Futility Closet - 144-The Murder Castle

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from a misplaced omnibus to an Englishman with eight religions. This is episode 144. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. When detectives arrested H.H. Holmes in 1894, they thought he was a simple con man. But they were shocked to discover that he'd been operating a bizarre Chicago hotel in which he'd sadistically murdered dozens of victims.

Starting point is 00:00:38 In today's show, we'll follow the career of America's first documented serial killer, who headlines called a fiend in human shape. We'll also gape at some fireworks explosions and puzzle over an intransigent insurance company. Herman Webster Mudgett was born in New Hampshire in 1861. We don't have much reliable information about his early life, but there are some indications it was troubled. reliable information about his early life, but there are some indications it was troubled. One source says his father was a violent alcoholic, and another says that bullies, who were jealous of his excellence in the classroom, once forced him into a doctor's office and made him stand face-to-face with a human skeleton, which he said gave him a

Starting point is 00:01:16 fascination with death. After high school, he married early and then enrolled in medical school at the University of Michigan, which put him, incidentally, into the same class as Holly Harvey Crippen, the murderer whose story we told in episode 62. Two aspiring doctors-slash-murderers in the same class, though it's doubtful the two of them knew each other. He was already showing signs of criminal character. It's believed that he paid for medical school through insurance fraud, buying insurance policies on supposed family members, then stealing cadavers from the school and arranging to make them look as though they died in accidents. After school, his marriage fell apart and his wife and son returned to New Hampshire,

Starting point is 00:01:53 and Mudgett became involved in a couple of scandals. In New York State, he was seen with a little boy who later disappeared, and when he was working in a Philadelphia drugstore, another boy died after taking medicine that he had dispensed. He denied any involvement, adopted the name H.H. Holmes, and moved to Chicago. In 1887, while still married to his first wife, he married a second one in Minneapolis. He had a daughter with her and lived with the two of them in Wilmette, Illinois, while he tended to business in Chicago. There he took a job at another drugstore, working for the elderly couple who owned it. When the husband died, he offered to buy the store from the wife. She agreed to this, but when he failed to pay her, she filed suit against him and then mysteriously disappeared.

Starting point is 00:02:34 He told customers that she'd gone to California to visit family and decided to stay there. Now that he was established in the city, Holmes unfolded some ambitious plans. In 1888, he bought an empty lot across from the drugstore and built a hotel three stories high and a block long. Chicago was booming and lodging was still scarce after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He designed the hotel himself with a new drugstore and retail shops on the bottom and apartments above that he could rent out to his employees and to lodgers. From the outside, it somewhat resembled a medieval fortress complete with a turret. People called it the castle. He raised

Starting point is 00:03:10 the money for the construction by swindling people, a talent he'd been cultivating for years. For example, he sold the original drugstore for an inflated price by paying people to stream through it and buy expensive items, making the store seem more valuable than it was. And he regularly cheated the workmen who were building the hotel, using tricks that are almost comical. For example, he bought a large safe, had it installed in a room in the hotel, and then had the door narrowed and refused to pay for the safe. When the merchant complained, Holmes invited him to repossess the safe but warned him not to damage the hotel, which was impossible at that point. He bought furniture from another supplier and refused to pay for that, too.

Starting point is 00:03:46 When the supplier searched the hotel, he couldn't find any trace of the missing furniture. A janitor later confessed that he'd piled it all into one room, bricked up the door, and papered it over. Holmes was continually firing workmen, accusing them of incompetence and refusing to pay them. This kept costs down, and it also prevented anyone from knowing about all the strange features he was adding to the hotel. On the second floor, behind Holmes' own apartments, was a chamber of horrors of nearly 40 rooms. Staircases that led nowhere in particular, blind passageways, hinged walls, false partitions, rooms with no doors and rooms with many doors.

Starting point is 00:04:20 Later, when Holmes' crimes became public, newspapers published lurid maps giving ghoulish names to these rooms. The Black Closet, Sealed Room All Bricked In, Blind Room, Five Door Room, Mysterious Closed Room, and the Secret Hanging Chamber. From Holmes' bathroom, a trap door opened into a windowless cubicle from which a greased chute dropped straight to the cellar. Near the rear of the house was an asphyxiation chamber with gas connections and no light. Behind this was another chute leading to the basement. Some rooms were lined with iron plates, and some had false floors that concealed tiny airless chambers. Nearly all the rooms had gas connections, and all the doors on the upper floors were fitted with an alarm system so that he would know when anyone was walking about in the hotel. All of this took months to build, with the work surging

Starting point is 00:05:06 or lagging according to the success of Holmes' money-raising schemes. But finally it was complete. What he'd built was a murder factory. When the hotel was ready, Holmes began to kill his guests, his lovers, and his employees, many of whom were required to take out life insurance policies with himself as the beneficiary. Some victims were locked in soundproof bedrooms in which he could asphyxiate them at any time with gas. Some were hanged in the hanging chamber on the second floor. Some were locked in a soundproof bank vault near his office where he left them to suffocate. One secret room made of brick could be entered only through a trap door in the ceiling. He would leave victims there to die of hunger and thirst over a period of days. The corpses were sent through the bathroom chute

Starting point is 00:05:45 or a dumbwaiter to the basement, where some bodies were buried in pits of quicklime, some were incinerated in furnaces or dissolved in pits of acid, and some were stripped of flesh and converted into skeleton models that Holmes sold to medical schools. In order to create a stream of victims, Holmes took out a series of newspaper ads to attract employees and lodgers to the hotel. It's estimated that he hired as many as 150 young women, usually as stenographers or notaries, Holmes took out a series of newspaper ads to attract employees and lodgers to the hotel. It's estimated that he hired as many as 150 young women, usually as stenographers or notaries, helping in his various fraudulent businesses. He peddled a miraculous mineral water, sold a phony cure for alcoholism, and invented a machine that converted ordinary water to natural gas. He tended to hire young, pretty women from small towns, preferably wealthy,

Starting point is 00:06:24 and had them appointed notaries public so that they could notarize his fraudulent document. When one of them would disappear, he'd claim she'd grown tired of city life and moved back to the country. One early victim was Julia Connor, who was originally the wife of a man who worked at the drugstore's jewelry counter. Holmes started an affair with her, and her husband discovered this, quit his job, and moved away. Julia and her daughter Pearl remained at the hotel, and presently she became pregnant with Holmes' baby and pressed Holmes to marry her. He agreed, but told her she could not have the child. She agreed to let him perform an abortion, and he killed her with an overdose of chloroform and later killed her daughter. When another tenant inquired after their whereabouts, he said they'd left for Iowa to attend a wedding.

Starting point is 00:07:04 Did he kill them deliberately, or was he attempting to perform the abortion and accidentally killed them? We think he killed her deliberately. It's amazing that he got away with all this. I'll get into that later. On a business trip to Boston, Holmes met a railroad heiress named Minnie Williams. After his return to Chicago, he kept in touch with her and sent her love letters. In February 1893, she moved to Chicago and became his personal stenographer. He persuaded her to transfer some Texas property to him and encouraged her to invite her sister to join them in Chicago. He eventually killed the sister by locking her in an office vault and turning on the gas line. Minnie herself also

Starting point is 00:07:37 disappeared. Eventually, Chicago was selected to host the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, a fair marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the New World, and Holmes seized the opportunity to attract even more people to his hotel. The event would last six months and bring millions of sightseers to the city, and the site was just a few blocks from his hotel. On opening day, he began advertising his lodging house as the World's Fair Hotel. More than 27 million people attended the fair between May and October 1893. No one knows how many stayed at the hotel, but it appears to have been filled to capacity on most nights. It's also not known how many guests died there. Holmes

Starting point is 00:08:15 confessed to killing only one fairgoer, but estimates go as high as 50. As with his other victims, he'd send their bodies to the basement through the chute, where some were converted to medical specimens. Most were destroyed in the crematorium or the acid vat, along with their personal effects, except for those that Holmes wanted to keep, such as cash, jewelry, and watches. All of this brought in money, but Holmes was deeply in debt, and the panic of 1893 sent the economy into a recession. When the fair ended that fall, he set fire to an upper story of the hotel and tried to collect on a $60,000 insurance policy, but this only attracted suspicion, and he still owed his creditors between $25,000 and $50,000. With repossession men and insurance representatives circling, he fled to Denver, where he found time to marry a third wife, Georgie Anna Yoke, whom he'd met when she'd worked at the fair in Chicago.

Starting point is 00:09:01 But now he was on the run, fleeing across the country. when she'd worked at the fair in Chicago. But now he was on the run, fleeing across the country. When he was detained briefly in jail in St. Louis, he met a train robber named Marion Hedgepath and asked him to recommend a crooked lawyer who could help with an insurance fraud. The plan was the same one he'd used in medical school. Holmes' henchman, a man named Benjamin Pitzel, would fake his own death, posing as an inventor killed in a lab explosion. When the insurance company paid the claim, Holmes would divide the money with Pitzel's wife and with the crooked attorney. Holmes agreed to find a body that would convincingly appear to be Pitzel's, but in the end he simply killed Pitzel and arranged an explosion to hide the crime. Pitzel's body was discovered in Philadelphia on September 4,

Starting point is 00:09:37 1894. Holmes collected $10,000 on the insurance policy and then manipulated Pitzel's wife into giving him custody of three of their five children, saying he would arrange for their education. And then began a bizarre flight across the country. Holmes and the three children traveled throughout the northern United States and Canada, while Holmes escorted Mrs. Pitzel along a parallel route, lying to her about her husband's whereabouts and the location of her children. In Detroit, the mother and her children were separated by only a few blocks, and Holmes was staying at a third location with his wife, who knew about none of this. Finally, and fatefully, Marion Hedgepath, the train robber in the St. Louis jail, grew resentful that he'd never received his share of the money. He sent a note to the police chief

Starting point is 00:10:17 declaring that Pitzel's death had been an insurance fraud. Holmes, increasingly desperate and hindered in his flight by the children, killed two of them by gassing them in a trunk and buried their bodies in the basement of a rental house in Toronto. A detective followed Holmes to Indianapolis, where Holmes had drugged and cut up the remaining child, Howard Pitzel. His remains were found in the house's chimney. Holmes was finally arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894. He helped officers locate the widow Pitzel and the remaining two children, and then he began telling a complicated series of lies. Investigators eventually discovered the murder castle in Chicago, where eight ribs and part of a skull were found in a vat of acid in the basement, and police found two buried vaults filled with quicklime and additional bodies,

Starting point is 00:10:58 as well as hair whose color matched that of the missing Williams sisters. They also found bones belonging to a child between six and eight, and a dress that had belonged to Julia Connor. When the police interviewed Holmes' employees, the caretaker said he was never allowed to clean the second floor. Altogether, nearly a year had passed between Benjamin Pitzel's murder and the truth emerging about the children and the murder castle. Holmes was charged with the murder of Benjamin Pitzel. By all accounts, he was remarkably self-possessed at the trial. He dismissed his lawyers to conduct the defense himself, though he later called them back, and he even took questions from the press.

Starting point is 00:11:35 He claimed that Pitzel had committed suicide by taking chloroform, and he presented no witnesses in his own defense. After one morning of gruesome testimony about decomposition and bodily fluids, Holmes said, I would ask that the court be adjourned for sufficient time for lunch. The jury found Holmes guilty, and he was hanged on May 7, 1896. His neck did not snap, and he strangled to death slowly over 15 minutes. The New York Times wrote, he died as he had lived, unconcerned and thoughtless, apparently, of the future. Because Holmes was tried specifically for Pitzel's death in Philadelphia, most of the newspaper stories about the trial focus on that and not on the murder castle. In reading them, I have a real sense that the true

Starting point is 00:12:08 depth of Holmes' crimes was never really registered by the public then or now. Holmes confessed to 27 murders, of which nine were confirmed, but the actual total might be as high as 200 based on missing persons reports and the reports of Holmes' neighbors. All of this happened in the days when crime scene investigations were fairly primitive. One newspaper editorial condemns the Chicago Police Department. Not only did they fail to stop him, but they failed even to know that these crimes were taking place. A New York Times story of the time notes that if the Pitzel children had not been found buried in Toronto, Holmes would likely have served time only for insurance fraud.

Starting point is 00:12:43 It was the discovery of the children's bodies that sent detectives to Chicago, where they uncovered the full extent of his crimes. Indeed, one writer points out a huge irony in the finale. After a spectacular criminal career, what tripped him up was an investigation of an insurance fraud that wasn't a fraud at all. Holmes had planned to disguise a cadaver to look like Benjamin Pitzel's corpse, and then decided just to kill Pitzel actually, so in that sense it wasn't a fraud. The mistake that had tripped him up was tiny, almost incidental compared to his greater crimes. This is troubling. Holmes is remembered as one of the first serial killers, but perhaps he was just the first to get caught. In 1895, the New York Times seemed to realize this. The editors wrote, it is practicable for an intelligent

Starting point is 00:13:18 and skillful man, utterly devoid of conscience and intent upon criminal undertakings, to follow the horrible trade of the professional murderer for years without suffering inconvenience at the hands of officers of the law? Is it not possible that other men of the same kind have been guilty of similar crimes and escaped detection? Why did he do it? That isn't clear, at least to me. He killed to get insurance money, personal property, or skeletons. He killed to silence people who knew too much, to end relationships that had become burdensome or annoying, and sometimes for scientific inquiry. But he was intelligent, well-educated, capable, and personable, and he excelled at the few straight jobs that he'd held. He could have had a perfectly successful life with a lot less work and worry if he'd simply

Starting point is 00:13:58 gone straight. We'll never know what drove him, and the signs of his crimes are now largely hidden. The murder castle was gutted by fire, apparently set by arsonists, in August 1895, and it was finally torn down in 1938. Holmes was buried, according to his own instructions, in a coffin filled with cement, in a double grave filled with even more cement to discourage grave robbers. He's buried somewhere in Philadelphia's Holy Cross Cemetery, but no stone marks the spot. Philadelphia's Holy Cross Cemetery, but no stone marks the spot. Today's episode is brought to you by our patrons and by Kryzol No-Glare Lenses. If you wear glasses, then you know that fingerprints, smudges, scratches, and glares can obstruct your vision and be a huge distraction. Sometimes you end up focusing more on what's on

Starting point is 00:14:42 your glasses than what's going on around you. But not anymore, thanks to Krizol No-Glare Lenses. Krizol lenses offer resistance to blemishes, giving you the clearest vision possible. That means no more fingerprint smudges from taking your glasses on and off, or scratches from cleaning your lenses on your shirt. Krizol lenses even protect against blinding glares from the headlights of oncoming traffic, as well as harmful UV light. And because Krizol No-Glglare lenses stay clear and reduce distracting glare, your friends and family can actually see your eyes, not just your glasses.

Starting point is 00:15:12 Look better, feel better, and most importantly, stay immersed in the world around you, not just your lenses. Go to krizol.com to learn more. That's C-R-I-Z-A-L.com and start living life in the clear. Matthias Arbu wrote in with some follow-up on episode 136, Dear Futility Closet. My name is Matthias. I'm a robotics PhD from Trondheim, Norway. I recently listened to the podcast on the Boston Molasses Disaster, and as with all your other podcasts, the idea permeated my everyday conversation. A Danish colleague of mine recently told me about an incident that you might consider interesting in a similar vein of absurd things that can happen.

Starting point is 00:15:58 In 2004, the fireworks factory in Seist, right outside of Kolding in Denmark, caught on fire. A case of rockets had been dropped and subsequently gone off, and an explosion occurred at 1525. This triggered a cascade effect, and three major explosions were heard at 1745 as the main storage facility lit up. The storage facility contained explosives equivalent to about 284 tons of TNT. And the explosions created an earthquake measured to about 2.2 on the Richter scale. What is absurd is that this was supposedly loud enough to be heard as a low boom all the way in Sweden,

Starting point is 00:16:34 290 kilometers away. The fact that only one person died is a testimony to the expedient evacuation. The YouTube videos make you rethink fireworks displays, but I'd steer clear of the comments. And I think the advice about steering clear of YouTube comments is probably a good one in many situations. But you can find some amazing videos of this event. We'll have in the show notes one that I watched and a little searching quickly find several others. According to the information I was able to find in English on the event, the explosions left 355 houses damaged, with 176 being uninhabitable.

Starting point is 00:17:10 In total, over 2,100 buildings were damaged and 500 people were left homeless. Wikipedia says the damages were estimated at 100 million euros, or about $105 million. million dollars. And as Matias noted, the quick evacuation of about 2,000 people from the area is credited with there being just the one fatality, that of a firefighter, though it's reported that 24 people were injured and an additional 69 people from the rescue operations were treated for smoke inhalation. And it turns out that if you're looking into any given fireworks disaster, you quickly realize that there are a number of lists of such events, such as the 10 worst fireworks disasters ever. Several of these lists that I happen to see named as the worst of them, the Ensaday fireworks disaster in the Netherlands in 2000, when a fire broke out at a fireworks factory that happened to be very

Starting point is 00:18:01 unfortunately located in the middle of a residential area. An estimated 177 tons of fireworks exploded, pretty much destroying the whole surrounding area, with the blast being felt for up to 30 kilometers or 19 miles away. A total of 22 people were killed and 947 were seriously injured. The BBC News report on the event reported limbs flying through the air and dead bodies lying in smoldering rubble. About 1,500 homes were damaged or destroyed, leaving 1,250 people homeless. Damages exceeded 454 million euros or 478 million dollars. I'd never thought about this before, but I wonder if fireworks companies have to carry liability insurance. I guess they do. I mean, they basically make explosives. Yeah. Reading the reports about this before but i wonder if fireworks companies have to carry liability insurance i guess they do i mean they basically make explosives yeah i'm reading the reports

Starting point is 00:18:48 about this event too it like some of the people living in the area did not realize there was a fireworks factory sort of in the middle of their town like that's a thing too like you don't think about right i never thought of that before yeah um so that was definitely one of the more extensive fireworks disasters but atlas obscura says that the record for the deadliest fireworks accident is held by a disaster that occurred in Paris in 1770 during the celebrations of Marie Antoinette's marriage to Louis XVI. when a gust of wind blew some partially exploded rockets down onto the closely packed crowd of thousands of people, causing them to panic, and numerous people were trampled during the rush to escape the area through a narrow street. Although the official government death toll was listed as 133, numerous sources placed the toll at a much higher number, usually in the thousands, though even the 133 number does mark the event as the deadliest in history so far,

Starting point is 00:19:46 with the next highest number of fatalities coming from a terrible fire and explosion during a fireworks celebration just last year at a temple in Colom, India, when 111 people were killed and about 350 were seriously injured when sparks from a firecracker set off a stock of fireworks in a nearby storehouse.

Starting point is 00:20:04 As Mattia said, it does make you rethink fireworks displays. Yes, it sure does. Back in episode 31, we covered the story of how Futility Closet was named after a utility sign with an F added to it that Greg had seen many years ago on a closet door at American University in Washington, D.C. while I was a student there. Greg had explained this in the introduction to his first book, and we covered it on the podcast because we had just received an email from Carl Magnuson, who was the current owner of that exact sign from the closet at American University. He came to own it in a bit

Starting point is 00:20:42 of a roundabout way, which you can check out the details of in episode 31 if you're interested, but Carl summed it up at the end of his email like this. While reading a book in Iceland, I discovered that the website I discovered from my cousins in Michigan and Arizona while I was in Tennessee was named after a closet sign that a guy who lived in two separate houses in Washington, D.C., which I also lived in, had taken from a place he used to work and forgotten about, which I now have on my bedroom door. I just don't think you can make that up. There were a number of coincidences that had to happen to have led to Carl's story, and now we have one more to add to the tale. We recently received this email from Karsten Hammond. Just another coincidence

Starting point is 00:21:25 for your personal interest. I've been a longtime reader of the Futility Closet blog, but only started listening to the podcast a few weeks ago. I started at the beginning and am now in the mid 30s. I listened with interest in episode 31 when you discussed an email from Carl Magnuson and his finding of the original Futility Closet sign and the coincidences surrounding its journey through DC. Carl, in the email he sent you, cited cousins from Arizona and Michigan as his first intro to Futility Closet. Strangely enough, I am one of those cousins. My brother and I grew up in Arizona and went to university in Michigan. It is quite coincidental that I listened to the Futility Closet podcast that referenced my cousin mentioning me as the person who told him about Futility Closet and described him reading the Futility Closet book while on a bus in Iceland and realizing that the sign was on his apartment door in Washington, D.C.

Starting point is 00:22:18 All while I was running a trail marathon in rural Denmark and all while Carl was skiing in Vermont and only days after I emailed you for the first time ever. My marathon went well, but Carl broke his leg skiing that very same weekend while in Vermont while I was listening to the podcast that referenced him mentioning, etc. And Karsten ends with, I will keep my eyes and ears out for more Futility Closet curiosities here in Copenhagen. So we hope you are recovered, Carl, and thank you to everyone who writes to us. If you happen to have any Futility Closet curiosities yourself, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle.

Starting point is 00:23:06 I am going to give him a strange-sounding situation, and he has to try to work out what is actually going on, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from listener Daniel Sturman. All right. A man stole a pickup truck, drove off with it, and almost immediately hit another car. The woman who owned that car was insured against damage

Starting point is 00:23:26 caused by uninsured motorists and filed a claim on that basis. Yet even though the insurance company agreed with her about how much damage was done and who was at fault, they refused to pay up. Why? Okay, is it significant that it's a pickup truck? No. Are any of these vehicles, are all these vehicles conventional vehicles?

Starting point is 00:23:44 They're not like little matchbox cars or anything like that? They're conventional vehicles. So basically a man hit a car with another car. Yeah. Well, with a pickup truck, but yeah, that's just, that's not important. And that, the car he hit was insured against, was covered against uninsured motorists. Right. And he was uninsured.

Starting point is 00:24:01 Yes. Is this true? Yes. Does it matter where it happened, like what country? No. Okay, and just to be really specific here, she was trying to recover against the damage caused by the collision, right? Right.

Starting point is 00:24:17 Not against something else, so they didn't think it was ineligible for that reason. Right. Do I need to know anything more about her car? Was there something unusual about her car? No. Do I need to know anything more about her car? Was there something unusual about her car? No. Do I need to know when this happened? No. Are there other people involved?

Starting point is 00:24:31 Um, yes. Are there vehicles involved? Um, no. No. But other people? Yes, there is one other person involved, but that's a little complicated. So if you don't get to that part, that's okay. Okay, I don't need that.

Starting point is 00:24:50 You don't absolutely need that, right? Okay. So I have to car with... Was the reason the insurance company refused to cover this because they said that the damage was already existing? No. Did they agree that the car had been damaged? Yes. By this guy's pickup truck?

Starting point is 00:25:11 Yes. As Daniel says, even though the insurance company agreed with her about how much damage was done and who was at fault, they refused to pay up. It seems like this has something to do with the notion of an unsure motorist. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Okay, so do I need to know more about the nature of the damage itself, like what exactly happened? No. If he had hit someone else with the same insurance coverage, would he be in the same situation? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:25:47 And if she had been hit by someone else, anyone else, would her company still have refused to cover the damage? Probably not. Probably not? Probably not. Wouldn't have refused, so they would have covered it. They would have covered it. So something about him. Yes.

Starting point is 00:26:01 Do we need to know about his occupation? Is he connected somehow to the— No. Is there some history here I need to uncover? There is a little bit of history, but you're right in saying there's something about him. Are they connected somehow? No.

Starting point is 00:26:16 Like, do they have some relationship between them? No. Um... You said I need to know a little more about what did you just say i said there was something important and relevant about him about him that's not his occupation correct something physically about him something about his truck no not nothing about his truck and the fact that his truck is not significant he's not hauling something or... Right. Do I need to know about the actual geography,

Starting point is 00:26:48 like where this happened? No. So a guy hits a car with a truck. Yes. And I've told you what you need to focus on. Something about... You've said I don't need to know where this happened. Right. There's one really salient fact...

Starting point is 00:27:08 About him. About him. That this all turns on. But it's not his occupation. It's not his relationship to her. It's not his physical description. It's not his vehicle. Right.

Starting point is 00:27:20 I'll agree to all of that. Good idea, Sasha. Yes, Sasha's trying to help. Trying to help. And not his driving history, not anything about his history. What else is there that's salient about a person? I mean, you might say it's about his history.

Starting point is 00:27:39 Sounds like that's tenuous, though. Yeah, I mean... Not about his insurance policy. Right. There is something about him that is unusual, though, that this all turns on. Do I need to know his identity? Is this actually a person who...

Starting point is 00:27:54 You don't need to know his specific identity. And he is uninsured. Why would you deny a claim? Uninsured motorist. Right. This, this, this, it would surprise me if this has ever happened in any other time in history. Like if this has ever happened more than once. You said that he only.

Starting point is 00:28:25 He'd only driven a very short distance when he hit her. Is that significant? Yeah, I mean, it fits in with the whole story. When you know the whole story, you'll understand why. But, yes, I mean, that has to do with the whole thing. I'm sorry, I need a hint. I can't think of anything I haven't asked. You said something about him,

Starting point is 00:28:44 but I don't know what more I can ask. There is something important about him. About his state. Is he impaired in some way? You could say that. Is he drunk? No. Is he physically impaired?

Starting point is 00:29:02 Is he blind or impaired in some way like that? Not exactly. He's more impaired than that. Is he dead? He's dead, yes. This really happened? This really happened, yes. He was dead when he hit the car.

Starting point is 00:29:20 Yes. This really happened? This really happened, yes. He was dead when he hit the car. This happened in Kansas City in 2006 when a man at a car wash stole another man's pickup truck at gunpoint. Unfortunately for the thief, the victim also had a gun, and he shot the thief several times as the thief was driving away. The truck, being driven by the shot thief, crashed through one of the car wash's bays and hit the woman's car, the incident damaged her car and caused her some significant injury. In this case, Dautry v. American Family Insurance Company

Starting point is 00:29:50 was presented on the website called Lowering the Bar, which is written by attorney Kevin Underhill. And Underhill says that Mrs. Dautry's insurer denied coverage, maintaining that the thief was dead and thus not the motor vehicle's operator at the time of the incident since dead bodies can't operate motor vehicles. But Underhill, the attorney says, well, no, obviously the guy operated the vehicle at least briefly in order to get it to move unless you think it was propelled along by the bullets. And apparently a jury thought so too, as they awarded Dautry $450,000 in 2011 in her suit

Starting point is 00:30:25 against the insurance company. Oh, all right. Because I thought if they didn't fine for her, then she'd just be minding her own business and sustain all this damage and just have no way to get, you know, to collect on it. Right. Well, the jury found for her. So thank you, Daniel, for sending that in and to everyone who sends in puzzles to us. If you have a puzzle that you'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if you want to say which

Starting point is 00:30:50 one of us should read the puzzle, go ahead and put that in the subject line. Normally, we just kind of divvy up the puzzles randomly between us. So we can't look at them first to see who might be better for giving or receiving a particular puzzle. So if you have a preference on that, just let us know. Futility Closet is supported primarily by our wonderful patrons. While we do have some advertising on the show, it doesn't cover the big commitment of time that it takes to make the podcast each week. So if you would like to join our Patreon campaign

Starting point is 00:31:18 to help keep us going and get access to some bonus content, please go to patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the support us section of the website. If you're looking for more quirky curiosities, check out the Futility Closet books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample more than 9,000 catching bitlocks. At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast

Starting point is 00:31:40 with links and references for the topics in today's show. 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 performed by my wonderful brother-in-law, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 144-The Murder Castle

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