Futility Closet - 060-The Day They Hanged an Elephant

Episode Date: June 1, 2015

In 1916 an American circus elephant named Mary was hanged before a crowd of 3,000 onlookers. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll review the sad series of events that led Mary to a Tennessee railroad crane. We'll also get an update on a very inventive bank robbery and puzzle over the escalators in London's Tube stations. Our feature on Mary was based chiefly on Charles Edwin Price's 1992 book The Day They Hung the Elephant. Our first lateral thinking puzzle this week was contributed by listener Paul Sophocleous. The second is from Kyle Hendrickson's 1998 book Mental Fitness Puzzles. Here are two links with more information about the bank robbery described in Episode 58's puzzle. (Warning -- spoilers!) Enter coupon code CLOSET at Harry's to get $5 off a special Father's Day razor set. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Episode 60. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1916, an American circus elephant named Mary became the only elephant in history to be executed by hanging.

In today's show, we'll tell Mary's story and the sad series of events that led to her death in a Tennessee rail yard. We'll also get an update on a very inventive bank robbery and puzzle over the escalators in London's tube stations. We want to let you know that there won't be a show next week, so look for the next episode of Futility Closet on June 15th. We also want to remind you that our podcast is brought to you primarily by our incredible patrons. If you like Futility Closet and want to help support the show,

check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or look for the link in our show notes. Thanks so much to everyone who helps support Futility Closet. Okay, two notes at the start of this story. One, it involves a mention of an incidence of cruelty to animals, so if you're sensitive to that, that's just something to be aware of. The second thing is this story was particularly hard to research. It's basically the story of a circus elephant that was hanged in Tennessee in 1916. So that story has been out there for 100 years, and it's just tailor-made for embroidery. So there are all sorts of bad sources, bad nude stories and folklore and just tall tales that have come up around it.

I'm getting my research mostly from Charles Edwin Price, who wrote a book about this in 1992. He's a specialist in Southern Appalachian folklore and history, and he, as far as he possibly could, got his information from eyewitnesses themselves. There were some of them still alive in 1992, and also there had been some interviews that were stored with other eyewitnesses that are kept at universities. So he looked those up and then checked them against the facts that are known. So I think this is probably as close as anyone's gotten to a fairly accurate account of what happened. There is no doubt that the bare facts are true that in 1916, a five-ton circus elephant was basically lynched from a railroad crane car in the little town of Irwin, Tennessee. The story starts with a man named Walter Eldridge,

his nickname was Red, who was a handyman at the Riverside Hotel in St. Paul, Virginia. On September 11, 1916, he learned that the Sparks World Famous Shows was coming to town. Sparks was a moderate-sized circus that toured the American South with, among other things, five elephants. The largest elephant was Mary. On the handbills, she was billed as the largest living land animal on earth, three inches taller than Jumbo and weighing over five tons. That's probably an exaggeration to some extent, but she was very big by all accounts. As a boy, Red Eldridge had worked odd jobs for circuses back in the Midwest. No one's quite sure where he came from exactly, perhaps Indiana, but he didn't like his job at the hotel, so he quit and went hoping that the circus would have an opening for him, and sure

enough they did. He was assigned to prepare the elephants for the parade that took place every day before the performance. So he led an elephant that afternoon, named Mabel, during that parade, and he watched the performance that evening, which went fine, and then he rode with the elephants in their car as the train carried them across the state line overnight to the next engagement, which was in Kingsport, Tennessee. In Kingsport, the matinee performance went well, and afterwards, before the evening performance, the elephant trainers planned to take the elephants to a pond, which is only half a mile from the circus grounds up Center Street, so they could drink and wade, which apparently elephants like to do.

Eldridge was happy about that because he'd be able to ride Mary the Giant Elephant. This wasn't organized as any kind of performance or a parade, but it's sort of informally amounted to that. They drew some onlookers as they went up Center Street. informally amounted to that. They drew some onlookers as they went up Center Street, the five elephants walking in the classic circus trunk-to-tail procession fashion. And each elephant had a trainer on her back. One of the onlookers was a man named William Coleman, who was 19 years old at the time. He remembers that each beast bore a rider, and each rider had a stick to help keep the elephants under control.

The elephants walked up Center Street and what Coleman remembers is that they had barely gotten off the circus grounds when they came upon some pigs that were eating a watermelon rind by the side of the road. And this attracted Mary's attention and she paused.

Eldridge, who's on her back, prodded her to keep her moving and she shook a little and snorted and she started to Eldridge, who's on her back, prodded her to keep her moving, and she shook a little and snorted, and she started to reach for the rind with her trunk. Oh, so she wanted the watermelon rind that the pigs had. Apparently elephants like watermelon. She was in the front of the line, so the elephants behind her started to back up, causing sort of a roadblock, and people in the crowd that had gathered began to laugh at Eldridge's apparent inability to keep her obeying him and keep the whole thing moving forward.

So apparently he was anxious not to hold up the line anymore, and he was getting a little embarrassed at this laughter, so he whacked her pretty sharply on the side of the head with his stick. She picked him up with her trunk, held him in the air, and then flung him into a wooden soft drink stand. Ooh. honk, held him in the air, and then flung him into a wooden soft drink stand. Then she walked over to where he was lying, immobile, and basically stepped on his head.

Coleman, this 19-year-old witness, said later he didn't know. He may already have been dead when she stepped on him. I mean, he wasn't moving. Anyway, people screamed at that and scattered, thinking this was a rogue elephant. And a local blacksmith, whose name was Hench Cox, ran for his shop and returned with a pistol. Mary wasn't doing anything threatening. I mean, after she had stepped on Eldridge, she just stood there, basically. The other elephants were trumpeting loudly, and the other trainers let down from their elephants.

Some of them ran to see after Eldridge, and the others just tried to keep the elephants under control. So no one was really in any danger, it looks like here. They were just scared. Cox, the blacksmith, assumed that one of the elephants had gone berserk, and Mary happened to be standing closest to him, so he fired five times at her. She groaned and shook, but just stood there. The gun he had was a.32-20 pistol, which is apparently not the gun you would choose to go elephant hunting. It's not even clear that the bullets penetrated her hide. She wasn't badly hurt, and she didn't attack anyone further. Coleman, the witness, stood his ground along with some other people, and a couple roustabouts rushed to calm Mary down. The crowd began to calm down itself when it saw that she wasn't going to just go around killing people.

wasn't going to just go around killing people. So, but unfortunately, some of them, seeing Eldridge's body, began to chant, kill the elephant. Oh. The other trainers just tried to keep the elephants under control. All of this had happened. They'd barely gotten up Center Street off the circus grounds. They were only a few feet away. So Charlie Sparks, the owner of the circus, heard this commotion and heard the shots and

came as quickly as he could. Mary was under control, but the owner of the circus, heard this commotion and heard the shots and came as quickly as he could. Mary was under control, but the crowd were still chanting, kill the elephant. And Sparks, the owner of the circus, told the crowd that he'd be willing to kill her, but he said, quote, there ain't gun enough in this country that she could be killed. He was saying basically that it was impossible to kill her. It seems clear, if you read between the lines that he was hoping that the whole thing could maybe blow over um he was i mean any death is awful but at least he was it wasn't a townsperson who had been killed it was a circus employee um and uh the problem here is that this wasn't the first time that a circus elephant had killed a person,

but it doesn't usually happen out in public like that. Usually it happens when they're loading a car or something. Oh, so this is much more public, yeah. What had happened normally, at least according to Price, is that if a circus elephant kills someone, it would be quietly traded or sold to another circus, which would give it a different name, and things would continue in that way.

Elephants aren't generally dangerous enough to be worth killing, so that was a way to get past the whole unpleasantness without having to kill the animal. The problem here is that this had happened out in the open in front of a whole lot of sort of unenlightened witnesses who didn't understand any of that, and so it was hard to just hope that the whole business would blow over. In fact, it quickly grew worse. This happened in Kingsport, Tennessee. The next engagement was in a little town called Irwin. And the two beyond that were Johnson City and Rogersville. Both of those, Johnson City and Rogersville, said, look, your circus is welcome to come here and play, but we're not taking that elephant. We don't want a murderous

elephant in our town. And that was a problem from a business standpoint for Sparks because that was the whole circus's livelihood. I mean, if you have a circus, you have to have business just to keep it going. So this whole thing quickly became a problem and it grew worse as the publicity grew wider. That night, they had to go on with the show that evening with the evening performance, and Mary did perform in that.

The big top was filled to overflowing, and in fact, about half of Kingsport came out because they wanted to see the killer elephant. But the elephants got through it fine, and they were calm. There was no problem with that. But if Sparks had hoped that the whole thing would blow over, he was disappointed the next morning because newspaper accounts came out already sort of lurid and overemphasizing what had happened and how dangerous Mary was. She was acquiring the nickname Murderous Mary already.

And the authorities were growing uneasy. The circus packed up, left Kingsport and headed southeast for the next engagement, which was in a little railroad town called Irwin, where they arrived on September 13th, 1916. The publicity continued, unfortunately. That morning, a newspaper called the Johnson City Staff informed the people back in Kingsport, the city they just left, of Eldridge's death, and the citizens were growing uneasy there because his killer was still alive and possibly able to kill again. The mayors of Johnson City and Rogersville were still saying,

we won't have your elephant in our towns. Fortunately, the little railroad town they were in at this moment, Irwin, was willing to let them perform. So they had a little bit of time to think about this and see what developed. And Mary, as I say, was now so notorious that it would be nearly impossible for Sparks to sell her to another circus. And as I say, he can't, I mean, cold as it sounds, he can't afford to have this problem. You can't just sort of stand on principle and say, well, we're going to, you know,

just live with an elephant if we can't have business. The people who work for the circus depend for their livelihood on performing. So it's just hard to know what to do. And I'm sure a circus has a lot of costs even when they're not performing. I mean, they've got all the people that they need to pay, but they have all the animals they need to tend. And so there's continual costs and you have to have continuous revenue to offset the costs. Mary was worth about $8,000, which is a small fortune in 1916.

And she was uninsured, which means that if they did kill her, that the circus would have to absorb, just to add more to the trouble here, they'd have to absorb the cost. Also, she was the star of the show. She was this big elephant. She was on all the handbills. So without her, they'd have to come up with some new way to advertise the whole show, even to keep going. So it was a huge problem for Sparks.

But the publicity, bad publicity, kept going. Rumors were now spreading that Mary had killed as many as 15 men in the past. Oh, wow. Sparks had also heard that the state of Tennessee might order Mary destroyed and that a vigilante committee might be coming from Kingsport with a Civil War cannon to kill Mary themselves. So Sparks sat down with his publicist, the circus publicist, a man named John Heron, and Heron said that they'd have to destroy Mary.

It seemed like that was the only way to get out of this. No one wanted to. The people in the circus knew that she wasn't a monster. She was a living creature that they'd spent years with, and a lot of them had a lot of attachment to it. But it seemed there was no other way of getting out of the situation. So Irwin was basically a railroad town. The Clinchfield Railroad had a repair yard there, so they talked to an engineer there. His first suggestion, which everyone today is glad they didn't pursue, was to tie her head to one train and her body to another one.

Oh, no! They didn't do that. They just rejected that idea. So he thought about it some more and said, well, there's a 100-ton derrick that was currently being used to unload lumber in Johnson City, and he thought we could... Mary weighs five tons. This derrick would be strong enough to hang her like a gallows, basically, with a chain. So Heron, the publicist, favored that idea.

He said, this is a terrible situation all around, but we can try our best to make the best of it. The circus will get some publicity out of this. The killing will be public enough that these dubious towns of Johnson City and Rogersville will be convinced beyond any doubt that Mary was dead. And it was relatively humane, at least more humane than shooting her with a cannon.

So he recommended doing it right away that day, immediately after the matinee, and Sparks finally agreed to this. Mary didn't perform on the Wednesday afternoon matinee. She was staked out by both feet in front of the main tent, obviously nervous. She knew a performance was going on and she was used to being involved in those,

plus all the humans were acting strange. So her trainer thought that chaining both feet might be wise. The matinee went fine with the other four elephants. Some matinee attendees were unhappy that Mary had not appeared, but they were pleased to learn that she'd be killed immediately afterward and that they could attend the spectacle for free. People can be so bloodthirsty. Also, keep in mind this is 100 years ago,

so more reason people think differently about these things today. Anyway, shortly after 4 p.m., a crowd started to assemble in the Clinchfield Rail Yard. Those people who left the circus matinee just walked over, but there were lots of people there. The crowd is estimated at about 3,000 at the peak, which

is more people than actually lived in Irwin, Tennessee. People came by wagons, on horses, afoot, and even by car. Mary's trainer saw that Mary was nervous and knew this was only going to get worse, so she decided to be dangerous to lead her to the rail yard alone. And so we come to what I think is the saddest part of this whole story. They decided to take the whole herd of elephants, all five of them down there, walking in this grim procession, trunk to tail, just like a circus procession,

through the rain down to the rail yard where one of them was going to die, hoping this would calm her down, marry down. So they did that. One of the witnesses saw this from the top of a boxcar, and so we have a record that these elephants were seen coming, someone called Here Come the Elephants. And behind the five elephants walking in procession were the circus people themselves

in a double file, some looking sad and some crying. One witness noticed the elephant handlers were having trouble keeping the elephants together and moving. Mary, who was still very nervous, trumpeted and stopped and squatted on the ground and the handlers had to use the other elephants to get her going again. They finally got to the rail yard about 500 feet farther down the track from where they had this derrick. Some railroad laborers and roustabouts

had dug a hole for Mary's body. One witness, Bud Jones, said the hole was as big as a barn. The roustabouts chained Mary's leg to a rail

where she swayed and shook and trumpeted. She's still very... The rail yard environment itself wouldn't have been upsetting to her because the circus traveled by rail and she even helped unload the rail yard environment itself wouldn't have been upsetting to her because the circus traveled by rail and she even helped unload the cars.

But she wouldn't have been used to seeing this many people and this much sort of energy. And as you said, yeah, people were probably acting nervous or upset. Yeah. And she was probably picking that up. So she was in place and the handlers let off the other elephants so they wouldn't witness what was going to happen. And that upset her the more one of the roustabouts took the end of a seven eighth inch chain dangling from the derrick boom and threw it around mary's neck and fitted it through a steel ring and then the operator a man named sam harvey threw the stick

forward the derrick motor reeled in the chain which tightened around mary's neck and she basically lifted her off the ground i I'll get through this quickly. She started, she was, they got her about five or six feet off the ground and she was struggling a bit when there became a report like a rifle crack and she fell to the ground. The chain had parted. She was too heavy for that. The crowd started to run thinking now they had an enraged rogue elephant on their hands, but she just sat on her haunches. It turned out later that she'd broken her hip in the fall, so she just sat there. So finally, when it became clear that she was not dangerous, a roustabout ran up her back and attached a heavier chain, and the crowd started drifting back to the scene. Sam Harvey engaged the winch again, and they lifted her into the air.

This chain held, and a few minutes later, she was dead. That's most of what there is to tell. The Sparks Circus presented its evening show in Irwin that evening to an estimated 2,000 people. Nearly all of them had watched the hanging. The remaining elephants seemed nervous, but they got through the show fine. And I don't know what happened beyond that, but presumably Johnson City and Rogersville had lifted their bans now that Mary was demonstrably dead and Sparks probably temporarily got some kind of boost in attendance due to the publicity. I don't know what happened to the further history of that show.

Mary's was buried in the hole they had dug for her but the location of that grave has been lost so somewhere in an old rail yard in Irwin, Tennessee there's the body of an elephant, and maybe it's just as well she deserves some peace now. This episode is supported by our patrons and by Harry's, who remind you that Father's Day is coming up and that guys are notoriously hard to shop for. You don't want to get your dad a generic tie that he won't use, or another pair of socks, or break the bank with anything extravagant. So get your dad something this year that's personal

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That's H-A-R-R-Y-S dot com and enter coupon code CLOSET at checkout for $5 off. Harry's, a shave good enough to give. It's my turn to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg's going to present me with a situation, and I'm going to try to uncover it using asking only yes or no questions. This is submitted by listener Paul Sofoclaus. Okay. At many of London's tube train stations, there are two escalators going up from the platform,

but only one escalator going down. Why is this? Two escalators going up from the platform. You mean the train platform? Yes. Just want to make sure I understand the question. Going up from the train platform to the street? Yes.

Okay. And there's only one escalator going down from the street to the train platform? Yeah. Okay. Just checking. I wasn't sure I understood the question properly. No, you got to check everything. Okay.

And we want to know why that is. Two going up and one going down. Because when the train shows up, you have a whole lot of people who get off all at the same time and they all need to get up to the street at the same time, whereas people arrive at all different times. So you only need one escalator going down. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Fortunately, knowing you.

Thank you for that, Paul. I appreciate it. Well, it's an interesting trivia fact that I didn't know, and now I know a new trivia fact. You taught yourself a new trivia fact. I had another one in my holster here because I thought, knowing you, that you might get through the first one quickly. This one is from Kyle Hendrickson's book, 1998 book, Mental Fitness Puzzles.

After buying a new oven, Gerald sold his old one to a stranger. Although the stranger offered to pay cash, Gerald nonetheless had a very good reason for insisting that the transaction take place at a bank. Rather than be offended, the stranger clearly understood the reason for this unusual request. Why did Gerald make this demand? So he wanted to sell his old oven while physically inside a bank. Is that what the puzzle is? Uh, no. No. Okay. Okay. Gerald is selling an old oven. Yes. Gerald is selling this oven to another person. That's right. You said he wanted to make this transaction while at a bank? Yes.

But the transaction is not the selling of the oven. Well, it's... The receiving of the remuneration for the oven? They're not actually carting the oven into the bank. Okay. I can't tell if that's what you're asking. Okay. But, oh, oh, so he just wanted to, like, receive the payment for the oven while in a bank?

Yes, that's right. And the stranger understood why this would be? That's right. Okay. Does it have something to do with any property or characteristic of the oven itself? No. Okay. Okay.

Does it have something to do with the way in which Gerald was going to be paid? Meaning the form of payment or the method of receiving the payment? No, I was saying that. Does it matter what country this takes place in? No. What time period? No. No, okay.

Does Gerald have any physical characteristics or interesting things about him that I need to know? Yes. Yes. Does Gerald have any physical characteristics or interesting things about him that I need to know? Yes. Yes. Does Gerald have what would be called a disability, like he's blind or hard of hearing or something like that? Yes. You're laughing at me. Okay.

Okay. I don't know what I'm going to do with you. Okay. Okay. So Gerald has visual problems? Yes. Okay. So he wanted the transaction to take place in a bank so that somebody else could vouch for that he was receiving the right amount of money. Basically, you've got it.

Gerald is blind and fears he would be shortchanged by the purchaser if the bank teller would ensure the proper amount is paid. Ah, okay. You're, if anything, getting better at these. Just lucky some days, I think. Better at these. Just lucky some days, I think. Well, the puzzles went kind of quickly, but actually, we have a really interesting follow-up to the puzzle that we did in episode 58.

And that was the one about the robber who posted an ad listing the time and the place of his robbery. We are making this the last segment in today's show so that if you haven't heard that puzzle yet and you don't want to have it spoiled for you, you can stop listening to this episode now without missing anything else after this. Yeah. So this will be the last segment. So you can just turn this off if you don't want to be spoiled. Um, if you have already heard the puzzle, uh, you might remember that it was based on

an actual event and Adam France wrote in to let us know that they caught the guy that, uh, had conducted that robbery and that quite a lot is known about him and the circumstances of the robbery. Adam sent in a link to a Wikipedia article that we'll include in the show notes, and it gives a lot of background on the robber, Anthony Curcio, and his various crimes. Curcio was involved in a number of thefts and scams and schemes, but his robbery of a Brinks armored car in 2008, which was the basis for that puzzle, was kind of his really big one.

Curcio's story is a case of a promising life that went really wrong. He was captain of the football and basketball teams in high school, winning many awards in both sports. He went on to earn a football scholarship at the University of Idaho, which had been a childhood dream of his. But then a football injury at age 19 ended his sports career and led to an addiction to pain pills. And everything kind of went downhill from there. Despite going for several rounds of drug treatment over the next few years, Curcio kept relapsing and his drug use just worsened. By his mid-20s, he had had various business setbacks, and the stresses of that had caused his drug habit to just progress.

So at that point, he had a habit that was costing him almost $15,000 a month in drug use. Yeah, because he was using various substances at this point. And then one day, while on the verge of financial ruin, he was at a jack-in-the-box near a Bank of America when he saw an armored car pull up to the bank. And what followed next is like the plot of a heist movie. Curcio then spent three months watching this armored car make its deliveries to a Bank of America branch in Monroe, Washington. And he took really careful notes of the schedule of the deliveries, the location of the bank cameras, and the armored car's blind spots. He spent weeks trying to work out a way to use a nearby creek for his escape route, even spending considerable time trying to dig a trench in part of the creek to make it deep enough for a jet ski to go over. I guess a creek because it's harder for pursuers to.

I guess so. And yeah, I mean, well, I suppose it's like if you have a jet ski and other people don't and plus they might not think to look in the creek and I guess you wouldn't leave a trail if you're on water. Yeah, I guess if they had, if you did it really, really well, then even dogs couldn't follow you. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know why he was choosing that as his escape route, but he was, and he thought that would be the best way to go. Because, I mean, if they seal off the streets or, you know, somebody on the streets could see you. Yeah, that's true. So there was like this, you know, this kind of creak.

So anyway, he tried to like trench it out for a jet ski, and that totally didn't work out. So he kept coming up with different plans and finally worked out a whole complicated cable pulley system that he could set up and use to haul himself and bags of cash in an inner tube. He had mentioned in the puzzle that he escaped in an inner tube, which I didn't completely understand, but that's how he did it. And then as mentioned in the puzzle setup, Curcio placed an ad on Craigslist seeking workers for a supposed city cleanup project and specified exactly what the workers should wear, including safety goggles and painter's masks, which would obscure everybody's faces, right?

And had them meet in the Bank of America parking lot at the same time that Curcio planned to rob the armored car. Which in itself looks innocent. I mean, there's nothing fishy about that right up until now. There's nothing alarming, yeah. You've got a group of workers showing up and they all believe that they're showing up for a job that they're going to be paid for. I guess they were all pretty disappointed. So then, you know, dressed exactly like this whole group of workers that's all milling about the parking lot,

Curcio pepper-sprayed the armor card guard, grabbed two bags of money containing more than $400,000 in cash, and ran towards the creek. The police arrived to a crime scene, which is just filled with men all matching the robber's description. Perfect. I mean, you know, he's like this clever. You think, wow, what else he could have thought to do in life if he couldn't put this much time and ingenuity into things, right?

Yeah, really. So he escaped to the creek and pulled himself, using his cable and pulley system, pulled himself to where a getaway driver was waiting for him. And he might have gotten away with the whole thing. I mean, the police were just perplexed and didn't even know where to start, except that a homeless man had seen Curcio

retrieving his disguise from behind a trash bin where he'd apparently been storing it. That's all. That's all. That's all. That's it. That's the only thing that he did wrong. And the man thought this was so odd that he wrote down the license plate number of Curcio's car at the time, and then he provided that to the police after the robbery occurred.

So that caused the FBI to begin surveillance on Curcio, and they managed to get his DNA off of a drink bottle that he threw out at a gas station. I mean, this really sounds like something out of like a TV show or a movie, but this is really how they did it. They matched the DNA on the drink bottle to DNA found on a mask and a wig that Curcio had discarded near the crime scene before he got into the creek. But even that sort of, I mean, it sounds like he didn't really have any kind of criminal record before this happened.

Well, he did have some other small things that he had done, and that helped indict him, too, in the end. But they wouldn't have had his DNA. No, they wouldn't have. Right. If it hadn't been for the homeless man getting his license plate— He likely would have gotten away with it. He likely would have gotten away with this. I mean, I don't think the police had any strong leads before this.

So it really was the man's— That's really well thought out. I know. And I guess it shows you know crime doesn't pay you'll always get caught yeah really that's like

putting a moral lesson in here he couldn't possibly have the thing that caught off is something he couldn't possibly have foreseen he planned it so incredibly well and then as you just get tripped up by

right something you couldn't foresee just one piece of bad luck you know you just because it sounds like everything else

if that hadn't happened, everything else came off the way it came. Very possibly. I mean, you never know. Something else might have eventually, eventually tipped the police off. But that was what did it. He then spent five years in prison

and completed a drug treatment program while there, which seems so far to have kind of stuck this time. After his release, he gave an interview to the Seattle Times on the condition that they don't glamorize his crime I mean he's really not very proud of this whole thing I mean it sounds so clever and inventive but he doesn't want people to take it as this you know glamorous thing like sometimes we do in society with amazing crimes like you almost root for the criminal

yeah because it is impressive it is pretty impressive I mean I don't think I could have come up with this. Curcio said that he had finally found a certain peace while in prison, and he told the Seattle Times reporter, make it clear I know I was a loser, a liar, and a piece of expletive. And make it clear that people can change. He says that while in prison, he finally came to realize, I had always blamed other people, made excuses and justified

my actions. I finally had to admit to myself that I was the reason I was there. Nobody did it to me. I did it to myself. And Curcio now gives speeches to students about the allure and dangers of drug use and the importance of always making good choices. Although he says it's important to him to get his message out that people can make better choices and change he says i feel like this will never go away i will always be known as the guy who did this he sounds like i mean not to excuse what he did but he sounds like a good person at heart yeah yeah i mean and um he feels like i mean this is like his whole life is going to be marked by this like that he he he lives almost like a hermit now. Like afraid to leave his house. Because he feels like everybody.

Is looking at him. And thinking that he's the guy. Who did this. And that's all they're going to associate with him. He feels like. He also feels like he let a lot of people down. Like he had a lot of promise in his early life. And that he sort of let everybody down.

He. I mean it wasn't. It was the painkillers that led him down that road. That's what started it, yeah. It's not that he was just. Evil, yeah. He also blames what he says was putting a priority on the wrong things in life. He says that he was overvaluing things like money and prestige and status

when those aren't really the most important things. Also, he really paid his debt, you know, whatever debt he owed to society, he paid, so he sort of deserves... Hi, kitty cat. Sasha has shown up to weigh in on the whole subject. I really like this story. So you think, you know, he was caught, and he did his time. He sort of deserves a right

to start over and have this forgotten, and he kind of isn't getting it. We especially enjoy lateral thinking puzzles that are based on real stories, and this one turned out to be a particularly interesting story. It was a good puzzle, but it led to a really interesting story. And it was also a nice change from the

lethal puzzles that many of our puzzles turned out to be. That's true. No one died. And if you have a lateral thinking puzzle that we could perhaps use on our show, whether it's real or not, or lethal or not, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That wraps up another episode for us. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, you can check out our books on Amazon, follow us on Twitter or Facebook, or visit the website

at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample over 8,000 captivating diversions. At the website, Thank you. Futility Closet. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us or by clicking the donate button on the sidebar of the website. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening. Thank you.