Futility Closet - 148-The Perfect Murder

Episode Date: April 3, 2017

Insurance agent William Herbert Wallace had a terrible night in January 1931 -- summoned to a nonexistent address in Liverpool, he returned home to find that his wife had been murdered in his absence. An investigation seemed to show a senseless crime with no weapon, no motive, and no likely suspects. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll revisit the slaying of Julia Wallace, which Raymond Chandler called "the impossible murder." We'll also recount some wobbly oaths and puzzle over an eccentric golfer. Intro: In the 1960s, Washington state televised the World Octopus Wrestling Championships. Kansas schoolteacher Samuel Dinsmoor spent two decades fashioning a Garden of Eden out of concrete. Sources for our feature on William Herbert Wallace: W.F. Wyndham-Brown, ed., The Trial of William Herbert Wallace, 1933. Yseult Bridges, Two Studies in Crime, 1959. Roger Wilkes, Wallace: The Final Verdict, 1984. Ronald Bartle, The Telephone Murder, 2012. Hans Von Hentig, "Pre-Murderous Kindness and Post-Murder Grief," Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 48:4 (November-December 1957), 369-377. Roger Wilkes, "The 1931 Slaying of a Liverpool Housewife Remains to This Day the Perfect Murder," Telegraph, May 12, 2001. Liverpool Echo, "Riddle of Man from the Pru," April 7, 2008. David Harrison, "PD James Unmasks the Perfect Killer," Sunday Times, Oct. 27, 2013. Edward Winter, "Chess and the Wallace Murder Case," Chess History (accessed March 19, 2017). Listener mail: "Murder Castle," Lights Out, Feb. 16, 1938. Wikipedia, "Lights Out (radio show)" (accessed March 30, 2017). Wikipedia, "Oath of Office of the President of the United States" (accessed March 30, 2017). Jeffrey Toobin, The Oath, 2013. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Jake Koethler. Here's a corroborating link (warning -- this spoils 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 wrestling octopus to a concrete Garden of Eden. This is episode 148. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Insurance agent William Herbert Wallace had a terrible night in January 1931. Summoned to a non-existent address in Liverpool, he returned home to find that his wife had been murdered in his absence.

Investigations seem to show a senseless crime with no weapon, no motive, and no likely suspects. In today's show, we'll revisit the killing of Julia Wallace, which Raymond Chandler called the impossible murder. We'll also recount some wobbly oaths and puzzle over an eccentric golfer. At 7.15 p.m. on January 19, 1931, the telephone rang at the Liverpool Central Chess Club. The caller asked to speak to a member named William Herbert Wallace. The club captain told him that Wallace was scheduled to play a game that evening but hadn't yet arrived. The caller said he was a potential customer for Wallace, who was an insurance agent.

He said, I want to see him particularly. He gave his name as R.M. Qualtrough and asked Wallace to visit him at 7.30 the following evening, and he gave an address, 25 Menlove Gardens East. Wallace arrived at the club about 25 minutes later, and the captain gave him the message. Wallace looked puzzled. He said he didn't know anyone by that name, but he put the message in his pocket. His commission on new insurance business was 20%, and there was a depression on, so new business was valuable. The next day, Wallace went about his job as usual at the Prudential Assurance Company and returned home just after 6 p.m. He had tea with his wife, Julia, and left the house around 6.45 to visit the address he'd been given.

As she always did, Julia went with him through their back garden to the gate, which he reminded her to lock behind him. He walked to the tram stop and traveled to the other side of the city. behind him. He walked to the tram stop and traveled to the other side of the city. When he got there, he found Menlove Gardens north, south, and west, but no Menlove Gardens east. He asked a news agent and a local policeman, but no one knew of a Menlove Gardens east or of a Mr. Qualtrough. He called at 25 Menlove Gardens west, and he asked several other passersby, but no one could help him. Finally, after 45 minutes, he returned home. At around 8.45 p.m., his next-door neighbors, John and Florence Johnston, were just going out for the evening when they met Wallace in the alley behind their houses. He asked them whether they'd seen anything

suspicious that night. He said he'd found both the front and back doors of his house were locked from the inside. While they watched, he tried the back door again. He told them, it opens now, and he went in. He came out seconds later and called to them, she's been killed, come and see. In the parlor was the body of Julia Wallace lying face down near the fireplace. Her head had been beaten in by 11 blows with a heavy object. and told him that when he'd returned from Menlove Gardens, he'd tried his key in the front door and found that it wouldn't open. At the back door of the house, he tried his key and found that this door wouldn't open either. He had just tried the front again when he met the Johnstons, and they saw him get in through the back.

Wallace led the officer to the living room, reached to the top of a tall bookcase, and took down a cash box where he said he kept the money from his insurance collections. He said that four pounds was missing from it, suggesting that robbery had been the motive for the crime. The killer's actions were hard to understand. He had killed Julia violently, but without making a sound that the neighbors could hear, though the walls were thin. After the murder, he would have been heavily stained with blood, but he had moved around the house, creating disorder for no apparent purpose. He had wrenched the door off an unlocked kitchen cabinet and tumbled the bedclothes in an unused bedroom. off an unlocked kitchen cabinet and tumbled the bedclothes in an unused bedroom. He'd ignored Julia's handbag and jewelry but gone instead to the cash box, which was almost hidden from sight

on top of a bookcase more than seven feet high. He'd turned off the gas lights in the ground floor rooms and then managed to exit the house without leaving bloodstains on any door handle, wall, or other object, and apparently he'd taken the murder weapon with him. By 10 p.m., the house was full of detectives. At 10.30 p.m., a call went out for officers around the city to be on the lookout for a blood-stained man, but no one was found. In fact, the hunt for the killer continued for three weeks without success. During this time, the police made the surprising discovery

that the telephone box that R.M. Qualtrough had used to call the chess club was just 400 yards from the Wallace's front door. That raised a suspicion. Maybe Wallace himself had placed the call to set up an alibi from the Wallace's front door. That raised a suspicion. Maybe Wallace himself had placed the call to set up an alibi for the night of the murder. Maybe he himself had killed Julia, then went out to seek a non-existent address in Menlove Gardens and returned to discover the body. But this seemed hard to believe. The Wallace's, by all accounts, were happily married, and William had nothing to gain by Julia's death. And the details didn't seem to add up. The chess club

captain, Samuel Beatty, said he was certain that the telephone caller's voice had not belonged to Wallace. The police estimated that the killing had been brutal and frenzied, but no trace of blood was found on Wallace's clothing. A Macintosh belonging to Wallace had been found under Julia's shoulder, so according to one theory, he had stripped naked, put on the Macintosh to avoid a mess, bludgeoned his wife to death, and then cleaned up quickly and ran to catch the tram. But this seems absurd. And in any case, Wallace was 52 years old and in poor health. It wasn't clear that he'd be able to murder his wife, clean himself up, and still reach the tram in the time available. As an experiment, a police detective tried to do it, and he barely made it, though he

was young and fit. Nonetheless, the police found no other likely suspects, and on February 2nd, they arrested Wallace on suspicion of murder, perhaps because they were under public pressure to solve the crime. The case against Wallace was entirely circumstantial. The prosecution claimed that he had placed the phone call to the chess club, murdered his wife naked wearing the Macintosh, then taken the tram to Menlove Gardens, where he had pretended to seek a phony address in order to create an alibi for himself. After this, he had returned home, told the neighbors that he'd discovered his house was locked, and once he was sure that witnesses were present, he'd opened the back door and discovered the body. Prosecutor Edward George Hemmer told the jury, if this man did what he's charged with doing, it is murder foul and unpardonable. Few more brutal

can ever have been committed. Wallace consistently denied that he was guilty. Samuel Beatty, the chess club captain, swore again that it had not been Wallace's voice that he'd heard on the telephone. A milk delivery boy testified that he'd talked to Julia at 6 30 on the night of her murder. That would leave Wallace just 20 to 25 minutes to kill Julia, clean himself up, stage a robbery, and catch the tram. And again, William Wallace had no known motive, no reason to kill his wife. But no other likely suspects had been found, and Wallace struck many of the spectators as unusually calm and composed when discussing his wife's murder. He was cerebral by nature, and perhaps his interest in chess, botany, and chemistry made it seem possible that he'd somehow engineered the perfect murder.

After an hour's deliberation, the jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death. But now something historic happened. Wallace appealed, and for the first time in British history, the appeals court threw out the jury's verdict as improper, not because of some procedural mistake, but because it judged that the evidence simply wasn't sufficient to justify a guilty verdict. It said that a jury's job is to decide whether the evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty of a crime. It's not enough to say we can't conceive how anyone else could have done it. If the weight of the evidence doesn't establish the guilty of the accused party, then he must go free. The Court of Criminal Appeal decided that the evidence was insufficient, so it quashed the verdict and Wallace was released.

He was free, but he returned to his insurance job under a cloud. Many people felt he was guilty and had got away with murder. His customers shunned him, and he received hate mail and physical threats. Eventually, he had to take a clerical job out of sight at the company's head office. He moved to a bungalow in Bromborough and died just two years later at age 54 in 1933. No other person was ever charged with the murder, and officially it remains unsolved. charged with the murder, and officially it remains unsolved. In the years that have followed, the killing of Julia Wallace has become one of the most celebrated murder cases of all time. In 1959, author Iseult Bridges wrote, no case within living memory has been debated more keenly and persistently than this one, yet so far no theory has been advanced to account for the apparent senselessness of the act itself. Not even the prosecution suggested a motive, and subsequent speculations on the point have been characterized mainly by their wildness. The English critic James Agate wrote that the murder, quote,

was planned with extreme care and extraordinary imagination. Either the murder was Wallace or it wasn't. If it wasn't, then here at last is the perfect murder. If it was, then here is the murder so nearly perfect that the Court of Criminal Appeal decided to quash Wallace's conviction. In the 86 years that have passed since the crime occurred, it's been re-examined many times. Most writers conclude that Wallace was innocent. What's fascinating about it is that the facts are not disputed, but nearly every detail can be seen in two lights, making Wallace seem either innocent or guilty. The English criminologist F. Tennyson Jesse wrote, it was not so much that the weight of evidence swung evenly from one side to

the other, it was that the entire evidence pointed equally convincingly in both directions. The British crime writer Edgar Lustgarten called the case the perfect scientific puzzle. He wrote, as a mental exercise, as a challenge to one's powers of deduction and analysis, the Wallace murder is in a class by itself. It has all the maddening, frustrating fascination of a chess problem that ends in perpetual check. Any set of circumstances that is extracted from it will readily support two incompatible hypotheses. They will be equally consistent with innocence and guilt. It is preeminently the case where everything is canceled out by something else. And even fiction writers are admired the plot. P.D. James called the case more mysterious and fascinating than any crime fiction I have read. And Raymond Chandler said, the Wallace case is

the nonpareil of all murder mysteries. I call it the impossible murder because Wallace couldn't have done it and neither could anyone else. A few points of note. Whoever he was, the killer planned the murder carefully at least 24 hours in advance since he placed the call to the chess club on January 19th, which sent Wallace on this fruitless search for a non-existent address. The phone kiosk from which the call was placed, as I've said, was just 400 yards from Wallace's house, and the call was placed at 7.15. The only reason we know the time of the call is that the caller encountered a technical problem and had to speak with the operator, at which point the time and location were logged automatically. The caller spoke to two operators who later testified that he had, quote, an ordinary voice and was rather polite. Time tests showed that a man with Wallace's stride would take four minutes to reach the kiosk from the Wallace's front door.

So if Wallace left the house at 7.10, five minutes earlier than he'd stated, then he could have registered his complaint with the operator at 7.15 as it was logged. If the call was placed not by Wallace but by some unknown killer, then his plan seems strangely risky. Wallace might not get the phone message at all, or he might look up the address or ask someone and discover that Menlove Gardens East didn't exist. He might simply decide not to go, and the killer would have to monitor both the front and back doors of the house to be sure Wallace had left for his appointment before he knew it was safe to approach the house. Time tests show that if Wallace was the killer, then he would have had at most 70 minutes to take his tea, murder his wife,

clean himself up, and reach the tram stop. To catch the tram, he would have had to leave the house no later than 6.49. But the milk boy, Alan Close, gave evidence that Julie was alive at 6.30. That would give Wallace only about 19 minutes to commit the murder and clean up. In fact, the defense called a newspaper boy in an attempt to narrow that window still further. He said that he saw the milk boy on the Wallace's step at 23 minutes to 7. If that's true, it would give Wallace only 12 minutes to kill his wife and depart. In a 2001 summary in the Telegraph, Roger Wilkes wrote, in the time available, could Wheezy Wallace at 52, a heavy smoker, out of condition with a chronic kidney complaint, really have stripped naked, wearing the Macintosh to shield himself from splashing blood, bludgeoned his wife to death, cleaned and secreted the

murder weapon, which was never found, faked a burglary, attended to various gas jets, fires, locks, and bolts, and dressed himself for a journey across Liverpool, calm and composed, on a winter's night? The answer may be yes. Wallace was intelligent and methodical, and if he was the killer, he might have expected to become a suspect. In that case, he'd want it to appear unlikely that he could have committed the crime. In either case, Wallace went down to Menlove Gardens and returned two hours later. He says he tried both the front and back doors, found them both locked, and then met his neighbors, the Johnstons, who watched him enter the house and discover the body. If Wallace was the killer, then perhaps he'd planned all this so that witnesses

could see that he'd had no time to dispose of evidence. But how could he know he didn't encounter the Johnstons? If he wanted some witness to see him enter the house, he couldn't know that he'd get one. Yeah, but that point keeps sticking on on me but how he claimed that he tried the key and it didn't work and then suddenly it did like that just doesn't make any sense no it doesn't like that part's just very strange and i guess he could have i mean i don't know the habits of his neighbors but if he knew that people tended to be about at that time of night he could have hoped to have encountered somebody or i was thinking conceiv, he could have hoped to have encountered somebody. Or I was thinking, conceivably, he could have, if the Johnsons didn't present themselves, he could have sought a policeman and said, I've locked out of my house and I don't know

what to do. Let me try the back door again. Right. Or gone and knocked on their door and said, something seems strange at my house. Yeah. Have you seen anything? Yeah, that's true. So that's all possible.

If Wallace is innocent, then the idea is that the killer watched him go and then rang the bell. Julia answered the door and he gave her some pretext for needing to speak to William. Julia invited him into the parlor and lighted one of the gas brackets and then the fire. He beat her to death and then bolted both the front and back doors and began ransacking the house. Wallace returned while he was still in the house, but he managed to escape by the back door while Wallace was trying the front. Oh, and that's why at first his key wouldn't work in the back. Right.

And then it would have worked. Okay. I mean and that's why at first his key wouldn't work in the back. Right. And then it would have worked. Okay. I mean, that's one possibility. Well, it's the only thing that makes sense unless he was completely lying, right? Yeah, but there's still a thousand questions. Yeah. It's just one oddity here is that Wallace said he found the garden gate unbolted at his first approach to the back, even though the Wallace's made it an invariable practice

to bolt that gate whenever William left at night. Remember, she accompanied him through the garden and he said, remember to lock the back gate. Right. But when he showed up, it was unbolted. How do they know that he said that? Did a neighbor hear that? Because I guess they can't take his word for it.

Right, exactly. He testified that, but if he's the killer, he could be saying anything. He could be saying anything. And if the killer murdered Julia at 7 o'clock, why was he still in the house two hours later? He did many strange things in the house. He disordered the bed in the front bedroom. He ignored

jewelry and a handbag, but spotted a cash box atop a tall bookcase. He wrenched the door off an unlocked cupboard. But still, he should have been gone long before Wallace returned home. Why was he still in the house? That just seems impossible to understand. The only thing I can think of is he was searching for something in particular. Right? Maybe

Wallace was a spy or something. You know, right? I mean, he's a secret agent and he was searching for something in in particular you know and perhaps even found it and thought it was in the cash box or that's why he took what was in the cash box or yeah i don't know drugs i don't know uh in summing up the case the trial judge mr justice wright said this murder i should imagine must be almost unexampled in the annals of crime, murder so devised and arranged that nothing remains which will point to anyone as the murderer. That remained true until the 50th anniversary of the crime, in 1980, when news editor Roger Wilkes found a new lead. Wilkes' investigation pointed to Richard

Gordon Perry, a former colleague of Wallace at Prudential. In 1928, Perry had helped Wallace with his collections, and Wallace caught Perry skimming some of this money for himself. Wallace didn't report him, but during their work together, Perry had got to know Julia Wallace and had learned Wallace's habits, including his collecting schedule and the location of the cash box in his house. After the killing, Perry had become a police suspect because he'd been seen in an agitated state on the night of the murder. He'd had an alibi, though.

He said he'd been with his fiancée that evening. But he later jilted her, and she changed her story, saying that this was false. Wilkes also learned that Perry had had his car cleaned at a garage after the murder, and the cleaner had found a bloody glove. So conceivably, Perry was the murderer. Perhaps he arranged for Wallace to leave the house, seeking a non-existent address, then knocked on the door under some pretense related to business. Julia, who knew him, let him in and invited him to wait until her husband returned, and then he killed her and ransacked the house. Unfortunately, Perry had died

just before Wilkes unearthed these new clues, and the rest of the trail was 50 years cold at that point, so there's no way to know what really happened. Does nobody ever think the possibility of that there was, did he, the husband was actually in on it with an accomplice? Yes, some people think that Wallace was colluding with Perry. Right. There's all kinds of theories about it. I mean, then things would fit together a lot better. I mean, we don't have a motive, and that's a little strange,

but... If it was Perry, the motive, just to say this explicitly, what he was seeking was money from the cash box, and he just timed it badly and found only four pounds.

That's just to connect that explicitly. But he didn't take the purse. No. For whatever reason. Right. But yeah, that's possible. People have considered

that the two of them were in on it together or maybe there was someone else involved also. Right. Like if he just wanted his wife out of the picture for some reason

and so he hired someone, paid someone, then some of this would make a little more sense. Yeah. Also, no one seems to know anything at all about the victim,

about Julia Wallace. She led a very quiet existence and it's easy to say that no one had a reason to kill her, but we don't know anything about her or about really their relationship. I mean, how much does anyone know

about anyone else really? Right. Officially, the case remains unsolved and it seems unlikely that any convincing evidence will close it now. So someone, Perry, Wallace, or someone else

got away with the perfect murder that night, even if only by accident. Jeff and Andy were two ordinary guys who were fed up with getting ripped off buying razor blades, so they started Harry's to fix shaving. They knew there was only one way to ensure quality, so they bought their own blade factory. By taking less profit and selling directly to you over the internet, Harry's offers their blades at half the price. Harry's has sent me some of their razors to try, and I've been impressed with their quality. Their blades really do give a close, smooth, comfortable shave, and you can't beat the convenience. They ship them right to your door.

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Hello, my family and I love your show, and my nine-year-old daughter and I often listen to it on the way to and from school. The other day we listened to episode 144, The Murder Castle, and I was surprised to discover that I already knew the story. When I was a child, I loved listening to old radio shows, e.g. The Shadow, The Green Hornet, etc., and had a collection of several of them on audio cassette. One cassette was from the suspense

show Arch Obler's Lights Out and had the 1938 episode Murder Castle, which I now know, thanks to your podcast, is based on the story of H.H. Holmes and his murder castle. When I was a kid, I had no idea this was actually based on fact. I just thought it was a really creepy story. The radio show is a bit different than the actual events, as, spoiler alert, the sister of one of his victims comes to find out what happened and ends up exacting her own grisly revenge, but the setting is unmistakable. And Christopher found a link to that episode of Lights Out, if anyone wants to hear that for themselves.

He also included a link to the Wikipedia article on the show Lights Out, which was really interesting reading. The show premiered in January 1934 and was one of the first radio horror shows. Apparently, the early shows, which were written by Willis Cooper, were particularly grisly. Wikipedia says, a character might be buried, eaten, or skinned alive, vaporized in a ladle of white hot steel, absorbed by a giant slurping amoeba, have his arm torn off by a robot, or forced to endure torture, beating, or decapitation, always with the appropriate blood-curdling acting and sound effects. Arch Obler took over writing for the show in 1936,

and while he also had some rather gruesome plots, he wrote at least some of the episodes to reflect social or moral issues. His first plot for the show, though, involved a paralyzed girl being buried alive, which caused the radio network to be flooded with outraged letters. And apparently Boris Karloff was on five episodes of the show, including playing a desperate husband whose wife was turning into a giant cat. All in all, it sounds like an appropriate kind of show for the H.H. Holmes story, huh? Yeah, it's funny that you could fit these right, that fits right in. You'd never know it was true.

And spoiler alert here for lateral thinking puzzles from episodes 133 and last week. Christopher Johnson wrote, Hi G and S and S. Read the lateral thinking puzzle from a few weeks back where a person in trouble would thank you for giving her one but be much less happy if you gave her two answer was ends of a rope i thought i had solved it early on with a much more macabre answer morphine shots i was thinking of the scene in saving private ryan where the medic gets wounded and after the first shot eases his immediate agony he begs for the second shot knowing it will him, but believing his injuries are unsurvivable anyway. His comrades reluctantly obey him. A grim alternative answer true, but in keeping with the apparently unfailingly fatal theme of LTPs.

Love the show and a happy patron supporter of it. And Jesse Onlin wrote in about the puzzle in our last episode, in which I will say nobody died. The person who submitted the lateral thinking puzzle used in episode 147 claimed that the oath of office for the President of the United States was not botched again after Taft's mistake in 1929 until 2009. But that's not correct. There were two oath mishaps between 1929 and 2009. In 1945, Chief Justice Harlan Stone mistakenly called Harry S. Truman, Harry Ship Truman, guessing that the S stood for the name of Truman's paternal grandfather. In fact, Truman's middle name was just the bare initial S. In 1965, Chief Justice Warren slightly misread the oath to Lyndon Johnson, saying the office of the presidency of the United States instead of the office of the president of the United States.

And actually, when I looked into this a bit, I discovered that apparently Taft may not even have been the first chief justice to mess up giving the oath of office. In 1909, when Taft himself was being sworn in as president, Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who had sworn in four other presidents before Taft, apparently misquoted the oath, but the error wasn't publicized at the time. It's reported that after the girl who had heard the ceremony on the radio in 1929 and wrote to Taft to let him know he'd made an error while swearing in Hoover, and Taft wrote back to the 13-year-old saying, when I was sworn in as president by Chief Justice Fuller, he made a similar slip. And Taft added, but in those days when there was no radio, it was observed only in the Senate chamber where I took the oath. And that's a good point because who knows how many times there might have been errors in the ceremony before there were recording devices.

Like when John Quincy Adams was sworn in. We would have no idea. There were only a few people who witnessed it and if none of them caught the mistake, no one would know about it. Right, so it's kind of funny that Taft made an error, but then said that actually when he'd been being sworn in, an error was made in his own swearing in. Well, I'm kind of appalled that anybody's making errors. The oath isn't like a hundred words, and it's almost the most important thing anybody ever says anywhere. Yeah, and I thought it was a pretty big mistake to just assume that you knew what an S stood for in somebody's name.

Yeah. It's like, oh, let's just put a Steven in or whatever we think of that starts with S. In our last episode, I read an email from Catherine who said that she hadn't actually ever heard Sasha on our show, but was taking our word for it

that we really do have a cat and asked in what episode you can hear her most clearly. Eric Waldo wrote, Greetings, podcasters and podcat. I discovered your podcast recently. It was mentioned on No Such Thing as a Fish and have been working my way through the archives. In the latest episode, someone asked when to hear Sasha. She comes in during the lateral thinking puzzle in episode 46, jumped to about indeed show up during the puzzle, which startled Greg a bit as he had his eyes closed concentrating on the puzzle at the time. She meows a bit at about 2930, which you can hear if your speakers are turned up well.

And then you can hear kind of a squawk that she does a little before the 30-minute mark. And I also remembered that there was an early episode where Sasha showed up meowing as I was trying to do the outro to the show. So I checked, and that was episode nine. At about the 33-minute mark, you can hear me talking about the website and where the show notes are. And then you hear me start to lose it. You hear one audible meow, and then me laughingly trying to finish the rest of the outro. Because as I recall, Sasha was actually walking back and forth in front of the microphone during the whole rest of the outro, wondering why no one was paying more attention to her. She was doing her best to get some petting. But I think that was probably her first appearance on the show, if I remember

correctly. As we're recording this, she's attacking a piece of furniture about three feet from here. Yes. But with the new microphones, it's much harder for her to be heard. So thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us and some extra appreciation for those who have been telling me how to correctly pronounce their names. If you have any questions or comments for us or for Sasha, you can write to any of us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to

present him with an odd sounding situation and he has to try to figure out what's actually going on, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle is based on one that was sent in by Jake Koehler, and I was a little worried that Jake's version might have too many clues in it. Oh, I like that. So you took them out. I took some of them out, yes, and we'll see if I manage to make it just the right amount of difficult. That's actually a pretty tricky thing to do,

is make them just the right amount of difficult. So here's your puzzle. A well-known man in his late 40s wearing an expensive suit is at work when he surprises his colleagues by dropping some golf balls and hitting them with a golf club. He is pleased that he manages to hit one of them quite some distance, but he doesn't go after or try to recover the balls. What's going on? This is a real winner so far. A well-dressed man in his late 40s? A well-known man

in his late 40s. Well-known man. So this really happened? Yes. Is his age important? Not necessarily. You said dropped some golf balls. Yes. In his office. At work.

At work. There's so many things to go after here is it is it worth my while to try to figure out who he is have i heard of this man uh yeah you have is the time period important um not like specifically is he alive now do you know i don't actually know okay i'm gonna'm going to drop that. Do I need to... Is his workplace in a conventional building somewhere? No. Is he an entertainer? No.

No? No. Drops. Okay. All right. Golf balls. The first thing that caught my attention is you said dropped some golf balls. Yes. Dropped them onto a surface like the floor of the ground?

Yes. So just put some golf balls on the ground? Okay. I think he dropped them, but... But just, I mean, preparatory to hitting them. Yes, yes. Cause some golf balls to be on what you would call the ground. Is that significant or just that, or were you just saying that he hit some golf balls? on what you would call the ground. Is that significant?

Or were you just saying that he hit some golf balls? Maybe minorly significant, but he hit some golf balls. But it's maybe minorly significant. Oh, oh, oh. Did this happen on Earth? No. I don't know what put that in my head. Yeah. A well-known man.

In his late 40s. In his late 40s. Wearing suit oh that's good is at work um is it i can't remember who it was is he on the moon yes he is on the moon yeah it was alan shepherd right and jake says this event actually happened on the moon which means sharon might get this on her second question because i had about that, but I always used to ask, is this in the moon? And is he human? So yeah, this was Alan Shepard, the first American in space,

and he was 47, the oldest man to walk on the moon. So I was looking into this and apparently he had smuggled two golf balls and a golf club head aboard the mission in his sock and jury rigged a makeshift club with the club head and a retractable instrument

that's used to collect samples. And apparently hitting the balls was actually really hard because he was in this very bulky suit and very bulky gloves and the helmet limited his vision. So he'd actually practiced this back on Earth before trying it on the moon. And currently, Shepard's makeshift club and sock are at the United States Golf Association Museum in New Jersey, but the golf balls are presumably still on the moon. Or in space somewhere, I guess. Right, yes. So thank you, Jake, for that puzzle.

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