Futility Closet - 145-The Pied Piper of Saipan

Episode Date: March 13, 2017

Guy Gabaldon was an untested Marine when he landed on the Pacific island of Saipan during World War II. But he decided to fight the war on his own terms, venturing alone into enemy territory and trying to convince Japanese soldiers to surrender voluntarily. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow Gabaldon's dangerous crusade and learn its surprising results. We'll also examine Wonder Woman's erotic origins and puzzle over an elusive murderer. Intro: In 1955 Dodge introduced the La Femme -- "the first car ever exclusively designed for the woman motorist." In 1911 a 16-year-old English girl died when a gust of wind carried her 20 feet into the air. Sources for our feature on Guy Gabaldon: Guy Gabaldon, Saipan: Suicide Island, 1990. "Diminutive WWII Hero Gabaldon Dies at 80," Associated Press, Sept. 4, 2006. Richard Goldstein, "Guy Gabaldon, 80, Hero of Battle of Saipan, Dies," New York Times, Sept. 4, 2006. Jocelyn Y. Stewart, "Guy Gabaldon, 80; WWII Hero Captured 1,000 Japanese on Saipan," Los Angeles Times, Sept. 6, 2006. "Guy Gabaldon," Latino Americans, PBS, Sept. 24, 2013. Richard Gonzalez, "Filmmaker: Pacific War Hero Deserved Higher Honor," Morning Edition, National Public Radio, April 25, 2008. "Guy Gabaldon: An Interview and Discussion," War Times Journal (accessed Feb. 26, 2017). "Milestones," Time 168:12, Sept. 18, 2006. Gregg K. Kakesako, "'Pied Piper' Returning to Saipan," Honolulu Star Bulletin, June 6, 2004. "Guy Gabaldon," University of Texas Oral History Project (accessed Feb. 26, 2017). Gabaldon receives the Navy Cross, 1960: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVKEdyt_mvo Listener mail: Wikipedia, "William Moulton Marston" (accessed March 9, 2017). "The Man Behind Wonder Woman Was Inspired By Both Suffragists And Centerfolds," NPR Books, October 27, 2014. Jill Lepore, "The Surprising Origin Story of Wonder Woman," Smithsonian Magazine, October 2014. Katha Pollitt, "Wonder Woman's Kinky Feminist Roots," Atlantic, November 2014. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Steven Jones (thanks also to Hanno Zulla). Here are three corroborating links (warning -- these spoil the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music 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 we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page 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]. Thanks for listening!

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 car for women to a killing wind. This is episode 145. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Guy Gabaldon was an untested Marine when he landed on the Pacific island of Saipan during World War II, but he decided to fight the war on his own terms,

venturing alone into enemy territory and trying to convince Japanese soldiers to surrender voluntarily. In today's show, we'll follow Gabaldon's dangerous crusade and learn its surprising results. We'll also examine Wonder Woman's erotic origins and puzzle over an elusive murderer. Guy Gabaldon was born in 1926 and grew up in East Los Angeles, in a neighborhood that was diverse but harmonious. He spent a lot of his time on the streets, getting into trouble, but he remembered his childhood as happy. At age 12, he met two Japanese-American brothers, Lyle and Lane Nakano. He liked them because they did well in school, they were honest,

and they never got into trouble. The three of them were about the same age, and they went to the same school. Gabaldon spent a lot of time at their home, and eventually he moved in with the family as a sort of surrogate son. His parents didn't mind. His own family was very large, and he said, perhaps they thought it was good for me. Living with the Nakanos, he became familiar with Japanese culture, customs, and language, and he learned to speak Japanese from first-generation parents. He said, they were my extended family. He stayed with them for several years until World War II broke out,

and the Nakanos were sent to an internment camp in Arizona. Lyle and Lane Nakano enlisted in the Army and were sent to the European Front. Gabaldon tried to enlist also, but he was too young, only 16. He went to Alaska to work for a time, and on his 17th birthday, he applied to join the Marines. They were going to reject him on the grounds that he was too short and had a perforated eardrum, but he talked his way in by telling them he was fluent in Japanese. This got him a job as a scout with an intelligence unit during the attack on Saipan. Saipan is an island 25 miles long in the northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, and in 1944 it was held by the Japanese. The Marianas were a vital strategic target because

they were located only 1,200 miles from Tokyo. If the Allies could win the island, then they'd have the airfields that could send bombers to attack the Japanese mainland. On June 13, 1944, the Navy began bombarding the island, softening up its defenses for an invasion. After two days of shelling, 8,000 Marines landed on the western beaches. One of them was Guy Gabaldon. When they landed safely, the other intelligence personnel began to work on setting up an observation post, but Gabaldon had other ideas. He wrote, This is odd, and he doesn't quite explain his reasons. In his book,

Saipan Suicide Island, he says only that he was doing it, quote, to see what it's all about. I think there are a number of reasons. By nature, he says he distrusted authority and preferred to operate on his own. He was physically small, only about five foot four inches tall and 126 pounds, and he'd recently had an altercation with another soldier and wanted to show him up. And he wanted, in general, to prove himself to the other soldiers and earn some distinction so that he could serve as an official interpreter rather than just a scout. Still, he wrote, I must have seen too many John Wayne movies because what I was doing was suicidal. He wrote, My plan, as impossible as it seemed, was to get near a Japanese emplacement, bunker, or cave and

tell them that I had a bunch of Marines with me and we were ready to kill them if they did not surrender. I promised that they would be treated with dignity and that we would make sure that they were taken back to Japan after the war. He snuck out beyond the front lines to the north and came across three Japanese soldiers peering toward the American side. They had not expected an American to approach from the rear. He said, te o agate, which means raise your hands. One swung around and raised his gun, so Gabaldon shot him. The other two dropped their rifles. Gabaldon convinced them that they wouldn't be harmed if they did as he said. He marched them back to camp with their hands in the air. To his surprise, his commanding officer was angry. He said, so you think you're going to do as you

please? You are going to obey orders or I will have you court-martialed. Don't you ever go off on your own again, understand? Gabaldon agreed, but a few evenings later he resolved to sneak again into Japanese territory and not to come back until he'd proven himself. He later wrote, to this day I can't understand how I lived through that night. He set out for Japanese territory with pockets full of ammunition and rations. He wrote, to say I wasn't a bit nervous would be lying. I knew that this could either be a mighty foolish move or it could get me the recognition I needed to be an official interpreter. Some accounts say that his motives in doing this were peaceful, that he was trying to resolve the conflict without bloodshed. But in his book, he says that he went out on these missions with vengeance in his mind, vengeance for Pearl Harbor,

for causing the Nisei, that's the children of immigrants like the Nicanos, to be locked up, vengeance against the Japanese for killing thousands of people and for putting his brothers in danger. It was really a mix of these two things. He regarded the Japanese as enemies, but he wanted to capture them peacefully if he could. He crawled for more than an hour and suddenly smelled food. He listened and heard a group of enemy soldiers discussing the American defeat that would come when the Japanese fleet returned. This was mistaken. Their ships had already been sunk by an American task force. Gabaldon waited until sunrise and then threw two fragmentation grenades and a smoke grenade into their dugout, and the Japanese soldiers came out with their hands in the air.

He told them he had many Marines with him and warned them that he'd kill them if they didn't surrender. Altogether, 12 Japanese agreed to surrender. Gabaldon got them safely clear, threw two more grenades into the dugout, then commanded his prisoners to stand and run toward the American lines with their hands in the air. His commanding officer was angry again, but the two Japanese soldiers he'd caught on his first adventure had yielded good intelligence results, revealing Japanese units on Saipan that the Americans hadn't known about. Gabaldon wrote, after that, I was given free reign. Since he was getting results, the officers agreed to let him roam the island, capturing what soldiers he could.

He wrote, I chose where and when and how I was going results, the officers agreed to let him roam the island, capturing what soldiers he could. He wrote, This was still crazy, and it's the more impressive because the Japanese rarely surrendered. They'd been told horror stories about American atrocities, and their leader said that they must kill seven Americans for every soldier they lost or commit suicide. In part because of this, the Battle of Saipan turned out to be one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific War. Over the next several weeks, thousands of Japanese soldiers staged suicide charges against American lines, and entire families leapt to their deaths from cliffs to avoid being captured by Americans. Gabaldon went out repeatedly on what he called lone wolf missions and brought the enemy back alive. The Japanese would hide in volcanic caves

during the day and attack at night. Gabaldon took to approaching those caves. He wrote, I'd sneak up and get on one side of the mouth of the cave and toss a frag grenade in and kill a bunch of them. Sometimes one guy would come out. I'd have my carbine right on him. I'd say, I don't want to kill you. Tell your buddies to come out. I assure you we're not going to harm you. If you don't, I said, I've got a bunch of Marines behind those trees there. I had no one. I was alone. I said, you're all going to die. And it would work.

I conned them into surrendering. He convinced them that they faced a choice between surrendering with dignity and being captured violently by U.S. forces. He emphasized that they would be treated humanely, but, quote, I captured the enemy not by telling them that I loved them, but by telling them I would blow their heads off if they did not surrender. He wrote, when I began taking prisoners, it became an addiction. I found that I couldn't stop. I was hooked. It became a way of life. He became convinced that language was the key. He said, speaking in Japanese, even broken Japanese, is the only manner in which these people can be

convinced. If there is no communication, there can be no confidence or trust. Also, Steve Rubin, who later made a film about him, said, I think it was his bravado and his cockiness that really helped his success. Another example, he approached a cave and spoke from one side of the opening, he said, using the condescending form of speech, the manner in which you would talk to someone beneath you in status. He said he'd found this would either enrage them or they would feel that all is lost and surrender. One soldier came out holding a rifle. Gabaldon shot him and shouted in at the others. Another soldier came out. Gabaldon said, do not worry, I will not kill you. How many more are in the cave? The soldier said eight. Gabaldon frisked the man and told him that

he had more than a hundred men in the bush surrounding the area. He told him he would not hesitate to blast the cave if he and his friends did not cooperate. He said, I assure you that if you surrender, you will not be harmed in any way. You will be treated with the dignity due a brave fighting man. If we wanted to kill you, I would not be talking to you. Try to understand that your Bushido code, that's an unwritten samurai code of conduct, only deprives your family of your return to Japan. He tried to talk with confidence. He said,

Go back into your cave and explain to your friends that we are not savages. If you do not come out within five minutes, every one of you will be roasted by our flamethrowers. All my men will have their weapons concentrated on this cave. We're not savages, but we're going to roast you with flamethrowers. It worked, though. In less than five minutes, they started to emerge with their hands up. Gabaldon told them, march straight ahead toward the American lines. Everything will be all right. He commandeered an ox cart on the way back and drove them into camp. He wrote, now I was really getting into it. I would start my day or night with the thought,

How many will I capture or kill today? I could not let up. It became my driving ambition to take more prisoners than any American in any war. I made up my mind that I would capture ten times more than Sergeant York. That's Alvin York, a U.S. Army soldier who captured 132 prisoners in World War I. At one point, a friend asked him, Guy, why are you doing this? You've proven yourself already. Hell, you can stay back at the command post for the rest of

the campaign just talking to the Japanese. And he thought, how could I explain this burning desire to excel as a Marine? Even I did not know the real answer. He accumulated more and more captures, and the remaining Japanese were growing desperate, cut off from all military support. They launched a bonsai attack on July 7th, a mass suicide attack by both civilians and military. That failed, and then Gabaldon made his greatest exploit. The surviving Japanese had taken refuge in the caves among the cliffs to the far north. On the morning of July 8th, Gabaldon took two prisoners on top of the cliffs and spoke to them at length, trying to convince them that continuing to fight would mean sure death and pointing to the American ships offshore. He said, why die when you have a chance to surrender under honorable conditions?

You are taking civilians to their death, which is not part of your Bushido military code. The hard part was convincing them that they would not be tortured and killed, that they'd be treated well and returned to Japan after the war. He finally talked one of them into returning to the bottom of the cliffs and trying to convince the others to come up. That soldier came back with 12 more military personnel, each with a rifle. Gabaldon told them to sit down and offer them cigarettes. He said, fellow soldiers, I am here to bring you a message from General Holland Mad Smith,

the shogun in charge of the Marianas operation. General Smith admires your valor and has ordered our troops to offer a safe haven to all the survivors of your intrepid Gyokusai attack yesterday. Such a glorious and courageous military action will go down in history. The general assures you that you will be taken to Hawaii, where you will be kept together in comfortable quarters until the end of the war. The general's word is honorable. It is his desire that there be no more useless bloodshed. The American Navy, with its firepower, can kill all of you. The Japanese soldier in charge accepted a cigarette. Another asked whether the Americans had a well-equipped hospital. Gabaldon said they did and asked whether they had many wounded. The leader suddenly said, so be it. I become your prisoner.

The leader departed over the cliffs, leaving four men with Gabaldon, and he returned presently with more than 50 men. He told Gabaldon that there were hundreds more below, some civilians, some wounded. They needed medicine. Gabaldon told him to bring everyone up and promised he'd contact his own troops once they were assembled. He separated them into groups, military, civilian, and wounded. They needed food, water, and medical care. Gabaldon said to himself, my gosh, when is this going to end? He wrote, before I knew it, in four hours I had 800 prisoners. Two Marines saw me, couldn't believe what they were seeing. And here was this one Marine walking back and forth among all these Japanese. And they said they couldn't figure out what the hell was happening, so they finally came down. I said, get your ass on back and get some help immediately before they turn on me. Finally, hundreds of Marines arrived on the scene, and Cabaldon felt an immense sense of relief. He thought, my God, it's over. I did it. It was 10 p.m. before the last prisoner reached the stockade.

He was credited with bringing in more than 800 prisoners that day, a feat unmatched for a single soldier in U.S. military history. He went on to do largely the same thing on Tinian, another Mariana Island. His wartime career ended a few weeks later when he received machine gun wounds to his arm and hand. Much later, in 2004, he said, I'm 77 years old and I look back and say, did this really happen? He wrote, my actions prove that God takes care of idiots. I look back and say, did this really happen? He wrote, my actions prove that God takes care of idiots. Estimates vary, but altogether on Saipan, it appears he killed 33 enemy soldiers and captured at least a thousand soldiers and civilians. His commanding officer, Captain John Schwabe, recommended him for the Medal of Honor, the United States' highest award for valor. Schwabe later said, he was just a tough little Hispanic kid that had just had a lot of guts.

The commendation was downgraded to a silver star, the third highest decoration for valor in combat. When the war ended, he went back to regular life driving a truck, but in 1957, his story became widely known when he appeared on the TV program This Is Your Life. Three years later, Hollywood made a film about him, Hell to Eternity, and his silver star was upgraded to a Navy cross, the military's second highest decoration. The citation read, Working alone in front of the lines, he daringly entered enemy caves, pillboxes, buildings, and jungle brush, frequently in the face of hostile fire,

and succeeded in not only obtaining vital military information, but in capturing well over 1,000 enemy civilians and troops. He was awarded the keys to various cities, including Osaka, Japan, and made hundreds of speeches to students and veterans groups. In later life, he operated a seafood business in Mexico and on Saipan. Others have campaigned on his behalf for the Medal of Honor, pointing out that Sergeant York had won that distinction in World War I for capturing 132 soldiers, and Cabaldon had captured perhaps 10 times that number on Saipan. Cabaldon was more concerned as to why he was originally nominated for a Medal

of Honor but received a Silver Star Medal and then a Navy Cross. In 2004, he said, I hate to use the race card, but it is so obvious. I don't think the Marine Corps ever awarded the Medal of Honor to any Chicano in World War II. It was only with a twinge of conscience that they upgraded my Silver Star to a Navy Cross, and to me that indicated they knew they had made a mistake. Near the end of his life, though, he said he didn't want to receive the medal, since he did not give his life during his service. He said, I don't deserve the Medal of Honor. I enjoyed what I was doing. Medals of Honor should be awarded posthumously. The heroes are still over there. Those who gave their all are the heroes.

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In episode 142, Greg told us about the development of the modern polygraph and noted the contribution of William Marston to its development. Several listeners wrote in to let us know that Marston is not known only for having been the inventor of the first simple eye detector test. For example, Jonathan Knoll wrote and said, Hello again, Greg, Sharon, and Sasha. I just got done listening to the latest episode of the podcast, and in your history of polygraphs, you mention William Moulton Marston. I'm sure I'm not the first to mention this, but Marston also created the DC comic character of Wonder Woman. It's always a bit of a joke when people remember this, as the creator of Wonder Woman's famous lasso of truth

was instrumental in the development of the lie detector. Marston also has an interesting life story outside of both of these events, and a biopic is in production as of October 2016 called Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, which is being distributed by Sony Pictures. It will follow the real-life story of Marston, his wife Elizabeth, and their polyamorous relationship with Olive Byrne, one of Marston's students. As always, keep up the good work. So just in case there is anyone in the audience who, like me, is not always really knowledgeable about comic book characters, let me start by explaining that Wonder Woman is a superhero that was introduced in 1941. She is an Amazon who lives on an all-female island until a plane

crashes on the island and she is chosen to return the pilot to his home and, you know, help fight crime and the Axis powers while she's there. She has superhuman strength, bracelets that can deflect bullets, an invisible jet, and her lasso that compels anyone roped with it to speak the truth. Comic books had become extremely popular in America in the late 1930s. After the start of World War II in Europe, they came under attack for their glorification of physical and sexual violence. In 1940, the Chicago Daily News called comics a national disgrace. The newspaper's literary editor decried the fact that 10 million copies of these sex horror serials are sold every month and called for parents to ban comics unless we want a coming

generation even more ferocious than the present one. And this is where Marston comes in. A staff writer at Family Circle frequently interviewed him for the magazine, presenting him as a great expert on child psychology. In one of these articles, Marston defended comics, and that was enough for Maxwell Charles Gaines, the head of what became DC Comics, to hire Marston in 1940 as a consultant to help head off attacks on comic books as being harmful to children. What was ironic was that if Gaines had known more about Marston, he would have realized that this was not at all the right person to be hiring to try to reduce controversy. Marston had had a pretty checkered career path, as well as an extremely unconventional personal life for that time.

An article in The Atlantic calls him equal parts genius, charlatan, and kinkster, and notes that before turning to comic books, he had lost every job he'd held, as well as having been indicted for fraud. He was trained as both a lawyer and a psychologist, and is credited for inventing a test of systolic blood pressure. It's said that it was his wife who first noticed that blood pressure readings changed with people's emotional states, and Marston's work in this area led to the first simple lie detector tests. Many of Marston's ideas were pretty radical for the times that he lived in. He wrote a book in 1928 called Emotions of Normal People, in which he argued that many forms of sexuality that were

considered abnormal at the time, such as homosexuality or sadomasochism, were actually normal and fixed in a person's nervous system. In an article in 1939, he argued that people should lose their prejudices, most particularly their prejudice against those who are unconventional and nonconformist. And perhaps most unconventionally of all, he lived with both his wife and his mistress and their combined children, all in the same house. Marston had fallen in love with Olive Byrne when he was her psychology professor at Tufts University in 1925. He had told his wife, Elizabeth Holloway, that either Byrne could live with them or he would leave her. Byrne moved in and was presented to anyone who asked as Marston's widowed sister-in-law.

The four children, two from each women, were raised together as family. Byrne's children didn't find out that Marston was actually their father until 1963, many years after his death, when Holloway finally admitted it to them after she made them promise that no one would ever raise the subject again. Byrne, by the way, was the writer at Family Circle who kept interviewing Marston for articles, like the one that Gaines had seen, with their relationship to each other kept hidden. So this was the man that Gaines had hired to help quell controversy for his comics. Marston saw the job as an opportunity to advance his own particular ideas of feminism and to reduce what he saw as the hyper-masculinity of the comic superheroes.

Marston had been very impressed by the women's suffrage movement that had created a fair amount of controversy during his time in college. The 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote in the U.S. wasn't ratified until 1920. In addition, Byrne's aunt was Margaret Sanger, the noted women's rights and birth control activist, and it's believed that he was also very influenced by her work. But while Marston is today often acknowledged as an early male feminist, his feminism had an odd flavor to it by today's standards. In an essay that he wrote a few years after inventing Wonder Woman, Marston explained his creation like this. Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power.

Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving, as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman, plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman. So this was some of Marston's thinking as he created the character of Wonder Woman, who appears to have been based on a combination of the strong feminists he admired and pin-up centerfolds of the time known as Varga girls that he apparently also admired, who were sultry, athletic, and scantily dressed. It's also

said that Byrne herself was partly an inspiration for Wonder Woman's appearance. Byrne usually wore a pair of cuff bracelets while she lived with Marston in place of a wedding ring, and these appear on Wonder Woman as her bracelets of submission, as they are called. Despite Marston's having been hired to quash controversy, Wonder Woman actually sparked some different controversies of her own. She debuted in December 1941, and in March 1942, the National Organization for Decent Literature put her comic book series on its blacklist of publications disapproved for youth, giving for their reason, Wonder Woman is not sufficiently dressed. The other, perhaps more serious, objection to Wonder Woman was, as written by Marston, stems from Marston's

strong interest in the themes of dominance and submission. As was evident in Marston's quote about the strengths of women, which included being submissive and peace-loving, he felt that some forms of submission were a positive quality that women were stronger in than men. For example, he said, the only hope for peace is to teach people could be to train readers to be more accepting of loving submission to benevolent leaders for the good of society. However, he did also acknowledge some of the other implications of submission, saying, giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element. The imagery of chains and bondage were used a fair amount in the suffragist and women's rights movements and it's clear that marston intended his wonder woman comic to celebrate what he called a

great movement now underway the growth and the power of women a woman having to break the chains that bound her was a great metaphor for what marston called her emancipation from men but at the same time it seems that people who've studied Marston and his character feel that there was, for him, and at least some others who read the comic, a reaction to Wonder Woman's almost constant bondage that was more than purely philosophical in nature. In almost every episode that Marston wrote, Wonder Woman is at some point chained or bound, and Marston, who wrote the comic but didn't draw it, would send elaborate, detailed instructions to the artist of exactly how he wanted the bondage scenes depicted.

Gaines was not at all happy to be receiving letters from people objecting to what they saw as the mistreatment of women depicted in the comic. Josette Frank, an expert in children's literature and a member of the DC Comics Advisory Board, told Gaines that she felt she had to speak out about the comics' sadistic bits showing women chained, tortured, etc. After Dorothy Rubachek, the first woman editor at DC Comics, also complained, Marshton wrote to Gaines, Of course I wouldn't expect Miss Rubachek to understand all this. After all, I have devoted my entire life to working out psychological principles.

Miss R has been in comics only six months or so, hasn't she? And never in psychology. The secret of women's allure, Marston said, is that women enjoy submission, being bound. So, sorry. He depicted a woman being tied up and a woman objected. And he said, you don't understand women like being yes pretty much right she didn't understand psychology well whether wonder woman or any other woman enjoyed being bound there were certainly men who very much enjoyed seeing her that way and gaines was even less happy when he received a letter from one of them

explaining just how much and in what way he enjoyed seeing Wonder Woman in chains. Harvard history professor Jill Lepore, who has written a book about Marston and Wonder Woman, said in an interview on NPR, there's no simple story here. There are a lot of people who got very upset with what Marston was doing. Is this a feminist project that's supposed to help girls decide to go to college and have careers? Or is this just like soft porn? One of Wonder Woman's characteristics was to lose her Amazonian strength if she was bound by a man, so Marston had a strong defense for keeping that element in the stories. Gaines sent Marston a memo from Rubachek of a list of methods which could be used to keep women confined or enclosed without the use of chains and hoped that Marston could cut down the use of chains by at least 50 to 75 percent.

Marston was unmoved and wrote back, you can't have a real woman character in any form of fiction without touching off a great many readers erotic fancies, which is swell, I say, though he did acknowledge that real sadism or torture, where the pleasure is in the victim's pain, was 100% bad and I won't have any part of them. And I should note that in an article in Smithsonian Magazine, Jill Lepore says that Marston and Olive Byrne's son thinks that when Marston talked about the importance of submission, he only meant it metaphorically. She quotes him as saying, I never saw anything like that in our house. He didn't tie the ladies up to the bedpost.

He'd never gotten away with it. Marston died of cancer in 1947, and Wonder Woman underwent various changes in appearance and circumstances reflecting the influences of different writers in different times. For example, after Marston's death, she lost some of her feminist themes and was drawn as more curvy compared to her original leaner and more athletic look. Interestingly, Byrne and Holloway continued to live together even after Marston's death, until Byrne died in 1990.

They had lived together for 64 years. While Byrne was hospitalized before her death, Holloway fell and broke her hip and was admitted to the same hospital. When Holloway was told that Byrne was hospitalized before her death, Holloway fell and broke her hip and was admitted to the same hospital. When Holloway was told that Byrne had died, she sang a poem by Tennyson, Sunset and the Evening Star and One Clear Call for Me, and May There Be No Moaning of the Bar When I Put Out to Sea. No obituary of her death was given to a newspaper. Elizabeth Holloway Marston later died in 1993. So thanks so much to everyone who wrote in to tell us about this story, and I also really appreciate how many people have now been telling me how to correctly pronounce their names.

That's always a big help for me. And if you have any questions or comments that you'd like to send to us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. To send to 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 a strange sounding situation, and I have to work out what is actually going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Stephen Jones. Between 1993 and 2009, German police hunted a serial killer who was implicated in six murders. Described as the country's most dangerous woman, her DNA was found at crime scenes across southern Germany and Austria.

In a 16-year manhunt, police offered a 300,000 euro reward and racked up 16,000 hours of overtime but could not find the killer. Suddenly, in 2009, they called off the search without making an arrest what had they discovered that she wasn't human no she was like a bear okay um so they thought they wanted a woman yes for killing multiple people yes and they thought they wanted this woman because they'd found her DNA at multiple crime scenes? Yes. And it was the same DNA. That's right.

Did it turn out to be the DNA of a person they knew was not the killer? Yes. That's why they called it off. Was the DNA from a law enforcement person or a crime scene or a crime lab person? Jeez, you passed right on that one and her DNA was getting mixed in. What an interesting case, though. Yes, you basically got it. The so-called Phantom of Heilbronn became a national celebrity after the murder of a

22-year-old policewoman in 2007. Police chased the phantom for 16 years until her DNA showed up in the fingerprints of a male subject. Another second test with a different swab showed no match, leading police to suspect that the test material itself might have been contaminated with DNA. It turned out that the cotton swabs used to collect the DNA had been contaminated accidentally by a woman working at a factory in Bavaria. Oh, wow. The puzzle of the phantom killer has been solved, said Volker Link, a prosecutor in Heilbronn.

Apparently, the police had been using swabs intended only for medical use. They weren't certified for DNA analysis. Oh. So they were just coming out of the package already contaminated with DNA. And so anything you swab would come up with a match for this woman. And it was the same woman each time, though. That's like funny. Yeah, it occurred to me that if she, this is very unlikely, but if she submitted her

own DNA sample, like for instance, in a genealogy project or something, it could set off some alarm bells that they finally got the murderer. But fortunately, that didn't happen. So thank you, Stephen, for sending that in. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us, and we really do depend on the support of our listeners to be able to keep doing it. While we have some advertising on the show, it doesn't cover the big commitment of time that it takes to make the podcast each week. If you would like to help support the show and get bonus materials such as extra discussions,

outtakes, more lateral thinking puzzles, and updates on Sasha, the plushest audio engineer in the southeastern United States, then check out our Patreon campaign at 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 frappant esoterica. At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast 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 the always amazing Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.