Doomed to Fail - Ep 100 - Murder in a Locked Room: William H. Wallace

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

And we're back for episode 100!!!!!!!! Farz tells the historical True Crime story of the murder of Julia Wallace. It's a mystery to this day! Her husband was called away on a mystery work call turned wild goose chase. Meanwhile, Julia is murdered in her home, and the cash box is stolen. It's a classic whodunnit and one of those cases where it could ONLY be the prime suspect, but also impossible for the prime suspect to do! Put on your deerstalker cap and join us!  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. All right. We are back, Taylor, after a several-week hiatus. Uh-huh. Excited to be here with your recording once again, our standard routine on the weekends. So you just, well, not just, but like about a week ago, you got back from a lovely trip from Japan, which I was following along on social medias.

And it looked really cool. So tell us about it. Oh, my gosh. It was amazing. We were there for two weeks, just me and my husband. And it's just so easy to travel with your phone. You know, we just had like the phone on and an international plan. So we don't have to worry about anything.

We could like, it's really, it's like 16 hours ahead of California. So it was like a weird time to like, we call our family sometimes. And we just would use the phone to like, you know, you can geo-locate yourself on a map. And it'll show you train directions. It'll show you walking directions. It'll like just give you everything you need to get anywhere. Juan loves chat GPT. So we just chat GPT.

Like, how do I say this in Japanese? And people loved it. They just like, were so delighted when he would like say big, and Japanese and it was super fun and yeah we just had such a good time he did such a great job planning there was always something to do we went on a couple little like food tours and drink tours and we stayed in Tokyo Kyoto and Hiroshima and it was amazing awesome highly recommend going or yeah absolutely absolutely I don't feel like you were saying I was listening to something that you said I think right before I left that was like people think Japan is like another world and like I don't feel that way I think maybe that's half because I've lived in big cities before so I don't feel like weirded out by crowds. I went from like Joshua Tree to Tokyo. I'd be like

what the fuck is it? It's like going to Mars. It's like it might as well be a different planet. I didn't feel that and also just like the language is like you can hold Google translate your phone over things and it will translate it for you. It's really incredible like words.

I think the way I've heard Japan is different is kind of in the sense of like it's cleanliness there's more of like an empathy towards others uh i don't know i mean it wasn't i mean like Tokyo was a big city it wasn't i saw on house people i saw drunk people on the streets you know like i didn't see a ton it wasn't like l a but it wasn't zero you know it was like and you know the i think the trains were a little bit cleaner there's no garbage cans and one of the people that we met there was saying that it's because like the yakuza used to put bombs and garbage cans

so now there's no public garbage cans which does keep people from like those like overflowing but in the morning when you wake up the seven garbage cans that are in Tokyo are overflowing you know it's not nothing but everybody of course is super super nice if like you go to a small restaurant or bar or something and we've been to a couple

like really cool cocktail bars there's like a couple people inside of them but when you leave the chef or the bartender will walk you out and buy it's very very nice um which is cool like the people there were just so so nice um yeah i mean it wasn't like i'm going to eat off the floor it was like that everybody was light yeah speaking of eating what was the food like um so it was for the most part great they had they did a lot of like there's a lot places they had like an american french breakfast so we'd eat like a lot during that time we would have we had a couple just incredible sushi places like one where it was really

expensive and we had to like preserve our spot many many months in advance and it was just like there were maybe like 10 people at like a counter and then the guy would just make the food for you and give it to you and you kind of eat whatever he gives you and it was amazing um a couple places like there's some like miso flavor that hung over everything in Kyoto that like was a little much and then also in Kyoto every single place when you get there they're like here are some baby squid and you're like no thank you yeah i've had that before and i will not do it again yeah i like the first two i ate and then the next day there's there were more and so i had one and then i was like i can't i can't eat i don't know what it is it's not that it tastes bad

it's that it feels wrong yeah and it just like doesn't really taste like anything if it's just like a it's just like a baby squid sitting in a bowl and i'm like nah yeah yeah i'll pass on that one But we took a sushi-making class in Tokyo. That was super fun. Yeah. All in all. Sweet. All right.

Well, you heard it, heard it here from Taylor. 10-10. Visit Japan. It's all worth it. Absolutely. Sweet. Well, let's get into our first part, first half of this week's episode. Can you enter the show?

Yeah. Taylor, it's been like three weeks. Okay. Give me a break. Oh, thanks. Welcome to doing the fail. We're a twice weekly. podcast. We cover history, true crime, all kinds of fun topics that mostly at this point we just find

interesting. And that's the energy we're bringing to the rest of our show, I guess. Absolutely perfect. Because you know, this episode is episode 100. Is it really? Yeah. So that was a perfect intro for episode 100 great job. Wow. Okay. Wow. Good for us. We're old timers, huh? Good for us. Shit. I'm brilliant. pressed honestly yeah we stuck with it um so who i don't know who's going um i'm i think it's you it's me okay i'll go first great um it's 8 20 p m here so i'll go first and then i will pour a drink and be a captive audience for your episode i don't know if you could just coast along

there we go as far as a coaster so i'll go ahead and kick mine on off. So I'm actually doing mine a little bit in honor of a national hero who just passed. Do you know what I'm talking about, Taylor? Is it O.J. Simpson? There we go. Is it really? You know you already did O.J. Simpson? I'm not doing O.J. System. I said I'm bringing in honor of O.J. Simpson because I'm going to be covering another mysterious situation with a dead wife where the husband was accused. And ultimately, I'm not going to say what happened, but whatever. It's very in line in O.J. Simpson. can you ever say like I know he wasn't going to do a deathbed confession but didn't you kind of want one? I think my

opinion is he is just a horrible horrible human being and he wouldn't give us the satisfaction yeah you can it's like he's a monster you can't expect them to do something good we don't have that component of their souls

yeah yeah yeah So, actually, like, the key difference between the person I'm covering today or the couple I'm covering today and the O.J. Simpson case is that this, in this case, we legitimately don't know who did it. That's the only difference. So there you have it. Although I guess in O.J.'s case, we never, we don't either because he never was able to find the... Elevada. There's a murderer out there. There's still somebody out there that we're being to capture. So, okay, I'm going to break this up. into four components. One is going to be our main characters. The other, the second part is going to be the crime itself. The third is going to be the investigation trial. And the fourth is going to be the conspiracy theories. So our story takes place in Liverpool. But we'll go ahead and tick things off with part one, the main characters. So we have two main characters, a husband and wife. So on the husband side of the equation, we have a gentleman named William Herbert Wallace, who was born in 1878. which would make him roughly around 52 years old at the time of this crime. Love of William Wallace. Yeah, yeah, literally. Like, I exactly, my exact thoughts was, was a great part.

He started working at 14 years old as what's called a Draper's assistant. So he was one of those guys that would like help like people who make manufacture clothes. And he would bounce around from job to job. And he had like a trade. He actually wasn't a total scumbag. He was well known to be. like a nice, genial guy, very well-dressed. He had, like, aristocratic hobbies, despite the fact that he was nowhere near an aristocrat.

He liked to play chess. He played the violin. He was really into botany and even lectured chemistry at Liverpool Technical College in his spare time. In 1913, he met a woman named Julia Dennis, and they got married around sometime in 1914. This is a little bit old in time, and it's England. So, like, a lot of the recordkeeping is going to be a little bit of. but ambiguous, which is going to really come into play when I get into specifically Julia's case.

So, by the 1930s, he was working full-time, as was called a collections agent for an insurance company. I took this to mean more than what we would consider a collections person. This seems like your neighborhood insurance guy is what this sounded like. Apparently this time, insurance people were like crazy trustworthy. So you're, like, seriously, like, your insurance. person like you could be your best man at your wedding like this is a kind of like you weren't just casually hired to be an insurance person again he was kind of like a well-coffed person but not like a rich

like it happens in like the merrill lynch commercials you ever see those where it's like oh that's our merrill lynch guy he needs to get the wedding so yeah it's like no people I don't want to chat which is just competing can be a chat like that's it so especially in this case because he worked for prudential which um at that time It was called Prudential Assurance Company. I ended up now insurance company. Yeah, it was assurance to start. Yeah, but regardless, like, that was kind of like the cream of the crop back then, and that's

where he worked. So he was like somebody important, kind of. The wife, her name, like I mentioned earlier, she was born Julia Dennis. Later on in the story, she'll be referred to as Julia Wallace. She was born to an alcoholic father and became an orphan at the age of 13, pretty rough. Although, I mean, she was like an orphan in the late 1800s in England. And I feel like, man, it's kind of like it could be a little bit charming if it wasn't so bleak. I mean, I feel like everyone was an orphan.

By rough approximation, we assumed that at the time that her and William married, she would have been about 53 years old and he would have been around 36. Early accounts you read of the story is that they're the same age. but somebody some like forensics investigator or something went way back into like the historical record and somehow deduced that she was 17 years older than he was so i'm just assuming it doesn't even matter the age actually literally has no relevance here whatsoever so who cares we'll just go with this so part two the crime this this is so this is a weird one this is this is actually super interesting i'm surprised it hasn't been a movie about this okay because it all sounds so shady it all sounds totally implausible but i'll get into it so on january 19th 1931 william attended a chet

club meeting and when he got there he was given a note taken half an hour earlier via phone requesting that he visit an address in town at 730 p.m the next night which is which would be the 20th to discuss acquiring insurance by a guy named r m qualtroth cool name it sounds it's like so like old school um not inspector gadget the other guy Sherlock Holmes is that a real name rm claude prof we're gonna figure that out okay that's not real he could the note was taken by the chess club captains a guy named Samuel Beatty who recounted that the man on the phone asked if William was there and once he told he wasn't he gave Beatty the message including the address the name I'm bringing this up because it was noted that Beatty recalls asking the guy twice about

the address and then Betty Betty ready read it back to him to confirm the address so everything was like wrapped up tight little thing yeah it was that that's what the guy whoever it was said on the phone exactly the next day it's all it's also worth noting that this guy's saying well baby like he's been running the chat club forever and has known um William forever so is it wait I said phone is it a phone message or is it like someone looking by or no it's a phone message it was a phone message back then the way it worked and this is good this i didn't write this to the island but this is how it's going to come up later is that you go to a pay phone you pick up the thing you say i want you to connect me with this establishment they say okay we are now

connected now hit the place your coins and hit the button a or b or whatever it is and then you hit it and then they initiate the connection and so there's actually a conversation happening in the phone booth before you even get connected you're talking to the operator to figure this out. Right. So the next day, William, he leaves home in the morning to start making his rounds doing collections on the insurance payments that he was owed. And his clients were later recalled that he seemed totally normal. His behavior was normal. His demeanor was all usual. During this time, at around 3.30 p.m. while he was out, Amy Wallace, who was William's sister-in-law, stopped by to visit Julia and spent about an hour with her. The timeline

going to be important so keep up with us so julia amy is there from uh 3 30 to 4 30 then she leaves william gets home at around 605 p.m and he has evening meal with julia between 630 and 645 a milk boy delivers milk and saw julia in person leaving empty milk bottles outside for him to collect to leave the new milk bottles there and it was at 645 that william also left for his appointment. That was originally self-reported. That was not the milk boy saying this. It was later corroborated

because we'll find out that William had to hop on two trams to get to this appointment. And he would be noted that he was at that in that location because people actually experienced him there. So police knew that really the 645 timeline is like key of figuring out

where William was. Like he had to have left his house at this time, essentially. So he makes his way to this part of town, again, via the tram, and he was supposed to go to Menloved Garden East. That's the name of like this area. There was no Menloved Garden East. The address that was given didn't exist.

He was dropped off at Menlob Garden West and started looking for the address and couldn't find it, obviously. He was documented to having spoken to locals as well as police officers in the area. And asked if anybody even knew who this Qualtrough guy even was. Nobody knew what it was. And everybody said that this place doesn't actually exist. There is no East part of this section. By this point, he was basically late to the meeting anyways,

which is also key because he was always on time. And he ended up talking to a police officer saying, hey, where can I find a phone book? And he directed him to a post office. Again, this was all noted because the police officer was talking to him. And this guy was checking his watch. And the reason he was checking his watch he would later say was because He was concerned that the post office might be closed.

It closed at 8. He's like, okay, at 745, exactly enough time to get to the post office and see if this guy's name is in the phone book. He gets there, no Qualtrov in the directory. There's nobody that's his name. At this point, he's like, whatever, I'm over this. He gives up and he catches a tram back home at around 8. It's technically around like 757 or something, but we're just going to round up to 8.

around 840 he gets home and tries his keys on the front door they won't open apparently they've been bolted from the inside so then he goes around to the back tries that door he can't get in he goes to the front again he gets a little bit more frantic and nobody's answering the door he's dunk on the door when he's coming through uh he goes again to the back door at that time his neighbors the johnson's a married couple encounter him and see that he's kind of frantic and all that and uh he was mostly frantic and he was mostly frantic because at that time, Julia had bronchitis. And also, there was, like, a spat of robberies that were going on in the neighborhood. And so he was just kind of, like, concerned about what might be going on. And eventually, he tries the key. I don't have no idea. I couldn't figure out of this one detail, like, why the key worked this one time, but it was working before. A little bit suspect, but almost something like he wanted neighbors to hear him being frantic.

I don't totally know what the logic was there. But anyways, the neighbors are outside. He finally gets into the back door. He asks them to wait outside while he goes. and checks on his wife. He goes inside and on the parlor floor was Julia with her head completely bashed in with blood splattered all over the walls. Like her brains were literally coming out. I read a report that was written by the police officer saying you could actually see the brain.

Like it's really bad. If it was more recent, I'd be more, I'd be less like chuckling about it. But it's like it's very gruesome when you read about it. Yeah, yeah. So at that time, William, for some reason, tells the Johnson's to go get a doctor and a police officer. A doctor. The doctor is probably the coroner, right? Probably.

Actually, yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to save her, but it's probably the only person who, like, looks at bodies. Totally, totally. So police show up, and upon cursory examination, they realized that his collection box that he'd been out earlier that morning, collecting all the dudes. has been looted. So that's part two. Part three is the investigation in trial.

So the police start investigating, and by all accounts, they kind of messed up. Again, very similar to OJ. Like, the second the cops show up, and it's like the frenetic energy of a crime scene like this

seems to kind of cause things to go a little bit haywire. Let me touch everything and move everything around. Yeah, so literally, so there was one cop who was drunk, who ended up flushing, like a toilet, which could have cleaned away blood evidence that was there.

Another cop took some of the milk that was just delivered and started feeding the cat with it, which could have marked prints off or removed prints that could have shown that maybe it wasn't Julia the guy saw. Like, they just kind of bumbled their way through this crime scene. That's funny. It seems for the most part, the reason why it happened

the way that it happened was because the cops had this prevailing theory, which also just happens to be the correct one, which is always the husband. Like they were like, obviously he did it. So why are we even bothering with this? Let's execute him tomorrow. Like, who cares?

So this is the problem with this logic, though. The milkman saw Julia and William presumably walking around this men love garden area, presumably wasn't completely covered in blood. So this is similar to another case, which you have covered Taylor, which is the Lizzie Borden situation in the case that's up there. I was hoping when I said Paula, I was like, I bet that, like, triggered something with you. It totally did. And I'm thinking, actually, I just Wikipedia at it to see if I could see what they look like and their faces aren't on here, but I'm going to keep looking.

But there is something on Wikipedia that says he couldn't have done it, but neither could have anyone else. I wrote that. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly happened with Lizzie Borden. You're like, she definitely couldn't have done it, but no one else could have done it either. So who did it if you don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. I was like, this is the exact same situation as Lizzie Borden. There's nobody else who could have done it, but it had to, it couldn't have been this guy. Yeah. So, yeah, but therein lies kind of the cash 22 situation, the police ended up finding themselves in. So in the, in the least charitable timeline available, William would have had 15 minutes. The least charitable meaning that the milk boy mistook 645 for 630, which means somebody saw her alive at 630. And then William had to have left the house by 645 to have gotten to the train station, which means he would have had at most.

15 minutes to brutally kill Julia, staged a robbery, clean himself off, and then catch the tram. That's it. So it's also worth noting that William suffered from kidney disease. He actually only had one kidney, which also made him sickly. So what police found was when they tried to recreate this within a 15 minute window of time, it technically is doable. But it was not done by like a 50 plus year old guy with one kid. the you know working all day like right if you were like a young healthy person you could like

run and do it but he wasn't running anywhere yeah yeah and to add to that please could find no evidence of blood in the sinks because they'd assume that william must have cleaned himself off um and maybe like you know where's all the blood if he'd done this right is there blood like i don't know like with lily bored and too like there's no blood like leaving yeah you know like there's no black of that handles yeah yeah uh one part of julia's murder that the prosecution and police used to kind of explain this away was that julia was found laying on top of william's raincoat so it was the raincoat he was wearing earlier that day while doing his rounds and obviously he took it off when he came home police and prosecutors um presumably anxious kind of pin the crime

on william said that the reason the timing isn't that suspect fact is that William must have been wearing the raincoat when he murdered Julia and then laid that at the crime scene. It seems like a little stretchy. That seems hard because then you have to like, what do you do? Like roll her onto it? Or like, can you lay here?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they also said that they presume that he posed as this Qualtrop guy himself calling the chess club to give himself kind of this alibi and to be somewhere else. The only wrinkle on that, like I mentioned, is that Samuel Beatty, the guy who answered the chess club captain, he'd known William for years, and he said that it was impossible for the voice of Qualtrop to have been that of William. And you know that, like, when you know somebody that well, you can pick up their voice, like, immediately.

I mean, at least I can, I think. Was it weird for that to even be a thing? Or were people know, like, oh, I can, I know I can find the insurance guy at the chess club. We're going to get to that when we get to our conspiracy theories. You're good at this, Taylor. you would have burned through like the old hardy boy books like pretty fast i would imagine i've read i've read several as nancy drews so yes or nancy drews yeah i was i was actually gonna go with um scooby do you probably like saw the it was the cousin from the other town

i saw it like in my head yeah yeah so the other part of the the prosecution the police's theory was that what was probably used to beat her death was an iron bar and then the murderer took took the iron bar with him, presumably, in this case, William, hopped on the train and then hit it somewhere. Nobody ever found this iron bar. Nobody actually found the murder weapon ever. So on April 22nd, 1931, William goes on trial, and he was found guilty by a jury and sentenced to death,

which was the mandatory sentence. It isn't explicitly stated, but it is pretty implied that the judge overseeing his case was like, this is totally wrong. Like, this guy obviously couldn't be found guilty beyond. a reasonable doubt. One article I read about this was that in a very rare case in these situations, the judge didn't thank the jury. It was like, okay, fine, mandatory sentence, death sentence. He had no choice. He had no discretionary function here. Also, in a very unusual

turn of events, literally the first time this has ever happened in a capital criminal case in UK history, one month after this conviction and he sentenced to prison, and to death, the appellate court above the court that was trying him threw his conviction out, basically saying, like, there's no chance you could, A, it's all circumstantial, but there's varying degrees of how convincing circumstantial evidence is. And this isn't that convincing. So they threw it out. Less than two years after being released from prison, he ended up just dying of complications was caused by a kidney disease and was buried next to his wife. It was said that there was treatment for his disorder that he got from his kidney disease

and he refused treatment because his life was ruined. Everybody thought like he did it and he got away with a no J. problem, right? Like it just turned into that whole fiasco. So there are theories on who did it. So there was one guy named Joseph Caleb Marsden. He was found stealing from the entrance. company. William was a supervisor and he ended up firing him. There was some assumption that he

might have done this because when police started looking up guys named Qualtrough, they found one who was a client of Marsden. And he really didn't have a good alibi. His alibi was he was at home with the flu when all this went down. They're like Qualtrov, you have no alibi. Why wasn't he in the phone book? Oh, oh, he wasn't, it was different cities. It was different parts of the two. Yeah. And so, so that was one person. The more convincing person that most true prime authors now seem to say is like clearly the guy who did it is this guy named Richard Gordon Perry. So his alibi was that he was with his fiance when all this happened. They would later break up and she would come forth and say, no, he wasn't. He told me to tell you that. We weren't together that night. On an addition of that, he was also caught stealing. And it was basically like implied. that he should resign on his own. He was also being managed by William, who was the one who caught him stealing.

He also happened to have been in their home before, having met Julia and knew where the collection box was held because he'd been out doing the rounds with William before in the past. He also knew what days the box would be the most full, given, like, when he was going to be out doing his collections, and it would have been this night that Julie ended up being murdered. The other thing is interesting is that a garage mechanic, which I guess is where back in the day you would go to clean out cars.

He noticed that Perry had showed up at the garage and used a high pressure hose to clean off the garage. It was said and kind of strongly implied that he also had a bloody glove, again, very O.J. Simpson. But I didn't find any, like, clear evidence of that. So I'm just going to say that's a rumor. But it is interesting because in the 1960s, he ended up moving to Wales, moving far outside of town. and he changed his name, like, presumably for no obvious reason.

Did he ever, like, act like he had a lot of money or, like, buy something fancy? Yeah, so he did. So, yeah, his father was actually relatively well off. And so, again, he worked for an insurance company. So he was like a well-quoth kind of gentleman type. But it was also said that he spent super lavishly. It was assumed that he probably blew through the money he made and the money that his parents gave him. And that could have been a justification of why he did this.

Got it. So it would have been weird that he had a lot of money because his parents gave him. of money anyway. Exactly. Exactly. So, so yeah, he ended up dying

in 1981, I believe. And so technically the murder of Julia Williams is undiscovered. We don't know. We have no idea

who did it. All we have is several theories, which is, again, very Lizzie boarded me. Can you bring back deathbed confessions? Come on,

come on, guys. Yeah. Tell me who you murdered on your deathbed. Because we don't get many of those anymore, and I want to hear some. I would love to hear some. This guy I feel pretty bad for him.

It sounds like he was actually a pretty stand-up person, and it doesn't sound like he deserved what he got. And by all accounts, it doesn't sound. What's interesting is that they did several mock trials. The prosecution and the defense would do several mock trials. And there was two of them. So there was one real trial, two mock trials. both of them acquitted him of the murderer. It was only the real jury that actually found him guilty.

So, yeah. Who Wallace himself? Yeah. Well, okay, what about it being weird people call the chess club? Did we talk about that? Ah, that was the other thing. Sorry, I didn't bring that up, thanks for calling that out. So the other thing is that this guy Perry was in a drama club that also met at the same cafe that the chess club met in.

and so he what's what they have is this board that shows the matchups that are upcoming that week and so any anybody who's in the drama club would have been in there and been like okay so this is when this guy's going to be here and actually this is who he's playing so that is suspicious to me yeah yeah who do you think of it it's got to be this Perry guy I can't find convincing argument that it's anybody else that was one of the other reasons why the appellate court actually threw it out was because police were so eager to pin this on William and the husband trope that he did it that things like this mechanic seeing Perry that night were suppressed so there wasn't any counter arguments being presented saying that it could have been anybody else was like it's just this guy it has to be this guy oh it looks like though that John Parks the guy who said that Perry had come to his garage and washed his car, told people that a year before he died. So that is semi-deathbed confession. He told people that he saw him doing this. But Perry, that's not his deathbed confession. He didn't do anything wrong. He's the garage guy. No, I know. But his deathbed confession was like, his almost deathbed confession was like, this happened. It's true. You got me on that one. You got me on a technicality when you're out from his stuff.

He's only 21 Gordon Perry. It kind of overlaps, too, because I read that Agatha Chrissy also, like, she didn't write about it, but she would reference this murder in one of her books. I bet she did. So it's very fun, old true prime, old England true primie. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, like, I love, well, the pictures of it are the same as Lousie Borden's house. You know, it's like a cool, old-timey house.

Is it cool or kind of dark and scary? It's both. That I, for me, dark and scary is cool. So it's both. That's fair. That's why you would do great in a haunted house. I think I mean, I would love, love a haunted house. So, yeah, that's my story for this.

A little bit of a short one, but I wanted to go back to the true crime side of things. I was desperately looking for something obscure that is like interesting, obscure, and not covered to death. And I stumbled on this one. Thank you, Chat, GVT. Because I literally asked it, like, what is some weird mysterious unsolved deaths that people don't talk about? And it was like, look, this one. So. Yeah.

Yeah. But, yeah. So explain to me again. So the room was locked like from the inside in a weird white. or like it was just the door was just locked i couldn't get an answer to why it was such a story for him to like get into the house it was presumably that she had deadbolted the doors from the inside with no accessible key on the outside but i don't get how he got in the second time he tried the back door like that's the part of it that is like a little bit

suspicious to me is like, were you trying to make a show of it so that people would know you weren't in the house then? Right. Like that it was like extra locked. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Because even like at Lizzie Borden's house, they would like lock every door, you know, in like the weirdest way. They did this too because like I said, like at this time, there was a bunch of robberies happening, like home invasion's happening. And so people were scared. People were nervous. That was part of the reason why he said he decided to just give up on this Qualtrough guy and leave that part of town was because he was just like

it was worried he was like it's getting dark I'm nervous I could get mugged I'm nervous that my wife might get mugged I need to get out of here I get to get out of Dodge before it's any darker so yeah but but that piece of it is like interesting because I can't fully understand like what was going on with the locks that made it

such a predicament the first three times he tried and then why is he making such a if there's nothing wrong with the locks and he's making a huge scene then he might be guilty I don't know

I don't know and the phone call was made from a telephone booth 400 yards away from his house that's pretty far in a city yeah I didn't I read that too

it's cool looking phone booth did you see it I did see that yeah it looks fun But again, like, I mean, this is the 1930s. Like, people aren't reliably traveling 20 miles to do things. Everything's kind of in a tight cluster around like a city center. And they're in like, they're not in like a rural place.

They're in Liverpool, which is like a relatively big city. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. Well, I wish that we knew what happened. but that's exciting. There's so many stories like that. Taylor,

when I asked Chad GBT to spit out some stories, some of the things were so like blood curdling. I was like, I don't want to go down this. You know, remind me of the tote murder where I was like, I wish that stuff wasn't in my head. And like I started reading some of this stuff and was like, I really don't want to dispute my head. I'm going to go somewhere else.

No, there's so much stuff where I'm like, I wish I didn't know. Yeah. Like that's terrible. There's a weird. I actually don't know this for a fact, but it seemed like for some reason, like, Scandinavian countries have, like, a weird relationship with, like, unsolved, brutal murders. I don't know why, but there was a lot that came up, and I was like,

and also I was like, I can't pronounce any of these names or locations. Oh, yeah, that's hard. Yeah, yeah, it's a little too tough. Yeah. Anyways, that's my story. do we have any anything we want to read out today? No, I mean, I think

a bunch of people have just been responding to things which has been super fun. Oh, I saw Morgan, my friend Morgan, who's listened to every episode. Thank you, Morgan. She, like, binged the whole entire thing, which is awesome. And because of the show,

she found out that I was going to be in Japan and we overlapped in Kyoto and we had dinner and it was so fun. Just, like, super fun to see her. That same night, we saw our friend Dan, his band, Dirt Bike Annie, had a three show run in Japan, and we happened to be there at the same time. We saw his band play from L.A., which is also super fun. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.

Okay, so he's an L.A.-based musician, and they were touring. Yeah, and we know him because of him and Juan used to work together on The Apprentice in New York, like 20 years ago. No way. So he just happened to be there, which was really, really, really, really fun. So, yeah, so Morgan, Morgan is the mystery 15 downloads in Tokyo that you were talking about many weeks ago. Thank you, Morgan. Thank you, Morgan. Yeah, and if you know someone who needs a podcast to binge, Morgan is cool and she recommends it.

Tell your friends. Trust Morgan. Dooms to fail on all the social medias. Love it. I love it. Awesome. Well, we'll go ahead and cut things off and rejoin you all with Taylor's story. in a few days.

Woo. Oh my God.