Futility Closet - 265-The Great Hedge of India

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 10,000 quirky curiosities from a plasterer's greeting to a prolific mind. This is episode 265. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In the 19th century, an enormous hedge ran for more than a thousand miles across India, installed by the British to enforce a tax on salt.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Though it took a Herculean effort to build, today it's been almost completely forgotten. In today's show, we'll describe this strange project and reflect on its disappearance from history. We'll also exonerate a rooster and puzzle over a racing murderer. And just a quick programming note, we'll be off next week, so we'll be back with a new episode on September 30th. a new episode on September 30th. In late 1995, the author Roy Moxham visited a secondhand bookshop in London and bought a book called Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official by Major General Sir W.H. Sleeman, KCB. Sleeman had traveled through central India in the middle of the 19th century, and his book included a footnote that seemed impossible to believe. It was a quotation by a civil servant named Sir John Strachey. He wrote,

Starting point is 00:01:28 A customs line was established which stretched across the whole of India, which in 1869 extended from the Indus to the Mahanadi in Madras, a distance of 2,500 miles, and it was guarded by nearly 12,000 men. It would have stretched from London to Constantinople. It consisted princip principally, of an immense, impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes. This sounds crazy on its face, and Moxham had particular reason to be skeptical. He'd visited India every year since 1992 and had never heard of a giant hedge. He thought the reference must be wrong. This hedge would have

Starting point is 00:02:02 existed within the memories of living grandparents, and he could find no reference to it in the usual histories. But he managed to confirm it in another book. That said, there had been 1,720 guard posts along this customs line, and a historian who'd seen the hedge, Grant Duff, said it could be compared to nothing else in the world except the Great Wall of China. There were no details of its precise location. It still seemed incredible, but Moxham found more in the records of the India Office, which had overseen India during the years of British rule. In one annual report,

Starting point is 00:02:33 Alan Octavian Hume, the Commissioner of Inland Customs, wrote, In populated parts of the country where smuggling is rife, the men are active in preventing the passage of contraband goods by a barrier which, in its most perfect form, is utterly impassable to man or beast, and all the outlets through which are guarded. Moxham eventually wrote this up in an entertaining book called The Great Hedge of India. It's true. There was once an enormous hedge running for hundreds of miles through India, which has now been all but forgotten. Its purpose was to enforce a tax on salt. been all but forgotten. Its purpose was to enforce a tax on salt. The British East India Company had imposed the tax in the eastern part of the subcontinent, where it could cost a family two months wages per year. To avoid the tax, people started smuggling salt in from the princely states

Starting point is 00:03:15 to the west, which were outside of British control. To block that smuggling, the British established the Inland Customs Line in 1843. Essentially, they drew a line across the map, and anyone who transported salt across the line into British India had to pay the tax. The line took shape gradually. At first, it was just a series of customs posts guarding certain roads and rivers. Those were easy to get around, so they put the posts in a line. Smugglers could still pass between them at night, so the British got serious. They cut thorn bushes, dragged them into position between the guard posts, and staked them in place, creating what was called a dry hedge. And eventually, for ease of maintenance, the dry hedge was replaced with a living green hedge of thorny plants,

Starting point is 00:03:57 prickly pear, thorny acacia, and bamboo. The scale of this was mind-boggling. At its height, the inland customs line stretched 2,500 miles across India, from the Himalayas almost to the Bay of Bengal, and its central portion, 1,500 miles, was a barrier of thorns 14 feet high and 8 feet thick, or 4 meters high and 2.5 feet thick. At intervals along its length were 1,800 customs posts, guarded by nearly 10,500 officers,

Starting point is 00:04:24 who collected the duty on salt from everyone who passed through the line. It's amazing how thoroughly this has been forgotten. The hedge was probably first established in the 1840s, but no one knows quite when or whose idea it was. G. H. Smith, the Commissioner of Customs from 1834 to 1854, wrote, In the performance of their preventative duties, the aforementioned Alan Octavian Hume, the long-suffering commissioner of inland customs, who recorded the almost unthinkable labor it required. Every mile of the dry hedge required 250 tons of thorny brushwood to be cut remotely and then carried up to six miles and staked in

Starting point is 00:05:16 place. In 1867, that amounted to 100,000 tons. And that was just the beginning. Now you had to maintain it. Ants devoured the shrubs, storms blew them away, fires consumed them, and whatever remained began to rot in place. Hume wrote, no one out of the department at all realizes the incredible amount of labor that even 200 miles of good dry hedge represents. It is not too much to say that what with decay, white ants, fires, and storms, at least half has to be renewed yearly. The British began to realize that many of these evils could be avoided by planting a live hedge instead of assembling a dead one, and eventually they did this for at least 800 miles of the line.

Starting point is 00:05:55 But where the dry hedge required the labor of Sisyphus, Hume wrote, the green hedge required, quote, an absolutely inconceivable amount of labor and trouble, at least in the first few years. They had to experiment constantly with various thorny shrubs and planting methods to see what would grow. Where water couldn't be found, they dug trenches to catch rain. Where floods rotted the plants, they raised ridges on which to sow the seed, and where the ground was barren or stony, they carried in good earth from a distance. Hume wrote, no one who has not taken in hand the cultivation of a thousand miles of live hedge can form any conception of the Herculean labor this involves. Still, by 1870, Hume calculated that they had 448 and three-quarters miles of what he called perfect hedge, and 233 and a half miles of hedge, quote, which, though strong and

Starting point is 00:06:41 good, requires future additions to render it impenetrable. This hedge is in places solely a live hedge, in others entirely a dry, thorny barrier, while in others, again, it is a combination of the two. The hedge is nowhere less than 8 feet high and 4 to 5 feet thick, but in places it is as much as 12 feet high and 14 feet thick at the bottom. Hume was eventually promoted to Secretary of the Government of India, and the next commissioner, G.H.M. Batten, focused on making the line impregnable. He found the work just as hellish as Hume had. The hedge was attacked by frost and field rats, against which he unleashed an army of wild cats.

Starting point is 00:07:16 He made nurseries for cactus, which was the only plant that would thrive in certain sections. By 1873, the hedge was 1,248 miles long, but there were gaps. Parasitical creepers had seized and blighted some sections, which had to be replaced entirely. Locusts settled in the hedge and checked its growth, and the plants themselves decayed continuously and had to be replaced. But Batten wrote, Notwithstanding all this, the hedge in the greater part of the Agra division flourishes to such a height and thickness as to be, if not a thing of beauty, a standing monument Those men were an army in themselves.

Starting point is 00:07:53 Each officer patrolled a beat of 10 to 30 miles along the line and oversaw about 100 men who maintained the hedge and manned guard posts. posts. In 1869, there were 100 beats and 1,727 guard posts, and the line was patrolled night and day, except where tigers were a danger in the central provinces. In 1869, that added up to 14,000 people. In that year, Hume calculated, the officers marched and patrolled 350,000 miles and weighed more than 200,000 tons of goods. The men walked more than 18 million miles, dug more than 2 million Hume wrote, I believe that under the present system of administration, there is no large body of men in the world from whom so much unintermitting and hard labor is required. All of this agony was worthwhile because it was profitable. The line collected 10 times as much in tax revenue as it had cost to build. But there were many problems. Apart from being expensive to maintain, the hedge made travel and trade difficult. If you lived on one side and wanted to

Starting point is 00:09:00 land or visit family on the other, you might have to make a detour of four miles to pass through one of the gateways. The officials at those gateways were underpaid and rewarded for the salt they confiscated, so they tended to become corrupt. Many of them extorted bribes, turned their backs on abuses by subordinates, and colluded with smugglers. The line did slow the smuggling of salt, but it didn't stop it. In 1847, 6,000 people were convicted of smuggling, and the ones who couldn't pay the fine were jailed for an average of six weeks. The greatest objection to the hedge was moral. Salt had always been taxed in India, but the country as a whole has enough salt for its population. In the past, the practice had never

Starting point is 00:09:37 led to deprivation. But with this new system, the British brought a rapacious efficiency to the project that began to cost lives. Hundreds of millions of people in the interior were now cut off from the sea, and for them the price of salt tripled. The poor simply could not afford this. During famines, they had to spend all their money on grain, and thousands began to suffer and die for lack of salt. British doctors working in India protested to Parliament that this was inhumane. In effect, the hedge was extorting money by withholding from people an absolute necessity of life. The civil servant John Strachey described it as, quote, a monstrous system to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any tolerably civilized country. In the face of this criticism, even as

Starting point is 00:10:18 the customs line was being completed, the British government was looking for another solution. Even Hume, who had labored so hard to build it, wrote in an 1877 memo, every package and every vehicle that has to cross it, is an anomaly, a relic of barbarism that no really civilized and enlightened government can continue to tolerate. He called it a grievous hindrance to the trade and traffic alike of its own subjects and those of its friendly and protected native princes. I just find it amazing that so many thousands of people labored for decades, I mean really laboredored to build, you know, the equivalent of the Great Wall of China, which still stands today, and people definitely remember it. And so this would have been such a big part of so many people's lives. I mean, back-breaking

Starting point is 00:11:17 work. And then you have people realize like, oh, wow, this is maybe not actually a good idea after all. We need to just get rid of it, and we'll all forget about it, and we'll all forget that it even happened. And there was no interval. It's not like they finished it, and then it lasted for 50 years, and then they started to think twice. They were thinking twice almost before it was finished. Oh, my gosh. And it took decades to put this all together. So you're right there. But the workers, I'm sure there were workers who would just go to sleep exhausted and then dream about thorns

Starting point is 00:11:43 all night and then get up again. And that was your life for years and years and years. And then you hear, you know what? We've decided this is not a good idea. We're just going to forget the whole thing that you've just spent 20 years working on. And now it's literally almost completely forgotten. And nobody even remembers it. And this was, I mean, it was such a significant part of so many people's lives, I'm sure, at the time.

Starting point is 00:12:05 But it makes you wonder how many other things humans do and devote so much time and effort to. And then it's like, it'll just be forgotten. It'll be erased from memory almost. Hume negotiated treaties with the various princely states, and eventually Britain managed to get a monopoly on salt production throughout the country. Salt now costs the same everywhere, and so the expensive, hard-won customs line was not needed. On April 1, 1879, it was abandoned. The salt tax itself continued all the way up to 1947. If you know Mahatma Gandhi's story, or if you've seen Richard Attenborough's film about him,

Starting point is 00:12:40 you know that in 1930, Gandhi and 78 followers marched 241 miles to the sea, deliberately to make salt illegally there and force the British government to confront them. Gandhi said, next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor. Cattle cannot live without salt. There is no article like salt, outside water, by taxing which the state can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed, and the utterly state can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed, and the utterly helpless. The tax constitutes, therefore, the most inhuman poll tax that ingenuity of man can devise. He didn't manage to abolish the salt tax as he'd hoped,

Starting point is 00:13:15 but the British did permit people in salt-producing areas to make salt for their own use. The tax was finally abolished in February 1947, six months before the British left. The tax was finally abolished in February 1947, six months before the British left. By that time, the Inland Customs Line and its bizarre hedge had lain abandoned for 70 years, and today almost no remnant of it remains. The shrubs that made up the hedge withered away with time, and farmers began to cut them away to increase their farmland. The line the hedge had followed was well-surveyed,

Starting point is 00:13:44 which made the land attractive for building roads and railways, and as those expanded, they tended to obliterate the remains of the hedge. Still, it's surprising that such an eccentric, laborious enterprise has disappeared so entirely from memory. Strikingly little was written about it, even in its own day. Roy Moxham wrote that in his own research, quote, highly detailed books on the difficulties of trading across 19th century India hardly mentioned it. Monumental histories of the salt industry in India merely gave it a few lines. The multi-volumed histories of India issued by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge virtually ignored it. After he published his own book in 2001, Moxham said he expected people to come forward to say they knew all about the hedge, but no one did, and in fact many people thought it was a hoax.

Starting point is 00:14:23 There are several reasons it may have been forgotten so quickly. The physical obliteration of the hedge was certainly one reason, and Gandhi's campaign may have eclipsed the hedge in the modern mind as a symbol of the salt tax. The annual reports that were the richest sources of information about the hedge were apparently not retained in either India or Pakistan, and at least at the time of Maksim's research, the copies in the British library were poorly cataloged and hadn't yet been digitized, which would have made them hard for scholars to consult. And the peasants who had been most immediately affected by the hedge were mostly illiterate

Starting point is 00:14:53 and would have left no written record. This raises an interesting question that I've been thinking about ever since I started researching this. There are probably other instances like that of even great undertakings that have somehow been entirely forgotten and passed out of living memory. And they may survive in books that no one reads,

Starting point is 00:15:10 but there's kind of a question about whether that's been, you know, there may be fascinating episodes of history that are not remembered by any living person in our civilization and never will be, but are technically remembered in our books. Right. But there's a question whether that counts as memory at all. You know what I mean? If no one ever reads those books, and eventually our whole civilization passes away, you'd be sort of hard-pressed to say we've remembered those things. Well, and then there's ones that aren't even written down, right,

Starting point is 00:15:40 that were huge undertakings or huge events that nobody really knows about because nobody wrote them down anywhere. At least if they're in a book, somebody can stumble across it like they did about the Great Hedge here, but there may be so many other things that are just permanently lost. And those are never coming back. The things that are still in books, this is an interesting time to be alive, I've been thinking, because those books are slowly being digitized

Starting point is 00:16:03 and indexed for search, and we're gradually waking up again to learn that these things have happened. So I would imagine there are other things like this that are going to start to come to light that before that were just completely forgotten. We don't even have an image of the hedge. In 1911, barely 30 years after its abandonment, the historian Francis Haverfield wrote, I have tried to get a picture of the hedge, but it was presumably neither beautiful nor picturesque, and antiquaries had hardly begun to photograph when it was abolished in 1878. Moxham, who says his interest in the hedge grew into an obsession, made three journeys to India to see whether he could find any remnant of it.

Starting point is 00:16:39 In 1998, he finally managed to find a line of thorny acacias 20 feet high on an embankment in Uttar Pradesh. Some thorny Indian plum trees grew nearby. That was all he could find of a barrier that had once stretched for 2,500 miles. I'll put the coordinates of the embankment in the show notes, but it's hard to make out even if you know it's there. It seems likely that the last vestiges of the inland customs line will soon disappear entirely, leaving no remnant of one of history's largest man-made enterprises. In episode 207, I discussed the difficulties that software programs can have with names

Starting point is 00:17:23 that have less common features, and how a tech journalist named Christopher Null encounters a lot of difficulties with his last name, as many programming languages use the word Null for a variable that has no value. There was an interesting update to this topic that made some tech news recently, as we heard from some of our listeners. Ben Cardinal from St. Louis, Missouri wrote, Hello Sharon, Greg, and Sasha. I've been listening to your podcast for some time now on my commutes and while running around the neighborhood. I am a software engineer and enjoyed the discussion about design challenges, how online

Starting point is 00:17:54 forms handle names that don't fit in our assumed structures. Along those same lines, I came across an article about a clever geek in California who got a personalized plate of null, which is a special value in computer science and therefore in many databases. His original hope was that the null plate would be ignored by the parking ticket database, making him immune to tickets, but instead every ticket with a null entry was sent to him. It is another fun lesson in the challenges of trying to classify an analog world in a digital database. Keep up the good work. In 2016, security researcher Joseph Tartaro got a personalized license plate for his car that read null. He has said that he wanted a plate that somehow related to his job, and he

Starting point is 00:18:38 thought that he'd get void for his wife's plate, so together they would be null and void. He also said in a talk at the August DEF CON Hackers Conference that he thought that the plate should make him, in his word, invisible to California's ticketing database. Instead, his plan totally backfired, and he ended up with over $12,000 in tickets. The first one he incurred in 2018 was for his car lacking a registration sticker, and it showed that his license plate was not invisible to the system after all. And then, once his null license plate was associated with his personal information in a database of outstanding tickets, he got sent every ticket

Starting point is 00:19:16 in that database that didn't have a value in the field for license plate, arriving by the dozens to his mailbox. The tickets were for a wide variety of vehicles that, of course, Tartaro has never owned and were written in various towns in California, including ones he's never been to. And they dated back to 2014, before he even owned his null license plate. Tartaro has had a rather difficult time making any progress with the private company that processes citations for the state. He's been working with the Department of Motor Vehicles to void the various tickets, but they keep coming in as the processing company hasn't changed its system. And as of August, the DMV was refusing to let him renew his car's registration while there were unpaid citations

Starting point is 00:19:59 on his account. Still, Tartaro refuses to change his plate. He's quoted in a Wired article as saying it's because there are still tickets associated with the plate, and he thinks that if he changes it now, the situation will become even more convoluted and confused. I got the link to the Wired article from Jonathan Meir, who pointed out that the article included a quote from Christopher Null. Null, who has lived with the problems caused by his name for years, had very little sympathy for Tartaro, saying that he was playing with fire by choosing that plate in the first place.

Starting point is 00:20:32 He's quoted as saying, he had it coming. All you ever get is errors and crashes and headaches. I hadn't thought about it, but that's probably a pretty common name. Null? Yeah. I mean, as a last name?

Starting point is 00:20:42 I would think so. I don't know. I mean, relatively. And, you know, that would just be following around your whole life, just causing all kinds of mischief and trouble. Yeah. That would be very hard to undo. Yeah. So don't anybody deliberately change your name to that or get it as a license plate, apparently. Yeah. Wow. In episode 233, we covered some examples of what can go wrong when you allow software to automatically convert text using certain rules, such as replacing some words with others. Tony Glazer from Somerville, South Carolina, sent us a follow-up to that topic.

Starting point is 00:21:16 Dear Sasha and your secretarial staff, this reminded me of an experience I had many years ago in the infancy of PDAs, personal digital assistants. Are you old enough to remember Palm Pilots and Newtons? Answer to that, yes, I am. Tony says, I was an early adopter, and as a physician, I bought a pocket database of prescription drugs for my Palm Pilot. It was a digital version of a well-known paper pharmacy reference book. Looking up one particular drug, I was amazed to see that it said that it must be used in pregnant women, when I knew the opposite was true.

Starting point is 00:21:52 I checked a few other listings in the paper version of the book and found that every word that was originally in bold or italic, like not in this example and other major warnings, had been automatically deleted in the digital version. I emailed the duly embarrassed publisher who quickly fixed the glitch and offered me my pick of as many of their products as I wanted. As far as I know, nobody died from this, but it is easy to imagine that they could have. That is terrifying. Yeah, that is really terrifying. I mean, how could nobody check that just editorially before they put it out?

Starting point is 00:22:23 I mean, just even spot check proofreading. It sounds like it just went right out the door without anyone. I don't know. And our show wasn't originally designed to be very topical, but through our listener mail segment, we have wandered into covering some more current event type items. Unfortunately, our production schedule isn't set up to handle things in a very topical manner. So here are a couple of mildly late updates to somewhat current events that I covered in episode 262. Jonathan Ginn wrote, Greetings from the UK.

Starting point is 00:22:54 You may remember talking about Maurice the French Noisy Cockerel, who was being sued for making an abnormal racket and disturbing the peace. I don't remember what episode this was in, as I've been listening to them at breakneck speed, but I remember hearing you talk about it. You may be pleased to hear that the case has finished and the court has ruled that Maurice may keep crowing. Although this line is not from the court case, the Guardian mentions a 1995 case with the most incredible defense of the chickens crowing. And here Jonathan quotes the Guardian, in 1995, faced with a similar case that led to a death notice being served on a cockerel, a French appeal court declared it was impossible to stop the species from crowing. The chicken is a harmless animal, so stupid that nobody has succeeded in training it,

Starting point is 00:23:39 not even the Chinese circus, the judgment read. I wondered that myself. If the rooster lost, how would they enforce the judgment? You can't just tell it to be quiet. If he lost, they were going to make the rooster leave. He would have to be taken to another location. But once that precedent is on the books, presumably anyone could sue any rooster, and they'd have to. It just doesn't sound like it could possibly work. That's like the only outcome you could hope for. Yeah, so I guess we were glad to hear that Maurice was vindicated, and a tribunal rejected the complaint about his early morning crowing, and actually ordered the plaintiffs to pay a thousand euros, or about eleven hundred dollars in damages to his owner. This case was an example of the current conflict in France arising from

Starting point is 00:24:24 people from urban areas objecting to some of the traditional noises of more rural areas, such as the ringing of church bells or noisy animals. There have been several similar cases in France besides the 1995 case that Jonathan mentioned. And there's currently another case in the courts right now about a noisy flock of ducks and geese. about a noisy flock of ducks and geese. To try to end these types of cases, the mayor of one village is proposing that the various sounds of rural life from cows, frogs, church bells, and various birds should be inscribed on France's heritage list

Starting point is 00:24:54 to give them some official protection. That's interesting. And I have another important update on some of the critical events that have been unfolding in Britain, that of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's pets. In episode 262, I reported on how Johnson was rumored to be thinking of getting a dog and the imagined reaction of Larry, No. 10 Downing Street's permanent feline resident. And a few of our listeners let us know about the latest developments there. Hanna wrote,

Starting point is 00:25:50 So some of the not-qu not quite breaking news out of the UK is that Johnson and his girlfriend Carrie Simmons have adopted a Jack Russell Terrier puppy named Dylan. Dylan had been abandoned by a puppy farmer because he had a misaligned jaw and was thought to be unsellable. So it is nice to hear that he has hopefully found a good home. We try not to take political sides too much here at Futility Closet. So I should say that although we are clearly pro-cat, we are also definitely pro-dog. So we're all for puppies getting good homes, as long as they don't push out poor Larry. Larry is 12 now and on his third prime minister, so I'm feeling a little concerned about him. The Telegraph reports that measures have been taken to prepare Dylan for his new situation, and the woman who runs the shelter that Dylan came from noted that before his move to Downing

Starting point is 00:26:28 Street, he'd been living with a cat for a few weeks and they'd been working on training him. She said, he is only a baby, so he is going to be very workable and he is a delightful little pup. I think he will settle in well, although there may be more issues on the side of the cat. But as long as the puppy learns who is boss, which will be the cat, then everything will be fine. Unlike the chief mouser who stays at number 10 no matter who else leaves, Dylan will belong to Johnson and Simmons. So if Larry doesn't like him very much,

Starting point is 00:26:56 he can perhaps take some comfort in the idea that the dog might eventually be leaving. It also sounded like from the BBC's reporting that Dylan would be living more in the private residence section, and I gather that Larry spends his time more in the public areas, so that might also help. That could work. On this situation, Armin Seltz said, you were right, Larry the chief mouser of Downing Street is getting some four-legged competition. Aren't Jack Russell's the mousers of the canine world? Maybe a little mouse off is in order. So based on what I could find about this, terriers in general are supposed to be good mousers or ratters. And the Jack Russell terriers bred specifically for fox hunting are reputed to be particularly good mousers. As I've reported before, though, Larry sometimes seems to

Starting point is 00:27:41 have a bit of difficulty living up to his Chief Mouser title, so for his sake, I hope that there aren't actually going to be any mouse-offs in his future. Jeff Callender in Marchwood, Hampshire sent a rather interesting article from the Telegraph about the history of Downing Street pets. According to the article, the first Downing Street cat that there are reliable records for was Rufus of England, who was moved from the treasury to number 10 in 1924, while Peter, the first officially titled chief mouser, joined Rufus in 1929. Apparently, Peter became quite a good mouser after they got the civil servants to stop feeding him scraps. And as we have marveled about, these chief mousers do seem to go with the building rather than with a person, so Peter served under five different prime ministers, for example.

Starting point is 00:28:42 from a Moscow supermarket for one of her chief mousers, and Winston Churchill told a colleague that his pet cat Nelson was doing more for the war effort than the colleague was since Nelson served as a prime ministerial hot water bottle. The article does note that in addition to the chief mouser, several PMs have had their own pets, whether other cats or dogs, so there is clear precedent for the current situation. I guess we'll all just hope for the best, and hopefully our UK listeners will let us know how things are going for both Larry and Dylan. Thank you to everyone who wrote in on these

Starting point is 00:29:15 topics. We do appreciate all the email that we get, and I really appreciate the links and articles that people send. If you have anything that you'd like to add to our discussions, please send it 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 see if I can work out what is actually going on, asking yes or no questions. This is from listener Dav Viney. Police investigating a murder suspect found a photo of him running a race, which led them to discover his involvement in another murder. How?

Starting point is 00:29:55 Okay, this is confusing. So they're investigating one murder. They find a photo of the suspect running a race. Yes. And that leads to them suspecting him in a different murder. Yes. So now he's suspected in two different murders? Yes.

Starting point is 00:30:10 Are the two murders connected? Like it's a pregnant woman, so it's now her and her fetus somehow or something like that. They happen to be, but they don't have to be. They don't have to be connected. I mean, this would still work if they were completely unrelated. Okay. All right. So they found a photo of him running a race. Yes. So you can see him in the photo. Okay. But somehow this is going to tie

Starting point is 00:30:30 him to another murder. Yes. Potentially. Okay. Does it have to do with where the race is taking place? No. When the race is taking place? No. Does it have to do with something else they see in the photo besides him? Yes. Okay. So like if the photo had been cropped so closely that all you saw was him, this outcome would not have occurred? No, that's not the case. Okay. So if all they saw in the photo was him, they still would have suspected him in the second murder? Yes. Yes. Would have come to suspect him. Would have come to suspect him. And it's because of something they see on him. Yes. Okay. Something he's wearing, would you say? Yes. So he is wearing something in this photo while running a race. Yes. Is this something that

Starting point is 00:31:19 people would typically be wearing while running a race? Yes. An article of clothing, would you call it? No. Wearing something like a haircut or a beard? You'd say they're wearing a hair... Oh, good. Wearing a beard? No, that's not it. Not an article of clothing.

Starting point is 00:31:36 Something like a fitness tracker or an activity tracker? Yes. Okay, so they can see that he's wearing... Does it matter if it's like a smartwatch or a fitness tracker, something along those lines? It does matter to some extent what exactly it was. Is it a smartwatch or a GPS tracker? Yes.

Starting point is 00:31:52 A GPS tracker. He's wearing a GPS tracker. Oh, and so they know that he has one. Yes. So they get a hold of it and can see where he's been at different times. Yes. And that leads them to suspect him in this other murder because he was in the vicinity of this other murder. Basically, yes, that's it.

Starting point is 00:32:10 Wow. Detectives were investigating British hitman Mark Iceman Fellows in the murder of organized crime leader Paul Massey when they came across a photo of him wearing a Garmin 4Runner running watch while participating in a 10K race that had taken place two months before the murder. They found the device at Fellows' home, and his GPS data showed that he had apparently practiced the murder, biking to a field near Massey's home, walking, and then stopping. According to the Liverpool Echo, this matches the escape route Fellows followed two months later after shooting Massey in his driveway. The watch data showed that three years later, he'd done similar reconnaissance before killing Massey's associate, John Kinsella.

Starting point is 00:32:44 He was arrested in May 2018, and this January was sentenced to life in prison. Wow. Thanks, Deb. Thank you. And if anyone else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Just a reminder, we'll be off next week. In the meantime, if you'd like to become one of the awesome supporters of our celebration of the quirky and the curious, and check out some bonus content, like outtakes, extralateral thinking puzzles, more discussion on some of the stories, and updates on our chief mouser, please see our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or the support us section of the website at futilitycloset, or the support us section of the website at

Starting point is 00:33:26 futilitycloset.com. While you're at the site, you can also graze through Greg's collection of over 10,000 bite-sized distractions. Check out the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for the podcast with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. All our music was written and performed by Greg's talented brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you in two weeks.

Futility Closet - 265-The Great Hedge of India

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