Futility Closet - 288-Death at the Lane Cove River

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 11,000 quirky curiosities from blank art to ghostly buildings. This is episode 288. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. On New Year's Day 1963, two bodies were discovered on an Australian riverbank. Though their identities were quickly determined, weeks of intensive investigation failed to uncover a cause or motive for their

Starting point is 00:00:37 deaths. In today's show, we'll tell the story of the Bogle Chandler case, which riveted Australia for years. We'll also revisit the Rosenhan study and puzzle over a revealing lighthouse. And just a quick programming note, we'll be off next week, so we'll be back with a new episode on March 30th. Early on New Year's Day, 1963, 15-year-old Michael McCormick was following the Lane Cove River to the Chatswood Golf Links in Sydney when he saw a man in a dark gray suit lying face down on a grassy verge by the riverbank. He said later, I thought he was a hobo who had been drinking and was sleeping it off, but I saw his face turning blue. It did not look right.

Starting point is 00:01:24 He went on to the golf course, where he met a friend, and the two of them spent an hour collecting golf balls. Afterward, he told his friend about the man, and the two of them returned to the spot. The man was still there. His face had turned a darker blue, and they noticed a trickle of blood at his nose. McCormick's friend said he thought the man was dead. They went to a nearby kiosk and reported what they'd found. Friends said he thought the man was dead. They went to a nearby kiosk and reported what they'd found. The police arrived to find a puzzling scene.

Starting point is 00:01:50 The man's suit was only draped over him. When the coat was removed, it revealed a rectangular portion of brown carpet lying on top of his shirt. His trousers were merely draped over his legs. When those were removed, the man was naked from the waist down except for his shoes and socks. There was no sign of injury. It wasn't immediately clear what had killed him. The puzzle quickly grew more alarming. Further downstream, a constable spotted a leg protruding from under an array of flattened beer cartons. Beneath them lay the body of a woman in her late 20s, her clothing in disarray. She had no pulse, but her body was still warm. As with the first body, there was no

Starting point is 00:02:25 indication how she had died. The two bodies were less than 18 meters apart, he on the grassy bank, she on the exposed riverbed. Both were half-naked and had been strangely covered, and there were no signs of violence. The man's wallet identified him as Gilbert Stanley Bogle, a physicist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO. The woman's body bore no identification. She wore a wedding ring, but there was no inscription. The investigation that followed was not illuminating. Bogle's wife said he'd left home at 9 p.m. to attend a New Year's Eve party at the home of a co-worker. At 5 a.m., she'd awakened to find that he hadn't come home.

Starting point is 00:03:05 She called the party's hosts, who told her not to worry. The party had run very late, and Gilbert had departed only recently. She called the police to see whether he'd been in an accident. She said she couldn't imagine who the woman was who'd been found with her husband. The party hosts answered that question. She was Margaret Chandler, the wife of one of Gilbert Bogle's work colleagues. At 2 p.m., the government medical officer formally pronounced both victims dead, but he couldn't determine how either had died. It was the start of one of the longest homicide and forensic investigations in the history of New South Wales. The police went to question the dead woman's husband, Jeffrey Chandler. He said that he and Gilbert Bogle had been colleagues at CSIRO for

Starting point is 00:03:45 a number of years. He said that Margaret had first met Bogle 10 days earlier at a CSIRO Christmas party, and they'd spent some time talking. The New Year's Eve party was only the second time they'd met. At around 1130 that night, Jeffrey had told his wife that he was stepping out to buy some cigarettes and left the party alone. He'd gone to another party where he'd met with his lover, a university secretary named Pamela Logan. Then he'd returned to the first party, had supper, and left, again alone, about an hour later, just after 4 a.m., about an hour before Bogle and Chandler had died. That sounded suspicious, but Jeffrey Chandler didn't seem to have anything to hide. He owned up freely to all of this. He seemed to have very progressive views as to his marriage.

Starting point is 00:04:28 He said he'd had affairs and didn't mind if Margaret had them as well, including one with Gilbert Bogle, if she wanted one. At the party, he told her he would pick up their children from her parents' house, and in fact he did so later with Pamela Logan, his lover, who confirmed this. The evidence showed that Jeffrey Chandler couldn't have been at the river at the time of the deaths, which police estimated took place between 5 and 5.30 a.m. It was clear that Bogle and Chandler had driven from the party straight to the river, a journey of only 10 minutes, and three independent witnesses told police they'd seen Jeffrey in his distinctive automobile at times and places that matched his account of

Starting point is 00:05:04 New Year's morning. He had been nowhere near the Lane Cove River when Bogle and Chandler were dying. Margaret's friends had noticed that she'd been unhappy recently, upset at her husband's philandering, and she'd told a friend about Bogle, who had shown interest in her and paid her compliments at the Christmas party. She'd said, doesn't it make you feel nice and young again? Jeffrey Chandler seemed to be the prime suspect, but he had a corroborated alibi. He acknowledged that his wife had slept with his co-worker, but he said this was done with his approval, and he insisted that his marriage was strong and that these affairs were, in his word, transitory.

Starting point is 00:05:37 And there was simply no evidence to tie him to the deaths. What other possibilities were there? Double suicide seemed unlikely, as Bogle and Chandler had met only once before. Murder suicide was possible, but witnesses said that both of them had been in a positive frame of mind and had been looking forward to the evening. In fact, Gilbert Bogle had been the life of the party. Another guest, journalist Lester Cotton, said no one who saw him that night could accept the theory that he had the faintest foreknowledge of what was to come. In fact, Bogle's future was bright. He was planning to move to the United States shortly to take a position at Bell Labs. Autopsies showed no marks on the bodies beyond

Starting point is 00:06:15 some superficial scratches. There were no bullet holes, knife wounds, or needle marks. All that was certain was that their hearts had stopped beating and they'd stopped breathing, and even the order of those events was unclear. The director of the Division of Forensic Medicine wrote, the means by which the deaths had been affected could not be established. He suggested poison, and chief toxicologist Vivian Mahoney agreed, but after three days, investigators had found no trace of poison in the tissue samples of either victim. In fact, Mahoney eventually tested so many poisons that he feared running out of tissue samples to test them victim. In fact, Mahoney eventually tested so many poisons that he feared running out of tissue samples to test them on. He said,

Starting point is 00:06:48 It was obvious that what killed one killed the other, but nothing was coming out. Everything was coming up negative. They both had a little bit of caffeine, and that's all. This was baffling. In the previous year, police had solved all but one of the 52 homicides in New South Wales, and all of those culprits were behind bars. But here they couldn't even establish the cause of death. By the end of April, police had received more than a thousand letters from the public offering information and theories, and they'd solicited dozens more from police and scientific agencies around the world. They had interviewed more than 200 people until the police running sheet filled 770 pages,

Starting point is 00:07:25 but still they had reached no conclusion. The coronial inquest began on May 7, 1963. It heard more than 50 witnesses over the course of three weeks, including some of the country's most distinguished pathologists. It didn't shed much light. The policeman who'd been first on the scene said that Bogle's body had been covered in a way that seemed intended to provide warmth and protection. The carpet that had been found on his back turned out to have come from his own car. The investigators were inclined to believe that a

Starting point is 00:07:53 third person had covered the bodies as a mark of respect. Certainly, Bogle couldn't have covered himself as he was found, but that third person was never identified. The cause of death was still a baffling mystery. The victims hadn't been strangled, they hadn't been bitten by funnel web spiders, and they weren't radioactive. And four months of lab analysis had found no indication of poison in their organs. Jeffrey Chandler said that his wife had expressed an immediate attraction to Bogle on meeting him at the Christmas party on December 21st,

Starting point is 00:08:23 and he was forthright about his affair with Pamela Logan. He didn't seem to care how it looked that he was having an affair, which might have provided a motive for murder. By the time it was over, the inquest was the longest in the state's history, but it found no evidence suggesting how Gilbert Bogle and Margaret Chandler had died. The coroner, J.J. Looms, said, I find it hard to believe that I am no more able today to ascertain the manner and cause of death than I was when the inquiry began. Police Commissioner Norman Allen said that the case would remain open and that his detectives would continue to pursue every avenue to discover how Bogle and Chandler had died. There had been only 11 other major unsolved cases in New South Wales

Starting point is 00:09:00 since 1945. He called this one the mystery of the century. In the years that followed, one theory after another was proposed and discredited. Bogle and Chandler had not been poisoned with shellfish toxin or with sodium fluoracetate. They hadn't overdosed on aphrodisiacs or LSD. Bogle hadn't been killed by Soviet agents or been killed by the intelligence community for knowing too much or become a Russian intelligence officer himself. He hadn't been experimenting with a death ray. Sydney Morning Herald reporter Basil Sweeney worked for years on the theory that someone had put Teflon into the external manifold of Bogle's car engine, producing phosgene gas that had poisoned the pair as they drove to the river. That couldn't be proven either. At one point,

Starting point is 00:09:42 John Lang, director of the State Division of Forensic Medicine, wrote, I have never had so much done on a body before or since and come up with so little. Finally, in 2006, filmmaker Peter Butt suggested a possibility that seemed to accord with the facts. The Lane Cove River had been badly polluted in its earlier history. Since the 1880s, it had served essentially as an industrial sewer, and one factory in particular had been pumping so much sulfurous waste into the river that the bottom had been saturated to a depth of half a meter with hydrogen sulfide, a colorless, poisonous gas

Starting point is 00:10:15 that's heavier than air. Bogle and Chandler had been lying in a hollow that opened onto the river. In the cool, still air of the morning, if hydrogen sulfide had been released from the river bottom, it would have spread across the surface of the water and reached them there. Fatal acute hydrogen sulfide intoxication produces few identifiable abnormalities beyond fluid in the lungs and congestion of internal organs. The gas smells like rotten eggs, but in high enough concentrations it overcomes the olfactory nerve so that victims don't smell it. It kills its victims by causing chemical asphyxiation, preventing oxygen from reaching the brain. The only anomaly that the chief toxicologist had found was a purplish discoloration of the blood in both victims.

Starting point is 00:10:55 That's a hallmark of hydrogen sulfide poisoning. Forensic toxicologist Thomas Milby said, the evidence that we do have is strongly, extremely consistent with hydrogen sulfide-related death, and I can think of nothing else, neither gas nor any other kind of poison or anything, that could argue against that hypothesis. And he said that unless a pathologist is looking for evidence of hydrogen sulfide poisoning, he won't find it. The gas attacks the brain quickly and leaves little evidence behind. If Budd's theory is right, then what might have happened is this. Bogle and Chandler arrived at the river shortly before dawn on New Year's Day. Bogle took a square of carpet from the boot of his car, and the two of them crossed Millwood Avenue and walked south along the river. Looking

Starting point is 00:11:35 for privacy, they climbed down the bank to a hollow in the riverbed. There they were making love when something overcame them and they began to suffocate. Both tried to move to save themselves, but they were quickly unconscious, then comatose, then dead. By the time the police arrived at the scene about five hours later, the gas had dissipated enough that the smell wasn't noticeable. After Butt's documentary aired, two people came forward to say they'd been at the river early that morning. One had had breathing difficulties and saw dead fish floating on the surface. The other said his dog had returned from the river, reeking of what he called rotten eggs. Maritime scientist Maurice Fry, who had investigated pollution in the Lane Cove River in the 1940s, felt that this theory was compelling. He wrote,

Starting point is 00:12:16 It is regrettable that these unfortunate people were in a hazardous area at the time when cold air formed a blanketing canopy and coinciding with the sudden release of toxic hydrogen sulfide. Chris Winder, a toxicologist at the University of New South Wales, said after Butt's documentary aired, the gas might have come across the river and built up in the little hollow where they were and it could have reached toxic proportions and killed them, though he doubted this could be proven well enough to satisfy a court of law. Butt admits that his theory is circumstantial, but there's still a slim hope for some confirmation. Early one morning in 1965, a psychologist saved a young woman from sexual assault by a group of drunken young men in

Starting point is 00:12:55 Canberra. She told him she didn't want to go to the police or to a hospital. He noticed a St. Christopher medal around her neck and asked if she was a Catholic. He offered to take her to a nun he knew at a convent nearby. She broke down and told him she'd been having nightmares due to something she'd witnessed two years earlier at Lane Cove. She had gone to a New Year's Eve party with a girlfriend, and the two of them had gone to the riverbank afterward. There they saw another couple arrive and begin to have sex. Suddenly the woman had grabbed her throat, made strangling noises, got up, and staggered off. The man, too, seemed to struggle to move. Watching this, the woman had grabbed her throat, made strangling noises, got up, and staggered off. The man, too, seemed to struggle to move. Watching this, the two women had smelled rotten eggs, but

Starting point is 00:13:30 the smell dissipated as they approached the water's edge. They discussed what they'd seen and decided that perhaps the couple had been on drugs. They didn't go to the police because they were in a relationship, which was frowned on at the time. The psychologist never learned the woman's name, and neither woman has responded to appeals to come forward, but if they did, it might help to explain what happened that morning. If they're still alive today, they'll be in their 80s or 90s. Without such an insight, it seems unlikely that we'll ever reach a definitive conclusion as to what killed Gilbert Bogle and Margaret Chandler that morning almost 60 years ago. Both were in the prime of their lives with young children and must have been healthy when they'd arrived since they were having sex.

Starting point is 00:14:08 Butt's theory of hydrogen sulfide poisoning is well regarded but not conclusive. Formally, the case remains unsolved. In episode 202, we covered the study published in 1973 by psychologist David Rosenhan, who had sent healthy volunteers to psychiatric hospitals where they claimed to be hearing voices. Once the volunteers were admitted to the hospitals, they behaved normally, but still they were all diagnosed as being seriously mentally ill, and most were kept in the hospital for a considerable length of time, as long as 52 days. In the article, all the participants reported rather dehumanizing and decidedly non-therapeutic hospital experiences. And about this story, Alex Baumans wrote, way back in episode 202, you covered the Rosenhan experiment. In the January 10th issue of the Times Literary Supplement,

Starting point is 00:15:11 there was a review of a book about the subject, The Great Pretender by Susanna Cahalan. The author is a journalist and former mental patient who got suspicious of Rosenhan's story. She wondered why there was so little corroborating evidence and why none of the other participants had ever come forward, even years after the fact. So she started digging and came to the conclusion that many of the assertions made by Rosenhan were, if not outright fictions, at least serious misrepresentations. For one thing, some of the test subjects may never have existed. For another, when she managed to track down the records of some of the pseudo-patients, including Rosenhan himself, there were serious discrepancies between their stories and what was said in the article.

Starting point is 00:15:49 One person actually liked being in the mental institution, which led to Rosenhan dismissing these data. Also, Rosenhan himself was being less than honest. Instead of presenting himself with vague symptoms, as he claimed in the article, he had concocted an elaborate backstory that fitted in well with the symptoms of schizophrenia, crucially including suicidal tendencies. An article in the Lancet Psychiatry says that David Rosenhan's On Being Sane in Insane Places is arguably one of the most influential psychiatric studies of all time. It asked, if sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them, and claimed to show that psychiatry was incapable of making the call. As Greg covered in his story, there were significant concerns about and criticisms of Rosenhan's study and conclusions even at the time it was published,

Starting point is 00:16:37 but Cahalan's book raises a whole new set of concerns about whether the study was even conducted as it was portrayed by Rosenhan. of concerns about whether the study was even conducted as it was portrayed by Rosenhan. When she happened to learn about Rosenhan's study, it had really resonated with Cahalan because several years earlier, she had appeared to have a serious mental illness and it had been sheer luck that she had eventually been correctly diagnosed with a newly discovered treatable autoimmune encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain. Given her history of having received an incorrect psychiatric diagnosis and with a background in investigative journalism, Cahalan decided to track down Rosenhan's pseudo-patients to learn more about their experiences. Cahalan based her book on

Starting point is 00:17:16 information from Rosenhan's private files, 200 pages he had written for a never-published book on the study and for which he was sued to return the publisher's very large advance, his diaries that she got from his son, interviews with his former students, friends, colleagues, and assistants, and the hospital records for three of the pseudo patients, one of which was Rosenhan himself. She also interviewed the two still living participants that she could find, Bill Lando and Harry Underwood, Rosenhan himself had died in 2012. As Alex said, the admission notes from Rosenhan's hospitalization, for which he used a pseudonym, indicate that Rosenhan had claimed to have more symptoms than just the simple auditory hallucinations that he had stated in the published study, including his being suicidal.

Starting point is 00:18:01 Rosenhan reported that he had had a pretty unpleasant experience in the hospital, but Underwood told Cahalan that he had had a tough time only for the first two days, and only because he'd accidentally swallowed a dose of the antipsychotic drug Thorazine and had had a number of side effects, but that the rest of his stay had been uneventful. Lando had actually had a rather positive experience in the hospital, finding the staff to be caring and the environment to be supportive, but he was excluded from the final published article for what appear to be rather flimsy reasons. Rosenhan's study contains various specific numbers about things like how many pills the subjects were given and how many times and for how many minutes a day they interacted with various hospital staff. many minutes a day they interacted with various hospital staff. Collecting this kind of data would have required constant vigilance and precise note-taking by the pseudo-patients, but Underwood told Cahalan that he had paid little attention to these kinds of details during his hospital stay,

Starting point is 00:18:55 and neither Lando nor Underwood recalled being asked to quantify interactions with staff in this kind of way. Also, while Lando's data were apparently included in an early draft of the study and then supposedly excluded from the final version, Cahalan states that none of the numbers given changed between the two versions. Further, despite extensive digging, Cahalan couldn't find any evidence that the other six pseudopatients had actually existed, although she can't prove that they hadn't. But overall, from what I saw, even reviewers who started Cahalan's book skeptical of some of her concerns found her thorough research rather compelling and rather damning of Rosenhan. Still, as flawed, distorted, or possibly even deceptive

Starting point is 00:19:37 as it was, Rosenhan's study did at least bring attention to the fact that at the time, inpatient mental health care was not always very humane or therapeutic. Though it may not have been as uniformly bad as Rosenhan presented it, it was at least extremely variable in terms of the quality of care that patients received. Cahalan herself shies away from completely condemning Rosenhan's study and says, I believe that he exposed something real. Rosenhan's paper, as exaggerated and even dishonest as it was, touched on truth as it danced around it. Unfortunately, Rosenhan's isn't the only classic psychological study to have

Starting point is 00:20:12 come under serious suspicion in recent years. As Greg reported in episode 249, Moussafer Sharif's 1961 robber's cave experiment was later found to have been rather manipulated to produce the results that Sharif wanted. And similar allegations have been made about Stanley Milgram's obedience studies from the early 1960s and Philip Zimbardo's 1971 Stanford prison experiment. I guess the social science is it's harder to replicate studies like that. In other disciplines, you would just try the same thing again and see if you get the same results. And here it's kind of, there are sort of ethical concerns and other considerations that keep you from just running the same study again to see if you get the same results. And here it's kind of, there are sort of ethical concerns and other considerations that keep

Starting point is 00:20:46 you from just running the same study again to see if you get the same result. Yes. And sometimes, though, actually there's been what some are calling a replication crisis in psychology where some early studies that are being attempted to be replicated are not, they're not finding the same results. And it's kind of hard to know why in psychology because people are very variable. And even if you're doing it in a different time period or in a different location or with a different group of subjects who just are a different age or a different demographic, it might be sometimes hard to replicate results. But they are having trouble replicating some of the earlier studies.

Starting point is 00:21:19 And you're right. And some of them just can't even be, they can't even attempt to replicate them because of maybe ethical concerns. And it sounds here too, like there's, it would be hard to excuse this as some kind of misunderstanding or honest mistake. It sounds from what she found, like it's pretty clear that he was deliberately. Yeah. It seems pretty clear that Rosenhan was fudging it at least to some extent or another. That's really audacious then because- And it might be pretty fudged. some extent or another. That's really audacious then because... And it might be pretty fudged. Not only did he have to present that as accurate, but he at least implicitly went on. I mean,

Starting point is 00:21:57 he got some fame for this afterwards. Yes, he did. Yes. And if he went through the rest of his life knowing that it wasn't really completely earned, he never let on. It's not just... Well, it's thought that's why he didn't publish his book. He basically wrote the book and then never published it. But still, he's remembered until this book came out. He's remembered for this. Definitely. And on some rather different topics, we received an email with the subject line, a utilitarian's amalgamation.

Starting point is 00:22:23 Greetings, Greg and Sharon. My name is Matt Suing. I bet you amalgamation. Greetings, Greg and Sharon. My name is Matt Sewing. I bet you can handle this one on your own, Sharon. And I write to you from Omaha, Nebraska, a town who you have briefly mentioned a few times, most of all when another listener wrote in to report our Dundee neighborhood being the victimless site of a Japanese aerial fire bombing in World War II. My never-ceasing desire to learn led me to your podcast only a few months ago, but I have been devouring it since. I have listened to the first 200 episodes as well as episodes 246 onward, as that was the most recent episode when I began listening. I am a

Starting point is 00:22:54 believer and fan of what you do, so much so that groomsmen at my wedding received copies of your books. What I bring to you today is an amalgamation of some of my favorite things you've covered, because I found them unreasonably entertaining and funny. First are the AI-generated works of literature, especially the AI recipes and cookbooks. Second is the immaculate work English as She Is Spoke, the English phrasebook that was written by someone who did not themselves speak a lick of English. And third is Sharon's desire to not mess up the names of people who write in. But where could all of these things come together? Why, of course, in the tale of the video game Fighting

Starting point is 00:23:30 Baseball. The story goes that when the game was made in 1994, it was released in America on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System under the name MLBPA Baseball. And because it was licensed by the Major League Baseball Players Association, it used the names of real MLB players of the time. The Japanese release, however, did not receive the MLBPA license. The solution that the Japanese game studio arrived at was to simply, apparently without any consultation, come up with American names. I will let you be the judge of how well they did. Here are some pictures of the rosters, and I would just love to hear you attempt to list off some of its members. My short list of personal favorites include Sleeve McDycle, Onsen Sweeney, Rar Dick, Wob Wonkots, and of course, Bobson Dugnut. P.S. Sharon ought not to worry about offending any of these baseball players, as they almost certainly

Starting point is 00:24:22 have no real-world namesakes, though I hope not to press her phobias. And in addition to Matt's picks, I was also tickled by Sean Furcott, Doris Hintlein, Varlin Genmist, and Am O'Urson. We'll have the images of the rosters that Matt sent in the show notes if anyone wants to see them. They sound American. Doris Hintline is American. Am O'Urson. Thanks so much to everyone who sends us comments, updates, and feedback. If you have anything that you'd like to add, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if you'd like to help me manage my anxiety,

Starting point is 00:25:02 please feel free to provide pronunciation tips for your name. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him a strange sounding situation, and he has to work out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Stephen Jones. Because of a lighthouse, a forgery was uncovered. How? Wow. Nice, short, simple.

Starting point is 00:25:28 That's a strange-sounding situation. Because of a lighthouse, a forgery was uncovered. Yes. Was the image of the lighthouse on whatever the forged item was? Yes. Oh, wow. How about that? I got a yes on the first guess.

Starting point is 00:25:42 All right. So was it the presence of the lighthouse that gave it away? Yes. So there's some, was the forged item money? No. Money with a lighthouse on it. That would be cute. Well, the background or something.

Starting point is 00:25:55 Right. Right. Instead of like the Washington Monument, they put a lighthouse. All right. But some, it bore some image. Yes. Of a landscape, I guess. Sure.

Starting point is 00:26:04 Yes. It bore some image. Yes. Of a landscape, I guess. Sure. Yes. And the appearance of the lighthouse gave away, wasn't accurate somehow. Right.

Starting point is 00:26:17 Wasn't true to what was on an authentic version of this forged item. Never mind. I had to withdraw the question. Good, because I don't think I could answer it. Someone forged an item that included an image of a landscape in which was a lighthouse that was rendered incorrectly. And that's how they discovered it. I don't know if I could say yes to all of that. I could say yes to parts of it. Sorry.

Starting point is 00:26:38 Would it help me to guess what the forged item was? Sure. Was it a piece of art? Yes. A painting? Yes. I'm getting a lot of yeses you are you really are okay so someone forged a painting yes was it a painting of a lighthouse uh primarily that was the subject of the painting no okay so there was just a lighthouse in the painting yes do it would it help me to know where this like what the actual lighthouse particularly was? No. All right. So a painting of a landscape was forged and I guess offered for sale somewhere.

Starting point is 00:27:11 That's how the forger planned to... I don't actually know. All right. I guess it doesn't matter. But someone was trying to pass this off as some... Authentic. Authentic painting. Right. Which it wasn't.

Starting point is 00:27:20 And do I need to know who figured out that it was a forgery? No. So someone looked at this painting and saw there's a lighthouse in it. Yes. Do I need to know specifically what was wrong with this picture of the lighthouse, like what they got wrong, the forger got wrong? Is that something I need to know to solve the puzzle? Yeah, I mean, I was going to, that's part of what it hinged on,

Starting point is 00:27:42 but I'm not sure you're phrasing it quite right. Well, what a picturing is, a picture of a landscape, and it's got a lighthouse in it. Yes. And in painting that somehow, I mean, I guess that corresponds to a real lighthouse in the world somewhere, right? Yes. So the person was trying, or I guess the authentic painting included that lighthouse? No. Ah.

Starting point is 00:28:07 Oh, is that it? That the, for example, the original painter, the authentic painter, had painted the landscape before the lighthouse existed? That's not quite right. What I just said is not quite right? Yeah, what you said is not quite right. Okay, so there's someone who originally painted the genuine original painting. No, that's not quite right either. Oh, really?

Starting point is 00:28:30 Okay, because I thought this forgery was being passed off as that painting. No, sorry. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I'm not sure if I did. It's not that it's being passed off as a specific other painting. It's just being passed off

Starting point is 00:28:42 as a painting of this landscape, and it's forged in the sense that it... No. Okay. No. What else would make a painting a forgery? Well, if it was represented as a certain artist's work... Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:55 Oh. That's another yes. That's another yes. If you want to steal it, Tom will keep score. Okay. All right. Wow. This is getting more interesting all the time. So someone passed off this forged painting as the work of a particular artist. Okay. All right. Wow. This is getting more interesting all the time. So someone passed off

Starting point is 00:29:06 this forged painting as the work of a particular artist. Yes. And the presence of the lighthouse in it. Yes. Showed that that couldn't be the case. Exactly. And that's what it hinges on. Why? So why couldn't this particular painter... Okay. Was it... Yeah. You're getting right to the crux of it right there. Was it that this painter, the real painter, was incapable of painting a lighthouse at all? No, but that would be kind of cute. Like, you had a lighthouse disability somehow. All right. So does this have to do with time periods then?

Starting point is 00:29:37 Yes. Okay, so the original painter, I guess, passed away at some point. Yeah, uh-huh. And passed away before, I guess, some change to this real lighthouse had been made. Not quite. Back up. Or before the lighthouse had been erected. Yes, that's it.

Starting point is 00:29:52 That's exactly it. Stephen says, this comes from the British drama series Death in Paradise. The painting shows a landscape that includes a lighthouse, but the lighthouse didn't exist during the artist's lifetime. Therefore, the painting was a forgery. So, and just in case anyone wants to check out this particular episode of Death in Paradise, as best as I could determine, the episode is called An Artistic Murderer. That's a good puzzle.

Starting point is 00:30:14 So thanks so much to Stephen for that puzzle, in which I gather that someone actually did die trying to prevent the forgery from being exposed. But that didn't enter into our puzzle, so I'm counting it as non-fatal for our purposes. If anyone else has a puzzle for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Just a reminder that we'll be off next week. In the meantime, if you're looking for more Futility Closet, you can check out the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can graze through Thank you. and a link to our Patreon page, which you can also find at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. We would really appreciate your support. And if you become a patron, you can spend next week catching up on all our bonus content. If you have any comments or feedback for us, you can always

Starting point is 00:31:16 email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by Greg's incredible brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back in two weeks.

Futility Closet - 288-Death at the Lane Cove River

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.