. I was thinking, like, he's dating holly madison like they're all dating these like super hotties and i'm thinking like well i was gonna say i never understood how britney got to like a space where she's writing things like i'm a slave and like that feels chris angely ah it does doesn't it yeah i feel like that song makes a little more sense now

i'm gonna google it because i could totally be making that up um let's pretend it's real let's just oh no they totally date it yep fun okay chris angel intended to this is a vice article uh chris angel intended to transform britney spears into birds at 2007 bmas i'm sorry could you say that again in slow motion please let me put on my journalism voice. In today's news. Reporting live at 10. Reporting live. This is Christine Schieffer of ATWWD radio.

Breaking news. We just received. Criss Angel intended to transform Britney Spears into birds at 2007 VMAs. According to Mid-A magic sensation, Chris Angel, you explode into a flock of birds. At least that was his plan for Britney Spears. I have heartburn because What's going on?

That was so enjoyable. Can you just look at them? Oh, sorry. It makes sense. Wild. Kismet. That wasismet can you can someone please take that picture and then um and then photoshop birds into it do you know i have a photoshop picture of me with chris angel listen okay i said too much i've said too much i've said too much can someone hack into chris's computer for that picture only no Nope. The end. It's somewhere on Facebook.

I'm going to delete it right after we finish recording. I would like a picture of you being in like a cuddle puddle. Like you're the middle of the hug sandwich between like David Blaine, Criss Angel, and then like Zach Bagans and like, and then Patrick Stump. Like just like all four strong Gothic men holding you. I think it's too much for me.

You'd be so sturdy. Wow. You would just be never, you would never fall wow you would just oh my god never you would never fall i would just be a big puddle of like emo it would be that would be at least 800 muscles pressed into you wow that got weird it got exactly what i wanted i didn't know i wanted it until it happened but i was like yeah this is right um so anyway that being said other magicians were uh who usually try to expose frauds um like houdini houdini himself wasn't doing it but there were still magicians who i guess still had a vendetta

some people i guess had a problem with the fact that they were claiming to also maybe be spiritualists um so surprisingly the one magician of the time who was known to be debunking people was like on cool terms with them. And then there were other magicians trying to steal their act. So anyway, so they got to France. And then there was another scandal where a volunteer examined a cabinet and then intentionally tried to break off a railing from the seats and then announced to the audience that he found spring-loaded seats in there um so

just to like cause like a panic i suppose and he like the audience did freak out and the police had to like clear the room oh my god and um it's like vandalism and then they ended up for the rest of their tour in france getting like a like an order where they had to limit their seances to only like 60 people or something oh my goodness uh they also traveled to ireland germany belgium russia poland and sweden um and their first public seance in st petersburg was the biggest one it was attended by a thousand people. Oh, wow. So they also held seances for celebrities, royalty, like emperors, very notable people.

They would do it in their homes. They would do private seances for these people and they would perform for scientists and the press who were trying to debunk them. In 1868, they returned to England and the Anthropological Society appointed a committee to investigate them. And not just that committee, but there were several scientific studies, probably like the SPCR and things like that.

They were trying to scientifically categorize or find data about spiritualism and like being able to summon spirits and all these sorts of things. So they were part of a lot of new experiments to see if they could try to like analyze this or contain it in some way. But every committee that investigated them and every scientific study that they did, that was probably still a little bit trying to debunk what they were up to. Nobody could ever pinpoint them with any fraudulent activity.

So one of the people actually doing a study on them said that the spirits were quote absolutely true and belong to the spiritual order of things in every respect and there was this is where it gets kind of fishy there were some trials where they last minute just decided they weren't going to be a part of it because the uh the committee's standards or what they proposed to do didn't uh it wasn't like to the standard that the Davenport brothers wanted or like they didn't like the conditions and so they would just decide last minute they didn't want to be a part of it um and it just sounded like oh all of a sudden they were being told what was going to happen and it was going to out them. So skeptical reporters did say like the ones that got to like tie the knots and things like that or investigate the knots or investigate how they were being tied down or things like that. Skeptical reporters did say all of the knots looked like you had to have been a sailor to know that profound of knot tying. So they're probably not ghosts.

They're probably children who were taught rope tricks since childhood by daddy so in 1876 the brothers toured india um they also toured with a guy named william marion fey who was also an up-and-coming performer and uh ed davies who was at the time the premier ventriloquist of the world the world's quest so they were basically their own little um illusionist circus or traveling situation i'm not sure um traveling situation the traveling situation that was what we did with last year it's certainly what we did nothing more nothing less remember when your mom called this like the the murder radio situation she literally called it like the murder situation show and i was like the what she's like you know the murder situation show. And I was like, the what? She's like, you know, your murder situation show. And I was like, well, that's rude.

I dare you to say she was wrong, though. So she was definitely right. But it was three weeks in. So we were taking ourselves very seriously. And now I'm like, OK, yeah, she was on to something. So these shows, though they seemed to be the traveling situation. I mean, sorry. So the traveling situation, even though it seems to

be more about magic and an illusionist stuff it also had like some weird like competitions involved there was also spiritualist stuff it was just like a weird variety show um and then they planned on going to australia but um once they got to australia before they started touring uh william got sick and he ended up dying at like at like 36 of tuberculosis slash consumption um there was a newspaper article in the hobart mercury in 1877 and it wrote the davenport fey company are in the north making money fast william davenport uh however is not likely to enjoy it long, for he is evidently going really to the land of spirits.

And then very quickly after that, he died that summer right after marrying someone. And there was also speculation about whether he actually died from TB, but Ira's great-grandson, Doc Davenport, which just sounds like a magical person in the woods um he he sounds like he's a sailor but like he sounds like a mad scientist like the only people on his ship are like little woodland creatures um but yes like a mad scientist also um so uh doc davenport who is ira's great grandson he confirmed confirmed for people that William did die of tuberculosis.

And he also, like, in this, like, confirmation, decided, like, he was feeling a little zazzy and decided to throw in some drama at the same time. Okay. And talked about William's scandalous love life. Oh, yeah. And said that William was once actually secretly married uh before he was married to his wife where that he when he died in the same year there was another woman no one knew about named ada or ada um ada it has an h at the end so i'm not sure ada uh isaac's menken who was at the time the highest earning actress and she herself was very scandalous because she

had no problem with nudity and she was known he was taking his pants off on stage all the time she probably saw one of his shows and went that's the one for me that's my guy found him uh apparently she was famous for like this one play she did where she rode a horse across a stage naked cool maybe he was at her show didn't like daniel radcliffe did that do that he that's equus i think he just stood by the horse he did get naked on stage he did get naked on stage it was not the same show though just different naked thing people in horses shows got it got it got it the naked horse situation um god that is not our podcast to be clear uh and so uh he said that they were secretly married um and they they were secretly married as in like they were never legally married

because she was legally married to someone else and they apparently had a rocky relationship because she was married to someone else but after he died ada confirmed for people that her son was actually his not her husband's tea time tuesday oh my god my goodness so that is drama when william died uh so that was also just thrown in there with like no no he had tuberculosis also while we're talking about things that went down so when william died which this sounds like something i would do for you if you died ira allegedly quote ordered a magnificent memorial for him on which was carved a representation of their act so it was like this carving shrine made of ropes cabinets and other seance props

oh yeah you would first that's an m move all the way i'd be like why isn't there a lisa frank ouija board on your gravestone i don't understand you would just tape it on yeah but apparently in australia i don't know if it was because it was in australia or he died in australia and this was all set up there but after he made the shrine he never got permission from the cemetery and they couldn't take the shrine so it's actually like placed the monument is placed outside of the cemetery oh no so like his ghost is just like looking like oh it looks so great like i'm sure it looks awesome dude thanks so um it was placed outside and said in 1911 ira also would die but just before he did their friend houdini exposed them come on and he was like legitimately like they were pen pals they would visit each other like

they were friends but i think he something happened maybe he thought ira already died and he like let the cat out too early and then like it was like oh shit he's still alive and just heard what i did like oh awkward he saw my tweet exactly so uh literally like right before he died he told everyone um this was a quote and it's in his book called a magician among the spirits which by the way was quite a reference to all of my notes okay um so houdini said while on tour tour in Australia for himself, he was also on tour in Australia, I hunted up the grave of William Davenport and finding it sadly neglected, I had put it in order, fresh flowers planted on it and the stonework repaired. Ira, the surviving brother, was so touched by this act that he taught me the famous Davenport

rope tie, the secret of which had been so well cut that not even his sons knew it. tie the secret of which had been so well cut that not even his sons knew it and so fun fact in the book there's also a whole paragraph dedicated to ira's love life people are just oh man which his isn't like as like uh negative dramatic or like scandalous dramatic but it is kind of wild apparently ira literally had like a love at first sight moment with his wife who did not speak english and he had he was touring in france and then he saw this woman after his show and had the translator that was with him just say like will you be my wife and then she said yes and then uh apparently but what if the translator like mistranslated it and it was just like do you want to get coffee and it's like he wants to marry you well oh awkward if that's the case then like the coffee date went real well because apparently houdini said that he had like never met

a couple that were just so in love oh so they were like having a great time um so anyway so houdini i'm almost done sorry houdini also wrote that ira often said that he and his brother again never claimed to be mediums or pretended that their work was spiritualistic they just kind of avoid the situation but houdini did say that ira and william kind of let their parents die believing that they did have superhuman powers they never told them to think anything else okay um that's nice here's another fun fact which is kind of special until you realize that like houdini like straight up told their secrets to people um i'm gonna pretend it was like for a good reason or like a sweet reason or something um but ira when he right before he died his final words to houdini were houdini we

started it you finish it and so i guess because houdini was the only person he ever told his cabinet trick to and his rope trick to wow so he was like how touching he was like i'll fucking finish it and then he just oh do that. I already did. I actually did it on Twitter a few hours ago. Don't check the tweets. Don't check Twitter. Put your phone on do not disturb. It's okay.

Trust me. So anyway, the most successful successors of Ira and William was actually the guy that they went on tour with, the William Fay, as well as another guy that worked for them called Harry Keller. And basically once William died, Ira tried to go back out on tour with William, or with William Fay. And apparently it was just too hard.

And so he ended up leaving, but William Fay and Harry Keller ended up getting together. And so they ended up going on tour together as like their, you know, the, the grasshopper becomes the master or something, whatever.

What's the thing? The grasshopper. I was trying to say earlier when I said they got bigger than dad or made, I don't know. Yeah. Kind of generationally speaking, this was like the second time in a row.

I know that sounds wrong the grasshopper i think those are two maybe they're two separate like two things that i'm mixing up at the same student becomes the master and then like the grasshopper grasshopper becomes the the birds and britney spears's hair yeah that's right at the vmas in 2007 yes so it all makes sense. Anyway, two of their like, their protégés, I suppose, ended up becoming another successful team. And they kept the Davenport Spirit Cabinet part of their act. But what they did is when they were traveling everywhere, they realized that the cabinet was like way too heavy and inconvenient to travel with.

So they would literally build them for each show and then just abandon it there. And so for years, there was just all these abandoned Davenport cabinets all over the world. Wow. All right. I don't know if it was all over the world, but it was at least in a few places like Mexico. There was apparently Keller went back to Mexico a couple years later and saw it right where they left it. Like no one touched it. Oh, I want one so bad. Someone they left it. Like no one touched it. Oh,

I want one so bad. Someone go to Mexico and get me one of those. I would love. Oh, Davenport. So they ended up leaving them. Uh, yeah.

In different towns. I wonder if some of them still exist. If you know of one, please take a picture and send it to us. I'm I'm please take it and send it to me. That has to be worth millions though. Now. I mean,

there was like, like it's over a hundred years old. It's almost 200. I'm going to find it. I'm going to be worth millions though now i mean it was like like it's over 100 years old it's almost 200 i'm gonna find it i'm gonna find one just like what like hot spotted or something ebay um yep so after they died um houdini took their acts on and used them in his own performances which he did have permission for um probably because since he learned the trick i think maybe ira knew what he was doing when he told him the secret because he knew houdini and he knew that houdini was there to expose frauds and if houdini could have had a new really spectacular act to prove that you shouldn't

trust what you see before your eyes i think ira kind of gave him the permission on like this is what we were doing with that line like you finish it? Exactly. So Houdini ended up taking on the act himself and doing it. And therefore the Davenport brothers weren't just influential in spiritualism, but also in the magic world because they now have one of the most famous early acts. I love that. And this,

basically it, because they never again confirm or denied denied and they just kind of use their what are we as like almost clout or a pr campaign um it ultimately furthered spiritualism so they accidentally did that too so now before this ends i am going to tell you how it was done this cabinet trick because i've been okay great letting it linger and then i'm done well i'm gonna get one soon anyway so you might as well teach me now if not we can just build one we'll just get a big old there's a wardrobe somewhere can we just make the blues cruise clues wardrobe into a davenport cabinet it's the blues man groups wardrobe okay we'll shop

we'll shop it we'll shop it we'll shop it we'll shop it that so here's how it was done the volunteers were all plants so uh not oh i was wondering that earlier not like succulents like they were like they brought cacti in with them yes no they were like they were they were a setup planted in the audience yeah yes so um i said it and there was a wow there was a silence and i was like she thinks i'm talking about fucking flowers um wow what a weird surprise so the volunteers who joined them in the cabinet uh were plants and so they were able to also help kind of dishevel their own pants down probably bingo and also like play instruments and you know make the whole room shake and clatter um and uh ferguson was i said

was also a plant because they knew how much he loved them um so remember the two acts were at first they're in the cabinet alone and the second one is when they would have a volunteer planted in the audience so the first one they didn't have a volunteer so they they how were they doing it by themselves in there then if they really are tied down oh sure so in those cases non-plant volunteers um who were there to tie the knots remember they still had someone come up and at least tie them down they would just pick people who looked like really like the wealthiest ones or like people who like have who looked like other people do work for them basically and so they were like i know they don't know how to tie a knot so smallest biceps really

yeah like most forearms they don't look like they were a boy scout so right right interesting they don't look like they're a sailor or they don't look like they're strong or like a laborer exactly like they look like they've really never moved in their life so hilarious so they knew that no matter what they would do a a shittier knot and then if they uh actually were getting like surprisingly tight with the knot if you just go like like naturally people are gonna stop and so they would do it before it ever really hurt they would just act like they were too tight and so they were just like guaranteeing it was always going to be kind of gaslighting everybody got it yeah and also the like the the wincing like

made it look really good for the show too so that's right so they were strong you are exactly oh you're so strong yeah um so that was basically how they did it with the the people who weren't actually plants they would just pretend that they were tight they did it with the people who weren't actually plants. They would just pretend that they were tight. They were just loose, the ropes. And then if they, for the flower, I still don't understand how they did this. I'm guessing they basically had like whatever the version then of wet wipes was in a pocket. And so they would put all the flower, they would, they had the flower in their hands. They would quote tie themselves down.

And then once they were able to wriggle free, they would just like put all of the flower in their hands. They would, quote, tie themselves down. And then once they were able to wriggle free, they would just put all of the flower back in the pocket, do a bunch of shit, and then wipe themselves off beforehand with something wet that would collect the flower. Sure, and then put the flower back in their hands. And then put it back in their hands and wriggle back into the ropes. So for the levitation acts that they did, all of those were during the dark seances where it was

pitch black and basically they would just tilt someone's uh notice how everyone by the way that levitated they were maybe like mostly children uh right so they could like lift the chair kind of easy on their own and you only had to lift them a little bit and the human mind freaks you out enough to think that you're all the way up at the ceiling so if you like just tilt one side of someone's chair and kind of brush the top of their head they think they like hit the ceiling so oh my god so they would just like fuck with people like i mean just being in the dark people are already psyched out and they just yeah yeah um so well and there's also like instruments so you probably don't hear it if like they're scraping or if you're like exactly yeah so that was their levitation when it came to the actual ropes and untying themselves

um like i said they were always relatively loose but it was the construction of the cabinet itself because the way that they were tied in with the ropes is so that it was one massive rope basically they would let me make sure i read this right um so the benches had two holes in them and the brothers would be facing each other on the benches rope the rope would be tied first around brother number one let's say ira so it'd be tied around his knees and then it would spiral downward all the way to his ankles so like all his whole shins calves are wrapped up then, um, uh, across the way.

So it would get to his feet and then that rope would keep going, keep going, keep going and start at William's ankles and go up his knee. So that way they were tied to the same rope. They're, they're on different ends of the same rope. And then the same thing happened with their wrists. And so the,

in layman's terms, because that's all i've got for you is they would uh kind of be like really tense as they were tying like let like letting people loosely tie them they would super tense themselves and then they had this kind of dance choreography down where once the door was closed if they relaxed there was already some slack but also right if uh the way they kind of had to do like a team effort where if i removed his hands this way sure there was now all of a sudden like a foot more slack of rope for william to have and so it's almost like rowing a boat and they were in sync so that's kind of amazing when they own yeah so like you could like get yourself at least

your legs free enough to wriggle if like both of you work together and then when they had to when they knew the door was going to open again, they'd put it all back on and then just like stretch and tense up as hard as they could. So it looked like the rope was taught. Wow. And so here's the other things that they would do just to like guarantee nothing would happen before or during private performances because remember they like had like famous people having uh shows or like hosting shows at their houses they would uh let's say this famous person was like chris angel no britney spears because no swedish opera singer it's a bunch of birds so they would um if there was like an audience of like 10 personal people at this house they would because it caused to prevent spirit collusion one of the

ways that they were uh they would uh keep that from happening is they would have to tie strings to everyone's button shirts it was it makes no sense but they would weave string through people's like button up shirts buttons and so and they would weave string through people's like button up shirts buttons and so and they would it would all connect almost like they were tying them up so nobody could get up to go like exploring while the lights were off if that makes like literally yes it makes sense tying them together like roping them together but with something so tiny no one felt threatened um and so they would say like avoided or prevented spirit collusion which makes literally no sense for sure they just didn't want people getting up and looking around um next

uh they said that uh they also had they had at least 10 plants in every show so it wasn't just like one volunteer it was at least 10 people they could rely on um and they also uh placed traps in the aisles so nobody would try to like bull rush the stage and like see and try to mess with the cabinets when they were in there um and that way no one would sneak on stage and surprise them so anyway that's how it got done and that is the davenport brothers wow they seem much more reputable to me than the fox sisters yeah they weren't trying to they weren't i mean i guess they were trying to like trick people but they weren't trying to uh the part of the shtick was like you didn't really know what the truth was they weren't like taking advantage of like vulnerable people in my mind and they weren't flat out lying either right right right

like the fox wow that was a fun one m thank you for our pseudo christmas episode yeah you know christmas is christmas is magical christmas is magical sometimes probably not this year but we'll see all right my turn okay um so i know i said that this was not really a christmas story but it actually kind of is a christmas story oh shit okay cool so uh here we go happy holidays everyone um this is a big one people have been asking for since day one um oh so this is like yeah here we go is all i have to say how do i not know what this is okay of john benet ramsey oh christine oh christine it's a it's a doozy as we like to say it's a boozy doozy so get your drinks because you need it i you know what i have a carton of ice cream at home that now i have a

reason i haven't even heard the story yet i can't wait to go home and finish that off now because i'm gonna need it by the end of this yeah i got my box straws downstairs which is happening directly let me get cozy let me take my orthopedic slippers off real quick there you go okay someone by the way um i i saw you on twitter someone said something about my fish flops and you were like why are you wearing banana leaves on your feet and i was like hey they're i said that no someone on twitter i'm saying i saw you whoever tweeted that someone said that my fish flops look like banana leaves and i was like they're fish they look like dead fish thank you very much they actually do kind of look like banalities because i went and watched the episode where

that tweet came out and i went oh yeah you can only see like a little green a little yellow so anyway well orthopedic slippers off orthopedic slippers are off everybody have your drink okay great so this is a wild tale how much do you know about this m i'm curious i gotta be honest for someone who has 200 episodes of a true crime a podcast i literally know nothing at all i know that you're pretty good about like keeping out of it like you know preparing for the other person to do a story well even then like i certainly didn't actively try to not learn about her i think i just like somehow moved past it every time like people are usually shocked when they hear the like i don't really like outside of this podcast have an interest in true crime like i never a lot of people during marvel monday will be like what's your favorite like right like

investigation discovery show and i'm like i literally watch none of them i i don't know so like this this stuff unless you tell me about it i don't know yeah because we really i mean when we started the podcast it was very much like a divided like this is your like forte and this is my forte yeah and there's a reason we split like let's teach each other about it exactly exactly i know it's the blonde girl and i know i guess she went missing i because everyone's like where's John Ramsey and she was like in a toddlers and tiaras kind of situation and people think the brother did it that's what I know and that's it it's pretty it's pretty solid summation I will say um and when we get to the end

I think that might be just a good theory there's just a good like recap of all of the above so got it I'm just gonna get into it because this one confounds me it stresses me out it frustrates me i've watched every single documentary on that i can get my hands on at least twice like at least and then again for this episode i like i just find it so fascinating and it's okay i want to preface too it's one of those things where a lot of people have very strong opinions and um it's one of those things where a lot of people have very strong opinions and um it's one of those things where every documentary has such an angle like whether intentionally or unintentionally that almost every time i watch a documentary i'm like wait okay so he did it or oh okay so they do

a really good job of convincing you it could be anyone it's yeah it's sort of like one of those things where you could kind of go a lot of ways and i'm pretty open-minded to a lot of the options so oh so do you do you have a personal preference or a preference like an opinion on what happened i do i do okay we'll hear about it by the end yeah i'll tell you at the end what i think um but again when i say what i think it's not like i know that happened it's kind of like that's where i'm leaning right and apologies in advance in case this gets me as fucking wild and riled as uh last week because i got real fired up about that and i felt bad i went home and was like shit like i really hope i wasn't like too intense no i felt bad because i mean full disclosure everyone emma to go to their their funeral the zoo funeral so i was trying

to like i was trying to like rush through this story so i hope it didn't come off like i was like pushing past your comments or anything i was had i been here for one more minute i would have missed the memorial service for sure yeah i know that i was literally watching my clock like like oh that's interesting em anyway i hope it didn't come off like that. I wasn't trying to be dismissive. But truly, on this one especially, I rewatched four, five documentaries for this in the last How many hours of work do you think you put in for this? Well, I hate to call it work when it's just like, because after the notes were done, then I was like, I'm just going to binge all the documentaries. So it was technically work pre like, prepping my mind.

But it wasn't, you know, hard work. And then I'll tell you at the end, too, like, what my favorite documentaries are if anyone's interested. Okay. So if you do have questions, please ask because I am in a headspace to discuss this. Oh, my God. I love when Christine's in a headspace. I've been in a weird headspace all day. I kind of am digging it, though.

Like, whatever's happening, I'm, like, it'sspace. I've been in a weird headspace all day. I kind of am digging it, though. Like, whatever's happening, I'm like, it's electric. I'm like, okay, let's go. I'm feeling, like, jazzed up. All right. So this is a Christmas tale because it occurred on Christmas. Oh, okay. I was like, yo. Yeah, you were like, wait, holiday?

Hold on. Yeah, it occurred during the holidays. So technically, 1996, yeah, you were like, wait, holiday. Hold on. Yeah, it's a it's it occurred during the holidays. So it technically 1996, the day after Christmas, Patsy Ramsey, mother of two, headed downstairs very, very early in the morning. She lives with her husband and two kids in Boulder, Colorado. As she went down her spiral staircase, she noted three pieces of A4 sized paper laid out neatly on one of the stairs okay they had writing on it that read mr ramsey listen carefully and this is kind of a long a lot of paragraphs all over the place or whatever okay like this is the definition of there's paragraphs everywhere look out or whatever that thing was called this is a lot of paragraphs why don't i

just literally look up what that no because it's way more fun to make up a new one i know the word paragraphs is at the end and the like gist is there's a lot of them like and it's the gist is like it's pretty chaotic so buckle up that's what the article should have been called it's pretty chaotic so buckle up so that's what's happening here and it it is a bunch of paragraphs. And I'm going to read it to you and just like, let me know what you think, I guess. Okay. Mr. Ramsey, listen carefully. We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your business, but not the country it serves.

At this time, we have your daughter in our possession. She is safe and unharmed. And if you want to see if you want her to see 1997 you must follow our instructions to the letter whoa you will withdraw 118 000 from your account 100 000 will be in 100 bills and the remaining 18 000 in 20 bills make sure that you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. Okay. Thank you. Okay.

So someone there is a diva. I got it. Please don't. I don't mean to stereotype, but it sounded a little fashion forward. It was like, bring the appropriate size attache and don't you dare bring two. Yeah. And also like no reusable tote bags, please. We need to look professional here.

Exactly. When you get home, you will put the money in a brown paper bag. I will call you between 8 and 10 a.m. tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting, so I advise you to be rested. Oh, shit. Oh, my God. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence an earlier pickup of your daughter any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter you will also be denied her remains for a proper burial the two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you so i advise you

not to provoke them oh my god speaking to anyone about your situation such as police or FBI will result in your daughter being beheaded. What does that face mean? Does she get beheaded? No. Oh my god, what? No, she doesn't. Does she?

No, she does not get beheaded. Wow. You know, you have a lot of power right now and you can tell me anything you want and I'd be like oh my god okay she could be beheaded fuck if you talk to the police she will be beheaded if we catch you talking to a stray dog she dies what okay so like that was trying to say like anyone don't be distracted by absolutely anything just yeah or like don't let this leak anywhere

even to your neighbor's dog or something holy fuck if you alert bank authorities she dies if the money is in any way marked or tampered with she dies you can try to deceive us but be warned we are familiar with law enforcement countermeasures and tactics you stand a 99 chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us follow our instructions and you stand a 100 chance of getting her back you and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities don't try to grow a brain john you are not the only fat cat around so don't think that killing will be difficult don't underestimate us john use that good southern common sense of yours it's up to you now john victory signed s b t c so that's what she finds on the stairs day after christmas good morning wow hello um

okay my opinion so far this is not the thing to focus on but i'm wondering why 118 000 specifically this is not the thing to focus on but i'm wondering why 118 000 specifically good uh yeah glad you god you noted that yes it's just such a weird like at least round it up like come on exactly exactly ding ding ding red flag uh if we're playing escape game rules then sbc whatever i imagine that's like the first initial of each of their names or something um sounds like it yeah and or maybe like it's like the acronym of like a sentence that they were like a belief or something. Yeah. Because they wrote victory before it. Yeah.

So it sounds like anonymous when it's like you expect us or whatever. Yeah. Wow. OK. So I don't know what I think. OK. That's terrifying. Good.

Because I mean, to this day, I still don't 100% know what I think. That's terrifying. Good. Because, I mean, to this day, I still don't 100% know what I think. What was, like, the first, that was the weird part. It was weird. It's, we are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. Okay. Is that the part you meant? Yeah. I was like, great.

Yeah. It does, okay. It's just, it's just odd. Obviously. It's just, like, it's just odd. Obviously. It's just like, it's just wild. So also my, like my big fear, like I've just seen enough like horror movies where like the thing that I'm real panicked about, like I should be more panicked about like a child missing who might get beheaded.

But like my current fear is when I hear like you have a big day of like, like finding her is going to be really difficult. That sounds like some saw shit like yeah like you better rest up because we're gonna start breaking bones tomorrow it's so weird it's like the delivery will be exhausting so i advise you to be rested it's like okay so take a nap like what i would be prepared like oh you're gonna torture me i imagine you're gonna torture me yeah or like make this a living hell somehow yeah exactly anyway weird weird weird so she finds this letter and it's three pages on the staircase like laid out um handwritten and patsy immediately rushes she

she yells she took for john who's dressing upstairs she rushes to check in on her daughter jean-benet who was nowhere to be found was not in her bed so she and john uh wake up or she wakes john up she gets him downstairs she's you know they check on burke the brother he's in his room and despite the warning to not call the police and obey orders they call 9-1-1 okay which in like yeah you know i mean i get it like i i think i would have done the same yeah sure i would have you know sorry i mean what else are you gonna do sorry kids but like i probably i would have my my really like cynical side would come out where if i got a letter like that i would just assume whoever was being held for ransom was already dead i'd be like because yeah there's those sick

people where it's like they died the second i kidnapped them i just wanted to like fuck with you yeah yeah it happens and what else are you supposed to do so she calls 9-1-1 and i'm gonna read you the 9-1-1, aka roleplay it by myself. So wish me luck. Great. Okay. I'll be the dispatcher, but I'm not going to interact at all. Okay. So I'm going to be the dispatcher actually and Patsy because I'm going to say the whole

conversation, but you're just going to have to guess who's who. Okay. I think I'll figure it out pretty quick. You will. 911 emergency. That's Patsy. No, I'm just kidding. That was actually the news reporter from the bird story. Oh yeah. Oh my God. 911 emergency. That's Patsy. No, I'm just kidding. That was actually the news reporter from the bird story.

Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. 911 emergency. And then there's an inaudible noise and Patsy says, police. 911 says, what's going on? 755 15th Street. What is going on there, ma'am? We have a kidnapping.

Hurry, please. Explain to me what is going on, okay? There's a note left and our daughter is gone a note was left and your daughter is gone yes how old is your daughter she is six years old she is blonde six years old how long ago was this i don't know i just found a note and my daughter's missing does it say who took her what does it say who took her no i don't know it's there there's a ransom note here it's a ransom note it says sbtc victory please okay what's your name are you patsy ramsey i'm the mother oh my god please okay i'm sending

an officer over okay please do you know how long she's been gone no i don't please we just got up and she's not here oh my god please okay please send somebody i am honey please take a deep breath for me okay hurry hurry hurry patsy patsy patsy this was then followed by six seconds of some audible inaudible sounds in the background and then uh patsy hung up the phone okay so that is a 911 call obviously it was a lot more uh you know, frantic and emotional than my dry reading of it. But to give you an idea, this is the chaos that ensued that morning. Sure. So that was at 5.52 a.m. on December 26th of 1996.

Operator Kim Archuleta was speaking to Patsy Ramsey, who was calling about the disappearance of her six-year-old daughter, Jeanne Benet, from their home in Boulder, Colorado. Two minutes later, Patsy and her husband, John, call their family friends, the Whites. And the Ramseys had actually been over at the Whites' house the night before for a Christmas party. Okay. at 5 30 p.m on december 25th the ramses had so the night before christmas the ramses had arrived at the white's family party which and they stayed there until 8 30 p.m and arrived home around 9 15 okay john benet had fallen asleep in the car so john ramsey carried the sleepy john benet up to bed and they hadn't seen her since so that was the last they had seen her. Okay. So back to the next morning, December 26th, police officer Rick French arrives at the Ramsey's at 5.59 a.m.

And the White family makes their way over to the Ramsey's house and they arrive at 6.35 a.m. So Rick French did an initial search of the house inside and outside, but he didn't find anything out of the ordinary. And so he called for backup because in this situation like this time is of the essence, especially if it's a kidnapping. So Detective Linda Arndt is also on the case and she arrives around 810 a.m. And during this time, john was making arrangements to try and get this ransom money set up okay so he and detective linda aren't are waiting for this call because the letter said the call will come between 8 and 10 a.m right so he's like he's called his bank he's like i need this money and then they sit around and they're every he said every time the phone rang you know they jumped uh waiting waiting waiting can you imagine like i feel every every second would feel like a century i would and you can't do anything but wait which is my nightmare as the most impatient person on

the planet right yeah um so the forensics team then arrive they cordon off john benet's room to prevent contamination of any evidence in her room and by 10 a.m the cutoff time for the ransom note uh no one had called nobody had been in touch about the ransom money okay so at this point they're panicking they're fearing the worst that these people had found out that they had called the police and had you know gone through with their promise of beheading their daughter murdering their daughter because at this point they're thinking well we did call the we broke the rules so well my first found out just like how earlier one was like well she called the police and then you and i were both like yeah i would call the police even though they said not to because like i at least would i if i

found out later that something happened to her and i could have called the police i would fucking yeah myself yeah like you have to do something right i mean i'm like you can't just sit around and wait and trust that the kidnapper has your best intentions right we'll actually go through with it like and then my my anxiety would kick in after i hung up the phone and i'd go fuck like now exactly now i'm upset that i did it so it's a game of like hiding it yeah and now like i mean i totally get why they're like so paranoid about like, shit, we should have not. Yeah.

Yeah. Should we have done that? Yeah. And the cutoff came and they had not heard. So they're wondering if, you know, their daughter had suffered the consequences that were outlined in the letter. Right. So in the early afternoon at 1 p.m., Detective Arndt pulls John and Fleet White.

That's the friend's name, dad uh of the other family the white family whose name is fleet white and at this point she has been left alone at the scene so the other officers have all left and they've left linda aren't alone at the scene um to kind of handle things and uh i guess according to her john was so restless and agitated and anxious that she was like i gave them a mission i gave them a task basically to kind of get them doing something so she uh pulled them aside he john and his friend fleet and told them to do a top to bottom search of the home and this home i don't know how much everybody knows about this story but it's a it's a mansion uh it has 15 rooms uh it has 13 000 chandeliers

no that's the winchester mystery house that's uh it has 15 rooms in my mind my first thought was like damn like that is eerily like sarah winchester yeah it didn't cross well it didn't cross my mind that you were making a joke and i was like oh my god that's crazy the chandeliers it's like i don't know why my brain was so slow on that update but i was like that's bananas and and i was like oh my god that's crazy the chandeliers it's like i don't know why my brain was so slow on that update but i was like that's bananas and then i was like seance room downstairs too everything had 13 hooks and there was one shower what is going on and the lady wandering around up half stairs yeah um no this was a more american you know new new built new build uh only 12 000 chandeliers got it

okay yeah yeah exactly uh it had 15 rooms and it was seven i think 7 500 square feet so like still holy shit massive i mean massive uh i mean it's the shed at the winchester house but it's fine yeah exactly it's uh it's big for a family home. Wow. They decide to work from the bottom up, so they head to the basement. It was during that search that John, Dad, John Bonet's dad, opened the door to the basement, what they called the wine cellar, because, of course, they have a wine cellar. If you've got a house that big and you don't have a wine cellar, you're doing something wrong. Yeah, like, what are you even doing? What's the point? don't have a wine cellar you're doing something wrong yeah like what are you even doing what's the point um so they have this wine cellar room um and they had also this is also where they hid the christmas presents for the kids oh so he opens this room and immediately he spots jean benet's

favorite white blanket on the floor and there's something underneath it. To his horror, it is the body of his daughter, Jeanne Benet. So, okay. So before you say anything else, let my novice brain process that. So there was no league of foreign factions or something. It was just like a... Or if there was, they didn't do a good job. Right. was just like a or if there was they were in the house and right or they were in the house and like i'm assuming killed her before they i imagine they brought her downstairs killed her and then gently placed those three pieces of paper on the stairs and then left right just so they could wake

up and think they even stood a chance so i was right so like by the time like the kid was already dead yeah yeah long story short she had already been dead exactly when the when the ransom note had been found yes she was dead so as far as things that we like know for sure that that's one that we know for sure wow um so when he found her body her mouth and neck were covered in duct tape uh her neck was wrapped with a white nylon cord so when he found finds her he screams picks up her body runs upstairs and lays the body next to the christmas tree uh in front of the detective and all the people who had been there to kind of lend support so he brings the body

upstairs lays her out he's crying over her um and patsy is described as like wailing somebody's like banshee wailing like over her dead daughter's body um and so this is obviously like just the most wild outcome of you know day after christmas for a little six-year-old girl um and so uh i guess just some background on jean-benet because that also is ends up being a huge factor in this entire story and why it's such a huge case. Okay. So JonBenet Patricia Ramsey was born six years before this tragic incident on August 6, 1990 in Atlanta, Georgia. And she was named after her parents, JonBenet, so JonBenet. Got it.

And her mother,ricia uh which is her middle name's patricia classy i mean that's like a that's a fun way i had a neighbor across the street whose dad name was john and mom's name was donna so her name is jonna yeah i love that that's fine yeah it's a it's a fun little thing to do my name would be bernada my name would be larry oh well that's not bad. Yeah, that's okay. Bernada is pretty terrible. At least Larry's an actual name.

Yeah. At least Larry's a real name. Oh, no. Anyway. Or it'd be Renhard, which is also terrible. Okay. Anyway. No matter what, you sound like you're part of like a bike gang.

Yeah. Good for me. Aw. I'm part of a small foreign faction actually that's you know what i knew it it sounded it sounded something right okay oh boy okay so she's named after her parents and john the dad was a multi-millionaire businessman he was the president of access graphics a computer system company and her mother uh was a former beauty queen she had been crowned at miss west virginia of 1977 and had participated in miss america pageants and so on so this was john's second marriage he had had two kids before and then he also had two kids with patricia jean-benet and her older

brother burke who was nine at the time of jean-benet's death but had been asleep when the note was found so whether because she wanted to follow in her mother's footsteps is what patsy patricia said or whether her mother was vicariously trying to live through her daughter which is what the media said uh jean benet was also very active in beauty pageants okay that's so that's that i know yeah that is like the big selling point of this story the media circus the cause of the media circus every i mean i remember 1996 i was like five or six and i remember like seeing those pictures of the beauty queen on every magazine at like kroger like every magazine had like slain murdered you know i mean it was horrific and i remember being like holy crap and it's like this you know very made up maybe that's that maybe that's why i have that

one image of like her face because yes i'm used to only like the tabloid cover of it and then i know nothing else it's it's a very famous photo um and we'll put some of those in the video itself here but uh yeah so she started doing pageants and according to patsy um she said oh she went to a pageant with me and she said when can i start doing that i want to start doing that um now there's mixed uh you know there's a lot of mixed opinions about this um i'm personally not a fan of beauty pageants yes oh sorry this is where i tell you that it's kind of i'm gonna make it about me get ready always i'm ready i it's very interesting that uh you that this is the story that you picked on the day that

i talked about my gammy because in 2008 she was miss senior new york what yeah she was a uh beauty pageant queen stop it gammy is like orchestrating this episode and we know it true i mean what are the odds that i would like have this like feeling i needed to talk about her today and now you're talking about beauty queen that one of her proudest moments and like her last few years where she was like totally with us is she like she fought tooth and nail to win miss new york and apparently i remember it was so fun because the whole family came to like to go to her beauty pageant and like see like her talent and everything obviously her talent was singing afternoon delights oh and uh there was one woman that ended up being the runner-up that she hated oh i love it and so i got to hear like all like

the the senior beauty queen drama behind the scenes rich stuff it was good look my gammy knew what was going on oh and she like they took it seriously like apparently like miss senior america is um like you actually do a lot of really wonderful charity work so a few years after she won she was busy all the time they had her go into all these different events like it wasn't just like it wasn't just a title that like happened and then nothing ever came from it like she was like booked solid for like three years making appearances and shit so cool oh i'm so proud of her anyway that's my gams okay badass i love that yeah yeah so basically it was a scenario where

you know patsy said she took jean benet to pageant and Jean Benet, like, fell in love with it. And, like, that could have been the case. But she did start doing this at age, like, two or three. And, you know, I don't know if you've watched Toddlers and Tiaras as much as I embarrassingly have. I sure have. I didn't watch Toddlers and Tiaras, but I watched the spinoffs, every type of spinoff with, like, Mama June and Honey Boo Boo. That was my thing for a long time. I watched Toddlers and T my thing for a long time i watched toddlers and t.r.s for a while

there it's pretty depressing but like you really see some wild stuff parenting like and i'm not one to judge a parent i'm not a parent as you know i'll know except to my dog um so i'm not one to judge parenting but it gets to a point where it's like you know they're putting like these intense spray tans and fake teeth and you, you know, it gets like really wild. And it's like very, you know, a big argument in the pageant world. No, no. Like the non like the the public, the public opinion, public court of opinion, let's call it. Sure.

One of the big arguments was like, you know, you're sexualizing your child. She's wearing like I mean, in photos photos she's six and she or five even and she looks like she could be like 25 like really yeah it's like airbrushed i mean the makeup and like super short skirts and like bikinis i mean you know it's the whole pageant thing yeah i mean i could i could argue though like they're they're too young to understand the like you know what things they should be valuing or like you know it's fun when you're older i think like it's fun to do because you can kind of separate like oh i'm doing this yeah versus this is what's important in the world and like if you're six and you're getting awards because you look this way or you act this way like it can become a little and you're competing with other girls about like how you look and how

you shake your butt because again like with the talents the talents, it's like, sure, they do talents, but it's not like barbershop quartet talents. It's like you shake your butt to a, you know, cowboy song. Right. And you win like a big trophy. And I mean, and there's all sorts of problematic stuff in there that like everybody kind of knows what I'm saying. We get it.

We get it. Yeah. Yeah. You get it. So essentially she, so Patsy was like the stage mom she was a stage mom sure uh for lack of a better term so um she was jean benet was like caked in makeup dressed in tight clothing and most of the images that we see of her um a lot of people you know argued she was being sexualized by her by the pageants by her mom um and a family friend judith phillips remembered that what uh at one christmas party when john benet came down the stairs she had this like really aggressively

bleached blonde hair and she pulled patsy to the side and was like are you dying her hair and remember this girl's like four or five at this point right uh and patsy responded no it's from the sun but like okay wow it's like definitely did you take her to mars what did you take her to the sun oh okay yeah especially especially with the tan um yeah so it was like she was you know really pressing her up actually i think mars is farther away from the sun i we are. I know. I wasn't going to say that because I was like, I could be wrong. I always get mixed up with Mars and Mercury.

So I was trying to say Mercury, but then I thought that can't be it. And then I just said the wrong thing. Whatever. We all went to Mercury. Wait, wait. Okay. Everyone pretend like this is getting a, what are they taking her to Mercury? I like how you say, let's pretend instead of like, hey, just cut this part in.

You're like, let's just all pretend it was. No one knows, Christine. She's going to be here. We're not actually going to edit it. She's going to be here. Wow. She looks like she's from Mercury. She's got such wonderful hair.

Crazy. Like sun kissed. Sun kissed. Sun smacked. Yeah. Smacked in the head. Yeah. However, different to Jean Benet's mom, Patsy jean benet was not showy herself um she wasn't

like the typical like you know out go like she was outgoing and bubbly but she wasn't like seemingly upset she wasn't seemingly like as in love with pageantry it wasn't her passion perhaps not i mean it could have been but here i'll just explain so the same friend judith recalls that once her daughter went over to play with Jean Benet and saw her room, which was full of trophies, and Jean Benet, like, didn't really want to talk about them. And then when her friend asked, Jean Benet said, they really belong to my mom. Oh, that's sad. So, like, that's a good glimpse into, like, that's how she viewed it as far as this is my mom's thing and i'm doing it for her with her you know i'm her accessory it is how it kind of feels of like this is a i'm just a pawn in something that she's up to or yeah like she's in charge of this it's

not yeah i'm not leading the way in this hobby i guess yeah like this is not my hobby no one asked my opinion is what's happening here yeah um and like you know my mom forced me to play a piano when i was miserable for like literally 16 years but she didn't force me to wear like bikinis and you know spray so it sure there's different levels of that so anyway um the ramses had moved to boulder only a few years earlier from georgia and uh pageantry you know is something that's tends to be more common in the south and Patsy said that although her daughter had a gift for performing it was just one of her many hobbies although in the book she and John later wrote uh called the death of innocence uh pageantry was the only hobby they discussed of hers according to CNN the six-year-old uh

Jean Benet took home first place for Little Miss Colorado, Little Miss Charlevoix, which is in Michigan, Colorado State All-Star Kids Cover Girl, America's Royal Miss, and National Tiny Miss Beauty. Damn. Okay. People also, she, I mean, she was a beautiful girl. Like, she was really sweet, very, you know, like the ultimate pageant girl, like you'd see in a movie. Like, just picture perfect, blue eyes, you know like the ultimate pageant girl like you'd see in a movie like just

picture perfect blue eyes you know blonde hair also i i appreciate that like she's like not even quote trying as hard or like it's not even at it's like not even as some as investing for her as like it might be for the other kids and she just keeps like raking it in cleaning up shop okay yeah yeah people magazine also reported that ramsey that uh jean benet won the local little miss christmas beauty pageant sweet okay and to be clear like she did this a lot so she like she a couple days before her death uh her last performance was actually singing at the local mall like she did like a christmas like concert so like she did perform a lot and she was like very you know bubbly and like into it um so she was definitely like good at it uh clearly damn yeah clearly right she's

like i'm not even trying i know oh this oh this little thing oh you mean all my little little miss sunshines or whatever they're called i forgot oh i love that movie um so there's an excerpt from a book called We Have Your Daughter by Paula Woodward. There are a lot of books on this case, unsurprisingly. Yeah. The excerpt reads, by the Monday following her body being found on the prior Thursday, the networks were already involved. It happened so fast and it was so competitive. Within a few days, we learned that the networks were interested and her child beauty pageant

pictures had been leaked and sold to the media by the photographers who took them oh fuck off yeah and it became international so like every photographer who did a photo shoot with her was like oh great five grand or whatever i don't know the price like here's her portfolio and so now they had these like you know skimpy photos of her plastered everywhere i mean it made for like the ultimate media yeah circus you know for lack of a better word like truly i just was also because like there's nothing wrong with looking like that sometimes but like this was not the time like this was not the place i feel like like yeah your pageant pictures yeah this isn't a performance this is a crisis and we need to be paying attention to yeah it was sort of like you know wealthy white family tiny blonde girl plus she's living her

her mother's vicarious dream of being a pageant star look how like she's being sexualized and now she's murdered you know i mean it was a whole a whole thing um so let's see the so the whole world at this point is like invested in this story for obvious reasons and boulder itself was known as very peaceful town um very low crime rate so uh it's actually well it was i guess because there's also a fun fact here from uh episode 198 the shenan and chris watts story yeah uh boulder's only 34 minutes from frederick colorado where they lived oh so i guess things have gone downhill since then but it's a radius i don't want to be a part of yeah a couple like high profile things are happening here something in the water something in the water so uh but at the time and probably still boulder has a very low crime rate

um and they i saw in one documentary they had like one or two murders to deal with a year like a year and so now they had this like wild homicide of a child so as you can probably imagine um the police didn't really know what the hell to do. And keep in mind also that it's the day after Christmas. So a lot of people are on vacation, right? Like come in, not enough people are even there to like properly do this job. Yeah. And like, remember when I said they left that Lisa detective alone, right scene. And detectives later admitted, like the supervisor said, like, I made a huge mistake. I shouldn't have like left one officer alone at the scene to just kind of like run everything well i remember when you said like

you were when you were the dispatcher and you said like um oh i'll have an officer out there and i was like an officer i was like can you get a squadron out there please damn the fbi helicopter yeah i mean that house had to have a helipad right for helicopters what else you're gonna do with all that space i i get you wanted a wine cellar so you got a 7500 square foot house to match but like maybe they put it where the seance room was i don't know right um but so yeah so they were stretched thin basically and on top of that they're not this is not a thing that they've ever had to deal with so they're stretched thin it's christmas it's already a small town it's already not prepared for this kind of thing so shoddy police work would forever be associated with this case just like last week like police work was not top notch here uh-huh um and admittedly like from later investigators have

said like at least mistakes at least i can respect that. At least they owned it. Okay. Exactly. Some of them. Some. So on the morning that Jean Benet was found, the Ramsey. So this is just kind of a summation of all of this shoddy police work. On the morning that Jean Benet was found, the Ramseys had friends coming in and out of the house.

They were passing the ransom note back and forth to read it with each other. Friends came over and cleaned the kitchen like this place was uh just tampered tampered tampered tampered they were uh swarming this place friends were coming in and out yeah they were passing the letter back and forth trying to read it trying to figure it out um and police were there like this isn't like before police arrived police arrived within minutes so they didn't properly cordon off the home basically as a crime scene sure also like the dad like literally picked up the body and like brought it upstairs that's the one of the biggest biggest ones for sure which like if there's anything i've learned there's two things I've learned in my entire relationship with you. One, cyanide smells like almonds.

Two, do not ever touch anything until a proper investigation has been handled. Praying to God it is a proper investigation. I have a new fact for you though. Oh my God. Or a new fun statistic. Mercury's closer to the sun. What? That science is not saying I can help you with, but.

Britney Spears is birds what that one that one i already taught you that one's um as far as like true crime apparently which i mean correct me if i'm wrong all you actual forensic people out there but uh apparently if you find a loved one uh who has hanged themselves excuse me human nature is to cut them down so a lot of times if you find a person who has been hanged and like nobody cut them down, it's a little fishier. Like, OK, this was just in a story I read where somebody was that somebody had been killed. I know. Hanged to cover it up.

And they were like, well, so weird that they wouldn't try and take her down. No, that makes sense. I think. Sorry, I was trying to put it in my put myself in those shoes but absolutely if which it makes no sense because if they're already gone then like what's the what does it matter but the first thing you want to do is try to bring comfort and like and help so like or like maybe they're still alive you don't know i mean yeah and like that's yeah so it's human nature i guess as far as i've read again this is caveat like i just read

this in a book i don't 100 know that it's true right but apparently it's human nature i guess as far as i've read again this is caveat like i just read this in a book i don't 100 know that it's true right but apparently it's human nature so but yes other don't i mean check okay potential fun fact pff pff yeah but also if you do come across body check if they're alive because a lot of times people don't do that and it's like well shit now we don't know she could have been alive still or she could have also if you're in a car crash or if you see someone in a car crash unless it's a dire emergency do not pull them out of the car because you move them you could do so much more damage to them skeletally their back could be broken yeah or it could not be broken and then you break it because you're pulling them out and all it needed was that one last tug so yeah or

their neck or you could paralyze them yeah anyway point being there's nothing you can do is correct in any circumstance wait okay book closed i've aced the class i yes that was the secret to to the entire course that i was waiting on okay without even a term paper everything you do is wrong that's bingo bingo okay don't worry it goes for me too so they the ransom note they're passing it before back and forth with people um and they only sectioned off uh jean benet's room as opposed to the whole house being treated as a crime scene and uh the investigators just like you know my opinion should have investigated the house as uh rather than letting the dad and his friend investigate the house thousand percent just like the the dad and his friend investigate the house

thousand percent just like the wildest thing like oh here's a task go look for your go search the crime scene for your dead daughter if i ever saw if i ever walked into a crime scene if there's one thing i know it's like just fucking walk right back out and call the police like yeah don't touch it because you're gonna tamper with it yeah exactly or like then i incriminate myself by accident like like incriminate as in like now i'm added to the suspect list if i've been touching shit like yes so my my advice is check that they're check if they're alive because if they are alive you could call 9-1-1 and have help cpr and so on uh if they are dead immediately call authorities and don't touch anything bingo exactly yeah that's my advice as a uh really low tier

podcaster who knows not much about anything as someone who has an opinion um that's mine as someone who has an opinion about things that uh i don't deserve an opinion on that's my opinion yeah yeah oh my gosh okay so um private investigator john st augustine said on a podcast called the killing of john bonnetpect, quote, when you're doing an investigation much like this, where the initial call is a kidnapping, it is crucial that the crime scene is provided with forensic sterility. What that means is you try and maintain the crime scene as best you can. And so what happens in this case is that we have a major contamination of the crime scene. Not only do we not move the family from the crime scene when the call comes in we actually allow the family to introduce their friends their pastor so there's never really any security in this investigation and again like you said he grabbed the body

carried it upstairs laid her out then her mom started crying over her like nobody i mean the investigator checked and said he's or she has passed so they checked she is she was dead but they didn't preserve the bot you know what i mean they like i mean like i would i would assume there are a lot of information that my untrained eye does not see but like if there's a body lying on the ground how it is lying on the ground could probably tell you a lot or like yes yeah there's some there's some there's some clues that people have been trained to look for especially like it was wrapped in a blanket like maybe there's clue there how was the cord tied does it look like someone's left-handed or

right-handed so that the the that actually stays into play like that that they were able to oh they never took it off as it was like tied around her so and they never the rope was tied around her um etc so as much as they were like crying over her nobody like cut it off or anything like that yeah that's weird because i would i without thinking like what logically i should do if i like saw saw like my mom, you know, in that situation and there was a rope wrapped around her, I would immediately want to rip it off and be like, I don't want you to look this way, you know? Yeah, I think it was like a really thin nylon cord.

So it wasn't like an aggressively big thing. But also it was like very much secure to her. So they would have had to like cut through the nylon rope i i don't know um that but that part did stay on and became evidence later um so anyway on to the investigation and what they found so i just want to warn you the autopsy is a bit gruesome especially it's a child you know it's upsetting um so the autopsy revealed that jean benet had died from asphyxiation due to strangulation in addition to a skull fracture that was seven and

a half to eight inches in length holy shit huge eight and a half inches yeah and she's a six year old yes so her whole head was like eight inches yeah like right right right a tiny person okay yeah uh exactly so there were also two stun gun marks on her face and on her back stun gun marks yeah that which is that feels like a really in a really important piece of evidence it does and it honestly throws a wrench into a lot of the theories i will say that uh because the stun gun is kind of like wait stun gun like it just uh adds confusion is that i think my my first thought would be like oh well then i know through what i've heard about john bernie ramsey a lot of people think it was the brother but if the brother is nine like he doesn't have a stun gun right like the family didn't end up having a stun gun

as far as we know so yeah sorry sorry no no but that's exactly like why uh that was like a really weird piece of evidence so yeah stun gun marks on her face and back and there was evidence leaning toward sexual assault as well fuck okay yes so there was no evidence of rape and no semen but the pathologist recorded that it appeared there was chronic inflammation of the vaginal wall and it was also thought that her vaginal area had been wiped with a cloth okay uh there was a garrotte that was made from a nylon cord and a broken handle of a paintbrush that was tied around her neck and i described what a garrotte was in like episode eight or something do you remember no i heard paintbrush and I kind of just landed on that one.

Yeah. So it's basically a garrote is when you have a rope and then you or a strangulation method and then you use a bar or tool, a brush or whatever to as extra leverage to strangle somebody. Got it. If that makes sense. Yeah. Like you use it as kind of a for torque lever yeah yes yes yes yes yes um which is also a weird detail of like a very specific tool of murder you're doing that's that's like obviously her being dead is a uh pretty clear

indication of intent but like the something like that is like, oh, you really wanted to like do something. Yeah, and somebody, right. And somebody knew what they were doing if they made a garrote. Like, and by the way, the garrote was made of a paintbrush that came from Patsy's art kit in the house. Interesting.

So they're also like able to improv something like that. Yeah, so it's like if it was made in the house, somebody knew how to make it. They didn't stay home and watch WikiHow or read WikiHow andiki how right which like if i ever were going to be like a murderer i would be wiki howing like how to not get caught by the police like one and i would i would definitely be that guy who forgot to go on incognito mode and just like immediately sent it to all of my you know i would accidentally text that link to the police and then be like oh no you'd be like oh is this how and it's like you're facetiming the police department no they're gonna see my handmade garage in the

background yeah that's us this is why we're bad at everything anyway this is why we do everything wrong as we like to say bingo um so the autopsy now this is where things just get weirder the autopsy also revealed that in her stomach she had undigested pineapple okay so that was the last thing she ate yes and it indicated that she had eaten it a few hours before her death as it had not yet digested so it wasn't it was far enough along that you could tell it was pineapple but it had not been digested in her small intestine yet and do we know what the time of death guesstimate is? No, I don't think so. Shocking.

Usually that's the first thing I hear about on SAU. I know, I know. And they don't have that. All they know is that she was dead at some point before the police arrived. It just lets you know how incorrect Hollywood is sometimes because anytime I've watched Law & Order, it's like they just want to, that's the first thing they always tell you and it's always like oh well she died obviously at 329 and i'm like yeah yeah they like smell they like smell her hair and

they're like this is a 618 murder it's like there's like an invisible clock they like once you get the degree in forensics you like see this clock clock. Yeah. It's a, yes, exactly. So I don't have, I don't believe I have a, an estimate time of death. Okay. But it was basically proof that she had eaten pineapple within the hours of her death, which happened sometime that night, the night of Christmas. So apparently John and Patsy were very adamant that they had not fed pineapple to Jean Benet. But this is. Wasn't she at the party, though? I'm sure there was a fruit platter.

So they found the next the next morning when I guess before the friends were all cleaning up the kitchen, the photos from the crime scene show a bowl of pineapple uh on the kitchen table okay and uh weird thing to lie about well oh it had burke's fingerprints on it okay this is where that is okay uh-huh and it also had patsy's but again you know she's the mom she's admittedly have has done dishes so it's not that weird that the moms are on there but jean benet's fingerprints are not on it but burke's are okay and go on the parents were like we didn't feed her pineapple like we don't remember doing that that's not a thing we did um but so there was a dish of pineapple apparently pineapple and milk which i'm like. Sounds great.

It sounds gross. I'm thinking of it as like a, like a, one of my favorite like Thai foods is like when they do like the, the mango sticky rice. Yeah. Do you know what that is? I mean, I imagine it's like pineapple stick, like pineapple and coconut cream could be kind of good. I just hate like pineapple or like I hate, huh?

I know you hate milk right now. I just feel like pineapple or like I hate. I know you hate milk. I just feel like it would curdle. It would curdle the milk. I don't know. Never happened to me. Okay. Pineapples and cream maybe I could get on board with. But like milk just sounds weird.

I'm thinking pineapples and cream taste good. So like milk isn't that far off and it makes it less disgusting to me. Yeah, I guess. Also, they're like two of my favorite things to put in my body. So I do love pineapple and I like like milk so yeah i guess um so uh they found a bowl of pineapple on the table and it was found to have burke's fingerprints on it now there wasn't a time stamp on the fingerprints but patsy and john were certain that burke had slept through the night and only woke up when the police arrived at the house.

And by the way, he stayed in his bedroom the entire time that the police were there. And when they later interviewed him, he just said he was scared, which like, okay, understandably, you're nine and your sister's missing. So Patsy and John were interviewed briefly after the discovery of their daughter's death, but they refused to be interviewed separately um they insisted on only being interviewed together uh at any point which not a great flag no because like they need to make sure their their alibis check out in theory their stories line up yeah um so they only conducted their first formal statement interviews on april 30th 1997 which

was four months later i was gonna say wow yeah yeah yeah so they because they because the police were like no we want to interview you separately so it took them four months to to get to that point jesus okay um in the meantime however uh much to the irritation and almost like hurt feelings of the police, they were happy to go on CNN and do news and press and media coverage. However, they refused to talk to police. So it was not a good look. And they had hired a media consultant. And I'm like, maybe that media consultant was just bad at their job. But it wasn't a good look and it honestly really hurt their case because um on january 1st 1997

um you can hear so you can watch clips of these interviews and they've gotten a lot of scrutiny and you you'll see why if you watch okay um so you can hear patsy say we have to find out who did this before John continues, not because we're angry, but we've got to go on. Then they say, for our grief to resolve itself, we now need to find out why this happened. And in one of the most famous quotes from this interview, Patsy makes the plea, oh my God, I wasn't looking and I just saw Robert out of the corner of my eye, like moving across the screen and holding him.

I think he just wants to be seen. I think needs some love yeah he just needs a little love everyone needs to be center of attention he looks so handsome maybe we should just zoom in on him for the whole episode okay that's just no one else no one needs me anymore it's been like an hour no no that's all all for you maybe every time it cuts to me he's like wait he's like my turn i'll say the quote okay uh okay so one of the most famous quotes from the interview patsy makes the plea uh to to all my or to everyone in boulder tell your friends to keep your babies close to you there's someone out there yikes so this interview uh is interesting it did not bode well they decided they're not going to interview with police but

they are going to go on national television and this backfired because people did not take well to this uh this look because they they didn't have the most like emotive response like they seemed cold and careless to it not careless but definitely just like a little distanced or like composed very composed like like like homeboy in the last episode the the the other colorado oh yeah yeah yeah yeah like how he was he was he because he did a really good job for a second right he like had a had a total meltdown, but then like when they would talk to him, he was like a little too chill. Yeah.

And they were like, you haven't cried once about them. Miss your daughter's missing. Yeah. But you've cried about other things. Right. So it was weird. Is it kind of like that? Yeah, it is.

And I've like mixed feelings on that because on the one hand, like, sure, you know, you expect people to behave a certain way, but the other hand uh she's a pageant queen like she's been trained to perform her whole life composed yeah yeah be composed exactly and she's probably rehearsed this a million times to like prepare and she knows the world is like looking at her as a suspect well like my big thing too is when like the way that my emotions process is like i'm kind of like all or nothing where like i have that my emotions process is like i'm kind of like all or nothing where like i have all the emotions immediately and then i'm just numb like i'm just like i can't fucking feel anything yes exactly and like i can shut down and be like i'm just

distancing myself from it so so like i don't like when people kind of just critique it based solely on how they expect someone to react in a scenario like this especially because you know they've had uh i imagine if i were in this scenario which i can't imagine but if if i were in this scenario i imagine i would get a very strong prescription for valium for whatever to like tranquil like to just like not one thousand percent out and so in one of the videos and i hate to make this speculation but i'm gonna do it anyway she almost talks in a way where i'm like she could be talking on like klonopin and only because i take klonopin so i'm like i can tell when sometimes

like the zombie voice there's like a little not necessarily but just like kind of a calmer demeanor than maybe would be warranted in a scenario i feel like i like when i've ever had to take like chill out medication i get like zombie voice like just like brain fog voice or i'm just kind of like not really aware of my surroundings because i'm kind of just like in another space yeah and it's like it's just harder to to like get riled up and uh get your adrenaline going that's the whole point it's like chemically affecting you so i can see why you'd be like i'm upset but not like screaming you know so anyway that being said there were some other issues with this interview that i also find questionable which which is instead of saying like, oh, we don't, we're not angry.

Okay, I'm glad you said that because I want, we got off on a tangent, but it had there not been one I was going to say what freaks me out of anything is him being like, well, we're not angry, we just want to like have closure. And it's like, if someone killed my fucking kid, like, oh, I want you to, I want you to ask me in 90 years if i'm still not like if i'm not angry if i found my child's body and somebody had threatened to behead her and left her in my base yeah if like that's like yeah i don't know if you were trying to like come off as like like the the bigger person but like it came off as like you're the fucking weird you're like you're her dad yeah it wasn't a good look his fucking face off like yeah the public was not having it with this especially because

they said like we just want to know why and it's like you don't want to know who like or or when i would want to know where you live and i'd want to know what your biggest fear is and i'd want to know how slowly i can make you bleed out i'd want how many tarantulas i can buy and kill you slowly with spiders how many how many little uh uh little cockroaches i could like put all over your eyeballs yeah exactly yeah exactly you get it we're gonna be great parents i could imagine myself as a kid like or as a parent being like you better do the dishes or i'm gonna put five cockroaches on i know your worst fears i know where the cockroaches are okay i have a guy don't worry about it um and so it was really strange and she kind of said like

there's someone out there and like she was warning people and it was kind of focused on that rather than like we need answers who the hell is it come forward like we want to know who you are like who knows it was a little bit odd um and the fact that they had refused to speak to police right but now they were doing media which you know involved coaching from their media coach so it was a little bit questionable but patsy uh and john said they wanted to warn people that there was a murderer out there and that's why they did the the view they're the not the view the show they did the the public uh appearance the wendy williams show yeah yeah yeah yeah they went on ellen and danced a little bit right uh but so there were some other odd details just uh aside from the uh weird interview and this goes

back to the evidence so firstly the ransom note. The ransom note is one of the weirdest, obviously, one of the weirdest factors of this whole story. Yes, it's bananas. So if you're looking at it objectively, the ransom note was three pages handwritten. Right. What kind of fucking ransom note is three fucking pages long? What kind of ransom note is handwritten? Like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Handwritten? Totally. is long well like that what kind of ransom note is handwritten like that's the stupidest thing i've ever heard like handwritten totally put it in some cut out tiger beat and get some letters or

print it out like come on now like you're it makes me think like they're definitely new to this and also they left the but do you know how not that i ever want to kidnap somebody but my my go-to move wouldn't be leave the body at the scene of the crime like uh-huh i would just take it i would take it and no one would ever write a note and then put it upstairs yeah i also want to add that the note was on the back staircase which you wouldn't have known was the one they used unless you either a knew the family very well or were in the family or watched the family like they use that back staircase and that's where the note was left even though they had like a full front staircase to the front door where you would think you'd

leave like right a note for whoever wakes up first um so a little bit odd so um it gets so much weirder it gets so much sketchier so oh my god this um it's just horrifying. Okay. So you're thinking, oh, well, maybe they wrote this note at home and they're just a very, you know, they like to talk. Maybe they like to, they're, what's the word? Look, I don't want to say it wrong. Look what? Loquacious? No.

Loquacious? Is that a word? That's not a word. No, it's locution. Wait, okay. Please, God, don't think think i'm gonna help you in this it's not and i clear i'm making the point right now because i still i'm like having nightmares about the time i said sisyphusian instead of sisyphean anyway so i still don't know the

difference so good on you there's like 10 s's no matter what in there oh my gosh thank you for protecting my feelings okay so um anyway it's 380 words long it's three pages it's handwritten it's really long it's on the back staircase and you could think like oh well maybe they just love to hear themselves talk they wrote it at home and brought it with them uh-uh the note was written inside and do you know how we know that because the paper from a4 the paper came from uh patsy's notebook oh i remember you saying earlier that she walked down she saw three a4 size so i was gonna be like did she just buy a4 paper yeah i mean basically it came from their personal stash of paperwork. Like, their stationery. It just feels...

So, that... So, okay. So, I want to think that it's, like, an outside job. But, like, it sounds like they... It's like they were gonna have, like, you know, pretending we're on the side of the ransom killers at this point. Yeah. In this situation.

It's like, I imagine them going in there with, like, a duffel bag, a whole kit, like, ready to, like, you know, fuck up people's lives. But like they lock the bag in the car. And now they're like frantically trying to like impromptu to do everything that they wanted to. But now they're using like the random shit they can find because they like forgot their gear. It just feels like everything should have been done first. Like why wouldn't you want to write a note like that that takes a long time on a very especially if you're saying you're like some professional part of a foreign faction and you know but like you know all about like the fbi and local yeah like we're watching galan for

it's like you're not coming off very professional if you're writing this kind of it's like you're doing it like off the cuff like yeah yeah okay so basically they took this note and they were able to figure out what pen what type of pen what brand of pen it came um uh it came from and uh guess what they found the pen and it was in the house and it was put back where it belonged like there was a pen that was like in a certain spot there's something eerie about putting it back. Yes. And after this person wrote this note,

they took the time to put the pen back. Yeah. There's something, it's like just too casual. It's so odd. And like time consuming. It's such a small, it's in a very small way.

It reminds me of like the stories you've covered where someone gets killed, like someone breaks into someone's house and then kills them, but then like eats food out of their fridge and shit it's like you're just like a turkey dinner yeah so lackadaisical about it yeah it's really wild um so they basically by this logic the murderer was able to find a pad find a pen like presumably not knowing that where they would be uh practice oh i forgot to tell you they also found drafts of the note in the house fuck off okay so they really just did this like multiple drafts like okay okay got it yeah so basically by this logic they're able to find a pad find a pen

practice the note a few times write the whole note then return the pad and pen to where their usual placements were so they were in absolutely no rush got it yeah so this is like wildly alarming i think uh you know you'd think if you're breaking and entering you want to get out as quickly as possible especially if you have this grand plan and you don't want to get caught obviously um and so in the case of john benet ramsey which is documentary uh they gave uh a group of people the task of copying the note out and it took them on average 21 minutes and 28 seconds to write that entire note so shit and they practiced it a bunch of times so they were in that house for at least an hour and that was uh them copying it verbatim it wasn't think you have to

would you would have to actually as you were writing you were thinking of what to say right right as the ransom writer so it probably took even longer wow um so it's like as a lot of people have pointed out online especially like they could have gotten the message across in four sentences we want money we're gonna kill your daughter don't call the police i mean it's we've seen a million times like why not just do that? It's really odd. It's really odd. Instead of being like, make sure you bring the right size briefcase. It's like what? Rest up a little bit. An appropriate attache. It's like, wow, you this really is like your first outing as a as a bank robber. You're like, I'm going with the best accessories for my first moment too hard yeah exactly so um anyway it's also the part about the small foreign faction but like that you mentioned

that is really red flag because like what uh you know almost like on if it's not true but if someone i'm not gonna i'm gonna pretend it's just a, but if someone, I'm not going to, I'm going to pretend it's just a complete random stranger and I don't have my own opinion currently. It feels like it's like almost mental instability of like this, like the government's after me or I'm after, I'm the government coming after you. It feels kind of like, it feels kind of on that vein, but also it just feels like a flat out line. You're trying to, you're like, what sounds intense and scary.

Yeah, like foreign faction yeah and um i will also add that okay actually i'm going to mention this in a minute um but so the the small foreign faction thing too like wouldn't you say like we are from a powerful league of terrorists like you we're we're we're a little scary yeah we're just like on the outskirts of of terrorism but we're trying you know it's like we're on the fringe we're a little scary yeah we're we're just like on the outskirts of of terrorism but we're trying yeah it's like we're on the fringe we're trying to break through that it's just weird um so anyway within the ransom note the author they've they've realized made allusions to the film's dirty hairy ruthless people speed and ransom and the movie ransom had come out like months prior. So it was like, this is a little weird that it's coming out right after this movie came out.

And it's the illusions. It's almost like someone thought, what would you write in a ransom note? And you made a flowery ransom note where you were like, this is what it would say. You know, like just really dramatic. So the other thing that you caught on to immediately was the amount 118 000 and as everybody asked why didn't they just round it like people 120 150 anything like people ask for a million bucks people ask for 500 whatever but like 118 is very specific and the ramses at the time were worth 6.5 million dollars so it it's not like they were wanting for cash.

Like they could have asked for $2 million and, you know, probably gotten them to do it. Yeah. So what's most interesting, and this is where things get a little like, Oh, so $118,000. Well, that month, John had received a Christmas bonus from work of, you guessed it, exactly $118,000. Well, that month, John had received a Christmas bonus from work of, you guessed it, exactly $118,000. Okay. And although he did get like a write-up in the paper about like his success at work, it didn't specify $118,000. That was a very specific number that you would only know if you worked with him or maybe not even that.

Only know if you were close enough that you would have know if you worked with him or or maybe not even that only know if you were close enough that you would have had that information so at this point um i don't know where we really are in like terms of like the investigation but do have the have the police already made their own opinions of this okay are they like are they even thinking like oh maybe it's someone from work or are they pretty sure it's the father? Yeah, they're convinced it's the family. They're almost immediately. And that becomes problematic, too, because they really just it's another thing where like in the last episode, they said it's a suicide and then like blinders and didn't. And just rode with that one, even though it could have been something else.

Yeah. else yeah so they they really it was it became problematic because it was such a gung-ho theory that like a lot of things kind of got pushed aside evidence-wise um and anyway i'll tell you but yeah exactly they did immediately think it was coming from coming from inside the house okay for lack of a better term sure um so uh many people including police um just thought this ransom note was staged uh for obvious reasons and if it looks or if it were staged so that means the family would most likely be the culprits of the crime or at least have something to do with it and so uh this is the okay sorry so if they were if we're thinking okay the family wrote the note now this immediately calls into question the chronological order of things as far as the note checking on the kids and then the 911 call so the 911 call

in the 2016 documentary the case of john benet ramsey a forensic linguist named jim fitzgerald provides an analysis of the phone call and he questions why this is some of my favorite stuff by the way when like linguists like forensic linguists and people who look at you know writing samples and can like figure stuff out from people's verbiage i just think it's so fascinating it's the things you never think about it's like yes how on earth did someone even make that into a job and now it's like a successful whole department yeah cool and it's like so powerful like what you can learn from this so anyway he uh provided an analysis he questioned why patsy never says jean benet's name in the entire call oh uh She refers to her as my six-year-old daughter.

She's blonde, but like doesn't say her name, which is just seemingly odd. Right. She says, instead of saying like, my six-year-old daughter is missing, she says, there's been a kidnapping, which I know that like, there's a lot more of this online where you can

people really like study these 911 calls and a lot of times people who are using certain verbiage like i i found a body i found this or i did like some there's something fishy going on if you're like inserting yourself fascinating focal point of the story um and and also deflecting so like not saying someone's name or saying like there has been a kidnapping instead of like my daughter's gone you know what i mean like it's it's almost like distancing even if there's like a like a like probable cause for there to have been a kidnapping because i know if i saw a note like that about you and now you're missing i would assume okay that she's been kidnapped right but instead of saying like oh my god i think my my daughter's been kidnapped i think

my friend's been kidnapped she's saying there's been a kidnapping and doesn't say her daughter's name um instead of saying you know instead of saying like oh my god i think someone took my daughter or i think my daughter's been kidnapped or someone might hurt her. This is on YouTube? This is – what is – how did you learn about this? Oh, so these are – basically they play this 911 call in like every documentary. So you can hear the call. I'm sure it's on YouTube. And the analysis is in – this specific one is in a documentary called The Case of Jean-Bernie Ramsey. But you can find – like there are sites that uh analyze the ransom note

that i find oh one of the things that i didn't write down so i want to mention it real quick in the ransom note um it uses the word hence and like hence is not a very commonly used word but in a uh church service that had happened like really recently prior to the murder that the family had written to do a reading or something at church. They used the word hence in that reading. So it's like another odd thing of like how many people are using hence in like a frantic ransom note. And how many people are using that twice? Yeah, exactly. Like it's weird that you keep thinking

about that word that word is just like not so commonly used and so it's just an odd coincidence um anyway so you know instead of saying like yeah something's wrong with my daughter or she's missing or someone took her or someone hurt her it's like there's been a kidnapping forensic linguistics that's what's Yeah, it's very interesting. Yes, yes. Okay, I'm going to look that up later. It's so cool. I could read those all day online.

They like highlight certain words and like say like. I'm about to literally go into a rabbit hole. Yeah, do a deep dive because I've done them years ago. It's been a long time. I think when I first started getting into this case, but it's really interesting. Anyway, so and then what's most interesting about this 911 call is patsy hangs up right there's and also there's

like a weird pause where she doesn't even sound like she's crying or anything it's just silence so there's like inaudible voices oh okay background and then she hangs up but like if you're calling 911 and you're like my daughter's gone somebody's taken her yeah you wouldn't hang up right you'd be like i'd be like i'm gonna be on the phone and make sure you get here immediately also the inaudible sounds like it to me my first thought is that like her if her and her husband were like co-conspirators in this then like the husband was like whispering advice and like or saying something like get off the phone or saying something where if if something happened to you and I was on the phone with the police, a car could hit me and I'd still be paying attention to the police. Like I wouldn't be like back off.

I'm on a 911 call as you're flying. I'm fucking busy right now. Do you mind? Yeah. Yeah, it's so actually, we're lucky to live in an age where we can enhance sound and try and figure out what sounds potentially are saying, even if they seem inaudible on first listen. Okay, technology. Yeah. Okay.

Forensic shit like this is so interesting. Richards and Jim Clemente figure out with the help of a sound engineer that in the muffled silence, you can hear a man say, we're not speaking to you. Followed by a female voice saying either. There's two options that it sounds like. Oh, my Jesus. Oh, my Jesus. Or what did you do? What did you do? I was like, I don't know.

But she also had a southern accent. Maybe that was part of it but and now this is followed by a different higher pitched voice saying what did you find wait so there's like a whole little a little pack of people in here just all talking together so wait was it hang on wait was it the parents and that party was the party an alibi in some way or like the party the night before the party the night before didn't they they they came from a party and then they picked her up and brought her to bed because she fell asleep in the car right so was it those people and they're the only other people i've heard of so i'm just like oh no so oh damn it no so uh they believe that the first voice is most likely john

saying you know saying we're not talking to you second voice is patsy and the third is burke oh okay that's a lot less fun than i thought i was i was thinking but is it but is it because the dad says oh because he said what did you find the dad says we're not talking to you as presumably to this to burke then patsy says what have you done what have you done or what did you do yeah and then uh burke says well what did you find so it's like a creepy kid yeah yeah so if that is what happened it's not a good look um which if that's the case like then damn i feel so fucking bad for these parents like awkwardly having to cover for your kid's killer because they're also your kid oh wow it's like now you're gonna lose both kids right um so then she hangs up which is also like

why would you hang up but i guess if if burke walked into the room for example um for example's sake you wouldn't want the operator to hear that right might hang up before anything else could be revealed so um let's see and to be clear here also in all of their statements including their like april interview with police patsy and john insist that burke was sleeping this entire time so even if we're not totally understanding it like there are voice there there is a voice of like seemingly a child in the background so okay seems to be they're lying about something here uh whether it's to protect him and he's innocent or whether he did it and he's not innocent and they're protecting him something's up it's it's fishy oh wow i've this whole time i've been like so ready to like punch that dad in the face and now i'm like oh maybe that guy really needs a hug like yeah that's why this is

such a crazy story because every fucking documentary you're like oh my god it's him oh my god it's her and even within the family you're like oh it's a family oh no it's a family. Oh, no, it's like some other guy. It's a stranger. Like, man, they can pull you in every direction. So to Kim Archuleta, who is the operator, which good on you, Kim. And again, thank you to everyone who is a dispatcher operator, because wow, that's a lot uh stress you probably deal with yep um she was the operator that evening and she thought the call seemed rehearsed um and as she listened on while patsy thought she had hung up the phone kim thought she heard a gear shift in her voice uh kim believes she heard patsy then say we've called the police now what oh which could go both ways yeah which could go both ways but it sounds like okay we've done the next step in this plan or like what's how like what's what's now what do we do list yeah yes yeah but it could also just be like now what do we just fucking wait around or like do we hide from the ransom guys yeah exactly you're right it could be either way but she did say she felt

like her voice shifted from like panic to kind of just kind of like when like in a crisis you have to like be you just got to get your shit pull it together maybe yeah but obviously this is not like proof of anything um so the first major theory obviously is that the family did it but the second major theory is that this was the work of an intruder. Seems to be most people are split right down the middle. And as the so in 1998, a police detective who was like really well renowned. His name is Lou Smith. And he basically had like a 90 to 100 percent success rating in solving murder cases. Like he was like they they brought the big guns in.

Like they they brought the big guns in. And he actually came in and determined pretty quickly that he did not think the parents or the family had anything to do with her death. And I'll tell you what he kind of found as far as evidence. He published a book later, which argued his side of the case, saying there is substantial credible evidence of an intruder and a lack of evidence that the parents are involved now his key argument was that the in the basement there was a window that had been smashed open and is that true she yes and she was found in the basement right okay so you can see photos crime scene photos of this there's a window that has been smashed open however this was not a new smash in the window uh apparently john ramsey had smashed it months prior because he had locked himself out of the house on a number

of occasions and he just never had the window pane replaced okay so he had climbed in that way when he got locked out so it's just that was his new normal that's just a new front door. But that doesn't mean an intruder couldn't have seen that and climbed in. Sure, sure. But nobody's new smashed the window open. According to Rolling Stone, there also appeared to be finger marks on the glass and an unidentified footprint on the suitcase that stood below it. A suitcase which Smith believed was part of the intruder's plan to sneak jean benet's body out of the house okay it was later discovered that foliage had grown underneath the metal grill that blocked the entrance meaning that um someone had removed the grate at some point

and uh then put it back uh however this fact is also disputed because within the smashed window there was a spider web okay named deb no i'm just gonna i was gonna say skylar makes an appearance okay remember we used to say skylar has seen so much in this room skylar has seen so much in this fucking basement if skylar has uh quite a backstory we skylar knows the truth and it's like really scary that we can't ask her what what her this What? Her? This whole time? Oh, what? Oh, that she's been the... That she's a she, Skylar. Oh.

Is Skylar a girl in your mind? Yeah. Yes. Oh, is she not? I thought Skylar was a boy. Oh, well, all the Skylars I've known are always girls, so I guess I just kind of assumed it was a girl. Skylar has another mystery to them.

Wow. Wow. I mean, who's to say, really? It's probably not for me it's probably for skylar to say well but she keeps everything really close to the chest so i don't think we're gonna find out spider chest of theirs okay yeah yeah yeah okay um i guess because of deb and skylar i just assumed they were like a little like little gal pals yeah little gal pals um so right there was this cobweb there uh and you can see it in the photos and it had do like do and dust on it so apparently they

determined it was around 70 unlikely that this web had been made after an intruder could have entered like it was it had been there for too long yes so they believe if okay so here i'll explain it better but um because of the size of the window so lou actually does a demonstration and climbs into the window himself um because of the size of the window and the level you'd have to crouch there's no way someone could have gone through without destroying the spider web oh okay um so basically apparently it takes an average spider one hour to spin a web so technically an intruder could have come in and out and then a spider created this web but it also had a lot of dust and water and stuff kind of built up on it it was yeah so they determined i

guess like a 70 chance this thing was there before so nobody went through that window it was vintage also like i like how there's this like something as simple as something as simple and as complex and as tiny as like a spider web can completely like make or break a forensic fascinating sensation yeah yeah it's just the wildest shit that you don't ever even think of um so on october 13th 1999 in balerado balerado holy shit i was gonna let it happen too i was about to like burp so i was like i have to get this word out quickly and then i just said balerado in boulder colorado older balerado yep know it well the grand jury decided there was not enough evidence to charge anyone in the death of John Bonnet. And this was shocking to everybody because they were like, basically, everybody believed that the parents did it, that Patsy did it.

Patsy was like the number one Patsy, I guess. She was like the number one suspect in the public's mind. So when this grand jury came back and said, we don't have proof that they did this or whatever uh we don't have enough proof that the grand jury whatever blah blah people were shocked well guess what we find out later that that wasn't actually true in 2013 it was revealed that the grand jury actually was prepared to charge the parents with fatal child abuse and accessory to a crime but the prosecutor kind of vetoed it and said like nope we don't have enough evidence to try them weird and so even though the grand jury and they're not allowed to talk about it so even though the grand jury

apparently ruled like we believe that they uh were part of fatal child abuse and they were an accessory to a crime the prosecutor alex hunter declined to try them um in the case and basically said like we don't have enough evidence so the public was like wait what and later we find out like everybody else in his court said like no no like we want them tried and he just made the call he like vetoed it okay so really odd um so the case to this day as probably most of you know remains unsolved but obviously the entire world has their opinions um and thoughts and here are a couple highlights of what people think might have happened so as far as intruder theories uh we've already mentioned that there's a foreign dna profile found um oh did i tell you that oh i think i told you that say that there

was a some dna found in her underwear you said there was some dna but then it never really got touched like it ever got like mentioned again okay yeah it was like a really brief comment but basically when they were going um through her doing her autopsy they found like vaginal swelling and they found um like spots of blood in her underwear and like us like something had wiped like like yes exactly yeah it seemed like it had been wiped and uh they found a foreign dna profile that didn't belong to anyone in the house inside her underwear now it sounds really damning however uh some believe the dna might belong to the worker who made the underwear which apparently happens because so it's so what they did is they used touch dna which i guess is controversial because it's just like when somebody touches something

and you i don't know it's very complicated but apparently they use touch dna to be like oh my gosh this is the same dna that matches the ones that was also the one that was also on her leggings but apparently they only used a few markers and said and in reality they said it's possible it could be the same dna in her leggings and in her underwear okay but in reality it couldn't be or it could also not be the same dna i don't know does that make any sense it does no it makes sense it's just that's so i never didn't know it was controversial because yeah because well at first they said oh my gosh the dna in her underwear and there was also some dna on her pants they matched and if they did match

then it's like okay then that's not just some random like, right interference from like police handling it evidence, whatever. Like that's, if it ended up in two parts of her clothing, like then it must be an intruder or somebody outside the family. Yes. But then later, it kind of became clear that like, maybe it wasn't the most reliable way to determine whether the evidence was I'm sorry whether the dna was connected um but apparently that does happen where manufacturing processes sometimes like small amounts of dna will get into the clothing i had no idea that was that weird that's one of the more fun facts of today that i've learned it's so creepy to think about but yeah you could wash something a million times and like there's still something from the very first in the moment from like whoever sewed it or you know weird touch the elastic or what have you yeah Like, you could wash something a million times and, like, there's still something from the very first moment. From, like, whoever sewed it or, you know. Weird. Touched the elastic or what have you.

Yeah. Okay. So neighbors apparently noticed a scream coming from the Ramsey household at 1 or 2 a.m. And after some testing, it was possible to hear a scream from the wine cellar room that Jean Benet was found in. Ooh. And not hear it from the parents room two floors up so really okay could could have been could have been could have been she was acoustics are a funny thing i know that wine cellar had some great acoustics but only only

horizontally not vertically oh yeah exactly like very specific um so john so john uh andrew ramsey uh this was the son of john ramsey so the junior the nine-year-old no no sorry that was uh burke so oh john had two kids from a previous marriage okay but i feel like i did not know that yeah sorry i mentioned very briefly but i also wanted to add that i mean it's really tragic so john had two kids from a previous marriage and his daughter was killed uh in a car accident and at like 21 or like very young i don't know like i think 21 or 24 some like very young age so that had already happened and patsy had already been diagnosed with ovarian cancer before oh my god before this event so they

are going through like hell on many levels here wow okay um it's a lot it's a lot but so john was the other son from that marriage he was definitely older and the theory there was a theory that maybe he was involved um and the main source of evidence on this is that they had found a blanket encrusted with his semen in the basement along with a doctor suitcase, Seuss book that was found in the suitcase below the open window in the cellar and it was his DNA

however he had like a really strong alibi that he was in Atlanta that day and I'm just thinking like I guess he could have been a part of this murder but like maybe he was just like had a gross blanket from his teenage years that he like left in some boxes in storage and his dad put the box

or the suitcase in the basement. Maybe he's really into hop on pop you know so yeah yeah listen I'm not here to judge okay everybody is allowed to have their kinks. You can do it in a box you can do it with some socks look it's fine it in a box you can do it with some socks look it's fine it's okay you can do it with some socks oh my god um yeah so yeah listen yeah uh anyway

uh that's another random fun fact for you that's not very fun and now there are a couple it's definitely shocking i didn't see it coming shocking and not fun and pretty gnarly um there have been a few names that also came up so one of them is gary oliva and it's one of these things where now the following two people i mentioned every time they started talking i was like yep that's the one that has to be the guy and then you hear the next one you're like wait no that has to be the guy like it just wild okay it's so frustrating so gary oliva is a 32 year old known sex offender in boulder colorado operating around the time that jean benet was found

strangled to death in what looked like a potential sexual assault given that there was a droplet of blood on her underwear and the convicted pedophile oliva had been living in the area on and off when police allegedly found a magazine cut out of jean benet ramsey in his backpack after he was apprehended on drug charges in 2000 and in that same backpack was also a stun gun oh and apparently in his home he had a shrine to her and he admitted that he loved her to police but he said he would never hurt her because she was his lover so good night yeah and you have to remember too that this girl has become like internationally famous because of this case so her her pageant photo of a six-year-old little girl is all over the world so

you know any sickos can say like oh i did it or right or even just like oh i'm in love with her but i didn't kill her you know it's like really sorry goose cam it's it's horrendous so there was the stun gun though which was odd um then there was this other guy named bill mcreynolds and he's now deceased and this is the santa claus theory i don't know if you know about this um the merry christmas i figured out how this is the holiday episode. Yay. So the Santa Claus theory, basically this guy, he's a friend of the family, Bill McReynolds. And he was very close with the family. And he would dress up as Santa Claus to entertain the neighborhood children.

And every year Patsy had this huge, she had apparently a Christmas tree in every room of her house. And she took it very seriously. And remember, this is a 15 room house um and she like did this huge christmas bash she said 1500 to 2000 people went through her house in a matter of like 48 hours to like look at all her christmas decor so uh this guy bill and he would dress up as Santa to entertain the kids, and they loved him. It's precious. Yes. And so, McReynolds was, however, rumored to have paid a little

too much attention to Jean Benet. Okay. And the rumors were not just rumors, so it's nothing like... Well, I'll just tell you. So he went so far as to arrange a secret visit from santa claus on christmas he said something special will happen to you on christmas okay and

then uh he said he had chosen john bonnet to be his special friend no and uh she had given him a vial of glitter as like a gift um because she was enamored with him she's like it's santa claus you know she thinks this guy's santa claus if i were six and santa claus live like right next to me and like he's gonna be at the party i'm bringing him some glitter and my mom could just hire him to come over whenever yeah gosh like i'm just like i got him on speed dial santa claus yes coolest kid in the world yeah that must be pretty pretty fucking great so she like had given him a tour of the house her bedroom the basement um and she had given him a vial of glitter and he had brought it with him to his heart surgery and like carried it with him and then uh even stranger he said when he died he wanted his wife to mix the glitter into his ashes.

Okay. Went a little too far. You know, it went a little far and I was going to allow it because like it wasn't too weird. It's now it's too weird. It's too weird. It's too weird. And there's more info you can get. But like basically this guy and also within a week he on talk shows, and he was talking to the public. And he, there were some lines where I went like, ew, where he was like, children are the most special creatures.

Like, he talks very strangely about children, to be clear. And so he was definitely a suspect. I don't think, oh, also another weird thing. It turns out his wife had written a play about a little girl being murdered in her basement see ya okay isn't that wild wow it's like there's a smoking gun in every single house every single person has like a taser that's just like oh that's the taser what is going on on? I know. It's wild. So. I'm overwhelmed, just so we're clear. It's overwhelming.

My brain is kind of muddy. Short circuiting. I'm kind of like, shake it around. What's going on? Okay. Yeah. So a forensic pathologist named Dr. Cyril Wecht rebuts this theory. He asserts if this was the work of an intruder, they would have had to climb into the house

without causing any disturbance. They must have known where the little girl's bedroom was awake like awoken her taken her from her room without causing a disturbance but again like if you tase somebody sure you could probably do that uh if you know where her room is because you're santa and she showed you if you tase her fucking face yeah yeah yeah maybe she'll come with you also you had to be able to know exactly where the pen the paper where you had to know which which of the stairs they went going down you have to be able to you had to hang out for like three hours to like come up with what you were gonna write and write it all out like jesus yes okay you had to know it was her favorite white blanket i feel like that was

symbolic and we're not even talking about it. God, yeah, true. Anyway. Oh, yeah, I didn't even think of that. So, taking her from her room without causing disturbance and nobody hearing anything. So, then he would have had to have some sort of, like, whatever his intentions were sexually or otherwise, would have had to do this, then kill her, then write a ransom note. He didn't even bring a pen and paper he would have had to go find it in the house wrote a long ass ransom note asking for money then left the body in the house even though the ransom note was asking for money in exchange for the body if i did if i did kill a child in their own home the last place i would leave that child is in their own home like it doesn't make any sense well you just you you were like i'm bored now like now

there was like halfway done and i don't want to do this anymore exactly and there was there was like a really interesting point that this one guy made oh god it was i'll tell you the documentary later but uh he said basically like it doesn't usually happen both ways either somebody is attacking a child or abducting a child for sexual reasons or for ransom and they like he said like virtually never are they combined combined and so he's like if somebody comes for sexual gratification they're not doing this for 118 000 right or whatever but also usually in that scenario you would take the body somewhere else to like right do that right okay um so it's all just very weird and it doesn't fit that there's a ransom note and allegedly like sexual reasoning behind it too

um so now we're back to the family theory essentially okay um some people think and uh thought and still do think that this was the work of patsy the mother she was like the number one suspect in the public eye for ever and still is i think um according to a 1999 washington post article colorado bureau of investigation agents concluded that four fibers on the duct tape taken from jean benet's mouth were consistent with a jacket that her mother wore on christmas night also the item used to strangle Jean Benet was a broken paintbrush from Patsy's art kit, like I had mentioned.

Right. And the ransom note. So there was an analyst who, there were a lot of analysts who looked at this, and they got handwriting samples from both of them. So the handwriting analyst said, the first page, you can tell someone's trying to fake their handwriting it's like wonky they're writing really slow and then by the second and

third page they're back into a rhythm of their own handwriting and she said that's what happens if you're trying to fake it at a certain point you just fall back into your own yeah like your brain forgets that you're trying yeah yeah exactly and basically they were like this is patsy's fucking handwriting so multiple analysts have said it's a pretty pretty solid assumption that she wrote the note i think that's pretty fair i think had it not been her it sounds like there were some other surrounding neighbors that uh it could have been like they definitely had quite a little uh bundle of characters in their life that yeah sadly all look like they could be capable of this that's it's horrendous yeah so the other weird thing about this too is that like in the interviews

when they interviewed john and um when they finally got to interview them separately john said um well maybe the handwriting looks like patsy's because it was written by a woman and then patsy said well maybe the handwriting looks like looks like mine because it was written by a woman they had like the very same wording of like maybe it was written by a woman and so like you can tell that they clearly prepped that in advance which was just a weird thing to say sure and if you look at it like it looks like her fucking handwriting uh interesting yeah so if a forensic handwriting analyst is saying it's her handwriting i'm just gonna trust him um so that and then what was the other thing oh oh my god her clothes that's the other weird thing so it turns out that patsy that next day

when like police came and everything was wearing the same outfit she had worn to the christmas party the night before and they were like that's weird and she's like yeah well i put it on that morning before i went downstairs to make coffee and they're like so you put on old clothes sweater you wore all day at a Christmas party the night before. I mean, like, to be fair, I'm pretty disgusting. And, like, quarantine has really, like, jacked that personality trait up. Like, I'm one of those people, like, that I don't really change my clothes until they're, like, dirty. Like, there's, like, there will be two or three days until I change clothes sometimes.

No, completely same but i think this is a different scenario because she wore like a christmas sweater and like velvet pants and like going out clothes i mean she was at a party like she wore like a full party outfit and then and then took them off and went to sleep and then went to bed in her pajamas and then said no and then and then said oh well i must have just put them on and they were like well why would you put on the same clothes and also she's like rich as shit like she's worth six million dollars like she has like a sweater she has at least a second sweater yeah like she's not it's just like weird to be wearing like a blouse or something you wore the night before at a party like that's gross it's probably sweaty it's probably smells like booze

like well okay my shirts are pretty sweaty and smell gnarly too but i know but it's the it's the taking it off them putting it back on that's the thing i like i have standards there yeah i wear the same clothes for days but the second i shower i'm like well fuck now i need to put on new clothes like i'm not gonna put on guess i won't see that shirt for seven more months until i exactly get through all of the shirts exactly so the weird thing was that she said she took them off the next morning and they're like and then she's like well i put on clean underwear and then i put those clothes back on and they were like weird yeah because maybe like if she got like fucked up that night and just like passed out in her clothes and woke up right okay that is not what happened in her

story and she is like a fucking pageant like she is like always prim and proper like she's not like sloshing around i don't want to say like vanity but like image yeah like you know image yeah and she's not uh you know running around looking sloppy so it was just like very odd because she clearly got caught up in it and went well i must have just put them back on and they were like that's weird but so obviously from everyone else's eye it looks like she didn't take them off like she was wearing them and then if one or two in the morning this event occurred right and um lo and behold the next morning she's wearing the same outfit she never took it off which i think makes the most sense um anyway so some people do believe that it was john ramsey who killed her uh some people think

he might have had some sort of like sexual relationship with her but there is zero proof of this and as far as the vaginitis or sorry as the vaginal inflammation it turns out she had been diagnosed with vaginitis which is just like an irritation that a lot of kids get like you can get it from soap you can get it from like wiping badly i was gonna say my my big fear was like the mom needed it to look like something else and like assaulted her own kid that was my that's what i was afraid no i don't okay that makes me feel better that like they didn't find semen they didn't find it like rape uh signs of rape they just found like inflammation which they thought like maybe this is a sign of ongoing sexual trauma but they talked to her pediatrician who basically said like trust me i every child that comes through inflammation which they thought like maybe this is a sign of ongoing sexual trauma but they talked

to her pediatrician who basically said like trust me i every child that comes through my practice like i'm you know this is one of my biggest concerns and he said she had inflammation a lot of kids have it it wasn't anything out of the ordinary like people are blowing this out of proportion and there is absolutely zero proof according to many pathologists that there was no and there is absolutely zero proof according to many pathologists that there was no ongoing sexual assault of this child good that's one good thing out of the story and also too she was not beheaded so like yeah i'm trying to find the really small silver linings here i mean she still didn't make it but i'm glad she wasn't like really horribly tortured beforehand maybe yeah well the the death was pretty violent but we'll get to that okay so in 2008 um patsy and john were uh officially cleared of any involvement in the murder but

basically uh the reason i just want to add that the reason people thought that patsy was the number one um suspect like when they they were like well what's the motive well apparently um jean benet had been having really bad bedwetting incidents um almost every almost daily it was becoming like an almost daily issue and so a lot of people said well you know patsy was like really upset about it really worried frustrated like maybe this happened and she just like flipped out and hit her and didn't mean to like kill her but like hit her in the head and then had to cover it up i see and that was that's like one of the main running theories is that she snapped or she flipped out uh hit her with some object and like knocked her out and then

had to like cover the rest of it up as like a i see and wrote a ransom note the whole thing um so that's kind of why they think she could have done it um so they were cleared of any involvement publicly um and some people think now as you mentioned earlier one of the other big theories is that it was jean-benet's brother burke okay now burke was known to have had a bit of a temper that he often took out on his sister. He had actually hit Jean Benet a year before death. And again, in August 1994, when he hit her in the face with a golf club. Fuck. And left like a scar.

So he hit her hard and left like marks. It wasn't like, oh, roughhousing. It was like he has hit his little you know four or five year old sister yeah very brutally in the head so not a good sign um and according to uh the ramsey's housekeeper linda in steve thomas's book jean benet inside the ramsey murder investigation she quote recalled once finding fecal matter the size of a grapefruit on the sheets in jean benet's room as well as feces on one of her gifts um and like that again like with the bed wedding is a sign according to

you know the experts on the documentary of like anxiety stress like a stressor um you know something something's wrong obviously uh it's not normal and so that you know one of the theories is maybe he was like abusing her or physically or otherwise um and another theory proposes that uh potentially burke was up eating the pineapple and milk uh and jean benet came down and took one out of the bowl with her fingers which is perhaps why there were no fingerprints on it and she had eaten it so somehow she had ingested it so the theory is he was downstairs eating it she took one like maybe teasingly or whatever he got pissed off uh took the nearest object and whacked her across the head much harder than he had planned shit the parents wake up or he wakes the parents up and says like uh-oh or you know whatever and maybe the only way to keep one of their children is to cover it up and um in burke's

interviews they're a little bit off like sometimes he goes into fetal position and he repeats a lot of the same phrases that his mom used uh that were kind of like grown-up phrases that didn't seem to fit like like he said like not that i'm aware of a lot and he was like nine you know phrases where you're like like hence like where you're like right um his tone is off he he asks uh he's asked if he's afraid and he says he's not afraid and uh it's a little odd a psychologist thought it was odd because his sister has just been murdered and you'd think like if there was a maniac on the loose like they could be coming for you you know like yeah as a normal child thought but obviously you know children react to things differently so the question is like how would he have hit her with such force thus killing her but uh in the

netflix movie casting jean-benet they did have a bunch of nine-year-olds uh hit a watermelon and okay it really what were we gonna have them do okay yeah yeah just a watermelon but it's it's really not that hard and um children's skulls are very thin compared to grown-up skulls and sent like fragile i like and like at her age like you barely have your kneecaps developed yes exactly she's got soft bones he was nine but he's also hit her in the face with a golf club so it's not like this is out of character practice yeah yeah so it was only on august 13th 97 that the autopsy results were released to the public um and the cause of death was deemed by the coroner initially it was deemed as asphyxiation due to the rope but uh now a new pathologist had looked at the autopsy results and

said because of the shape of the fracture he believes uh that the blow to her head was actually the cause of death so potentially the strangulation thing was done afterward oh now the counter argument to this is that with the strangulation you can almost see what people argue is fingernail marks of her trying to get the rope off of her own neck oh no okay but there's also no conclusive proof that that's what the marks are so if it is defensive marks then obviously that's what occurred first. But there's no proof that that's what the markings are. So basically, he believes that... Sorry, it was... Oh, so he said the shape of the fracture, it looks like it was done by a hard object.

And it was only when he was looking through crime scene photos and saw uh a flashlight a large flashlight sitting on the kitchen table that he realized that was most likely what could or potentially what could have been the weapon that killed her um and so there wasn't blood or hair on the flashlight but dr spitz who was the pathologist uh explained that a blow to the head with an object like that could break the skull but not the skin like that's a potential okay which i had no idea and therefore wouldn't have like broken skin and gotten blood on it how would you know sure yeah yeah and so he believes that due to jean benet's age and having like what he called an eggshell skull of a six-year-old uh anyone could have caused the impact the parents kept saying it must have been a man but he's like nope a child could have smashed

her head like she was small and little and had you know yeah thin skull and um so the flashlight interestingly enough was never claimed by the family or police so even though it's in the photos like nobody really knows what it's doing there. Interesting. And it was right next to the pineapple. So it's like, she could have grabbed the, she could have taken his pineapple,

like teased him and, you know, he could have grabbed the flashlight, swung it at her. Yeah. She falls to the ground and he goes, Oh, you know,

I don't, I didn't mean to do this. And it feels like a little kid thing to like, try to hide the, the, the baby or the kid with like just throwing a blanket on top and being like object permanence. Like if I can't see it, then maybe it's not there. Well, and you know, like they say when bodies are covered up, a lot of times it's like a

remorse thing. They don't want to see it. And so, I mean, my thought is that this is, I'm getting now into my thoughts, but basically if, if Burke did did it i believe that the parents were the ones that carried her downstairs i don't think he could have like carried her downstairs and done the whole rot and everything i think they were probably just trying to cover up stage the scene basically add like add like the garage with her own paint brush cover her up with a blanket um yeah i i don't know but i to me i'm thinking

what about the stun gun to the face i can't imagine like as as upset as you are that your child is now not here if you had to stage her murder for your other kid i still could not put a stun gun to my kid's face the stun gun is the thing that gets thrown in and you're like okay that part doesn't fit yeah do you know what i mean it's like every solution suddenly has all these like problems does it have to be a stun gun or could it be something else they did testing on pigs which is really sad um and they determined like that it's pretty much exactly the spacing and size of a stun gun. Okay. So, okay.

Anyway, he believed that they added the strangulation as an accessory to the murder to create a mystery as to like to complicate. Yeah. Because like why would you tie this whole thing on the neck? Yeah. Yeah. And maybe make it look like somebody had strangled her. Jean Benet's hands were also tied up, but they were done in a slipknot, which means, like, she could have broken free. So it's just odd.

Like, it could have happened after death because they wouldn't have stayed tied if she were alive. I can't imagine trying to stage the body of one of, but like having to like, not even just stage it, but like be like aggressive and violent with that body to make it look real, like tightening something on the neck and all that. That's what freaks me out. That's what freaks me out for sure. Yeah. And I mean, maybe that was Burke too. Who knows? Maybe he got violent.

I mean, I'm not saying it was because there's literally no way to know that right now. But I just don't know who did that. So CBS ran this documentary. And I remember when this came out. It was called The Case of JonBenet Ramsey in 2016. And it was like this intense, basically like allegations against Burke. And it was basically the whole, whole thing was like Burke did it. And I remember watching this in 2016 in my glendale apartment and going of course like burke for sure did it there's no fucking doubt in my mind and then

you kind of watch other documentaries and you're like okay it was so extremely one-sided like they found like the experts who were gonna agree with with that and the other. And he actually sued for $750 million for defamation after that came out. Whoa. So like they kind of did a... Did they have to pay him? I'm not sure if he won. I'm not sure. And I don't know, maybe it could still be ongoing.

Wow. But he did go on Dr. Phil after that to try and... Clear his own name. Fuck, I love Dr. Phil after that to try and clear his own name. Fuck, I love Dr. Phil. I know. Dr. Phil gets every fucking murderer or suspect, I guess, on his show. I really am just like an old Trailer Park grandpa. Like there's nothing I love more than watching Jerry Springer, Maury, Dr. Phil, Steve Wilkos.

I mean, just like the trashiest of trash i love it it's like my childhood just like sick from school watching maury like are you the father who knows the answer is fucking no i know it i'm telling you but i want to watch it happen anyway oh my god my mom would vacuum and i'd be like can you turn it down i'm about to find out if he's the father and i was like especially when they only turn the vacuum on right when he says like bill like he like says the name he's like you and then oh god my i'm like sweating already i'm only saying that because that exact thing happened so many times where i'd be like no i can't even truly it would piss me off when i was like you vacuum and i'm like that's not the point anyway um so he went on Dr. Phil and he got a lot of heat because he I guess was smiling

throughout the whole interview but also like and then Dr. Phil later asked viewers to remember that like Burke well this is kind of rude but he's like he's socially awkward uh he was hidden from the world after the death of his sister he was put on blast like on you know as a child and spent his whole childhood under this shadow and like in this limelight of like my parents potentially murdered someone or they think i murdered someone and either way like you're gonna grow up to be kind of not right in the head yeah oh yeah i mean like and he i just think like if i like if you're nine and like everyone thinks you're a murderer yeah and if you are okay well that you already are a little unstable yeah something right you're living with that first of all yeah or you are not a

murderer and the world thinks you are and you're nine and people think if it's not you it is your mommy and daddy and that's like your identity now you know yeah so like you're like you're not gonna end up being totally 100 like yeah i mean i don't blame like listen i'm socially i couldn't be on dr phil i'm fucking socially awkward so i can't imagine if like i'm there to defend the fact that i didn't murder my sister you know what i mean so like and so anyway he went to purdue he got a degree in computer science i think and like his name changed i would have fucking done that i don't think he changed his name but i do believe that he's like really off the radar like he lives pretty off the radar

understandably okay um but no i don't believe he changed his name. So anyway, the case remains unsolved. People are still trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Patsy has since died. She died in 2006 at the age of 49 of ovarian cancer. And John remarried and now lives with his wife, Jan, in Michigan. Like I said, Burke attended Purdue and graduated in 09, but keeps to himself for the most part. There's tons of books tons of documentaries i watched casting jean benet for the first time this week and it's very good but i would recommend you watch that after you watch like the other ones that go into depth about the case because casting jean benet is more of like a artsy look at it in the lens of other people

like it doesn't tell you much about the case but i would say my favorites um my all-time favorite series it's a three-part series um called jean benet an american murder mystery and uh that is on oh god i think i had to buy that on amazon prime uh but the i like casting jean benet on netflix and then the killing of jean benet her father speaks was on Hulu but now it's also on Amazon

you have to pay for it so that's annoying but those are my favorites and Wowza I mean oh

in my opinion basically which again I don't like to kind of make speculations on something like this because it's just wildly like

hurtful if it's wrong you know but sure my my my my thought is that burke got angry hit her with the flashlight parents wake up panic they're like we need to stage this and protect our son we just got to do it and that's why the mom and dad like just stuck to their stories um i think she wrote the note i think they couldn't think up think up a number besides 118 000 because 180 000 because that's just what was on their mind he had just gotten that money yeah i don't know um and i think uh you know then they shielded him

from shielded burke from press or whatever and i don't the thing that trips me up is the taser and um the the garotte because i'm like one of them would have had to do that and i'm not saying that burke is like a fucking sociopath right murderer i'm saying like it could have been an accident my thought is it was an accident within the house and they were covering it up but that's just that's the most common theory anyway um but that's kind of where i stand so i have no idea where i stand it's so fucking convoluted no fucking clue but i think you did a good job of at least like covering like every angle of it so like anyone can have an opinion but like i think the parents are involved somehow i just don't know if they were instantly guilty or if they got forced into having to do this yeah i think somebody knew i think they know more than they

let on i think yeah at the very least i think that for sure yeah um yeah wow holy fuck wow merry christmas you know what merry christmas that was uh quite a doozy I hope everyone is being safe this holiday if you don't have to travel I really really hope you don't have to travel and everyone just stays safe and where they are and Zoom is you know

kicking you don't have to wear your pants as Em can prove it I'm just saying like the only upside in that like I had to go to a funeral is that like pants were optional pants yeah and i also want to add to um it's i think it's gonna be really tough on a lot of people um because you're a lot of people are going to be alone for the holidays and aren't able to see family or have had family pass or are just isolated and it's hard to be isolated all year anyway and now with the holidays it makes

it extra hard so i just want to like give a little like hug to everybody who's dealing with you know feelings of loneliness or isolation especially during the what's supposed to be a holly jolly season so yeah um we're here for you and uh we're just gonna keep releasing episodes so pretend we're just you know gabbing away with you. Yeah. Yeah. Gabbing away. That's us. Obviously. I mean, at you.

At you mostly. Yeah. I hope. I like how it's like, I hope you don't feel lonely. So we'll talk at you and you can't contribute. Yeah. And you have to sit there and like suffer through it. Which is sort of like a holiday with your family.

So I mean. Yeah. Just pretend that we're your like really terrible family. But not like the racist terrible. I'm drunk uncle but like nice drunk uncle um i'm the one who's just asleep in the barcalondra before people even get there so no pants on either of us neither of us have pants that's i'm just the one that makes everyone like feel uncomfortable when they bring their like new partners over and they're trying to impress i'm the one that like you're like don't eat please don't even talk to them i don't even want you to get into that so and i'm like hey do you know

about jean-benet ramsey and they're like oh dear and then they're like oh my god yes i absolutely have opinions on that all right well christmas time is here oh i know i meant to do it at the beginning but i'll do it for our actual holiday episode next week. Okay. Since I forgot this time around, I apologize. But we'll be here on the 27th. Well, thank you guys, and hopefully you're doing hot. Doing hot. I don't know. And that's why we drink.ご視聴ありがとうございました