Futility Closet - 097-The Villisca Ax Murders

Episode Date: March 14, 2016

Early one morning in 1912, the residents of Villisca, Iowa, discovered a horrible scene: An entire family had been brutally murdered in their sleep. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the gruesome crime, which has baffled investigators for a hundred years. We'll also follow the further adventures of German sea ace Felix von Luckner and puzzle over some fickle bodyguards. 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. Sources for our feature on the Villisca ax murders: Roy Marshall, Villisca, 2003. “Suspect Is Held for Ax Murders,” [Spokane, Wash.] Spokesman-Review, May 15, 1917. “Says He Killed Eight at God's Command,” New York Times, Sept. 2, 1917. “Tells of Killing Six With an Axe in 1912,” Associated Press, March 29, 1931. “Iowa Town Marks 90th Anniversary of Unsolved Ax Murders,” Associated Press, June 9, 2002. “Infamous Villisca Ax Donated to Villisca Historical Society,” Spencer [Iowa] Daily Reporter, Oct. 31, 2006. Listener Rini Rikka writes, "Doch is very hard to comprehend for someone who is just starting to learn German. Besides the main usage as a short answer, it has lots of other meanings that help shorten the speech a bit. Unfortunately for the non-natives, those other meanings cannot always be translated with the same word, but with some practice you'll get the feeling where and how to use it. If you'd like to read about it, here’s a good explanation of the word in English." This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener David White, who sent these corroborating links (warning: these spoil the puzzle). 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.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]. 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 9,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Episode 97. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Early one morning in 1912, the residents of Villisca, Iowa, discovered something horrible. An entire family had been brutally murdered in their sleep.

In today's show, we'll describe the gruesome crime, which has baffled investigators for a hundred years. We'll also follow the further adventures of German sea ace Felix von Luckner, and puzzle over some fickle bodyguards. Felix von Luckner, and puzzle over some fickle bodyguards. On Monday morning, June 10th, 1912, Mary Peckham was growing concerned about her neighbors. They lived side by side in the little town of Villisca in southwestern Iowa, population 2,000. There were six people in the Moore family, the parents, Joe and Sarah, and their four children, three boys and a girl. All of them were early risers, but it was 7 a.m. now and none of them had appeared yet. Mary sensed what she later called an

odd stillness at the Moore house. The curtains were down, their livestock were growing restless, and no one answered the door when she knocked. So finally at 8 a.m. she turned out their chickens for them and called Ross Moore, who was Joe's brother. The Moores had last been seen the previous evening when they'd all attended a program at the Presbyterian church that the mother, Sarah Moore, had coordinated. And then afterward, they'd all walked home. The program ended at 9.30, and they walked home accompanied by two friends of their daughter, who were planning to spend the night that evening. They all would have arrived back at the house between 9.45 and 10 p.m. Ross arrived shortly after she called him and had

a key, so while Mary stood on the porch, he opened the door and went inside. The ground floor of the house had a kitchen, a parlor, and a guest bedroom, and when he looked into the guest bedroom, he saw that the sheets had been pulled to the top of the beds, but that he could see forms under them, and there were dark stains at the heads of the beds, and a limb extended awkwardly from beneath the covers. So we came quickly back out of the house and told Mary to call the town marshal, a man named Hank Horton. Horton went through the house and found that all eight people, ages 5 to 43, had been bludgeoned to death in their sleep with an axe that night, and their bodies had been covered with bedsheets. Doctors concluded that the murders had taken place between midnight and 5 a.m. The bodies that Ross had seen in the guest bedroom were the two visiting friends, sisters,

Lena and Ina Sillinger, ages 8 and 11. Their mother had called the Moore home early that morning just to ask when her daughters would be coming home and was surprised to find that no one answered. When she tried to place the call again, the telephone operator told her, everyone in that house is dead. Oh, what a thing if you're a parent. Yeah. Oh, wow. And the whole thing was a thunderbolt

because this sort of thing doesn't happen anywhere, actually, but certainly not in a little town in Iowa. There's a story about one couple got the news just as they were getting onto a train leaving Villisca. The train made one stop, and by the time they got to their destination, the news had beaten them there. That's how fast the word spread. Investigators believe that all the victims in the house had been asleep when killed. Ask me how that's possible.

How is that possible? I don't know. To me, that's the most confounding part of this whole business. The killer, it appears, started in one upstairs bedroom where the two parents were sleeping, killed them, then went to the other upstairs bedroom where their four children were all sleeping, and then downstairs to the guest bedroom where the two visiting girls were. And it was all done so silently that nobody woke up, unless they were all sedated? Yeah, that's one possibility. So basically, the bottom line is three times that night, the killer would have had to enter a room where multiple people were sleeping,

kill all of them with an axe without waking any of them up and i just don't see how that's possible that confused people at the time as well they thought perhaps he'd subdued them with ether or poison or something how do they know they were sleeping at the time i guess because of the way the bodies were positioned yeah remember this is 1912 so forensics weren't nearly what they are now um if it's possible that he did subdue them in some other way before attacking them, but that just, I think, invites more questions. If you have poison or ether, why don't you just use that? Why use an axe at all? And even if you have one of those things, how would you administer ether to eight people?

It just invites more questions. Another possibility is that there was more than one killer, and they coordinated their actions, but that just seems even harder to explain as well. So no one knows. This crime is still unsolved. It's the longest unsolved murder in Iowa history. Here are some more creepy details. The axe belonged to Joe, the father. It was normally kept either in the woodshed or on a pile of kindling in the backyard, and it was left leaning afterward against the wall of the guest bedroom. The whole crime has sort of an offhand quality to it. There's no strong evidence that it was premeditated to any great extent.

It looks like someone picked up an axe in the yard, killed eight people, and then left the axe leaning against the wall and went on his way. And they just don't see any motive for it. No, which makes it harder to investigate. The window shades were all drawn and the doors were covered with clothing so that no light could get out from the house, in the words of the attorney general. All the mirrors in the house were also covered. There were gouge marks in the upstairs ceiling in both the parents' and the children's rooms, which were thought to have been made by the backswing of the axe. These were seven feet off the floor. None of the victims received an injury below the neck,

but, I'm trying to say this delicately, their heads were reduced to unrecognizability. Very badly beaten. It looked like the coroner estimated that each one had actually been struck first with the flat of the axe to incapacitate them, and then the killer had come back afterwards with the sharp edge of it, apparently several times. Each person had been struck 20 to 30 times with the axe. The one who'd been hurt most badly or damaged most badly at that point was Josiah the father, who'd been hit as many as 30 times with an axe, which is an incredibly high number. If you count from one to 30 and imagine each of those numbers as the stroke of an axe,

it's an incredibly violent act. The father's pocket watch had been carried from the master bedroom downstairs and left in the guest bedroom there. A two-pound slab of bacon wrapped in a piece of cloth was found on the floor of the downstairs bedroom near the ax. They found another piece of bacon about the same size in the icebox, so it's thought that that's where he got it from. But it was just lying there on the floor. A bowl of bloody water was on the kitchen table. A short piece of keychain was on the floor of the downstairs bedroom. Also on the floor of the downstairs bedroom was a table lamp with the chimney removed,

and a kerosene floor lamp was at the foot of the bed in the parents' upstairs bedroom. It's thought that the killer let himself in through the back door, found a lamp, and split the wick so that he could light it to find his way through the house without casting enough light to wake anyone up. And then he left it at the foot of the bed, I guess, while he was killing people, and it just went out there. And he moved the bacon around. I don't know.

I'm trying to think. These must be clues. They are. You've got to figure that whole house was full of DNA evidence and all that other stuff, and it was just the fact that it happened to happen in 1912 means that there was no way of using it. All the doors leading into the house were locked, and most of those were latched from within, could only be latched from within. So he must have left after all this by the front door, locking it with a key and just taking the key with him as he went on his way.

If you think about it, all this business that I've just described, he couldn't have done that before the murders because he was bound to wake someone up. So he killed eight people instead of fleeing the scene. He stayed in the house for some time doing all this other business. Moving pocket watches and bacon. And apparently returning periodically to the bodies to just attack them some more. As I say, this case is unsolved, but it's certainly not for lack of trying.

In 1970, the 17, the Iowa attorney general wrote to the U.S. Senator W.S. Kenyon saying that they examined 160 witnesses and that, quote, the most thorough search has failed to disclose any possible motive on the part of any person to commit this awful crime. I'll go through a brief list of some of the canonical suspects, but most of them have alibis. Most of them just they can't possibly have done it. The first of them is Andy Sawyer, a transient who approached a railroad crew in Creston, which is about an hour from Villisca by train. At 6 a.m. on the night, on the morning, the murders were discovered. He was clean-shaven and wearing a brown suit, but his shoes were covered in mud and his pants were wet nearly to the knees. He asked for work for the day and they gave it to him. He got a hold of a newspaper during the day that had an account of the murder and he showed a great deal of interest in it, wondering who had

done it. He was apparently very good with an axe, according to the people who were working with him and in fact slept with his axe, but that's all circumstantial and I would be interested in a murder like that too if I saw a newspaper account of it. As I say, he had an alibi. He was, he could prove he'd been in Osceola, Iowa on the night of the murders. He'd been arrested for vagrancy there and the sheriff recalled putting him on a train, so he didn't do it. A couple other connections to the family who sort of had grudges against him, I guess you could say, Sam Moyer and Lee Van Gilder. Sam Moyer was Josiah's, the father's brother-in-law. He'd apparently threatened at some point to kill Josiah, but he had a valid alibi. He'd married one of Joe's younger sisters

a few years before and didn't support her very well, and it fell to Joe to support her financially, so there was kind of ill will between them. Lee Van Gilder was the divorced husband of one of the mother's sisters. It was rumored that he was prone to violence and had hard feelings toward his ex-wife, and he'd had some problems with the law. The problem is both of them, Moyer and Van Gilder, were cleared. They both were located living out of state, and it was established that neither of them was in Iowa at the time of the crimes. Now we get to the interesting suspects, and I guess the two most commonly discussed suspects. The first one is Frank F. Jones, who was actually one of the most prominent members of the Villisca community. He was a bank president, the owner of a hardware and farm

implement business, and a successful state representative. He was a former two-term state senator, and the Republicans were grooming him as the next candidate for governor. He had at least two reasons to have a grudge against Joe Moore. Joe had actually worked for him for seven years, but left in 1907 to set up a rival implement dealership and took the valuable John Deere account with him. So they were sort of business rivals. That's one reason. The other was that the father was rumored to have slept with Jones's daughter-in-law, who'd had numerous affairs. Because Jones was so prominent and because he was 57 years old, it's thought that if he was involved in this in any way, he wouldn't

have committed the murders himself. But it was conceivable that he would hire someone else to do it for him. The problem is that the detective who was investigating all this stuff decided that the man he would have hired if he'd done it was a man named William Mansfield, who, in fact, a couple of years later, was the chief suspect in another axe murder, this one in Illinois. The problem is that Mansfield had a cast iron alibi for these murders. Payroll records show that he'd been working several hundred miles away in Illinois at the time. That leaves, I think, the most interesting suspect, a Presbyterian minister named George Kelly, who had just arrived in Villisca on the afternoon before the murders. And he actually attended the church service that the whole Moore family went to that evening and sat by himself there. He stayed that night after the program with a local pastor and his wife at their home and then left by a very early train the next morning.

This was June, and the pastor's wife had allergies, so it was their custom in the summer months to sleep outside in a tent in their backyard, which means that Kelly had the house to himself that whole night. He went to his room between 1030 and 11, and then, as I said, left Villisca very early the next morning on the 519 AM train. So it's conceivable that he left the house. The house was just two blocks west of the Moore house. So he would have had time to leave the house, go through the dark to this random house, pick up an axe in the yard, kill everyone, and get back in time to pack up his stuff and leave by the train before his hosts woke up. That's the theory, at least. The two pieces of

evidence that are generally held against him are that when he left the train in Macedonia, Iowa, about 8 or 8.30 on Monday morning, an elderly couple there at the station alleged, testified, that he told them the news of the murder, which he couldn't possibly have known at that point because the bodies were just being discovered at that moment. That's one thing. The problem with that is that they later recanted their testimony, so we can't really know what to make of that. That's one thing. The other thing is that he gave a bloody shirt to the laundry, asking them to clean it, which certainly would be damning if they had DNA evidence at the time, I suppose. But he claimed it was his own blood.

He said variously that he had a nosebleed or had cut himself shaving or that the stains were hair tonic. And I think if you've killed eight people with an ax— There'd be a lot of blood you would spank. You'd maybe just let that shirt go instead of trying to get it laundered. Yeah, I mean, I don't think you could pass it off as like a shaving injury, you know, with the amount... I don't know. He certainly was a troubled man.

He was sort of a peeping Tom, but there was no violence in his past. He was mentally ill, is what we'd call him today. Doctors who examined testified variously that he was crazy and capable of anything or crazy and capable of admitting to anything. So you can come down on either side of that question. Also, he was 5'2 and weighed 120 pounds, so it's hard to imagine him wielding an axe and killing eight people, although it's not impossible.

He did have the opportunity. Well, and also he would have had to have made these gouges in the seven-foot-high ceiling. That's a good point. So he would need to be a little bit taller maybe. What he didn't have was a motive. He'd never been to Villisca before. He didn't know the murdered family. The only motive that the prosecution at his trial could come up with was that he doesn't

like children, that he had a record as a peeping Tom, and that he happened to be working on a sermon that included the phrase, slay utterly, which, okay, that he had a record as a peeping Tom, and that he happened to be working on a sermon that included the phrase, slay utterly, which, okay, that's not a whole lot to go on. The case against him kind of fell apart when it came to light that he offered a confession, but they discovered that it had pretty much bullied out of him by the Iowa Attorney General, a man named Horace Havner, in this marathon all-night interrogation session in which Kelly had repeatedly asked for a lawyer and been denied one. So it just looked worse and worse. In fact, the confession wasn't Kelly's words themselves. Havner had written it up and just

got him to sign it. So when that came to light in the trial, it fell apart. He was given two trials. In the first trial, 11 jurors just wanted to acquit him outright, and one of them held out for not guilty by reason of insanity. So that was a hung jury. They threw that out. At the second trial, they just acquitted him. So as I say, it's possible he did it. I don't have a better idea, but it seems unlikely. After the second trial fell apart, he was acquitted, and the state's investigation ended, and that's really the end of it. No one's ever been able to decide what happened in that house that night or who was responsible. Some citizens in the town thought perhaps that the killings were the work of passing ruffians or a cult or perhaps a traveling

mass murderer. The town, for a time, took up sides around this question. The Presbyterians defended Kelly, and they opposed the Methodists who defended Jones, and the two camps wouldn't let their children play together. But that eventually died down again. It's kind of, it would make a good play or a movie, I think. Even in a town as small as 2,000 people, there's enough love and hate to find a motive for murder. But eventually, it all blew over because they just couldn't make any progress on the investigation. It should be noted that there was a lot of murder in the Midwest in that period. More than 30 people were killed in a similar manner in that region between 1911 and 1914. Some murderers with axes, some near railroad tracks.

Villisca was a railroad town. And some in which the murderer lingered after the event. So you can build up, and some people have, a theory that this was the work of a traveling murderer. But some of those were likely copycats. Some were coincidences, perhaps. It is possible that there was sort of a traveling murderer who either got collared and convicted of a crime in another town that was never connected to this one. But it's also possible that someone just got away with murder here. Someone killed eight people for some reason we'll never know and just lived out the rest of his life without ever being brought to justice. As I say, it's the longest unsolved murder in Iowa history.

The house is still there. And for $428, you can spend the night there. Oh, do people do that? Yes. I think I'll stay right here. This episode is brought to you by our patrons and by Harry's, who are celebrating their three-year anniversary as a business this month. I've mentioned Harry's before. For years, I used an electric shaver until Harry's had me try their German-engineered razor blades, and I'd forgotten what a close shave a good blade will give. Harry's is the only shaving company that has both amazing quality and low prices. They make German-engineered five-blade

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out a special offer for first-time buyers. They'll give you $5 off your first order with promo code CLOSET. Stop overpaying for a great shave. Go to harrys.com right now. That's H-A-R-R-Y-S.com and enter code CLOSET at checkout. In episode 75, Greg told us about Felix von Luckner, a German nobleman who managed to wage war in an impressively humane manner in World War I. Anne Yerouk wrote in to us about that episode and said that she did a little happy dance when I asked her how to pronounce her name

so that I could read her email on the show. I hope she is still happily dancing after hearing my attempt at the pronunciation. Anne wrote, First, let me say that I love your podcast since I discovered it on Boing Boing. I'm slowly working my way through the archive. It has brightened many a dull household activity. I'm the type who gets stuff better done with music or podcasts. My dishes, vacuum, and laundry would like to thank you.

stuff better done with music or podcasts. My dishes, vacuum, and laundry would like to thank you. As a German, I love hearing about German things and listener mail from people with German sounding names. I also think it's totally cute how you pronounce German names. I'm writing to you on behalf of episode 75 about Felix von Luckner. As serendipity has it, I'm now living in a town that has greatly benefited from him in World War II. And Anne explains that towards the end of the war in 1945, Luckner was living in Halle an der Saale in Eastern Germany. Anne says, the approaching American army threatened to destroy Halle if it wouldn't surrender. So far, the town had suffered only minor losses as compared to other cities. Hitler had given orders to defend the town to the last man. The commander of the town was a hardcore Nazi and

willing to follow this order. But according to Anne, Luckner and a few others spoke to both the town's commander and the commander of the American forces. And after these negotiations, the town commander left Hala with the remaining armed forces. Almost all of the inhabitants of Halle then put out white flags and the American troops were able to take the town without any significant fighting. Apparently, Luckner wasn't ever able to return to the town as the Nazis had condemned him to death for his actions. Anne says, the English Wikipedia entry on the Seawolf just mentions this in one short sentence, but the German one is, of course, much more extensive. Accounts vary on how big Luckner's part in the whole ordeal was. Some people say he wasn't involved in the actual negotiations at all. Plus, Luckner tended to

exaggerate and gloss over his life in his memories. She says, today, the peaceful surrender of the town is celebrated every year by a small reenactment of the American troops taking over. A plaque can be found on a building at the market square. There is a Luckner Society, which keeps his memory alive. Wow. That's really striking because most of his exploits were known from World War I. From World War I, yeah. Probably exactly in both of them.

Yeah. Anne mentioned in her email that it's cute how we pronounce German names, and I think it was probably gracious of her to call it cute. Yeah, that's a kind way to say that. Names can be really tricky for us, and I think both of us really struggle with foreign names, but apparently we struggle even with American ones. Yes, I have to apologize to the residents of both Beaufort, South Carolina, and Placerville, California, both of which I've managed to mispronounce in recent episodes. We do actually usually attempt to figure out how to pronounce things. We Google them and look for pronunciation guides. Yeah, we actually spend a lot of time on that, but inevitably some of them slip through the net, and those are the ones we always mispronounce. Yeah, so thanks for that.

Sorry for anybody else's whose names we've managed to get wrong. And I also wanted to thank Anne for the scritches for Sasha that she sent. Sasha always appreciates being remembered and definitely likes scritches. In episode 95, I read an email from Maddie in Australia who wrote to us about how answering negative questions

like, so she didn't go to the store, can be confusing. And Rini Rika wrote in on this topic to say, in Russia, you'd usually answer these questions with no if the statement is correct, just like in Australia, apparently. But you can also say yes, as in the statement is correct, like you guys do. Since there are two ways to answer it, you always have to clarify what the opponent meant by that, which I always found inefficient. However, I think a bigger linguistic problem occurs if the negative statement is incorrect.

How can you make it clear using short answers like yes or no without building an extra sentence about it? In this case, I'm thankful that I can speak German. Germans have three words for short answers, yes, no, and doch. Doch counters a negative statement and means something like on the contrary. And Rini notes that doch can only be used to answer a negative statement.

So if someone asks, so she didn't go to the store, you'd answer no if she didn't go, and you'd answer doch if the statement is incorrect and she did in fact go. That's really useful. It is really useful. And Rini sent some more examples, and some of them it's like you can see, like if somebody says to you, you're not very smart, are you? There's no way you can answer that with either yes or no. That actually works, right? But in

Germany, you would just say doch, which means no, I am smart. Rini notes that doch has a number of other definitions and uses in German. It sounds like overall, it's just a really useful word that doesn't easily translate to other languages. And she includes a link if anyone wants to see all the different uses for the wonderful word doch on the same topic hayden green down in wellington new zealand wrote hi futility closeteers i just listened to episode 95 and heard the letter from an australian listener i thought you might be interested in a new zealand idiom that adds a whole extra layer of complexity. Yeah, nah. Yeah, nah can be given as answer in both the affirmative and negative with only subtle variation and inflection.

So I could say, yeah, nah, you're right, or yeah, nah, you're wrong. Sometimes it's used by itself, leaving non-Kiwis wondering what the exact answer is. I love the podcast, and I'm converting my partner to it as well. Hopefully, when I ask her if she likes it, she'll reply, yeah, nah, and not yeah, nah. And trust me, there's a difference. And I have to say that I took my best guess for adding in the inflections on the yeah, nah. So hopefully, I was in the ballpark. So thanks so much to everyone who writes into us. We can't always read all the emails we get on the show,

but we do read them. So if you have any questions or comments for us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd-sounding situation, and I have to try to figure out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener David White. Oh.

In 1997, a man and his heavily armed bodyguards boarded a military plane in Washington, D.C., which he requested to be flown to New York City so that he could visit his daughter. Only a few hours after arriving man basically went from Washington, D.C. to New York. New York. Okay. Was the man an American citizen? Yes. Okay. My first thought was that he was like a prisoner or something. Was he a prisoner or something?

Okay. When you say bodyguards, were these other humans that were intended to protect him? Yes. Okay. Just checking. No, that's a very good question. It's one I wouldn't have thought to ask. I don't know. Maybe you have some alternate meaning for bodyguards. I've learned to check everything. Don't just assume. I know what cabin means. Okay. So there were human

beings that were going with the man to protect him, presumably against some threat or potential threat to him. And then they suddenly left against some threat or potential threat to him. And then they suddenly left him while he was in New York City. That's right. And he made his way back to Washington, D.C. by himself. Yes. Is his specific identity important? Yes.

He's a specific person. Yes. Was he a president? No. Another politician? No. No. I'm just trying to think because he was coming from Washington, D.C., so I thought, who else lives in Washington, D.C. besides politicians?

You might call him a politician. You might call him a politician. Okay. But I might not. All right. Is the man's age important? No. And you said he's an American citizen.

So obviously his occupation is germane? Yes. Okay. So his occupation, and you only sort of would call him a politician. Would you call him some sort of celebrity? No. No. Who is sort of a politician and why?

Okay, so he had bodyguards. Were the bodyguards with him in his role as whatever his occupation is? Yes. Was his role in that occupation finished is. Yes. They were, they were, was his role in that occupation finished once he went to New York? Was he, was he no longer that occupation? Okay.

While he was in New York, was he suddenly no longer in the occupation he'd been in when he left Washington, DC? That's a very tricky question. That's a very tricky question. Okay. Should I rephrase it or just give up on asking it?

He had the same occupation. He had the same occupation. But a different status. I know I'm just confusing this, but I have to answer that carefully. Okay. Did some event occur that changed his status? Yes. Okay.

Not, okay. Something, I'm thinking something other than something he did, but let me ask that more straightforwardly. Did he do something that changed his status? No. No, that's, okay, that's what I was thinking. So did this have anything to do with his daughter? No.

No. Okay. Some world event occurred. You could say that. An event occurred. An event occurred. you could say that an event occurred. An event occurred.

Was he somehow in line for succession to the presidency? Where did that come from? Yes, he was. Well, because I'm thinking there's this thing about like with the State of the Union Address and all the politicians have to get together and then one cabinet member has to be guarded. Oh, that's exactly what it is, isn't it? then one cabinet member has to be guarded. Oh, that's exactly what it is, isn't it? And one cabinet member has to be guarded.

And so they just sent him to New York and he figured, well, I might as well visit my daughter while I'm there. I'm putting this all together. Am I right? You're just laughing at me. He just went from first base to home plate in a straight line. And now we know no longer how to be guarded because nobody would have a reason to kill him anymore. Yes. I don't understand how you do that. I don't feel so bad anymore for like bumbling around and walking into walls because that's impossible. All right, let me read. This is

David's write-up. The man was Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, and during President Clinton's 1997 State of the Union Address, Secretary Glickman's job was to serve as the designated survivor. In the event that the president, vice president, and seven other people in presidential line of succession were all killed, Dan Glickman would have become the president of the United States. The role of designated survivor was first established during the Cold War period of the 1960s, when it was thought advisable that at least one high-ranking government official should not be present when all the others were gathered under one roof during, for example, a State of the Union address. In the case of Dan Glickman, the heavy security that surrounded him was

abruptly made unnecessary as soon as the State of the Union address ended. His Secret Service detail left for Washington almost as soon as President Clinton finished speaking, and the Secretary made his way back to Washington sometime later alone. I was reading up on this after David sent it in. Glickman and his daughter watched the speech at her apartment and then had dinner at a Japanese restaurant nearby, and while they were eating, a storm blew up. So after dinner, Glickman and his daughter watched the speech at her apartment and then had dinner at a Japanese restaurant nearby. And while they were eating, a storm blew up. So after dinner, Glickman said, we waited and waited and waited for a cab to no avail. So we had to walk eight to 10 blocks back to her apartment in the freezing cold and sleet. The irony was, here I was just a few minutes earlier, almost the most powerful person in the country, and now I couldn't even get a cab.

There's a great lesson there in the impermanence of power. So thanks very much, David, for that one. Yeah, and I also thought, like, what if somebody had come and assassinated him right after the speech ended, and he'd be like, hey! Yes, thanks, David. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another episode for us. If you're looking for more quirky curiosities, you can check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample more than 9,000 frappant ephemera. At the website, you can also see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. Just click podcast in the sidebar.

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