And That's Why We Drink - E207 The Return of the Plunger Fort and the Paranormal Gossip Mill

Episode Date: January 24, 2021

Welcome to episode 207 where we celebrate our podcast conception and the birth of Em's paranormal tabloid! Em takes us on a salacious journey through the paranormal history of the Cheltenham Ghost. Then Christine covers a cold blooded case with some wild twists and turns in the murder of Betsy Faria. Also, please join us in dismantling the patriarchy one burp at a time... and that's why we drink! Please consider supporting the companies that support us! Go to Literati.com/DRINK for 25% OFF your first 2 orders and pick your kids book club today! Simply visit athleticgreens.com/DRINK and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today! Go to thirdlove.com/DRINK now to find your perfect-fitting bra… and get 20% off your first purchase!Check out all the amazing shoes, bags and masks available right now at Rothys.com/DRINK!Get started today at StitchFix.com/DRINK and you’ll get 25% off when you keep everything in your Fix!Go to FelixGrayGlasses.com/DRINK to shop glasses that work as hard as you do!

hello and welcome to and that's why we drink the podcast with em and christine your badass ghost hunters that's em that's me i have no pants on today tell me them who i am oh and that's christine she has pants on today i think how do who I am. Oh, and that's Christine. She has pants on today. I think. How do you know? I think I cannot be sure. Oh, speaking of no pants, I have things to say about that real quick. I'm sure you do. Um, one of our friends, Lizzie, I never got to, I didn't show you cause I wanted to show you on camera. He sent me a Christmas gift and it's from, uh, it has to do with the episode. I think it was like 191 where you gave me my own like Mexican wrestling name. Yes, yes, of course. So I now own a hat that says El Burrito Sin Pantalones, which is the pantsless burrito.

Holy crap. And it makes me so happy. Wait, that's so cute. Is that not the nicest? Sin Pantalones. People love that. That is beautiful. What was the red the red-headed devil or something that checks out anyway I wanted I you just I well I mentioned I'm not

wearing pants and in the spirit of that I wanted to let you know my hat also lets everyone know I'm not wearing pants so oh I love it I um for once am wearing pants because once the camera is on me, I feel like maybe I owe that much to the people who are watching. Not me. Not you. No, I would never on your behalf. But anyway, Em, what are you drinking today and why? That's a great question. What I was not prepared to answer. I am drinking water out of my, again, my Regina pizzeria cup because i'm trying to stay hydrated lovely um why do i drink well hmm a few things now that you've opened the floodgates um first of all i drank because i apologize in advance that my audio is very echoey next week it will not be like that because i am ordering a nice little soundproof situation for myself now well i'm sending you a plunger though i thought we're gonna put a plunger

for maybe i'll get like an honorary plunger and just have it next to me that'll be my decor yes i love that um the other reason i drink is because my adhd meds are not working like oh shit yeah i'm super bummed and like it's gotten to a point where the my psychiatrist has been like we've kind of hit the max dosage. Oh no. So like now I'm probably gonna have to start back at square one or maybe it hasn't kicked in right away. And he's like you can do it for another two weeks or so and we'll see if things change.

But if not then I don't know enough about psychiatry. But they were saying something about I'm gonna have to add a salt to it which apparently makes it like more problematic because it's like more addictive or something salt or like salt like apparently it's called a salt oh i thought you were saying like a salt with a deadly weapon they're going to assault me with some salt apparently okay i don't know why i can't just get some fucking adderall like i don't know why i gotta be trying all this fucking adderall like i don't know why i got to be trying all this stuff i was never prepared for so like i'm i'm hoping that i can just ask him like why didn't you just start me on like the most common thing but because it's controlled

medication they're gonna give you a hard time about it because people abuse it listen it's the same with the klonopin you get a really hard time anytime you go to a new psychiatrist. If anything, though, for the last 28 years, like I've been my own issue. Like I would rather just try one, like try an issue that like could become a non-issue and that like it'll help me for myself. You know what I mean? Well, hopefully that's what happens because when I had a psychiatrist who was like, I know you and I trust you and I don't think you're abusing this. But then when I moved and got a new psychiatrist, they were like, well, how am I supposed to know that you're not abusing this medication? And it's

like, you have to start all over the process of like convincing them that you're not gonna, you know, yeah. Anyway, that's probably why I why I drink in a bad way. But I do drink in a good way in that Allison is home after six. Yay. There's that. Why do you drink? And what do you drink? there's that why do you drink and what do you drink guess what i'm drinking a london fog i know blaze is like i'm running to the coffee shop down the street to grab like uh coffee beans uh do you want anything and i was like i want a london fog because em and i are recording today and they had one and it's really good em and they sweetened it without asking it's very good if you work at starbucks you know well not like every starbucks employee across you know about me and me specifically but i have complained a lot openly that starbucks who like is supposed to know the recipe half the time it's never right

because it's just apparently it's like a rare thing to ask for or it's not asked enough yeah weird and they always forget to sweeten it and i always complain specifically to you about that so i'm glad that they sweetened it for you yeah automatically and it's really good so i'm trying to come up with new ways for you to visit me um and oh here comes moon oh my god knocking all of my shit over okay here is two ways to lure me in a little kitty cat and my favorite tea exactly i'm trying my best here. Come here, man. Say hello. He's what people call a void cat because he's all black.

So it's really hard to see in like photos, his face. So he's keeping you sheltered. He's saving your eyes from the beauty that he is. The cuteness. Oh, I have a reason why I drink, which is really weirdly related to, I'm talking really fast. I think I had too much caffeine today, but it's really weirdly related to what you said, which is that I realized yet. I mean, I don't want to like rain on your parade at all. And I'm sorry if I do, but I realized yesterday. As Lady Gaga says, rain on me. All right. Yeah.

Whatever it takes. Did you know, actually, that is an original M. Schultz quote that was stolen by gaga you know the gags she loves to do that to me she likes to borrow your favorite saying and i let her i let her you know she actually has a new album coming out called noodles all the way to the top and i heard about that i texted her i was like miss gags what are you doing come on don't don't be don't be foolish like you don't. Like, you don't know. Sometimes Bear tells me, oh, you know, Bear, my dad, sometimes Bear tells me that he listens to the intro of these episodes. And I'm like, oh, God, oh, God, what did I say? I don't remember. Can someone make it? Can someone make an album, by the way, or like an album artwork of Bear and the Gags? Like, he doesn't know who the hell Lady Gaga is, promise you. But so sometimes he says

that. And I'm like, Oh, God, what did I say? And then he has this really disappointed look on his face. And I'm like, maybe I should start thinking better about what I start the episodes with. And here I am. I'm not doing that. So sorry. My father would look the same way if he even tried to listen. So you're I don't know if you're luckier. I'm really lucky he doesn't listen. Actually, that's how I usually feel. And then he's's like i tried listening to another episode it like pains him physically you know what terrifies me a bumble girl who i've been becoming friends with right i'm always scared when i meet someone on bumble and they don't know who i am which is what i want i want like a clean slate like i want like you

don't know me but i they'll creep on me because that's what you do when you like meet someone online you learn about them and they're like oh yeah haha I've listened to a few of your episodes to like get to know your vibe and I was like let me guess you're breaking up with me yeah that's the worst it's like you have to find a line of like somebody knows you well enough to be like oh I understand appreciate you but like the other line of not knowing you at all because then they're gonna be scared I've made a few friends where they have said so I know know that like, you're known for this thing, but I hope you don't mind, but I'm not going to listen because I want to get to know you. Like, wow. Like between you and me. And I was like, that's the nicest thing you could do. Like,

yeah. So like, please God, don't make an opinion of me. Don't judge me. Yeah. It's terrible. Yeah. I mean, sometimes I wonder that because i'm like and if you listen to bsu sandy too i'm like talking about my here it is my dilbert m&m machine all the time and i'm like if a new friend is like listening to the podcast and just hears me bragging about my dilbert m&m machine they're gonna be like this person's unstable yes i'm very proud of this that's a word you you did not use the first time you mentioned that. Showing you my true colors, future BFFs. Well, um, anyway, can I tell you why I drink? Sorry. I got sidetracked. Oh my God. You didn't even say it. Sorry. It's a caffeine. Okay. The reason I

drink because you said Lady Gaga, something or other rain on me, my parade, whatever. So what I'm saying is that I found out yesterday, I realized that the Lexapro is working. And I don't think I've ever had like an experience where it's just like- What does that mean? You found out it's working. So I was prescribed it because I was on Wellbutrin and it like, it's an antidepressant, but it like also is known to increase anxiety. And everybody knows I'm like a very anxious person. So I never really put that together. And I was like, well, I'd rather be anxious than depressed. And so I just kept taking it. And then my new psychiatrist was like, oh, well, they actually work really well together. And I was like, okay. So I started taking the Lexapro being like,

I don't know what this is going to do, if anything. And all of a sudden, so I realized it hit me because yesterday I had this like little interview on a podcast um a true crime show that I'll let you guys know when it comes out but I was like setting up for it and usually I get like just terrible stomach pains and like I get so nervous to get on a zoom call or a phone call and poor em is always like we're literally talking to like our manager calm down like we're calling eva we're calling eva literally can you relax i'm terrified and i'm like i have to change this is embarrassing i have to change shirts because i'm like sweating i have to like use the bathroom 10 times like it's really bad and yesterday i was sitting here and i was like

preparing and the guy was running late and i just sat there and all of a sudden the thing started ringing and i was like wait a second i didn even like, I wasn't like freaking out. I wasn't having to do breathing exercises. I was like a little nervous, but I was like, oh, this is what a normal person feels as far as like, oh God, I'm a little nervous for this, but not like my whole body is shutting down because I don't want to hop on the phone in a perfectly busy phone call. And I was just like, I think that must be what it's like. So I'm just very thankful. And a lot of people have written in saying Lexapro really did wonders

for them too. So thank the Lord. How long did you have to be on it before? It's been like five weeks, I think. Okay. And so I finally was like, wait a second. So I don't know how long it's been like adjusting, but yesterday was the first time I had like something that would have absolutely made me like piss my pants. And I was like, oh, that's weird. I'm just a little nervous, but that's it. And so anyway, I'm very thankful for it. And it's really changed. And I didn't have to take in Klonopin or propranolol.

I was like, holy crap. So anyway, cheers. Wow. Good for you. I didn't want to like, again, rain on you like Gaga says, but I was just very thankful that for once I was able to diminish my anxiety for once ever. Wow. Well, okay. Well, good for you. I'm very, I'm very happy for you. Thank you. And a lot of people have written in saying like, Hey, I started, I went and sought help for my ADHD, or I started antidepressants because you guys talked about it.

And that just makes my, makes me so happy that people are um you know opening up about that um a lot of people have through tea time tuesday because i see everyone's gossip whether or not i post it and a lot of people have been saying that this is like their year to go figure out their mental health situations so very excited for me it's the year of sandwiches for you it's the year of mental health whatever it's a wide range but listen new year new president new meds it's all today's garbage day as eva said earlier it's garbage happy trash day uh no today literally like a couple hours ago we got a new president also and also by the way i know a lot of people were like did anybody even did they not even know we were recording last week and we got off the recording and eva said hey maybe you should look at your phones and it was like capital has been breached and people are

mobbing the interior and we were like this has happened in the last two hours while we were recording like the simpsons blah blah blah and then we get off and it's like hey the whole world has gone to shit so we didn't ignore it we just didn't know it was happening it was i mean we really could not have picked a less convenient time it was so wild like as we were as i was talking about the simpsons i was getting like a flood of texts from people being like check the news your mom was calling you yeah i was like i'm recording like whatever tragedy has befallen the nation i will check later and then and then i found out it really was a tragedy that had befallen the nation isn't there

a weird thing that like the sim didn't the simpsons also predict that so they i'm pretty sure that was a photoshop situation oh okay because that would have been really weird before i like started looking into that i believed it because i was like so on simpsons stuff right um but when we found out about the capital people were starting to tag me in this thing that basically said that like oh they also predicted that this would happen as i'm telling the story simpsons predictions that another thing that that they could have predicted happened and so that was really weird but now i'm seeing that that was like fake and they were trying to free people out so i'm not sure well anyway anyway thank you for drinking uh london fog in celebration it makes me miss you like more than i thought i was just drinking and i was like i only ever have these with m and so now i'm just

like really sad i guess i need to go take more have you iced it because that's gonna really fucking rock your socks no but it's like 25 degrees here today so okay i'm going to but i wanted to make sure they sweeten it properly first and crank the heat and then pour that puppy over some ice cubes it's gonna change your world okay next wednesday when the next government building is being swarmed i'll try that yes okay perfect uh no and especially thank you because postmates and starbucks are now no longer working together, which means- I had no idea until you posted that. So I can't even get them anymore because they made a deal with Uber Eats, but Uber Eats'

menu is super limited. So London Fogs aren't even available. So if I want one, I have to make one and it is, talk about a tragedy that's befallen the nation. Oh my God. I heard that actually on simpsons season four it was somebody london fogs this is not the year canceled it's the year for everything else but not by london fogs okay anyway yikes sorry everybody welcome to that's why we drink where i don't wear pants and christine drinks my favorite drink from across the country um but it's sweating a little less so and that's what a london fog is for baby there's that the l foggy all the way yikes so this is episode 207 also this is our very first episode of we're

celebrating four years today how did we forget to mention this right my dude four freaking years four years ago yesterday m posted on instagram that they asked me if i want to do podcasts and i said i don't think so thanks though and then blaze said you're really depressed you need a new hobby and i said fine i guess and it worked and look how beautiful it turned out we're such we're we're our own worst enemy or it's like why do you celebrate today oh yeah i guess also today's our four-year anniversary but But technically, February is the anniversary. Yeah, this is like the conception anniversary. We are pregnant with the podcast.

We're expecting. We're expecting. Anyway, someone take that clip and really destroy the gossip tabloids. Oh, yikes. The podcast tabloids. You know them. You know. You've heard.

It's just me and tweeting. Also, wait a minute. If someone hasn't created a National Enquirer about just podcast stars yet, that's what this year is about for me. TM, TM, TM, TM. Okay. No one else. That's us. You've never heard about it. The very first story, hot off the press, we are expecting.

Four years later. But it's okay. Oh, also sorry. I know we have to start the episode but this is also the first episode ever not under the trump administration because we started in 2017 and trump had been nominated well this probably aligns with my depression it's making a lot of sense now but we started in 2017 and so we have never done an episode under any other administration besides trump i know and looks like they're having i don't know what an aneurysm are you kidding i never knew that i never put that

together whoa wow so something good came out of trump's administration no we'll see how this goes i mean i hope we can do it i'm a little nervous joe biden might be our uh might be the the end of it all for us I suppose help Joseph get it to girl get together okay um wow so we're expecting and Trump isn't a part of it which is nice Trump's been does not have custody any longer I love that oh my god that's so special it is special it's trash day it's our conception day is like your fucking trash uh okay yikes welcome to 207 apparently 200 plus episodes later we're finally out of the woods with trump yikes um and i'm going to cover a story that has a lot of names to it it is best known as the cheltenham chel fuck chel cheltenham chel does have a lot of names you've already said four different ones it's english so it's got that fancy looking name how do you spell it cheltenham oh yeah cheltenham is what i would say if i were being ignorant which i am welcome

um and it's called the cheltenham ghost because it is from cheltenham which is in gloucestershire so i mean like aka gloucestershire so like excuse me england with your gloucestershire who knows you know it you know it well. So the Cheltenham ghost, it's also known as the Pitville ghost. It's known as the Morton ghost and it's known as the D'Nor's poltergeist. Oh my. A lot of names. They all have to do with basically like one of the basic facts of the story, mainly the location. So the reason it's called the morton ghost sometimes is because up until 1948 the identities of the family were concealed until and that was the plan until everyone had passed away and then they would announce the actual names of the family members involved so their

code name or their fake family name everyone knew them by was the mortons so that's why they were called the morton ghost got it so that's one explanation and i'll get through why they're why it's named off the other basically the other names have to do with the location denor is the name of the actual house you know how like fancy houses have their own names oh yeah like mine the dilbert the dilbert m&m machine casa yikes i we've never come up we will ever since we watched charmed i told allison that this apartment is called the manor which i really that's good i really love that because they would always be like oh my god there's another demon meet me back at the manor and i was like i love

that the manor okay and so i don't use it as often as i should but maybe that should be my resolution for 2021. Where anytime Allison's like, where are you? I'll be like the manor, but also we're in a pandemic. You fucking knew that. So nice try, witch. Stop asking me about the manor. Wait a minute. It's all coming together. Okay. Anyway, so the house's name is Denor. So that's how Denor's Poltergeist comes out. It's also called the Pitville Ghost because it was on Pitville Circus Road. Didn't call it the Circus Ghost. Yeah, it would have been more fun, but whatever. And then Cheltenham is because that's the part of Gloucestershire it's in.

So it's all the basic facts. So this has to do with the Despard family. D-E-S-P-A-R-D. So I think Despard. Despard despard desperate i don't know the patriarch of this family is uh frederick despard um he's from ireland he's in his 50s he's an army vet and he is well traveled as you can tell by his children's birth certificates they were all born between 1858 and 1876 and almost all of them are born in like totally different places. I know one of them was actually born in, a few of them were born in Cheltenham.

One was born like Tanzania. One was born in- Oh my God. I mean- All over. The Channel Islands. Yeah. So just a fun fact for you.

In 1858, the same year that his firstborn showed up i suppose frederick's wife his her name was rosina meredith despard and she died from an unknown cause but it was likely from childbirth from their oldest kid um who was their daughter named frida i guess after fred and then so after his wife died in the same year he remarried to a woman named harriet and nixon great so then they have children fred and harriet the first one's name is rosina i guess after the first wife which is kind of odd interesting and then they have another daughter named edith they have two more daughters lillian and mabel and then they have a son Henry and then another son Wilfred oh I love all these old timey names Mabel that's kind of it's fun I know I love grandma names like Edith that's just so much fun yeah you don't oh I love it I was trying to think of like what's the most

grandma name I could think of and I kind of failed myself because I was like i couldn't think of anything on the spot ethel agnes eloise you're coming up with some wild ones i'm trying to think of the most bananas old one fun fact when allison lived in geraldine sorry geraldine when uh allison lived in tanzania they would call her alice because i guess like that name. That was also the name of my imaginary friend who was an old lady ghost, apparently. So story for another day. I don't even want to. I do. You told me that.

What? I said I had an imaginary friend. Her name was Alice. And I started describing her. And I was like, it's really weird because our family friend Alice had just died. And you were like, well, what did Alice look like? And I was like, well, she had long gray hair. And you were like, Christine. And I was like, I don't remember the conversation, but I agree with myself. I'm pretty sure it was the week we

met. Like we had, we had literally not even started the podcast yet. We hadn't even conceived yet. And you were like, Christine, I hate to tell you this. And I was like, no way. And you were like, Christine, listen to what you're saying. this is an old lady following you around so i can't believe i wanted to conceive with you after that that's the greatest part listen you knew what you were getting into okay i was like that's the one um but anyway so they all have old people names i do like the name henry a lot i love that name too so in 1882 this is where the beginning of like the real nuts and bolts of the story are so the family moves onto pitville circus road and they move into the denor house apparently the house had live-in

servants a coachman a gardener so i would say they were pretty well to do i would think family at this point rosina the daughter is 19 She's more or less the main character. I had a hard time understanding if she was the main character or if it was kind of her and a gaggle of her siblings that were a part of the story. But she is the one that gets mentioned the most. So I'd say she has a little more star power. So she's 19. And the whole story really starts where one night in her room, she hears someone at the door and she thinks it's her mom. And she opens the door to see what her mom wants now i'm going to tell you a quote that's kind of long but what's fun about it is any quotes that i give you in these notes are all from actual

reports from the spr from the society of psychical research cool so here is the first quote this is what ruzina says happened once she opened the door to expect her mom there i saw no one but ongoing a few steps along the passage i saw the figure of a tall lady dressed in black standing at the head of the stairs after a few moments she descended the stairs and i followed for a short distance feeling curious of what it could be i had only a small piece of candle and it suddenly burnt itself out and being unable to see more i went back to my room which i imagine is like from a horror movie like oh no the candle's burnt out now the whole place is pitch black yikes yeah no thanks the figure was that of a tall lady dressed in black of a soft woolen material judging from the slight sound in moving and the

face was hidden in a handkerchief held up in the right hand this is all i noticed but on further occasions when i was able to observe her more closely i saw the upper part of the left side of her forehead and a little of the hair above so just right at the forehead. Okay. And Allison is walking in while I record. You like glanced above the laptop. I thought it was the end of you. She just barged in here. Like she owns the damn place. Okay.

She's like, this is my manor. Okay. I'm the stinky witch of this manor. Thank you. Yeah. I know exactly what she had to say. And it was those words verbatim. Where were we? Oh, yeah. You could see her hairline, basically. The face was hidden in

a handkerchief held in the right hand. This is all I noticed. But on further occasions, I saw the left side of her forehead. Her left hand was nearly hidden by her sleeve and a fold of her dress. As she held it down, a portion of a widow's cuff was visible on both wrists so that the whole impression was that of a lady in widow's weeds which i will get into widow's weeds in a second okay okay so that was her experience her first experience so the figure was also said to have worn a bonnet with either a really long veil or a hood and she basically looked like a woman in mourning okay um and rosina only told this to her servant miss campbell but her sister frida also ended up seeing a woman in black later

frida saw a figure crossing the hallway and frida thought that it was a visiting nun oh sure that happens sometimes you know just my nun that walks around the manor through just goes through walls and up and down in the floor also one of the maids saw a figure and thought it was an intruder uh the youngest son wilfred and his friend were on the terrace when they saw a woman in the drawing room which hysterical which we have those now and the two boys they saw a woman in distress in the drawing room sobbing when they went into the drawing room to check on this woman and ask who she was, apparently the room was empty and the maid said that nobody had been there. So then in 1884, two years later,

this is kind of like the real peak of their paranormal experience, all the siblings. So Rosina is having a lot of paranormal experiences with this woman she once even saw the ghost standing silently in the drawing room for 30 minutes straight which like did you time that did you take your eyes off of her did you walk and see her and a half an hour later see her again i don't know if was she just doing this for 30 minutes i hope so on minute 31 you were like this is too much i lost the staring contest um so the sister edith also said that this woman would pass her on the staircase ew okay that's creepy because you're like in a confined space like you have nowhere to go a confined space where if you need to escape you are falling down yeah right you're you're gonna break a leg yeah there's no getting

out of the way it's uh taking the rule yeah the only way out is through um so edith said this is a quote from edith i saw it cross the hall push open the drawing room door and go in by herself also like it i didn't like that either yeah so the most common thread about all of these sightings amongst the siblings is that they see a woman's face uh she's always dressed in black and she's always hiding her face and a handkerchief held in her right hand nobody ever sees her face she's also always dressed in widow's weeds so this is where i get into a very unnecessarily long fun fact. As long as it's fun. It's fun.

It's just there's a lot to it. So this is where we do a deep dive, if you will. Sure. So widow's weeds. This is old English for the word robe. Weeds is old English for rope. And so it was widow's weeds was basically like the term at the time, like the Victorian era term for like your mourning grieving attire. Sure.

Here we go. Fun fact. Widow's Weeds are most associated with Queen Victoria because she was known as the ultimate mourner. What could that mean? Christine asks to herself as well as the audience. So after Prince Albert died the this is 1861 after prince albert died queen victoria was so distraught that she only ever wore black for the rest of her life and basically she was the reason that like mourning and funerals all started this

like really black dull attire she basically like revamped in a way the funeral industry in terms of like clothing and accessories revamped it it's like even i loved funeral chic you know that was our our style in new orleans she is the original fashionista she is the tyra banks of funeral she oh wow what an icon queen vict. She really had it in her. And so because she wore black for the rest of her life, everybody else started assuming that once you are in mourning, you wear black. All you do is wear black. You accessorize with black.

We're both wearing black right now, by the way. We are in mourning of. Always. I'm not sure. Of garbage day. We're not in mourning of that. Just kidding. No, we're in

celebration that's why you've got a little you've got a little snap of neon on true there we're in funeral chic which is not mourning it's it's celebration no the chic is what makes it chic you know correct so because of her wearing black dress for life and kind of being the catalyst in the funeral industry's fashion world um cemeteries had an influx in certain monuments and symbolism and quote funerary accessories during queen victoria's reign traditional mourning was that a woman would wear widow's weeds for a very long time after someone they loved died sometimes longer than a year after the death. Wow. And if a widow left her house, everything she wore and everything she brought with her, including like her purse, her

earrings, her umbrella, her hat, her shoes, her buckles on her shoes, everything had to be black because that was the Queen Victoria way. Oh, my fashion icon. And so even in 1840, this is just like a fun fact within a fun fact. 20 years before this happened, there was a work woman's guide that showed you how long you were actually supposed to traditionally mourn a person. And here's a dash of patriarchy for you. And by a dash, I mean a gallon. I was like a dash. Okay. So pretend you're in 1840 okay got it it smells real bad i can promise you that well there's no deodorant yet that's for sure no native no native i don't know where my candy cane deodorant is but that would be so depressing without it uh so okay it's 1840 blaze dies right

oh okay we're talking about death here. What did you think was gonna happen? I forgot. I was really like prepping myself for just like, you take me on a ride and you are. Thank you for a ride with a steep hill. So if Blaze died, you would be expected to mourn. And by mourn, I mean, wear these widow's weeds, never go out in public without wearing,

not only black, because this was 20 years before she had kind of made that rule, but go into mourning, not see anybody else, not date anybody else, not really leave your home unless necessary. You would be mourning expectedly for two and a half years. Woof. If you died, here's the patriarchy. Blaze was only expected to mourn for three months. Oh, so rough.

So rough being a woman um so anyway excuse me i just burped um this is we're we're dismantling the patriarchy one minute at a time so that's just a fun fact within a fun fact so back to the 1860s with queen victoria just like really showing us up on the runway while mourning her husband Queen Victoria because you had to wear everything black she also started wearing she didn't want to stop wearing jewelry so she made jewelry instead of out of like diamonds or pearls or anything she only wore jewelry made out of fossilized carbon whoa okay which makes it look like black glass almost cool and so that was called apparently that combination or the fossilized carbon its nickname was jet and so fun fact that's where jet black

comes from no way yes that's crazy i have no idea funerary fashion fun fact quadruple f for you man oh i love it so jet black comes from the jewelry she used to wear when she was mourning her husband in the 1860s that's fascinating all of that basically to tell you that queen victoria is the reason that now when you see a woman in black it is especially as a ghost when you see a woman in black it's mainly the thought is that oh she's in mourning or she's grieving someone because of the fashion from then which then makes me wonder so pre-1860s if we see a woman in black as a ghost like what does that mean like did she just really dig black was she ahead of her time maybe oh or maybe she was just

um a spinster maybe but i would think fancy clothes only black i don't know i don't know well i do think it would be if i were to like pretend like i was an expert and like i was a historian in terms of ghosts if someone showed me a picture of like a woman in black i would like to look really arrogant be like so it's it's post 1860s era because obviously the funerary fashion of the time you know so if you want to sound like a super douche if anyone ever mentions a woman in black you could probably bet that it was after 1860 um so uh let's see so that was just a very long-winded downward spiral of a fun fact love it but to let you know that the main ghost that everyone is seeing in this house and the only ghost that

everyone's seeing in this house they're all describing her basically as a woman in black so if you want to be a historian you could say this is post 1860s and more and more folks are witnessing this apparition it's not just rosina anymore it's not just the siblings they're having visitors come in who are starting to notice this woman. And people are mistaking her for like a solid figure, living, breathing human being. She's like, there's no doubt about it. This is a living human walking around. And then the only reason they say otherwise later is because she disappears in the thin air. So she was starting to get really comfortable around the family i guess and this setup where she was showing herself for like 30 minutes at a time became more and more frequent so it was people

were just getting used to her just being in the room for 30 minutes at a time and then vanishing and as time went on she also began to try to speak to rosina no i don't like that she's like gathering power right oh yeah i hadn't even thought of that i was just thinking she was getting like comfy with the kids like a like a mary poppins if you will but funeral chic mary poppins um so basically she's trying to speak she never actually does successfully speak before people get super creeped out that's not what happened i think that's almost creepier that she's trying to speak and can't like okay you're not wrong listen i don't know i'm just making shit up left and right but you're right i feel like at least if she could speak we would know what she wanted right and

maybe it would be like uh it's a beautiful weather outside like maybe it's like really inane and it's like not even frightening excuse me good madam um my body is not buried in the right spot if you could just move me three feet to the left i won't bother you ever again and then be like oh well problem solved um but no so i guess she was she could not speak but she would try to um so this is another quote from rosina she came in the drawing room and walked to the sofa so i went up to her and i asked if i could help her the fact that you can approach her to me freaks me out because usually you see something from the corner of your eye, you blink and it's gone. This woman sees you beelining towards her and she's like, what about it? You know?

She's like, I can't talk, but I can stare at you. I can sure as hell look at you. And hold my ground. Yeah. Oh, so I went up to her and asked if I could help her. She moved and I thought she was going to speak, but she only gave a slight gasp and moves towards the door. I spoke to her again, but she seemed as if she was unable to speak.

So now this person is like gasping for air trying to talk to you and it's not coming out. So goose cam. So during this time, there were reports coming in from in from again visitors and the siblings that they were all hearing footsteps on the landing and they were feeling this sense of being stared at especially one of the daughters i think it was edith who would say i felt an icy cold shiver and the figure bent over me as if to turn the pages of my song book oh so that's like i was gonna make a joke about that's not really mary popins. That's more like Maria from Sound of Music, like making, helping you out with the music.

But in terms of helping you with a songbook, I don't know if I would like that you're fucking with my stuff now. Yeah. Like, I feel like if this person is just playing the piano or playing the guitar or something, and this ghost is now messing with your stuff, it's like it's trying to interact with you which i really hate yeah and it's like getting better at it which i also hate and because it's solid and now it can also touch things it's not like oh it looks solid but it only goes through things or i can't actually grab other solid things it's like oh no it's able to turn pages for you it's able to wait but did she say it did turn the page

i thought she said it looked like it was trying to or going as as if to turn the for you it's able to wait but did she say it did turn the page i thought she said it looked like it was trying to or going as as if to turn the pages of my song but hmm you're right maybe it just like acted that way and didn't actually i don't like that she had the confidence that no certainly not she needs to sit down that way yeah yeah i'd be like first of all don't touch my shit i'm clearly trying to make music happen also pretending this is a recital and you keep interrupting also don't come at me because like we i think innately should want to be away from each other like have some distance but you're getting you're approaching me okay but what if what if the song was what if she was helping like oh the song's reaching the next page so she was gonna turn it

for me you know but still i don't love it i'd be like i can turn it myself thank you it would be super eerie if she was trying to turn the page to a'd be like i can turn myself thank you it would be super eerie if she was trying to turn the page to a song that like whose title had a message in it or something like like help me i don't know what's by beethoven featuring mozart i'm buried two feet three feet to the right. Right. Starring Maria from Sound of Music and Mary Poppins. So anyway, one of the main visitors, I guess he was a childhood friend. So he would come over to the house a lot. And therefore, the spirit was getting comfortable with this guy.

Also, his name was George Gooding. And he saw a lot of ghosts. Or he didn't see a lot of ghosts. He saw the ghosts a lot of times. Sorry. uh or he didn't see a lot of ghosts he saw the ghost a lot of times sorry but he also told the spr that apparently the family dogs would act really distressed whenever he knew the ghost was about to appear oh so that was like almost sad almost his cue of like oh the animal i mean it makes sense to me though because how often do we hear stories where animals are freaking out

and then something creepy happens so he said that the dogs would always get really excitable, but the family cats didn't give a shit, which like classic. One time, one time George actually got all the kids to form a circle and hold hands around the ghost, which sounds very sciencey. But really, the goal was to just corner her, which is so stupid in my mind when like she is known to just vanish into thin air so they tried to corner her and then she just like walked through them and disappeared and then they were like ah rats like didn't work back to the drawing board i guess so he did he was on to something though because this became a regular thing in the household where the kids would try to corner the ghost that's a fun game though it was very ring around the rosy but like ring around the dead lady ghost ring around the i was trying to think of what rhymes with rosy but

nothing specifically paranormal the ghosty ring around the ghosty yeah sure stop it take me out but this became a regular thing where they were trying to trap the ghost which means they were literally trying to build traps at one point and like they tried to use cords and trip the ghost they really didn't get it through their heads so like this thing was just going to walk through whatever they built they tried to trip it that's mean but they were like trying to come up with like little like Kevin McAllister traps. Like booby traps. Booby traps to try to catch this thing and then they were it never worked. But so anyway that became a common thread. And then in August 1884 this is like two years into them having such a regular bond I would say with this ghost but it sounds like this is super frequent but rosina finally decides okay siblings we're gonna tell the parents about this ghost this whole time the parents oh what

they didn't know i thought this was like a like a family affair yeah nope apparently the parents had no idea it's just the siblings and this george guy and the animals and the visitors who thought this was a nun or something so rosina told the parents about the ghost and they surprisingly took it seriously like us i mean i'm not sure why i said surprisingly i well it is i feel like most of the time parents don't seem to especially in like the 1800s i just imagine them going like oh that's rubbish and then walking away and then like getting on a horse and never coming home or something i don't really that sounds pretty accurate sounds historical i mean you are a historian so yeah they just say no no that's not true and then they go hang out with queen victoria

but the parents would take it seriously which i guess we also would have done and they go to the landlord about it they're're like, okay, so like, what's the history of this house? This is, again, another probably unnecessary deep dive, but the landlord gives a history of the home that says it was built in 1860. Hey. Hey-o. Same time as Queen Victoria's fashion came through. Oh, I didn't even put that together. I was like, cool.

Why are you making that hand motion at me? And apparently it used to be a market square garden. Fun fact. It was called Garden Reach. And Garden Reach had orchards and large lawns and it was super populated. Eventually the property was bought by a guy named Henry. Henry Swinho was his last name. Henry was married to a woman named Elizabethizabeth in 1851 they had five kids the wife died he remarried in 1870 and this new wife's name was imogen and they would get into a

lot of fights about a lot of things they were not a happy couple specifically about how the kids were brought being brought up imogen didn't like that imogen also didn't like that when his first wife died henry didn't give her all of his wife's jewelry didn't give imogen all of his wife his now wife number wife number two was mad that she did not inherit wife number one's jewelry from oh okay that was like the big fight that they like weird but all right i mean someone's gotta wear it i guess that was imogen's thing apparently henry did still have the jewelry but he hid it under the floors he hid it under the floorboards of the drawing room oh this is so interesting okay sorry i'm just thinking like all the theories of like what she's doing there in the drawing room

anyway i like to think that if i were like a math teacher like that's the sound i would want to hear from all of my kids though like this is so interesting but then i'd be like this is how the quadratic equation works but honestly if someone ever said like oh that's so interesting i'd be like you're being a shitty I would literally be like go to the principal you little like even if you meant it it hurt me so can you go yeah you don't need to mock me okay it's like sounds very rude that really happened it took me a long time to figure out long division I think I've discussed this before on the show but I figured it out way too late in the game like by the time calculators, I have no idea how to do long division. I'll be honest with you. No, once I went on a date with a math teacher and on our first date, I was like, can you teach me long?

I wish I could learn it. Somebody teach me it's it's the care I can get to it to a certain point. And then it's like, wait, I crossing out and I carry something and I lose it. I can't, I can't remember. Well, I, I, I clearly forgot about it because then I asked this girl on the date about it. So clearly didn't stick with me. But there was a moment senior year of high school where someone taught me long division or the math teacher taught me long division on a during our break. And I went, Oh, I get it. I get it. And I definitely looked like an asshole. Like, but really, I had just figured out something I should have learned a decade ago well listen i would have been impressed i i wish you could teach i wish someone could teach me uh let me call that

person i never went on a date with again that person you ghosted and see if they want to help i'm just kidding i didn't ghost them they were just weird as shit oh okay i i made sure they knew we were not going to be going on another podcast that would be they don't and even if we do she deserves to know that that was a terrible date um it was so fucking bad um it was pokemon girl well you didn't tell me that yeah pokemon girl is a math teacher i did not know that uh by the way woof it's not meant to be an insult to pokemon pokemon just got it's just the title yeah that's just the title of

this particular date pokemon got mentioned a lot during that date and therefore i just know her as pokemon one of the first conversations em and i ever had we were at the farm and we were like so what do you want to talk about and i was like i guess i can tell you about this weird date i went on that's true i remember i remember we were sitting at the table i just got my poppy loaf i was gonna say i just bought my poppy loaf oh but yeah pokemon girl is real fucking odd um anyway i hope you're doing well uh em rolls their eyes i hope you're doing well teaching math you did teach me long division very well that was probably the best part of the entire day okay so so yeah henry and imogen henry had all of the jewelry hidden under the floorboards of the drawing room and henry also became an alcoholic some stories say that imogen also

became an alcoholic just because they were always fighting with each other apparently they were such a scandalous couple that newspapers were keeping tabs on their relationship which sounds a lot like my national choir idea for the pods tm tm tm tm tm i'll just every episode or every uh cover it'll be like emin christine fighting again and it'll just be like us like looking so scat and then it'll be the tear in between our photos explosive conversation heard by a source and that source is eva every fucking time it's always eva always fucking eva anything for a story um but so apparently the newspapers kept tabs on them in 1876 they ended up officially breaking up but they went to court a lot for very stupid things. In the divorce petition, it said that Imogen had been known for drunkenness and decent language,

which sounds just like any old friend of mine. And she allegedly also would throw furniture at him. She also accused him in front of his children and the servants of cheating on her with one of the housemaids. Oh boy. She also accused him that one of the housemaids children was his illegitimate child and oh and that she was she also ended up being seen in the court as being super violent and unstable so no one totally knew if they could believe her accusations meanwhile henry on the other side was part of a lot of slander cases for like like one time said that the milkman was abusive to like the neighbor's dog or something um he also threatened to shoot a boy because the

boy assaulted one of his servants he also went to court and was found guilty of putting a stick into a wheel of a stroller so like a baby would flip out of the stroller oh my god he was found guilty but like at the same time it's like there were just so many wild stories like this is bananas who do you even side with get a hobby geez he has one it's called sticking a stick in a stroller and watching babies flip like catapulting babies down the road it's my favorite pastime threatening to shoot little boys oh my god this man is very unstable clearly off the rails. Anyway, whatever the official reason was for their divorce, they split up. Henry ends up living on

this property for a few more months, and then he died that same year. And then when he died, the house was renamed from Garden Reach to Pitville Hall, because it was on Pitville Circus Road. And then at some point, imogen also died really shortly after he died the building was purchased again and was changed from pitville hall to being called denor and that's basically within that time because there had been so much scandal in town about the couple who lived there because they were both really unhappy and both died within the last few years of the house being purchased and because because I guess at the time, because the building's name kept changing so quickly, that was a sign of like it being held under different management or wanting a different

reputation or something. So just all those things together gave the town a really bad feeling about the house that the property was like cursed in some way or haunted. It's like Cecil Hotel trying to rename itself. Yeah, exactly. It's not gonna work. We still remember what it was called last week, dude. But uh, so basically, all of those things together had the landlord give the despard family the house for a really low price because they just wanted to be able to sell it to someone sure and they made the despard family promise to like not perpetuate any stories of the building being haunted because they didn't want anyone to like keep that reputation going but even though

the family never said anything or maybe even didn't know about it until super late there were still servants that were quitting on the spot and fleeing the house because they were seeing this woman in black just showing up out of nowhere so even though nobody was talking about it there was still something everyone was seeing and experiencing it was in the inquire the national inquirer i wrote it myself so i'm sure you did uh and then also like i mean one example was that their neighbor heard a woman crying in the orchard and they thought it was one of the siblings who was visiting the house and i guess i guess it was the oldest one frida she was visiting after her like son had just died or something

and so the neighbor thought like oh i hear frida crying in the orchard because she's grieving her son so he sent his son over to go check on Frida and he said like oh Frida looks like this like I guess they'd never seen each other and was like oh well go check on Frida she looks like this and apparently the woman that he described did not at all fit the description of Frida and Frida wasn't in the orchard that day so he now saw and heard a grieving woman that everyone else had been seeing because it fit the same description but now she's moving out to the orchard oh god she's spreading she's spreading i don't like it so what's weird is in 1885 the ghost became more transparent so instead

of being super solid she's starting to be kind of see-through which i dumbass thought you meant like she became more honest about everything i was like that's nice she really started like looking in the mirror to open up yeah uh but no so in 1885 she like physically start visibly was more clear which is interesting it's almost like her energy wasn't as strong anymore finally geez i was getting nervous she was like growing and growing um after during that time people started seeing her less and less. And by 1889, I think she's completely faded away. And then soon after that, even like the weird sounds like footsteps also started fading away throughout the house.

So by 1890, there was just no sign of her. Rosina also ended up deciding to figure out who the woman was because she wanted an explanation and she assumes she never got a full answer but she assumes at this point that it was probably imogen um for a few reasons and her specific ones were that imogen is the only person who had any resemblance to the figure everyone saw the widow's garb that she wore didn't match henry's first wife so must be the second wife um and oh sorry there was a truck that went by um every time you like flinch i'm like oh we're doomed she's back she's gained all her power it took her 130 years um apparently so this is another quote from her another reason why she thinks it's imogen

although none of us had ever seen imogen several people who had known her identified her from our description also on being shown a photo album i picked out one of her sisters and said that she was the that she was most like the figure and we were told that imogen and her sisters looked a lot alike so if you're saying that this random woman looked a lot like the figure you're seeing an image of her makes sense. Probably Imogen. Also apparently her stepdaughter and others had told her that she, I guess Imogen her stepdaughters is an Imogen stepdaughters who they had found or made contact with said that Imogen loved the front drawing room.

Just love being there well she's looking for all those jewels under the floor exactly also there's the note of like hey all the jewelry you wanted that tore apart your marriage is yeah others say that the ghost could be like the mistress of someone who lived there or something or like another housemate or something but mostly people assume it's Imogen and the despards even though they moved to the house and that's when this big story of the ghost really showed up people were seeing this ghost before they even got there which was interesting to the SPR because they were trying to investigate this and they were like if it was all smoke and mirrors made by the despard family then explain why people were seeing it before they even moved in true that's a very

good point yeah so they did their homework and they they tried to find as many people as possible who had seen the ghost before the despards even moved in basically the whole neighborhood at one point or another they'd all seen someone they'd all seen a woman in black either walking down the street turning a corner up in the window out in the garden everyone had seen a woman in black at some point so in 1892 this officially became like a case that the SPR was working on because they wrote an account about this ghost called the record of a haunted house which seems very vague to me but back then you could name anything anything because it doesn't exist yet now i'm sure there's

right also yeah also because like they probably had a whole 10 articles and they were like this will do um so one of the founders of uh spr his name was frederick myers and i guess he lived in the area at the time. And so he was really interested in the case. And that's why he brought it to the SPR and they investigated it before any other accounts. So the SPR found that Rosina actually kept records, which is how they were able to pull so many quotes to put in their own report. So a lot of their report are straightforward, direct quotes from Rosina because she had kept all of her accounts written down. She kept notes of every time she saw this spirit. Right.

And so that was really helpful for them to compile their own record. I said earlier that she never told anybody about the spirit except for Miss Campbell, who some sources said it was her servant. Some said it was her friend. Maybe it was her servant some said it was her friend maybe it was both but so they were able to get all their information from letters that rosina had written to miss campbell which makes me think hmm why did they have to write letters to each other and be all hush-hush if they lived in the same house or if they were really good friends. And so there is the speculation that they were lovers. Ooh, okay.

Spicy. Anywhere to bring the gays in, I'm going to do it. Interestingly, this rumor, again, for the tabloids, if you will, I should just start my own SPR. I mean, I'm part of the SPR, but I should make my own that's just the gossip mill of just like. Hell yeah. But just like, so you need to keep your spot in the spr but keep this this part on the dl and then gather information as you go and then like keep notes and then later you can just like do a tell-all expose you know what terrifies me is that when i joined the spr the person who i got my like congratulations letter

from said like oh i listened to your podcast no no are you serious right now which means the spr is keeping tabs on this man so what happens when you're i know you told me you're in it what does that mean like do you have to like do work for it or like no it's like an honorary thing so i'm part of the spr i'm also part of the aspr which is the american spr sure i'm part of the ghost club I'm part of the parapsychological association. They're all more or less, if you're really invested, you can do zoom meetings. So I've done zoom meetings with the ghost club and SPR because historically those are the oldest ones and have, I talk about them a lot on the show. Like Harry price was in both of them. Houdini

was in them. So like they mean more to me. so you just do zoom meetings and people either share stories or a lot of them are scientists and so they hold conferences and lectures on like the science of this or the science of that or like is it really telekinesis or is it you know it's like um i'm so like science lectures just got chills there's also like the real big perk that you get is that they all have their own like monthly journals and so just like how i say oh the spr put out a report they still do that and uh every month we get like a new basically a newsletter a glorified newsletter but it's like a science articles like a journal type thing like a journal and like ghost club specifically is really liberal like it's basically if you want to write anything, if you want to write an article for the Ghost Club, go for it.

And people will post, there's like a whole section where people just write their own ghost stories. They're not like write fake ones, but they'll tell their own experiences. Are the memberships paid? Yeah. I think that's how, the only way they can fund it. That makes sense, yeah. But yeah, so they, it's basically just Zoom meetings and monthly journals that you get from them. So cool. But you can submit your own stuff. They also do their own investigations. So like if you want to, unfortunately, I can't be a

part of the SPR one because they're literally not in America. Right. But if I ever were to be in England, I could go to like one of their chapter meetings or something or hop onto a cool investigation if i wanted to so yeah i'm so jealous that sounds awesome i want to do like a zoom with you to hear about the zooms with them they're surprisingly dry i wanted it to be like um like ghostbusters but like it's very much like minutes you know so yeah anyway it's fun i i like it but unless you're like in it for the also boring stuff then probably shouldn't be a part of it but if you are into that stuff and you want to be a member like me join the spr or the ghost club or parapsychological association by the way a lot of them too there's different tiers to what membership you are and you get

different access to stuff it's like access to like different conferences and discounts to, I think one of them is discounts to merch. I don't think actually any of them have merch. Sounds like a Patreon. It sounds like Patreon. Yeah. But it's like a very expensive Patreon. It's like, I think there's one where like the top tier is like $500.

Oh, wow. So it's like a donation to any society. Yeah, that makes sense like yeah like a museum or something where you are like levels of contributor and stuff yeah i mean and the super expensive one i'm not a part of that one i think that's called the ryan association or the ryan society or something the source no i didn't even say right i'm such a dumbass sorry but no that because jb ryan was a big guy and uh psychical stuff so the ryan something i know that there's like a a tear there where i was like holy shit i'm never gonna pay that much i'm also part of mufon that basically yeah that was what i was gonna mention yeah mufon is i would say the most fun of them all because it's ufos

and stuff but MUFON also there's something I really want to do that I've told Eva about but I don't want to say it too much because I don't want to like I do want to manifest it but I'm scared at the same time but apparently they have like um like an invest like they train you to be a UFO field investigator and like to do that I really want to I think it'd be like a cool patreon video if like i filmed my experience yeah dude it would be a cool thing in general without even a video but their theirs is really fun because their monthly newsletters are actually monthly reports on how many sightings around the world how have you never told me this i'm like getting angry now

you're just like these cool things you get every month and i'm like you've never like told me these things that sounds so fucking cool a list of ufo sightings in your inbox i think there's a way i think i did it when i first joined and then since and i haven't touched it but you can you can like type in any city and you can see like all the history of the report since like the 70s but it's i don't if you're part of mufon don't listen to this part i don't think it's maintained very well like the website looks like it's like someone's grandpa handling it like the the merch is has clearly not been touched since the internet was created so like it's like it's it's fun but also like you have a lot of kinks to work around so okay i don't know i think if if all of a sudden they gave the job

of handling all of the digital stuff to a bunch of 25 year olds it could really be something but i think right now it's hey yeah i mean i'm not 25 but i can work a square space you know what i have thought about that i was like if i had more time in my life i would reach out to them and be like let me handle those three yeah i'm over here like offering our services i'm like we can barely get like an episode out. That's not true. But we can, we have priorities. Let's put it that way.

Anyway, this is a very long winded way to say the SPR had about 10 articles in 1892. And that's why this record was called the record of a haunted house. And one of the original founders, Frederick Myers, was interested in it because he lived in the area. Most of the records came from Rosina's letters to miss campbell the part i was trying to get to was that one of the members of spr is the one who spread this rumor that they were lovers and that member his name was eric dingwall And I don't know if you remember that name, but he is also the frenemy of Houdini who ended up spreading a bunch of shit about him after he died.

I did not remember the name, but holy crap. I think I am him reincarnated because I'm really loving the drama he pulls out of stories. You just spread it. So when I die, you're just going to start spreading your stupid gossip mag. Christine was actually an alien.

Yeah, because you're going to have, like, full control of your gossip rag, and I'm going to be dead. I'll have finally gotten access to Mufon's back end of their website, and they'll just, Christine's an alien! Anytime that you, like, search any city in their database, it'll just be, like, sighting of Christine Cheaper. It's just christine she's the only alien well anyway eric dingwall was one of the people that when houdini died he said some like pretty mean shit about houdini i think it was either houdini or harry price but he wasn't the best like an asshole yeah so anyway in 1893 three years after nobody ever saw the ghost again or at least the family didn't the despards moved out five years later denor was renamed again to in homes i n h o l m e s and it became a boys prep

school after that it also became a nunnery it became a nursery college where you could literally go to school to learn to be like a nanny which is cool oh um it also became accommodations for the diocese of gloucester and then it became apartments uh i think it's still apartments and they're called saint anne's can you imagine though like living in that apartment it's like oh is this place haunted well it was a nunnery a boys school a widow's like home and with jewelry under the floorboards like any possible literally don't get to speak when you're like oh yeah welcome to my fucking haunted house in cincinnati first of all you grew up in that goddamn house behind a cemetery and like the bishop died in the elevator or some bullshit like that

you don't get to speak your house don't have a name by the way it really should have some weird ass haunted man wait what my house your mom? It really should have some weird ass haunted man. Wait, what? My house? Your mom's house. It should have some weird spooky mansion name. I think it's a Procter and Gamble house or something. I don't remember. My house actually does have a name, which I'm sure somebody just gave it like to be fancy. It's because of the owner, the people who named it. I'm not going to say it because it'll probably let you find it but it has like when they were trying to post it on like zillow and shit they were like giving it names like this ridiculous name which now i'm like okay they were just trying to make it sound fancy but i'll tell you about it later it's very weird well anyway you of all people

don't get to talk i know you're right you're right you're right you grew up in a house as fucking creepy as that which still looks like it's from the 17 000 hundreds but whatever my favorite pastime in our relationship has been going to your house with new people to show them how terrifying it is to be like lisa still has a video of going into the attic where all those things are written on all the walls and like there's just plaster falling out of the ceiling and i'm like this is my bedroom and she's like oh my god one of my prized possessions in my phone is the video of first of all my first video ever of going through your house by myself because i woke up at 7 a.m or whatever and i was like what haunted where am i am i on and then the second video is bringing like

christine maiden or eva or someone. You had like a tour going. You were like charging 50 bucks a pop. It's like keep your hands and feet in the fucking vehicle because this is a serious house. Because there are like nails coming out of the walls and you're going to cut your hand open. Yeah. But anyway, it's very creepy. I know. You're right.

I take it back. And also your now house where it's like, oh, it's full of estate sale death items. That's true. And there's a staircase literally from an abandoned church. So you're right. Listen, I take it all back. Anyway, the building or the property is now St. Ann's apartment complex. And in the 1970s, a member of the SPR who was collecting witness statements, I guess he was an author writing about the case. And so he was collecting witness statements of various poltergeist activity around the area and he found that at least 17 people had witnessed the woman in black recently and over 20 people had heard weird noises on the grounds um he also said that

evidence of the woman in black or his like final word on it was that evidence for the woman in black the evidence was still there up until at least 1985 one of them in 1970 was that a woman was taking her driver's test and when she was on that road in front of the house she had to slam on her brakes and when the teacher said why she looked shocked because she was like didn't you just see the woman in black standing in the middle of the road looking at us and i would have hit her but she like four or five seconds after standing there she vanished away in front of the girl's eyes man she's just a drama queen this lady so as of at least 1985 there were signs that the woman in black is still seen today i don't know why she took like a hiatus when the family like in 1989

maybe she comes back every hundred years or some bullshit but anyway that is the story of the chelten ghost slash pitville ghost slash morton ghost slash denor's poltergeist wow ew that is creepy that was a lot of record that was a lot of information oh barely any of it did you need no i love it there you go oh it gives me the creeps dude something about like the fact that she could like you know what i wonder sorry this is like going totally off the rails but when like maybe she wasn't interacting maybe she was just like standing where she used to stand or something and people thought she could like see them or did they say like she really did interact with the kids and stuff i i guess the closest thing to interacting i can think of is when the piano

oh yeah because what if i'm like i was gonna say also that when rosina was trying to talk to her and she couldn't speak that's true that's true that's true okay that's the most yeah because i was thinking about the piano like maybe it was a drawing room where there was like a place for a piano and so there had always been a piano there and she was just like she was just like it was like almost like her yeah her residual blueprint of walking towards them but didn't actually do anything but yeah i other than those two you're right and but also like for all we know like rosina just caught her in the middle of a residual blueprint of trying to talk and not talking true so there's no real proof that she was intelligently interacting with people it could have all

just been residual stuff man she was creepy though i gotta say yeah there's something extra creepy about that one i don't know why i think it's just the amount that she kept showing up in different places it's like yeah it's just like can you she kept showing up in different places. It's like, yeah, it's just like, can you give it up already? Like, and also like, it is interesting where like her energy was dying down at one point, but then she resurfaced in the 1970s. Also, it wasn't even, it wasn't even the 1970s and 1970 was the driver's test girl. And when the author was actually getting all of the information from people, what I saw online was that at least through the 1940s, 1950s, all the way through the 1980s, that was the range that he was able to find people who had stories. So if she faded away by 1890 and he was able to get new reports of her by 1940, that's only like a 50 year nap.

I don't know nap and for all we know because it turned into so many things and so many people were churning in and out of there they're like maybe people had experiences but like just up and left or moved and never got to report what they'd seen i don'tinating. It's so freaking creepy. Anyway, if you happen to live in the St. Anne's complex, let us know if you see a woman in mourning. I would love to know if people today see it. That would be really interesting. Especially because now would be we're coming up on another like 50 years or so. Right. I mean, true. I guess in another 15 years, it would be 50 years. I don't even know if that matters. if that matters 70s if it was the 70s then we'd be like right in the 50 year mark right now

yeah so maybe people are seeing something well also what was i gonna say um also since now it's an apartment complex it's all split up so it makes you wonder like is she in certain parts of the house or like oh yeah where is the drawing board yeah who has to live in the drawing room the drawing room and also uh it makes me think too with all those renovations like you would think you'd stir something up right true true true true true true and i probably think there's probably not a piano there anymore so maybe there's like a lady just bending over what is she doing can you imagine if you have a ghost you're like yeah all she does is bend i don't get it i don't know she wiggles her fingers and bends but you could really the rumors in my tabloids could really

spread something pretty powerful of like oh she went to tie her shoe and she never came back you're seeing the final moments of her sad life oh mgs you are not as a gemini you are not allowed to be i'm sure there's a law banning you from controlling a gossip maybe for patreon though we could i can make like a fake gossip newsletter um i'm pretty sure that's xenon's actual newsletter and you could probably add a section because xenon's gazette or the xenon gazette which is the patreon newsletter like could use a bit of gossip i think you and xenon would be a powerful duo i would happily do the the gossip i think you should okay well there you go now if you would like to be a part of the xenon gazette and you'd like to see my my gossip it's getting out of control um it's like ask not ask not dear abby in college at cnu okay if you went to cnu at the time that i went to cnu then

you remember the very short-lived under the sheets column it was a sex columnist and it was very ahead of its time was it you no but i was always so jealous because the person was anonymous too because i'm sure they didn't want to like get like harassed or whatever but like because it's a small school everybody knew everybody but it was a column in our weekly newspaper where it would be like a dear abby where they would answer two or three x-rated questions and like i mean that was like what i went to college like five ten years ago the world was still to me a lot different in terms of sex positivity back then well you're also in virginia i was also in virginia which i do think plays a role in this but like the column

i remember being like whoa i didn't know we talk about this kind of stuff and i remember it like getting banned like the column had so anyway maybe xenon's gonna have a sex positivity column coming from the person who just called themselves the most vanilla person on the planet i don't think i'm gonna let you run the sex column here's the real column where you hybrid them together where it's the vanilla person trying to give x-rated advice now this is becoming like its own podcast or youtube series that would be very fun of like me trying to explain how supportive i am without knowing any information you'd be like that supportive parent where it's like dad just shut up like i don't like i get it you don't understand you you do you on that oh god on that on with all those things that you want all the sex

things okay yikes please tell me your story so i can stop talking. Okay, good. Can I go pee real quick? I'm sorry. I have to pee so bad. I drank a little London fog. Sorry, Eva, for how long this episode is. I just got a text from Tom, my stepfather. Do you know what it says? Yes. It says, so your mother and I were talking this evening. Great. it says, so your mother and I were talking this evening. Great. First, your first problem. Since she is out driving every day, it's hard for her to have conversations with her mom. So I said, why don't you call your mom at six o'clock every night and I will exercise. And then we talked further. And I realized that when I'm at hockey on Mondays, cause Tom is part of a hockey league.

Sure. Sure. I realized that when I'm at hockey on Mond mondays i have no one to talk to on my way home so your mom had a great idea that when i'm coming home at 10 30 eastern time i will start giving you a call because i'll be done with marvel mondays at the same time oh no he knows your schedule talk about winning the lottery you didn't even have to buy a ticket winner winner chicken dinner so good chicken dinner. Good luck, Amethy. Apparently now I have a phone date locked in for every Monday night. A weekly phone date with stepdad. And I will say a lot of people on Marvel Monday have been asking me if I like the name Amethy. And apparently it's become a real thing.

I do very much like being called Amethy, by the way. But I don't think you realize what you've done i don't either apparently a lot of people nobody calls me anymore if you if you go through my comments on tiktok i have like a thousand people going emmethy emmethy look what i've done you've created a monster and it's my own name so anyway i just wanted to let you know how you're involved again in my life oops i love that i just like dip in and then dip out and it's like i've just wreaked havoc in your whole environment i'm so sorry you're welcome oh okay well on that note. On that note, tell me a story. Tell you a tale. So this is the story. Okay, I'm doing this thing again, where this is a story I've wanted to cover for a long time. This is the story of the murder of Betsy Faria.

Okay. Okay. There was a podcast that was done by NBC Dateline and it was called The Thing About Pam. And it was like a true crime podcast. It was a huge deal. And I listened to it. I binged it when I was back in L.A. like a year or two ago. And it's hosted by Keith Morrison of Dateline fame. And it's so good.

It's so compelling. It's fascinating. And I always knew I wanted to cover it, but it was like a six-part series. And so I was like, I don't ever know how to get that down. And the storytellingpart series and so i was like i don't ever know how to get that down and the storytelling was so good that i was like i don't know how to get this down into notes took me a long time to finally like commit to doing the story here we are it's uh it's the story of the murder of betsy freya and i also listened to a generation y episode on this topic and they did a really good job too so okay cool here we go tuesday night december 27 2011 russ

faria who lived in troy missouri went over to his friend's house for their weekly game night around 6 p.m they watched a few movies played a few games and russ left around 9 p.m to head home how old is he sorry i know you just started this i did not say how old he was i am not actually even sure how old he was game night these days could really mean any age oh okay actually you know what probably probably in his 40s his wife was 42 so oh okay cool he was probably i would imagine similar age but he and his friends have been doing this game night for years so yeah i think probably like early to mid 40s is my guess but i definitely didn't write that down so russ

foria lives in toronto heads home around 9 p.m when he gets home he finds the body of his wife 42 year old betsy foria dead on the couch she had been stabbed over 55 times with her arms almost entirely severed from her body holy shit yeah and there was the murder weapon which was a serrated kitchen knife was found in her neck oh my god okay and another knife was found under the couch cushions of the couch she was laying on holy shit okay so russ calls 9-1-1 understandably and he is freaking out they played this 9-1-1 call in the generation y episode it's like him like hysterical shrieking crying screaming and um i mean can you imagine if that were like no like blaze you walked in and like you just didn't have fucking arms anymore

truly it made my heart or my hair stand on end i was like listening to him and i was like i can't fathom the scene so again big thanks to all the dispatchers out there because i can't imagine what that must be like truly um you must be good at creating a boundary bubble for yourself which i'm not good at i can't imagine i feel like dispatcher therapists need therapists you know yes agreed just like a just a lot like a chain of therapists all the way to the top all the way to the top yep so uh he calls 911 but while he's on the phone he says my wife has killed herself and so the dispatcher sends police and ambulance obviously and you know she's asking him is she breathing and he says no she's dead she's dead um there's a knife in her neck so uh

investigators arrive they conclude she's been dead for at least an hour likely longer and he had called 911 at 9 40 so just to give like a timeline here sure however with the 55 stab wounds and a knife in her neck they were like we're pretty sure this is not a suicide yeah i have a hunch you can't cut your own arm off when your other arm's already off. Yeah, right. Okay. I didn't even think about that. Yes.

That's like probably the clearest argument of all. Yeah, I think. I think. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. So and like with the one in the neck at the end, it was just like, it's just what are you talking about? So, you know, they were like, that doesn't seem likely.

So, of course, he being the husband, he was pretty quickly the prime suspect in this murder uh he was arrested the day after the murder um they did a diligent search of the house and in his closet they found a pair of slippers covered in his wife betsy's blood so bingo bango they also used basically what they called his volatile emotion volatile volatile emotional state state to kind of pin that on him and be like, he was erratic. He was acting like he was too hysterical. But I don't believe that stuff. Like, I mean, if I walked in and you didn't have fucking arms and there was a knife in your neck and there was blood everywhere like what the fuck am i supposed to act like like no well and it's always like a lose-lose situation because if you call and you're like my wife has been murdered they're like you didn't even care and

then if you call and you like start screaming they're like oh he's acting like there's yeah and you're gonna be analyzed no matter what you're either there's only a complete on switch or a complete off switch in that case like hysterics or shock there's there's no in between yeah and they kept saying kind of like well he was able to when we interviewed him like he was able to just kind of like turn off the hysterics and talk like normally i guess that's odd i don't know but like also you're who knows what the fuck your brain is doing when if you're trying to preserve yourself or you're suddenly being interviewed by police and you just shut off the hysterics i don't know i just feel like it's not fair to say like this is how you're supposed to act when you're under the suspicion of your wife's murder

you know because you're also thinking like well shit now i have to like defend myself i mean my my first thought is like yeah it would be a complete fucking basket case if i walked in on someone i cared about looking like that but then you're right like part of me might think like because you're the one that found her you're gonna be one of the prime suspects and then i would try to like play it cool while also having a fucking crisis and like yeah then i look really shady well and i feel like my body does that shutdown thing where i just like i don't even react or care until later and i like go into shock and like self-preservation yeah yeah or like disassociation or dissociation sorry um anyway so whatever so again you're right i don't really

believe in that either of like it didn't seem realistic or whatever yeah i i i fall for a lot of stuff but when it comes to like how someone's acting when they see their loved one yeah mutilated i'd like i'm out like i don't have an opinion on that one i do find it fascinating when they see their loved one yeah mutilated i'd like i'm out like i don't have an opinion on that one i do find it fascinating when they do those uh analyses of people's 911 calls and like the language they're using and if they're not using the person's name or like i think that's fascinating because it's like the psychology of like language and things like that i was like can you can you give that a shout out again because you you did that really well with the Netflix, the guy who's who killed his wife and two daughters. Oh, yeah, you called it something like linguists, like forensic linguistics. Oh, yeah, I think it is. I think it is forensic

linguistics. And they I think you're right. That was I remember being super intrigued by that. So just in case anyone wanted to look that up. Yeah,'s so interesting there are like websites dedicated to um let me look it up not forensic 911 calls so there's a book called analyzing 911 homicide calls i know that forensic audio video analysis yeah so i know there's a website on it i don't know it off the top of my head but it is interesting they like go through an expert like linguist linguistic experts go through and say like you know she's calling about this person's her best friend's death but she refuses to say like the name of her friend or you know things like that and when uh or she's like distancing herself in some way um and i know i know with the john benet ramsey case there's this

whole analysis of the 911 call where uh her mom keeps saying i'm the mother but like it's just a weird phrasing you know so there's i think that's fascinating but like yeah you're right once it gets into like she's not sad enough or he's not emotional enough or he's too emotional it's like how do you even you know it's not a black and white thing yeah anyway so yeah so anyway that's where we begin but then they find a pair of bloodstained slippers in the closet and yeah not a good look so next police bring in Betsy's best friend and this woman is 58 year old Pam Hupp and they bring her in to be questioned so Betsy the woman who was murdered was a mother of two she worked in a state farm office and she frequented as a part-time DJ on the side with her husband, Russ.

And they owned a DJ business called Party Starters. Hey! Hey-o, raise the roof. Okay, now I'm the old dad. Yikes. That's where the bear and the gags hang out. Oh, God, no! That's where Bear brings his basket of dried blueberries.

Oh, God. no that's where bear brings his basket of dried blueberries oh god so betsy had met pam at work at the state farm office they worked in insurance together and they were close friends so they had fallen out of touch for a little while but then betsy was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010 and she found out the following year that her cancer had metastasized to her liver and become terminal and that's when her friend pam kind of came back into her life and got involved again and started taking her to chemo and taking care of her. Right. So when Betsy found out how severe her condition was, she started thinking about like leaving her husband and daughters behind and started to worry about, you know, if she died, what would that look like for her family so she worried that the worst would happen that she would pass away and that they would her teenage daughters

would you know not be good with the money russ would quote piss it away like she was just worried they wouldn't take care of themselves and that the daughters wouldn't have money when they grew up so betsy made the difficult decision of changing the name of the beneficiary of her state farm life insurance policy to her friend Pam and did not tell her husband that she had changed the beneficiary from him to Pam. Got it. And she basically told Pam, you know, if I die, she would this, she was like, this is a timely thing. If I do pass away, then I want you to take this 150 000 and keep it in a trust for my daughters so that they are able to you know not quote piss it away like she said and they're able to have it as like a safety net growing up so back to the day of the murder betsy had undergone chemotherapy

that day and had then gone to her mother's house. Pam drove her home from her mother's house, making her one of the last people to see her alive aside from Russ, her husband. So according to Pam, she dropped Betsy off at her house at approximately 7 p.m., which was earlier than usual because apparently Betsy was really exhausted from chemo. She wasn't feeling well and thought maybe she had a bit of a cold coming on so when pam was interviewed by police she told them that russ had a quote violent temper uh he was a violent drinker and had actually threatened betsy before to the point that betsy had considered leaving him although she was too ill at this point to actually go through with it because of the cancer and one of the stories that pam explained which

is like pretty horrifying is that i guess russ would hold a pillow over her face as a quote game to try and you know i don't know to have fun apparently to like to like torture her to like hold a pillow to suffocate her until the last minute and uh and she would wake up apparently like suffocating on a pillow so you know she's okay she's saying like this is a volatile relationship this is he's a violent man betsy was scared of him sure um so pam told uh the police that betsy had actually been longing to move back to lake st louis which was closer to her chemo treatments and to where her friends lived and she'd actually already hatched a plan for her and Russ to move into her mother's house. And Pam said that

that evening, Betsy had told her that she was planning on bringing the idea up to Russ. She was planning on going home and saying to Russ, hey, I think we should move back closer to my chemo to my mom's house. And she basically told Pam she was terrified because he was going to be furious that she was like bringing this up um this was not something he was going to be happy about yeah so pam said she felt guilty about leaving betsy to face her husband alone because pam knew how violent he was and then as part of their investigation police found betsy's laptop and on it they found this sort of like diary document that she had left like a word document and uh it was betsy's laptop and on it they found this sort of like diary document that she had left like a word document and uh it was betsy's kind of journal entry talking about how afraid she was

of her husband she even included a section where she described being terrified that he was going to murder her so this is all like panning out basically as like they got the right guy it sounds so far pretty straightforward yes exactly i mean it's just yeah i can't imagine there being a twist to this currently yeah it's it's pretty like open and shut case from the start seemingly so on january 4th 2012 which was a day after betsy's funeral russ was charged with first degree murder and armed criminal action and he was held he couldn't meet his bail of 250 000 so he was held in jail until his trial began nearly two years later in november of 2013 which closed yeah that does um so during russ's trial his defense attorney argued that the

timeline just didn't add up for him to have murdered his wife because he had the testimonies of the four friends that he had gone to game night with who all said like no he was with us from six to nine and if you're saying like she was dead over an hour when he called police like that just doesn't add up right sorry over an hour before he had called 911 yeah it just doesn't add up he also had receipts he had made multiple purchases from different gas stations and an arby's throughout the course of the evening like on his way home from game night so they were like this just doesn't add up like he had receipts he had an alibi four different friends say he didn't

do it he was with them it also feels though like with receipts like that it feels like you're trying to get an alibi like so that's part of what they argued yeah because the prosecution said well why would you go to two separate gas stations in one night but he he argued this one gas station has better gas prices and this one has the cigarettes i like so he was like this is a normal thing i go to this gas station for gas and i stop at this one just better snacks so sue me yeah and so and he went to arby's also so this is what the defense is saying like no look at his timeline right and then the prosecuting attorney whose name is leah askey and she comes back in the picture she countered this argument by saying well it's a little obvious and like you said and she believed that russ's friends were providing a false alibi and they had been in on it and had

colluded with him to carry out the murder so she's arguing that one friend went to arby's to pick up a receipt one friend went to the gas station one you know to while he actually went home and murdered his wife and then they all said no we were all playing games together so that was the prosecution's defense didn't even think about that but okay we're not prosecute prosecution's argument yeah right i had it didn't even think about that. But okay. Or not prosecute. Prosecution's argument. Yeah. Right. I didn't even think that like, I would have thought that like maybe the friends were like saying like, no, he was here when he wasn't.

But I wouldn't have thought like, oh, they're that deep in where they're getting you and they're actually involved. Right. Like they actually are criminally involved in this murder. Yeah, exactly. So that's what she's arguing. Like they actually are criminally involved in this murder. Yeah, exactly.

So that's what she's arguing. So on November 21st, 2013, Russ Faria was convicted. And on December 22nd, he was sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison and sent to the Jefferson City Correctional Center. Wow. The end. Just kidding. I was going to say, but my fear now was like, since he's already been tried, wouldn't that be double jeopardy or something if he gets tried?

So double jeopardy is when you are tried and found innocent or not guilty, then you can't be tried again and found guilty. Okay. If you are found guilty, you can appeal and get a retrial and fight for your innocence. But. Oh my gosh, you're a lawyer. Wow. Renee is like somewhere is like, don't even fucking start christine i just graduated and took the bar esquire sheifer wow i one time joked about that and renee was like i can't joke about

like titles like that i get in really big trouble i was like sorry oh yikes okay i was like renee the attorney she's like i'm not an attorney yet please don't say that because i'm gonna get in trouble i was like okay my bad isn't Esquire though like the official thing you get to put at the end if you're so I looked it up once uh I would literally be one of I mean it's the most Gemini thing I could possibly think of every title I would literally become a lawyer just so I could say Esquire yeah well so Esquire is apparently what you can put even if you don't pass the bar I think but you put JD I think if you have oh if you don't pass the bar, I think. But you put JD, I think, if you have the. Oh, right.

I don't know. I looked it up once because I was like, I would love to put Esquire, but apparently that's just not a thing you do. Well, I didn't pass the fucking bar. Can I be an Esquire? Certainly not. Yes, I am. Certainly not. You can spell it wrong.

I'm an Esquire. I'm an Esquire with a K. And a W. Esquire. And a heart over the I. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

So yeah, double jeopardy is basically like, if you're found out guilty, you're clear. They can't charge you with that specific crime again. Got it. Okay. So, right. So he's sent to prison. The end, not really. Although the prosecution had said like, oh, Russ's four friends were in on this murder,

they colluded with him and they were part of this murder, for whatever reason, nobody ever brought any charges against them. In fact, the four friends hadn't even been aware that they had been accused by the prosecutor until a reporter told them later. Like, how do you feel about being, you know, named as colluding with him on the murder of Betsy Faria?

And they were like, wait, what? They had no idea that was even happening in court. So as much as the prosecutor said, like, oh, they were in on it. Like, nobody, like, went and filed charges against them, which is a little bit odd, in my opinion. Yep. So in January of 2014, Fox partnered with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dispatch to explore the case and they basically wrote this expose and they released it the following month and the expose is where shit gets just bananas so first of all the expose revealed that the 150 000 life insurance that pam had received

had not gone into a trust for betsy's daughters as betsy had wanted but had actually stayed in pam's little pocket oh okay she immediately four days after the verdict came through that russ was guilty she dissolved the trust immediately and took the money for herself not a good look not a good look at all no no no but she did have a reason she said she had been going through a really hard time her mom who has suffered from dementia and arthritis had died by suicide only three months before this expose was launched yikes and that plus the loss of her close friend betsy she sort of had her reeling and she was just like scared etc okay but the expose also exposed some other interesting nuggets of information. Nougats. Okay.

Some nougats. So investigative reports featured an interview with a 911 operator who had taken Russ Faria's call. And she stated that although the police described Russ as emotionally volatile, she believed his hysteria was fully genuine. And she was like, if anyone had asked me i would have said like no i i don't think he was faking it at all like i listened to a lot of these phone calls right and i'm pretty sure what he was acting was legitimate yeah which obviously doesn't prove anything but it's a point in his favor so next one which is a little more damning the expose also claimed that prosecuting attorney leah askey so the one who said like oh russ's friends made up this timeline and one went to wendy's and one and you know she

she was the one saying like russ is guilty and put him in prison so leah askey the attorney had actually been in a relationship with mike lang who was an investigator on the case and actually was testifying in the trial so they were like secretly in a relationship so you know she wanted to win this case there is the possibility that she said like i want i need you to testify and help me win this case obviously you'd hope that didn't happen but they also hadn't revealed their relationship to anybody so it's just really sketchy that she was dating a police officer who happened to be heavily involved with the murder case it's just like that shouldn't happen no it's like a conflict of interest times a thousand oh yeah and especially since they didn't tell anyone

it's like well that's extra shady you know yeah this is the time to be completely uh about everything put your cards on the table this is not the time for secrets no not really and he actually was also the captain of investigations for the whole sheriff's office so he had a lot of power oh a lot of information you know it's sketchy it's sketchy so two members in the jury actually found this out and went to report went to the media and said like hey nobody as the jury we found him guilty but nobody told us she was dating one of the witnesses and a guy involved in the case and so they were pissed because they were like well we should have known that if we were you know trying to determine this man's fate

as a jury like we want to know so they were the ones who actually flagged this to the media and so essentially yeah all that but things only get even crazier because on august 16th 2016 oh my god this is just like where i'm listening to this original dateline and i remember being in target and going i'm just like what's happening okay pam survives an attempted murder on her life okay just get ready so august 16 2016 she's sitting in her car in the garage when a man with an armed knife accosts her demanding she drive him to a bank to retrieve quote russ's money so luckily she was able to knock the knife out of his hand and run into her house but the man chased her she grabbed her gun which she kept on the nightstand and shot him in self-defense

oh she immediately called the police who searched his body and learned that he was one lewis royce gumpenberger okay i know a resident of saint charles missouri and on his person they found a note that had the following instructions handwritten on it it said kidnap hup and that's pam's last name kidnap Hup. And that's Pam's last name. Kidnap Hup, get Russ's money from Hup at her bank and kill Hup. Take Hup back to the house. Get rid of her. Make it look like Russ's wife. Make sure knife sticking out of neck.

I like how you, okay. Someone is clearly new to the team because if you needed instructions of like, okay, kidnap. Yeah. Yeah. Kill. Oh, whoa, whoa. Okay. Kill. okay kill kill yeah like you couldn't remember that that's what you were fucking there to do yeah and so the point of this letter was like fully clear instructions of how to kill pam make it look like russ's wife

get russ's money that he belonged to him quote unquote all it does all it does is like make it clear that it was like at least not the original suspect from the first murder like because in my mind i mean you're looking at me like i'm crazy here well no no because i'm wondering because the the way they looked at it was like well this would be russ giving these instructions saying like get my money from the bank that like i want you to get my money back that pam i'm just saying this like this clearly is this person did not kill the last person because like the fact that they need a to-do list to replicate it makes it seem oh no so actually nobody ever thought that he he's not even um oh my gosh i don't even this guy's this guy's just like in the in the mix all

of a sudden they just think that this guy has been hired by Russ to murder Pam to get his money back. So we're on the same page. Okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's not necessarily what they think, but that's what at least this is meant to portray. Let's put it that way. Like that's the image that was meant to be created with this note and message. be created with this note and got it but a message but also this could have been russ or the real killer planting his own to-do list so it looked like he was a new guy on the block when he could have been the original guy is that one of the options here just continue just continue just continue maybe i don't know sorry we're gonna find out the answers i think i'm so like involved in my head that i or like have read this so many times that i'm i'm just not even able to comprehend i'm sorry no it's i'm sure i'm not getting my point across clearly so but this is why i was

so afraid to cover the story because it's so fucking confusing and like all of this is overlapping in different timelines and so the way dateline did it was so like woven into itself and like interviews and i'm just so i just i love them so much they're so take it away i love you keith okay so all of this these instructions that this man gumpenberger had apparently this hitman basically had been given uh were supposed to be rewarded with ten thousand dollars that was what was written on the note like for ten thousand dollars this is what you have to do like like a recipe list ten thousand dollars one one dash of kidnap and then two cups of kill knife in neck but it's like one of those blogs where it's like the first 10 pages are like i lived on a farm and i love uh whipped eggs how

about you leave a comment below it's like okay my my favorite pastime is playing games with the boys and then going to wendy's after clearly but at a different gas station from my cigarettes you know my my son doesn't even know it's not real beef okay i'm sorry i don't know where i'm going um so the reward money was allegedly in this note ten thousand dollars so in his pocket police find nine one hundred dollar bills but things get even weirder because then they search pam's house and uh on her dresser they find a one hundred dollar bill and to make matters even eerier the serial number matched the bills found in his pocket okay got it so this is someone's first kill also yeah so basically she has a bill and the odds because she's saying i've never met

this man before in my life the odds that this man's in her house to kill her and she happens to have a sequential bill to the ones in his pocket are so extraordinary that they were like this the odds of this are not this is not a coincidence that she happens to have a bill that matches his serial numbers like it's ridiculous so something was obviously off and police were like okay this is getting a little fishy so they did more research into pam and cell phone records actually showed that pam had been in gumpenberger's neighborhood less than an hour before this alleged attempted kidnapping and she was like i've never seen this man before i don't know who he is she was literally like on his block uh within an hour which makes no sense it wasn't like where she lived or anything like that on august 10 2016 a police report had been so this

is about a week earlier a police report had been filed stating that a woman a mysterious woman matching pam's description had approached a local resident named carol alford and had posed as a dateline nbc producer and offered her a thousand dollars to reenact a 911 call and so this woman they interviewed her on the dateline episode which they fucking ate this shit up because dateline was like she was pretending to be one of our reporters like they were just so thrilled about the fact that like because in the description for the podcast it's like and learn how dateline got sucked into the story of the murder because like fangirling about their own show exactly he's like she thought okay but to be

fair if someone like i mean not like i hope this doesn't happen but like if someone were to involve reenacting and that's why we drink i know you know it is very meta it's i'm with you i think it's like really fascinating and so of course dateline snaps this story up and it's like we're gonna like milk this and they did a great job i'm not I'm saying you and I would do the same I agree with you right um but it's very funny because so this woman had called police and been like yeah this strange lady like drove up to my trailer and said I'll give you a thousand dollars because we're trying to reenact a 911 call I just need you to like say this audio and then I'll give you a thousand dollars so they had security camera footage and it showed that the woman the mysterious woman had been driving pam's car so they couldn't make out the person but they

saw the car and were like well that's pam's car so it's starting to fit together right did you hear that what was that that was the cats running down the hallway god i thought it was something that was not alive i thought they're very much alive both of them just hurled their bodies into the room. They chase each other a lot. It's really obnoxious. Oh boy. If you hear that kind of sound in my room, be more afraid because it's not alive.

Don't have animals. I'm sorry in advance. Mooney's doing that thing where he's like pretending he doesn't see Junie, but he's definitely like ready to pounce. Okay. That's fine. So they also discovered in when they were searching pam's apartment that her they had a swatch of carpet that appeared to have been positioned to protect a rug in pam's house

from getting blood on it when gumpenberger was shot goodbye okay i was like oh i don't want to ruin my nice wayfair rug in the process. So also not a good look. But on top of all this, police were like, Gumpenberger himself would not have, probably would not have been able to commit such a crime because following a car crash in 2005, Gumpenberger had actually suffered from severe mental and physical impairments, which made investigators very skeptical

that he would have been able to carry this out by himself. And so they were like, on top of everything else, he was just working a job trying to provide for his family. This seems really unreasonable that this man gets stuck in like sucked into this high stakes hitman situation. It just doesn't fit. Then investigators found that the knife that Gumpenberger had allegedly used to threaten Pam had been purchased at a nearby Dollar Tree in Pam's neighborhood alongside several other items they found in Pam's house. So the receipt basically had the knife and then a bunch of shit that was, I don't know, like her new glasses. I have no idea. But her reading glasses, I don't know what it was.

But they were all found to be from the same shopping trip at the local dollar store. Yeah, so it's not looking good. No no it's suddenly turning very quickly against her so all this was so compelling that police determined gumbenberger's innocence unfortunately obviously he had been killed um and on august 23rd 2016 pam was arrested and charged with first degree murder and armed criminal action against him so the prosecuting attorney and the chief of police basically theorized that pam had done the same thing and lured him to her home by presenting herself as kathy an nbc dateline producer and offering to pay him to reenact a 911 call and then when he arrived she killed him in cold blood and pretended he had threatened her and was coming

after her and then planted this note right then they were like well why would she plant a note mentioning russ like this is a totally strange like it's suddenly like pulling back to the old case i guess so but i feel like it could i could easily explain it away to me it would make sense of like oh well you're just trying to redirect like who the original person was like right nothing to do with to do with me it was always ross yes so that is that is literally exactly what she was doing but at the time they were still convinced that they had put the right guy in prison because it seemed so clear-cut that it wasn't until now that they were thinking wait a second like maybe we got this all wrong so i mean exactly what you're saying like why would she write russ on it well clearly she was to like, she felt like things were turning a little bit toward her and she was like aggressively trying to push them back at Russ.

Yes. Unfortunately doing the opposite, clearly. So when she was arrested, this is a little bit horrific. She asked to visit a bathroom and then she used a ballpoint pen to stab herself in the wrists and the neck. Wow. Think of the commitment like it would be her yeah it's like a heinous thought if i thought i have to stab myself and in the heart wait what hold on no no sorry in the wrists and the throat which also is that's still terrible yeah the throat is terrible if the if the options were go to jail or stab yourself in the throat i'd be like i guess i'm going to jail i couldn't i couldn't i couldn't i would just end up like drawing on

myself like it wouldn't work yeah i would or i would like do a test around where i just kind of like poked at and i'd go oh oh my god that was terrible yeah i was i know there's no way there's no way so basically sorry sorry the forensics not that i'm like you know the hot shot olivia benson or anything but like well none of us i'm pretty sure you could very quickly see like based on how it went into your neck if you stabbed yourself oh no she wasn't trying to hide it she was just trying to like get out of the you know how sometimes when people are cornered they do this like desperate move yeah like well you can't catch me if i'm dead sort of thing gotcha okay so the the theory is that she was basically cornered and desperate and there wasn't really much sense to it except like i'm

gonna take myself out before you can yeah yeah okay that makes more sense but it didn't work because it was a plastic pen and it didn't actually really do any harm so anyway all that to say she tried and it didn't work um so they were like but also now now they're looking at her like why the hell did you just try to stab yourself in the throat if you're innocent you know exactly right not a good look so bail was set at two million dollars for her and on december 16th of 2016 a grand jury indicted her for first degree murder and armed criminal action of Gumpenberger. But of course, now there's still that untied that loose end of like, well, why did she do this? We need to like figure out where this came from and what it's like pointing at basically. Right. So meanwhile, Russ is still in prison for life. And as this is all going on with Pam, this is what's kind of been happening on Russ's side is that his attorneys

are continuing to contest his guilty sentence saying he had nothing to do with it. And then in July of 2014, Betsy's daughters, Leah and Mariah sued Pam for their mother's money because they were like, hello, that was supposed to go to us. You even said it in the trial that that was our money.

And now you're just like owning it yourself. This is a, this is of all the trials probably i think the easiest one to just yeah you'd think so right well but she had signed it over to pam so it was all like hearsay you know what i mean oh okay so it's a little bit like he said also okay i mean we could fight about that forever i would just be like well who would believe that like this woman like just gave all the money to her own friend and not her children? But, like... Well, you'll see what she comes up with, because there is a theory. I know. Because people were wondering that exact thing. Don't worry, she has an answer.

Oh, great. She seems to have an answer to fucking everything. Yeah, she does. And it's usually pretty stupid. It's also always a really obviously bad answer. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah. So they did this civil trial where the daughters are suing her for their money back for their mother's money. And when Pam was asked on trial whether Betsy had mentioned that she wanted the money to be used for her daughters, Pam, in a major turn of events, said absolutely not. And obviously this completely contested what she had said in the first trial of like i did this for her she wanted me to take this money to give to her daughters and take care of

them so anyway on february 24th russ feria's case was remanded in june it was decided he would get a new trial to reassess all this information and luckily for lawyers on russ's case they received a new videotape police interview with pam where she tried to explain why betsy had left her all this money okay yeah she told detectives that she and betsy had been lovers god why are there two lesbians in this i know this episode is really just extra scandalously gay today when you said it earlier i was like but i didn't want to spoil it. Oh, I thought you were just excited that I mentioned lesbians.

Oh, I was. I was like, who wouldn't be? I was. I was just extra excited that I had a parallel story to bring up. So she says, neither of us were lesbians to be clear,

but trauma had made Betsy hungry for a sexual relationship with Pam. So Pam quote, replaced what a husband would be. It was a small, small sexual relationship with Pam. So Pam, quote, replaced what a husband would be. It was a small, small thing to give her. So wait. So they were. Hang on. So wait, they were not gay, but doing everything that would be defined as gay.

That's right. Okay. Well, and also she said she was only doing it to, like, take care of her dying friend. Like sex? Like sex stuff? Yeah. Who had a terrible husband and was like wanting for sexual fulfillment. So she gave that to her.

Now that's a good friend right there. Yeah, right. I know. But get this. A best friend. Okay. Well, not quite because apparently one of Pam's acquaintances literally snorted when they heard this saying,

Pam. this saying i can't i too would have snorted at that uh courthouse or that that room so it was like oh no we're not gay we're just doing really gay shit and like also like we're sleeping together but we're not gay but like we sleep together but we're not gay but i have to tell you why she snorted it's not what you think why no because pam was a fucking raging homophobe so like she's literally making this up and her friend is like that is even more hysterical that's even more hysterical so apparently this friend of pam said pam was the most homophobic person I'd ever met she'd say that's not normal that's not right anytime somebody talks about like any

sort of homosexual relations and so the friend was like that is bullshit like she would never she's making this up as like a last ditch effort to be like oh we were lovers I'm not gay but we were lovers and that's why Betsy wanted me to have this money but like she was making it up speaking of my gossip tabloid like this would be the funniest frontline news ever i know if someone

wasn't like stabbed 55 times it would have been very funny but it would be it would be extra funny if the person who like snorted was very gay like who was just like yeah and that's that's rough because it literally says like her close friend and i'm like well that's rough because if you're their close friend then you and you know they're like, well, that's rough because if you're their close friend, then you and you know, they're the most homophobic person ever. Then like, you're not keeping very good friends in my mind. No, you don't love yourself. Honestly, you're not.

You're kind of homophobic yourself. I would imagine if your best friend is. I feel like without even having known the context, I mean, look what happened. I just like hysterically laugh like without even knowing the context, if you were in that courthouse and you heard someone use that as the like like i'm gay that i'm not but like i'm i mean i would have just i would have heard one person snort and i would have just everyone would have fucking lost it i'd have been like okay and they would have been banging the gavel like order in the court sorry that was like such a small thing but like it just really tickled me i know and it's such

a bummer because she really just fucking used like being gay as an excuse of like it's such a fucking bummer it's like it wasn't even terrible none of it was even true she just was like she was like i'm gonna even throw my own beliefs out the window and pretend to be like the most heinous thing i know which is a lesbian quote unquote no it's terrible but it's money it's funny it is funny it's terrible but it is funny it's ridiculous because we know it's ridiculous like if she had really played this ruse and it had worked like that's one thing but people were like okay lady like you're getting sit the fuck down you straight stupid woman yeah straight stupid woman who hates gay people sit down yeah so anyway the snorting happened she said she was a lover of betsy's and that's why she deserved the money and wasn't giving it to her daughters um and i can just

imagine betsy beyond the grave being like sorry what did that bitch just say like also imagine the kids the kids being like truly i mean yeah all the trauma they've already gone through and now it's like oh and now apparently my sick mom was having a lesbian affair with this woman who she didn't even you're saying love but like but you could offer her you could you could serve her better than our own father like her husband her husband yeah i was like oh my god yeah i was like i'm not quite oh my god okay yes husband husband but also yeah and it's you're right because it's extra icky because she's basically saying like we're not gay but like she wanted this and as a friend and she was dying and this friend i just gave it to it's like ew don't be such a fucking gross she wanted

it and like her own husband couldn't offer this. Yeah, it's extra gross. It's just a real F you to the entire family structure. Completely. To these kids, at least. And the husband's in prison for this. So basically, they're going back on trial, and Russ's lawyers get a hold of this tape. And they're like, interesting.

Okay, fun twist. Also, interestingly, in the original trial, this is where shit kind of fell apart is that in the original trial the judge hadn't allowed russ's attorneys to present any evidence about pam so they the judge didn't allow the attorneys to say hey pam got the life insurance money they didn't allow uh them to say pam was the last person to drive her home and see her alive because according to the judge who by the way was later like got in huge trouble for quote not understanding the law uh and was actually very very um criticized for like abusing human rights so this person and was suspended and stuff like so this judge originally

was like no you can't say anything against pam in russ's trial because this trial is not against pam it's against russ so there was no chance that they could point to another person and say like russ didn't do this look who has more motive so the jury all they had was russ and they were like well that makes sense he was there and he and his wife apparently argued a lot so now finally that the that they're doing this retrial there's a new judge who says like hell yeah please bring all this information about pam so that we could like open this up and show the jury and other people like yeah russ may have had some motive but pam has like a thousand times more motive anyway so uh let's see oh it also so the the evidence that they were finally allowed to include also included cell phone records showing that pam had been at the faria house for 30 minutes after the

time she had claimed to drop her off so she said i dropped her off and left but now they had evidence showing that she was there for a half hour for no explained reason they also uh had information that pam was named the sole beneficiary of the life insurance policy that they were finally allowed to include and uh so remember russ had claimed he'd been with the four friends yeah and the the prosecutor said he was colluding with these friends they were they were part of it well one of the officers timed how long his drive would have taken 23 minutes and found the food receipt in the back of the scv time stamped at 909 so if russ had made it home in the time slot and gotten food uh he would have had only nine minutes to stab his wife 55 times clean up and call 9-1-1 so they were like it's really a tight window like

he right he would have had to do all this in a short window clean up himself shower and 55 times like that's horrendously a lot yeah but the strongest evidence in the prosecutor's case uh so it had been that there was blood on the slippers because like hello that's like nail in the coffin uh for us but if you look at the slippers the slippers had no blood on top of them they only had blood on the sides and so what they thought was that somebody had uh like put blood on them and or walked through the blood and then tossed them into his closet trying to frame him basically like look he did it but if the person had been wearing the slippers it would have been not just on the bottom i was gonna say even the beginning earlier when you mentioned the

slippers like the first time around i was like is anyone really that stupid to put them in the closet? Yeah. It's like, Oh, let me go kill someone and then put my exact outfit right back in. Let me clean it up. All of the blood all over it. I'll tidy it.

Yeah. Absurd. No, exactly. And like, obviously that's such an open and shut, like, well,

his clothes were covered in blood. Okay. He did it. But like, then if you look at it, it's like, why is there no blood on top of it? Just on the bottom.

Why didn't he throw those shoes away if they already had also that like it doesn't make any sense why would he put them right back in the closet where you would go look at his shit why wouldn't you put them like in a safe or under a fire or in the ocean in the ocean can you imagine that feeling though when they pull the slippers out and they're like there's blood on these and put them in a bag and you're like wait what like because you didn't do it that must be the most like dooming feeling of like i didn't wear those slippers i mean i would i would like to think if i got framed for a murder and someone found my bloody shoes in the closet i'd be like i'd like to think that i have friends who would like back me up at a police station and be like if m were gonna kill someone they wouldn't just fucking like that's that's not even critical thinking right there that's like

like the shoes if i ever kill somebody the shoes i wore will never be able to be found again the fish flops will be found at the bottom of the ocean with decades later with their original home with their original ancestors they'll be with actual fish yes oh fin and gill okay um so anyway the slippers now are kind of off the table because they're like well someone walked through the blood but hadn't worn them it doesn't make any sense so also regarding the fact that uh oh did i not even tell you this oh God, I totally missed this bullet. Russ had been brought in as well for questioning and he had failed a polygraph test. So that, I'm sorry, that was like way early bullet.

I somehow missed that. But yeah, so that was one of the first things that also was a nail in his coffin is like he had bloody slippers. He failed his polygraph. Like everything was just against him. Well, so with the polygraph, apparently he later explained like

i went in a room with a guy with a computer they didn't hook anything up to me uh he also had been awake for 32 hours and had smoked marijuana and so like there was he's not he's not a big thinker but like there's no way that like this would have been a legit polygraph because a right he was like totally out of his mind at this point and b he wasn't even hooked up they were like making it up to try and like pressure him into to admitting guilt but he's like i didn't even like take a polygraph they just sat there and asked me questions and tried to convince me that i had failed but like i wasn't even hooked up to any monitor so that was all baloney as well so on on top of this, Pam said that on the evening before Betsy's death, after she dropped Betsy off at home, she had tried calling her multiple times because she was nervous about finding her way home from Betsy's house.

Because they were like, why do you keep calling her on when you had just dropped her off? And she said, oh, I just like couldn't didn't know how to get home. And like, first of all, she'd been to betsy's house many times and second of all uh why would you go drive your friend home because she's sick from her chemo and needs to sleep and is getting a cold and the first time if you call her and she doesn't answer you know she's asleep and sick like why are you calling her over and over again also it's like 2016 or something. Like, you have a phone that can tell you how to get home. Well, I think it's 2012. So I don't know.

Did people have? 2011. 2011? I don't know. I didn't have a. She had a TomTom. And that's all that matters. She had a TomTom.

I had a Blackberry or something. But that's a different story. Yeah. So it was just weird. Because they were like, well, why are you. You just said it was just weird because they were like well why are you you just said you dropped her off because you were so worried about how sick she was call someone else or right now try and find your way home if you're that close shouldn't you already know how to get home from your friend's house because she had been there a week before as well

like she'd been there multiple times and this didn't seem to be an issue before so very strange things were not looking great. She apparently had originally dodged a polygraph test as well. So she'd agreed to she had agreed to one. But then she mentioned sustaining several head injuries over the year. So the doctor, the police were like, well, can you get a doctor's clearance so he can say, yes, you're you're clear to take a polygraph. So she wrote to her doctor and said, dear Dr. Fisher, could you please write Detective Kaiser a letter stating that I am not able to do a polygraph due to medical reasons? Don't need any more details than that. So clearly, instead of saying, hey, can you clear me for a polygraph?

She's like, can you tell them I cannot do a polygraph? Right. Fishy, fishy. Yeah. So obviously now the defense is pointing to pam as the one with the motive and uh russ at this point was found not guilty and was finally released from jail for a crime he did not commit um so that's good so now timelines cross we're back to how pam had shot gumpenberger in her house and so that was actually the month that it was announced

that betsy's case was being re-examined so like you said that was a month she found out russ is getting out of prison and now they're gonna be like who actually murdered her uh-huh so now i need to turn the tides back and say no russ did it so i'm gonna plant this weird note in this man's pocket also does that mean she like she premeditated a murder just so that it would help her her storyline look right like okay she's a bad bad lady i mean i know that she did like the whole like news lady thing but like i wanted to know if she like went into this with the intention to just murder somebody yeah it's pretty cold-blooded and horrific especially because like he had a lot of

disabilities and she took advantage of that and you know it's all just very upsetting and like she's a cold-blooded like it's scary how how bad she is and how much she doesn't care um anyway russ is out of jail pam is like desperately trying to point fingers back at russ and all of a sudden all the fingers are pointing at pam so it seemed like this was just her way of reframing russ which now wasn't working anymore so this is not all though because like i said pam is a cold-blooded biatch so in 2016 after pam was charged with the murder of gumpenberger the police department also reopened the case of the death of pam's mom who had died by suicide quote unquote on october 31st so shirley newman is pam's mom and uh shirley's son michael had said like no i believe uh her death was accidental or she had died by

suicide but after pam had murdered gumpenberger and was now another suspect in betsy's case everybody was kind of like maybe we should reassess the other death that happened what a death happening around this around this lady yeah she's the center of it so to break down what happened to pam's mom so on the evening of october 30th shirley newman pam's mom was driven home by pam following a hospital visit which already sounds familiar to betsy's story at approximately five pam dropped her off at her apartment and then instructed the staff of the facility or whatever not to expect her for dinner that evening or breakfast the following day okay and by the way nobody then the next day when she was dead, nobody was like, that's odd.

No, because it just didn't. So wild. I know. I know. I don't know. It's really weird. I feel like someone should have reported that of like, oh, well, that's weird that it was. She told. Yeah.

Implied we shouldn't expect. She wouldn't be around. Yeah. Yeah. It's very sketchy. So on October 31st, unfortunately, a housekeeper found shirley newman dead beneath the balcony of her home so she had fallen through the aluminum railing of her balcony like not over it but through the bars and like you can see it there's like bars busted out of it and they did a

medical examination it concluded that she had died from blunt trauma to the chest from a fall but the autopsy showed that she had eight times the normal dose of ambien in her system well okay so that's why they thought it was a suicide because they were like well she nobody accidentally takes a ambien if you forget you'd take another one you know whatever but eight in a row is a lot yeah they were like well that that's why it was initially called a suicide. And her son even said like, yeah, I think that this was something she took too much medication and was in a trance or a state and fell. But like, weirdly enough, this railing apparently was so, it was like nearly impossible to bust through. You need, I think like, I don't know, 400 pounds of force, or there's like something that they studied it.

They talked about it in Generation Y, but like, you need like so much force to be, you don't just like fall and bust out these railings. And I've never, yeah. And I've never been like an ambient person, but like, I imagine you're a real zombie. Like you're not. Yeah. Throwing a lot of force into something if you don't have to. Right. Right. And like falling is one thing but yeah exactly but it's not like you get like super strength and can bust through the railing and then you would have had to bust through the railing and then like

slid through it and fallen it's you know what i mean like it's very odd yeah it's a very odd thing that they hadn't really considered before um pam was also the last person to see her alive also sounds familiar to Betsy's story. And so from the death of her mother, Pam and her siblings each received approximately $120,000 of investments and they shared a $10,000 life insurance payout. But earlier that year, prior to her mom dying, Pam had been videotaped. This is really eerie saying basically she said, Hey, if I wanted money, when she was trying to defend herself about Betsy, she said, Hey, if I wanted money, my mom's worth half a million dollars and i would get all of it if she died so it'd be a lot easier for me to go for her than go for betsy and it's like okay why would you say that

a and b like she wasn't even worth half a million it was a lie it's just so sketchy i don't know if she thought that she was worth half a million but she was worth ten thousand dollars in life insurance so i don't know she was apparently worth something yeah i guess something something that am really wanted so yikes so the police reopened their investigation they interviewed the housekeeper who found the body and they then concluded again that the death was accidental but in in November of 2017, the chief medical examiner changed the manner of death from accidental to undetermined. And I think that's a pretty rare thing to like change the manner of death so long after. I'm not positive about that.

But in her notes, she stated since her death, many things have happened that involved the daughter. And so all of that investigation, including the one in Lincoln County and the one in St. Charles, became pertinent information. I was no longer willing to say it could be an accident so the medical examiner's like nope i changed my mind there's no way this was a fucking accident interesting so in 2018 during pam's trial for the murder of gumpenberger the judge ruled that prosecutors couldn't present evidence relating to shirley's death but they could present evidence relating to Shirley's death, but they could present evidence related to Betsy's murder. So there's all these murders going on. She's on trial for Gumpenberger's murder specifically. She entered an Alford plea, which I don't, I've mentioned this a few times on the show, but it's hard to remember. But basically an Alford guilty plea is where you admit that you say, I didn't do it. I'm maintaining my innocence, but I believe

that if a jury saw all this evidence, they would call me guilty. So I'm going to put in a guilty plea, but I'm to avoid the trial. I'm going to put in a guilty plea to avoid a jury trial, but I'm maintaining my innocence. Got it. It's like, I'm aware how shady this looks, but to say in my own skin, I'm going to plead guilty. It's like a technicality almost. It's like, I'm aware how shady this looks, but to say in my own skin, I'm going to plead guilty. It's like a technicality almost. It's like, I'm going to plead guilty, but I'm putting in the record that I did not do this. Right. So as a condition of this deal, Pam didn't face a death penalty. She was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. She's currently serving her sentence at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Chillicothe, Missouri.

serving her sentence at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Chillicothe, Missouri. And in a phone call to her husband, Pam claimed she had pled guilty so her family wouldn't have to witness an ugly trial. So she's still maintaining that she's fully innocent and did this for her family, which like, yeah, okay. Heard that before, lady. Yeah, for real. So in piecing all this together, basically her motive for everything she did was money. She worked in the life insurance industry, like had said and she had actually been fired twice for forging signatures so she had already been god this come on now like yeah why on earth are you even trying to kid anyone i mean it's ridiculous i know we have to like we can't just straight up say someone did something but i i personally don't

see another way no no and i mean i think it's pretty much assumed that she did it. Also, like who's hiring her after being fired twice for forging signatures in a life insurance place? That seems really sketchy. Yeah. So she had also collected money for a family impacted by cancer. And when she was kind of looked at for Betsy's death, she said like, A, like my mom has a higher life insurance policy. It'd be a lot easier for me to get it that way. And B, if I were so desperate for money, I actually raised $50,000 for this woman who it was her last Christmas because she had cancer.

And I raised $50,000 for her family, yada, yada. Well, later they fucking looked into this. She did raise $50,000 and she didn't give it to them she kept it and the family said the family whose mother did die after her last Christmas said we've never heard about this like she was using their family as like a fundraiser and saying like oh we just need to help her through her last year of life and she has a family to support and then she fucking kept the money it's yeah just the second you even said it i was like yeah yeah you looked really sad you were like no that's terrible stop saying this just stop don't even finish the sentence i already know

like it's fucking wow you sound all of like our all of our itunes reviewers can you just stop talking please for once also every single nastier viewer people are like m just interrupts christina all the time uh i had adhd how dare you do people say that oh everyone thinks that i'm just like the most annoying when it comes to interrupting you i was like i needed medicine excuse me so i'm unmedicated how dare you challenge them no i'll if if when it comes to i mean i haven't looked at the reviews in a long time but neither and we don't get too many nasty reviews but i would say 90 of the nasty reviews we have are because i won't show that hurts my feelings oh don't say that about my feelings yeah don't fucking say that about m i only read the ones

that said i was like a dumb valley girl so whatever but um hey i meant to say this actually in this episode fittingly enough but if you guys can write us a review on itunes it's super helpful well we haven't asked for one in ages i feel like most podcasts are like rate and review and we never say it so i'm if you have a minute can you just say i love when m interrupts christine it's great it's my favorite Or be like, I love that M is now medicated and therefore there's no more interruptions. So for all the people who had something to say, come back and listen again. Even though M said that the medication wasn't working, but. It's working a little bit. It's not, it's really not working the way I want it to though, which is such a shame. I really wanted like to be laser focused on shit. And like

now I'm, I'm still too distracted for me to be saying that this is a successful medicine so all right anyway but yes please write and review and maybe uh make those those mean reviews it does it does make me feel better because sometimes if i like check our podcast page just to like see if something uploaded and i scroll down like the featured review is a one star and it just like my heart crumbles into a million pieces because it's like I used to like this show and now they suck and I'm like okay that really hurts my feelings anyway I'm just a big baby I mean we're both babies but I uh no it does make me really happy though because there there really weren't too many mean reviews but the in between them there were so many nice ones so i know i know really

jazzed so thank you to all the people who do say nice things the wonderful reviews are so yes so heartwarming and like affirming and wonderful um and i know we did have some rough patches with touring so it always kind of stings i always stings i always feel bad and people are like after they started touring i couldn't listen to them anymore and it's like we couldn't listen to each other no i know like it was we get it though we fixed it and nobody did i moved across the country to fix it i left them i said bye no i think i definitely think we fixed it after that first tour we just didn't know what we were doing i mean we were out of our element yeah we were imagine all of a sudden someone says hey people really like you and now you have to completely flip your world upside down.

And you have you have no precedent for this. No. And all of a sudden we were so overwhelmed. But it's also your fault because you agreed to this. Like, you can't, you know, we know that it was like a rough time. And so we really tried to get things. I think we did. Yeah.

Especially with I mean, we I would say, I mean, people are probably already turning off the episode but wait there's more don't leave yet okay well we're basically facetiming uh we really did nail it like i mean granted like the the pandemic hit but in our first like chunk of here for the booze like we fucking figured it out we nailed it we got the formula we were like this is how we can retain our sanity limit our yeah our uh breakdowns yeah it was do a good show i was really proud of us it was such a it's really such a shame we say so often that the show was so fucking good and i would say anyone who actually had i got to come to the here for the booze show would say it was a fucking amazing show i hope but on top of that it was the behind the scenes finagling we did to make sure that like like the our actual podcast itself also stayed really yes it was like upfront work that we did to make sure that during the tour

we had it easy enough to make this our priority like the regular episodes a priority basically if you listen to other podcasts after this and they end up blowing up and doing really well that they start touring if during their first tour they sound real fucking exhausted give them a goddamn break and like and just power through because they're gonna figure it out like it's it's so worth it so yeah and we and like we recognized it like it was hard it was really hard because everybody was pointing it out and we were like we're trying to fix it and i'm not complaining in a way of like this wasn't our fault like it was because we agreed to it but we learned pretty quickly like how to fix it anyway sorry this is like a 10 minute rant about us trying to I don't know defend ourselves we love you and we appreciate everyone who stuck with us I do too when people

say I've been listening since the beginning it makes my heart like swell because I'm like that means they got through a rough patch they really really did. And we appreciate it. So if you know anybody who ever says like, oh, I used to listen, but I couldn't get through a certain patch, just say like, they figure it out. It's good. Say you haven't met Xenon. You haven't met Xenon. Do you even know who Lemon is? Do you even know? Stay. Okay. Sorry. I promise that we're getting here. okay anyway i love you all if you could leave a review it's super helpful you don't have to i don't you know it's not the end of the world but it is helpful um because sometimes i really hate seeing those one stars and maybe i should just talk to my therapist really the co-host of a one-star review i know it's painful it's like

one day you should do one day you should like really fuck yourself up and like do a beach to sandy episode on and that's why we drink oh i hadn't thought of that most people suggest do you know that sometimes to beach to sandy we like really are self-sabotaging because people send one-star views of ourselves to us and say isn't this funny and it'll be like alexander and christine are like the most blah blah blah and they're not funny and they just want to hear themselves like i, just like really cool stuff. And they send it to us and go, isn't this hilarious? And I'm like, no, it's just mean. Also, but like you guys kind of found the perfect formula

because like now when people give you one star reviews, you can roll it off your shoulder a lot faster. But does it keep you at the bottom of like? No, we said like, we've said like, we do not appreciate one star reviews like okay we make a point also in the show to like highlight five star views of companies and stuff to be like hey people who leave one stars are assholes and are ridiculous so basically nobody wants to be a one star if that makes sense anyway okay sorry uh yikes everyone just go away just turn this off sorry no i want to finish my story please

people already stop listening after your story i want people to stay so uh she still maintains her innocence in prison so her motive was money whether it was her mother whether it was this gumpenberger guy whether it was this family that she duped for 50 000 who had cancer which is just so sick so this neatly segues oh i mean segues into how russ varia a wrongfully imprisoned man seemed to have a little bit of justice at least in 2020 in that the eastern missouri sheriff department reached a two million dollar settlement with him so at least he got a payout eventually uh which obviously does not ever make up for being wrong time prison yeah but it's something to help him restart his life he's also like lost his job his reputation all of that he says he can't rebuild so it's it's really rough um and since pam was only convicted of killing

gumpenberger uh the case of betsy freeya's murder is technically still open even though we kind of all know who did it um and to think she stabbed her 55 times it's just so fucked up anyway and pam's mother's death is also still undetermined and vox says on the web their website quote it's also important to know that this is a story that's still ongoing following russ freya's overturned conviction and eventual acquittal in a second 2015 trial. His wife's murder is now still technically unsolved. The current prosecutor is trying to change this and new documents and information about the case are still being released. So it might come to terms that she is finally convicted of Betsy's murder, which I think would be a nice piece of justice for the family. Right. So you can listen to the thing about Pam, which is an excellent, excellent podcast.

Like so well done in research, the interviews. They talked to the woman who said that like Pam pretended to be Kathy, a Dateline reporter. So it's all very in-depth and interesting. Generation Y also did a good job. And I wanna leave on something a little bit positive, but also sad, which is just the the final note on the victims in this case so betsy freya died on december 27 2011 she's survived by her two daughters and

husband and is remembered by russ especially by her outgoing personality shirley newman died on october 30th 2013 and is remembered to be a loving mother and grandmother and lewis gumpenberger died august 16 2016 he is survived by his family including his son and daughter his ex-girlfriend shannon remembers how he always wanted to make everyone laugh and that is a story of the thing about pam is that she's a terrible person yeah the one thing that's most important about pam is to stay the fuck away from her yeah please oh my god do not come near her yikes wow well thank you i appreciate your story uh everyone please go right and review us after the chaos that is this podcast yikes i hope people don't give us a one star like they're just begging for attention i'm like oh someone will someone will but someone else will refute it so

we're i hope so we just love you guys and we want to keep doing this because you oh, I don't know how to ask. Someone will, but someone else will refute it. So we're good. I hope so. We just love you guys. And we want to keep doing this because you're just, I don't know. Especially after four years, I think we have like a slight fear in the back of our minds of like, oh my gosh, are we old now? Are they getting bored of us? Yeah. We're Gemini.

So we always want to keep things like rolling. Yeah, spicy. That's why we're starting a gossip mag. Go to bit. Yes. Spicy. That's why we're starting a gossip mag. Go to bit.ly. Go to M's tabloids. M's gems, if you will. Oh,

we'll work on that. Well, we'll shop it. But anyway, thank you guys so much. You can find everything at, and that's why we drink.com. Can't you?

You sure can. And our socials are VM Schultz and X Teen Schieffer. And you can find us at atwwd podcast yes and eva's social is ew gross with three w's three w's look up eva through our social i don't know okay just type in ew g and then wait no is it three s's you're probably right i think last week i said three w's okay well we'll find out ava okay anyway uh maybe just goodbye she's in there she's in there you'll find her here oh you're right it's three s's my dumb ass said three w's and eva didn't even correct me last week because she's too nice i'm sorry it's three s's not three Okay, ew, gross. And. That's. Why. We. Drink.

Yikes.