Here's Where It Gets Interesting - All That Is Wicked with Kate Dawson

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

On today’s episode of Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, author and podcast host Kate Dawson returns! Kate’s new book, All That Is Wicked transports readers to the Gilded Age–a time when money ...and prestige made it easy to get away with murder. Or almost, in the sensational case of Edward Rulloff. Kate and Sharon talk about the process of researching and telling true stories and how they shaped history. Rulloff’s case forever changed the way we research the criminal mind. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, friends. Welcome. So excited you're here today. I'm chatting with my friend Kate Winkler-Dawson. And if you've been a fan of this show for a while, you have heard us talk before. And one of the things that I love to chat with her about is this intersection of history, podcasting, and true crime. And nobody does it better. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am delighted to have Kate Winkler Dawson back with me today. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, thanks for having me back. It's always such a pleasure. I know people who listen to this show love listening to your shows, plural. They love reading your books, plural. And we read one of your books as our very first book club selection way back in the day.
Starting point is 00:01:00 And people in my community have loved your work ever since then. So I'm very excited to chat about your new book. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, I love being the first of something. So I was honored to be chosen. It's an honor to be nominated. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:01:14 That's right. I'd like to thank the Academy. Sharon. Or in the words of Snoop Dogg, I'd like to thank me for always working so hard. You know, I've never quoted Snoop Dogg before. I'm really impressed that you were in the first two minutes of this show. That's wonderful. I'd like to thank me for never giving up.
Starting point is 00:01:37 That's what you should. That's that you should go with that. I'll do it next time you get nominated for something. Next time. Well, if people are not already familiar with your work, give us like a super high level overview of what you do. Well, in my day job, I'm a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. And my everything else during the day job, I have three podcasts on the Exactly Right Network, which they are all historical true crime. So that is my thing is deep history into crime and then history
Starting point is 00:02:13 around that crime, why it mattered then, why it matters now, what resonates with us as an audience, what we can learn from it. So, you know, I have written now, this is the third book that's coming out October 4th, and I have the three different shows and they're all different types of shows. And so it's great. I am entrenched in true crime, but really, really old crime. I am really not interested in anything, I would say, more modern than the 1970s. The older, the better. I'm actually working on a case right now from 1766, which is a great case. Wow. The primary sources from the 1760s have to be a challenge to sort through. They are a nightmare. That's the challenge is the nice way of saying it. Yeah, it's very difficult because you have to translate the handwriting
Starting point is 00:03:04 and the language at the same time and just understand the context. So I lean pretty heavily on scholars who work in that area. I've been working in Williamsburg, Virginia, on a couple of different stories that have been fantastic. And I've just had so much help from the people there. So it's been great. Yeah. In the 1760s, we did not have standardized English spelling. And so people would just use what looked right or what sounded right or what somebody told them. You couldn totally different translations. So yes, it's a little bit difficult. But what I've learned about those stories from, you know, 1700s, 1800s, all the way through today is that history repeats itself. Crime, the reason people commit crime, it's all the same. It's money and sex and love and betrayal. It doesn't change. It's just the locations and the time periods that change.
Starting point is 00:04:07 But the motives are all very much the same. So they feel very familiar when I talk about them. And my goal with my books and with the shows are to really bring the victims back to make us realize how important it is to have the victims. I don't look at true crime as entertainment. I look at it as the vehicle to learn about our society and to shine a light on parts of society that sometimes are in the dark. Do you think that is where your journalism professor comes in, that you are not approaching it from the perspective of glorification of like, wow, I have some big, fancy, juicy crimes, and you're going to love all the blood and gore. It's really
Starting point is 00:04:50 takes more of that journalistic perspective. Yeah, I think so. I feel like I because of my background in journalism, and certainly teaching students, I am much more attuned to that. I'm much more sensitive. I am very uncomfortable talking about or, you know, addressing modern crime where the families are still around. The families I speak to about these cases, these are cases that are very old. They're in their families. It is important to the history of their families. They are oftentimes emotional, but we're not talking about their parents or even their grandparents in a lot of cases. So they have a perspective. And what's so interesting about the families
Starting point is 00:05:32 that I speak with, because I talk to families, both in my books and my podcasts, are it still resonates with them. It's still important to them. They're still feel very deeply about it, but there's a perspective where they could say, you know, I see the qualities that this person had from 200 years ago, and I see how the qualities repeat
Starting point is 00:05:50 themselves throughout the history of our family. And some of these crimes have never been heard before. The families never spoke about them. There are older generations that don't want to acknowledge these crimes for one reason or the other. And then there are, you know, these crimes that are really well known within the families. And so they're all important. But I have a very difficult time. You know, I'm working on a case right now from 1963 that a family brought to me and said, you know, we need help. These are our great grandparents. And it's still difficult for me because I don't want to make a mistake. I don't want to offend anybody. I want to make sure I get it right. And of course, I feel like that about my other stories. But these are people who this really, really means something. And so there's even more pressure.
Starting point is 00:06:35 And I think a lot of crime gets sensationalized. And saying true crime is a little bit of uncomfortable. There's a little bit of uncomfortableness for me because I really look at myself as a crime historian, less as a journalist involved in true crime in that way. Your new book, All That Is Wicked, is set against a backdrop of the Gilded Age, which I think America has always been, but is currently experiencing a resurgence in interest, in part because there's TV shows about it, multiple TV shows that are happening right now that has increased fascination with this time period. And I wonder if you think that the time period of the Gilded Age plays a central role in this story. I do.
Starting point is 00:07:27 The crux of this story is about a man named Edward Ruloff, who was a genius in 1840s all the way till 1870s in New York, upstate New York and in Manhattan. And he was an academic and he believed in research he was doing in linguistics, which was a really popular scholarship in the 19th century. And so, you know, Ruloff also was somebody who was a killer and he killed four members of one family. And you have a lot of people coming to his defense when he is finally caught after 30 years because they said that his brain is too valuable to be wasted on the gallows. And so Ruloff was, I think in some ways, he was incredibly intelligent, but he was also incredibly manipulative. And he was a shyster in some respects.
Starting point is 00:08:20 And the Gilded Age was, I believe, the era of the shyster. You could get away with so much in the Gilded Age was, I believe, the era of the shyster. You could get away with so much in the Gilded Age. And if you think about that time period, there was no national identification system. Photography was in its nascent period. There weren't a lot of people sitting for portraits. There was also, combined with now the extensive railroad system where you could commit a crime or be a snake oil salesman in Pennsylvania, hop on a train and be in Washington, D.C., and nobody knows who you are. Nobody knows. There could be a vague written description and that's it. So it was an excellent,
Starting point is 00:08:58 excellent time to be a fraudulent person in the 19th century. It was the Gilded Age. And there was money all over the place. And people were throwing money at any stupid invention, at anything that seemed to be innovative. So it was a wonderful time for the boss tweeds of the world, you know, with Tammany Hall in New York wearing the diamond pendants and slipping thousand dollar bills under dinner plates. It was an incredible time for the grifter. So true, though, that modern society has made it in many ways far more easy to solve crimes because we all are, even if we're cognizant of the fact that our phones can track us. We're still so digitally connected to the entire world. So with security cameras and computer chips in your vehicles and, oh, do you have OnStar?
Starting point is 00:09:53 You know, like just the ability to find somebody and to identify who that person might be has exploded. So that's one of the reasons I found it really interesting when you were talking about how now we have these sort of behavioral investigative units and the FBI, where we do all this criminal profiling, what kind of person are we looking for when we're talking about people who have committed serial murder? But there were people that existed even during the Gilded Age that you call mind hunters. And I think people would be really interested to hear about that. reasons, all out of self-interest, all out of his proclamation that he was a genius and that he had
Starting point is 00:10:47 made this incredible discovery in linguistics. And this is why he should be given the ability to do whatever he wanted to do. And if somebody got in his way, he would remove that person, which is what happened. But there is a moment when he is finally under arrest and he's shackled to the floor of a jail in Binghamton, New York, which is in upstate New York. And the governor is trying to figure out what to do with him because you have people like Mark Twain and Horace Greeley, who was almost on the cusp of running for president, who are saying you need to save this man's life. We know that he did horrible things. He killed his wife and child and all this other stuff. But really, can't we just send him to an asylum and still utilize him somehow now because he has a brilliant mind? And so the governor, John Huffman, at the time is trying to figure out what to do. And so he sends in a couple of really key people to figure out what made Edward Ruloff tick. And this really was the
Starting point is 00:11:47 beginning of our descent into figuring out the criminal mind. And we always think that if you look back in criminal history, my impression was always that this really began, of course, with Jack the Ripper, there was some criminal profiling there that turned out to be fairly inaccurate. But moving forward through history, really the beginning of criminal profiling and figuring out the criminal mind came with the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI, which was created in the 1970s. And you might have seen the Netflix series about it called Mindhunters. So what I discovered was 100 years before that, when Edward Ruloff is shackled to the floor, What I discovered was 100 years before that, when Edward Ruloff is shackled to the floor,
Starting point is 00:12:28 there was a group of men who went in and did the exact same thing. They interviewed him to figure out what made Edward Ruloff tick. Why someone who was charming, a kind of a Ted Bundy, charming, decent looking, he did not look like the 19th century impression of what a killer would be. And they wanted to know how this was even possible, because in the 19th century, a killer looked like a killer. They were disheveled and wild-eyed and predictable, and Edward Ruloff was not predictable. So you have journalists going in,
Starting point is 00:12:59 you have an alienist who is a psychiatrist going in, you have a neurologist going in, psychologist. You have all of these various, and of course, police officers and lawyers going in. And they all interview him and language experts. And they all walk away with a different diagnosis. And really, the diagnosis should have been psychopathy. He very clearly had antisocial personality disorder. He checked every box there was. But they didn't even know what that was in the 1870s. So this was really the beginning of after he died, taking literally taking his brain and figuring out what happened. Is there a pattern? And they made some really interesting discoveries based on his brain. He made history, you know, it was a wonderful story for me to research.
Starting point is 00:13:48 People are always so interested like this. I guarantee you, if we had a live studio audience here, question number one that people would ask you, how do you find these stories? Is that what everyone asks you, Kate? Everybody's like, how do you find these? They do. And, you know, I always have this answer. One of my favorite authors is Eric Larson, who wrote Devil in the White City. And of course, you know, he's written everything. So he has this wonderful phrase I read one time. He said, I am a promiscuous reader, which means I read everything. I have no standards. I read it all. And so I really do. I read everything. And I just eventually run into someone. I think I might have found Edward Ruloff on Wikipedia.
Starting point is 00:14:28 Just ran into him. But my first book, Death in the Air, I found on a Getty website. I found the woman who turned out to be on the cover of that book. And it was a very dramatic cover. And I thought, whoa, what's this story about? This woman with this scarf over her face. So I looked into that. And then the second book I just found in a really random book, the subject matter of American
Starting point is 00:14:51 Sherlock, he was mentioned, my forensic scientist was mentioned in a case in a book that I was reading. So it is just reading anything and everything you can get your hands on. Eric Larson was also in our book club. So you are in excellent. Wonderful. That's good. We read devil in the white city. Yes, he's he is very funny. But you're absolutely right that in order to uncover stories like this, they don't just magically appear in your lap. Generally speaking, you mentioned that you're working on a story where somebody had approached you, but that only happened because you had laid these many years of groundwork of demonstrating your credibility in this field where people felt comfortable approaching you. Generally speaking, it requires actually a tremendous amount of work to uncover these sort of hidden gems that haven't
Starting point is 00:15:41 yet been told or a fresh perspective on how to tell them. And it's a tremendous amount of work to find the stories and then uncover all the resources to be able to tell the story accurately. I think that's true. And as I've mentioned before, finding the families has always been important to me, and I've been able to with my books. And what was interesting about the Edward Ruloff story is that this was my second pitch. The first pitch, my editor said, yeah, I don't know. It was just his basic story. And, you know, it was a good story, but it wasn't until I really sat down and thought about this group of men who came in and how they preceded the mind hunters of the 1970s. And I had just never really been able to put it together.
Starting point is 00:16:27 And so for the book, I really concentrated on creating those parallels. What did the men in the behavioral science unit, men and women, I actually just interviewed one of the women in the behavioral science unit who was a forensic nurse at the time. And I figured out that there were so many parallels of what they learned about Edward Ruloff in the 1870s versus what the behavioral science unit learned from Ted Bundy, Edmund Kemper, some of these really big name serial killers in the 1970s. And so the parallels were really amazing. Edward Ruloff represented himself in court, which actually
Starting point is 00:17:03 turned out very well for him. Ted Bundy represented himself in court, which actually turned out very well for him. Ted Bundy represented himself in court, which went very poorly for him. The man accused of and convicted of the Atlanta child murders also represented himself in court. There is a thread between what happens to criminals in the 1870s, in the 1670s, all the way up until today. There is a certain bravado that a lot of these people have. And it's so interesting to just see the repetition. And then it goes back to what we just said. Society is not that different.
Starting point is 00:17:36 We're still driven by the same things, the same insecurities. We're still worried about money. We're still worried about, in some cases, the environment, war, independence. And it just, over and over again, it's the same things that come up that's so fascinating. And I love telling those stories and making people feel like they're there. They're right there in 1870s New York. What is it like? What are they eating?
Starting point is 00:17:59 What is Delmonico's in New York? I went to Delmonico's. It's mentioned. It's a great restaurant in New York. It's mentioned in New York. I went to Delmonico's. It's mentioned. It's a great restaurant in New York. It's mentioned in my book. So, you know, I love really kind of embedding myself in that time period. I'm a big believer. My first book is set in 1950s London, and it happened during a smog that happened over a five-day period. And so I went to London during those days to just feel what is the weather like? How cold is it? And I know it's
Starting point is 00:18:25 not transporting yourself back to the 1950s, but that visceral reaction. I went to Edward Ruloff's farm where he lived with his wife. And there's a tree that was absolutely there when he was there. And of course, the creek was there. And so it's amazing to be able to walk in that same footsteps. The well is the original well. So I was able to look down into this well that he had looked down, you know, a hundred and something years ago. So it's an important experience for most authors to be able to recreate that world. Hey, Torontonians, recycling is more than a routine. It's a vital responsibility.
Starting point is 00:18:58 By recycling properly, you help conserve resources, reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, and protect the environment. Toronto's Blue Bin Recycling Program ensures the majority of the right items are recovered and transformed into new products. Recycling right is important and impactful. Let's work together and make a difference, because small actions lead to big change. For more tips on recycling, visit toronto.ca slash recycle right. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm angela kinsey we are best friends and together we have the podcast office ladies where we re-watched every single episode of the
Starting point is 00:19:33 office with insane behind the scenes stories hilarious guests and lots of laughs guess who's sitting next to me steve in the studio every wednesday we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments so join us for brand new office ladies 6.0 episodes every wednesday plus on mondays we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Talk a little bit more, if you can, about how you approach the process of putting together
Starting point is 00:20:30 stories like this. I know people are always very curious about the behind the scenes. You mentioned some of your travels. How do you actually decide where to go? How do you decide, well, I have to go to Delmonico's or I have to make sure to visit his farm. And what do you do if a location is you can't determine where it is or a location is no longer there? Talk us through how you approach researching and experiencing things enough to put it into a book. Well, you know, it's difficult for me. I put a pretty high bar on my story. So for a book, there have to be a lot of things checked off on my little list of criteria in order for me to do the story. And one of the most important things is the research, as we talked about before, the sources that you have. I absolutely am a huge believer in primary sources. For me, I have to be able to sort of bring people
Starting point is 00:21:22 back to life. That includes not just primary sources, like a couple of letters. I mean, we need to talk about many, many, many letters. For the last book I did, American Sherlock, there were a couple thousand letters. For Edward Ruloff, I had probably about 300 letters that he had written in prison. And then you have to have memoirs, I think. And you have to just to have a lot of communication to get a sense of who these people are. Trial transcripts are wonderful. So oftentimes it's the sources, the firsthand primary sources that dictate where I go. So for this book, I spent an awful lot of time at Cornell University, which is my, I
Starting point is 00:22:01 don't know if you have a university crush. I do have crushes on certain universities. And I will say I have been to many for research and I would be monogamous with Cornell. Absolutely. It's a wonderful campus and the library is amazing and they're so well organized there. It really was a great experience for me.
Starting point is 00:22:21 And then luckily that was in Ithaca. The farm is about 30 minutes in Dryden, New York. It's about 30 minutes away. And I found the family. I sort of pride myself on being able to track down families, descendants who knew everything about it. They live to his family, who he murdered four members of. The last name was Scutt. And the farm is off of Scutt Road. They were very important in that community. And the farm is off of Scutt Road. They were very important in that community. And the farm is still there and the family still lives there. So that is invaluable. And as much as I can do that to go to the locations in the second book, American Sherlock,
Starting point is 00:22:55 Oscar Heinrich, who was the forensic scientist, it was the subject of that book, lived in Berkeley Hills. I went and found his house. I didn't really get, I didn't have the chutzpah to knock on the front door and say, can I come into your sprawling house? You don't even know me. I should have though. But you know, I go to as many places as possible because I think it's important. I'm not a big believer in dropping in and leaving and getting as much as I can and then just going. I really want to try to immerse myself and go to as many locations as I can. It doesn't mean you can't write the book. It just means, you know, if you're trying to put emotion and passion in detail, I'm a huge believer in detail. For Edward Ruloff, for me to be able to stand beneath this massive tree, this maple tree that he had stood under,
Starting point is 00:23:43 to be able to say what it sounds like when the wind goes through it. I went to New York constantly in the winter. One of the Scott descendants mentioned several times you should actually try to come not in February. It's lovely. But to be able to be there crunching through the snow, you can't recreate that in a book without actually being there. And I really enjoy doing that. And it's a nonfiction book. You still have to do those details are what's important. That's probably some of your journalist training, though, of being able to track down descendants from a serial killer from the 1800s.
Starting point is 00:24:17 Those are skills that you are currently using. I think Ancestry.com is just about the greatest invention ever. It's really helped me out a lot. It is. It's hard to track people down, but it's still important to the book because, again, for me, it always comes back down to the families of the victims and the families who have to live with all of that and really being able to speak with them about how this fits in the tapestry of your family history. in the tapestry of your family history. You know, you've got all these pieces, different people who have been long forgotten. And now here is this journalist knocking on your door, asking about a family from several hundred years ago.
Starting point is 00:24:57 And when they start talking about that family member, when they know particularly a lot about that person, boy, it just brings up a lot. Oh man, he really reminds me of my great uncle. And my great uncle is just like my nephew. And sometimes they can trace mental illness throughout their family. Sometimes with the Scuts, in the case of the Scuts who were the victims in Edward Ruloff's story, the Scuts said, we have perseverance. We always have. We've gone through many wars. We've had people serve in the War of 1812,
Starting point is 00:25:25 the American Revolutionary War, all the way up through what's happened recently. And we always have a perseverance and a family bond, and we've always lived near each other. For them to be able to say that and trace it back to a terrible story like this one throughout history, they really feel like their family is remarkable. And I enjoy being a reminder that your family is remarkable. And here's why. How do you reach out to them? Do you try to find an email address on whois.com and be like, yo, it's me. I'm legit. I promise I'm not a serial killer. Here's my creds. Can I come to your house? How does that work? I leave off the yo and then the yes to everything else. I say, sometimes I just blanket ancestry. I find people. So I was looking for a family for
Starting point is 00:26:20 my podcast for Tenfold More Wicked one time, and I was looking for a family and I sent a message to probably 15 people who had trees connected to this family. And I was getting responses. They were all very nice, but it was like, yeah, I'm fifth cousin, 12th remove or something. I mean, really like far out. And I don't know anything about the story. And then all of a sudden I got a niece. I said, yeah, I know exactly who she is. She was my niece and I was her niece. And I knew her husband who was the start of all of this. And I know the entire story and they stayed with us. And so, you know, you just never know, but it is really hard. I will say for Tenfold More Wicked, for the podcast, it has become much easier because at the end of the show, I say, if there's a
Starting point is 00:27:03 historical true crime that you think needs some attention, particularly one that comes from your family history, then reach out to me, info at tenfoldmorewicked.com. And so now they come to me. I have gotten so many great entries from people. I have one woman who I'm meeting with in New England in a couple of months, and she pitched me three different murders in her family that are 80 years apart. And they were all really good. And I'm actually, I said, I can't do
Starting point is 00:27:32 the middle one, the one that's set in the 1840s, early 1840s. And she said, why? And I said, because I'm writing a book. I'm already writing a book about it. And it's what's going to be the fourth book. I can't talk about, but it's going to be the fourth book. And I said, I know that case and I can't write about it, but I will talk to you about it from my book. So it's been much easier for me, but it can be difficult. You know, luckily, fortunately for people or unfortunately, you know, everything you do is documented on the internet. And so I'm able to find almost anybody I need to. I don't have to hire a detective or go with one of those weird services that'll give me everybody's phone number. I can generally track somebody down pretty well. Don't you love newspapers.com? I do. I do. I love
Starting point is 00:28:18 it and I hate it. I love it because there's so many of them and I hate it because it's not actually newspapers.com. It's more of 19th century newspapers where they spelled people's names in 20 different ways. It was really, I mean, Ruloff has been spelled every name. It's really R-U-L-L-O-F-F. And then really though, it's been spelled 19 different ways on newspapers.com, but it is fantastic. Ancestry.com is great. Newspapers.com is great. I use worldcat.org. I don't know if anybody in your audience uses them. You just plug in any author or any person at all. I could put in Sharon McMahon and probably anything that you've ever done will pop up. I use archive.org, which probably has your podcast on it happy i use sometimes so there i've learned
Starting point is 00:29:07 over the years there are quite a lot of sources that have been very helpful in research for me and sources that even our predecessors would never have had access to you would have had to go to a library and get a microfilm and sit there in a dark room i hope to come up with something i hope that they preserve those papers i still do that though that's what's funny yeah because not everything is digitized not everything is digitized for this story there were some local newspapers in binghamton for this book that were not available on newspapers.com so i had to go to the tompkins county library i think it was tompkins. Maybe that was Ithaca. One of the historical centers and sit down and do the microfiche, which was a unique experience.
Starting point is 00:29:54 And it gave me a little bit of a headache with all the whirling and stuff. But that's also part of it. That's part of their face. And so he has a death mask that actually is a tremendous likeness. And so I was able to look at this death mask. I also saw his brain, which is on display at Cornell University as one of the most remarkable brains ever preserved. And your listeners will just figure out why it was a really remarkable brain. You learn a lot from it, though. Again,
Starting point is 00:30:31 that comes back to really being able to immerse yourself in the story as much as you can, because I think as an author, I have a responsibility to bring all of those details to a reader or to a listener. I do my own audio book, too. So I have to responsibility to bring all of those details to a reader or to a listener. I do my own audio book too. So I have to make sure that those details, the visceral details are there. So I try to visit as much as I can. And I just like to be there. I love being there.
Starting point is 00:30:54 There was a restaurant named after him in Ithaca. So I bought like a glass and I wore Ruloff glass. I had his name, his likeness etched on it. And so there are a lot of things that are just element. And so I love that your work is perfect for somebody who loves history, perfect for somebody who loves the true crime genre, perfect for people who like suspense, mystery type writing. It really is such a unique melding of all those genres, and you just really do it so beautifully. Well, I appreciate it. It took me a long time to settle on this as a genre. I was not a crime producer or a reporter when I was a television news producer.
Starting point is 00:31:50 I covered everything. I did cover some crimes, but I've always been someone who has consumed crime, either fiction or nonfiction crime. And my mom was like that, still is, huge fan of true crime. And so when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write about, I'm interested in war. I'm interested in the Civil War, the American Revolutionary War. And it just, I was writing these book proposals and they weren't working. And a friend of mine said, you know, you're torturing yourself over these book proposals and you are taking a break by watching like CBS's 48 Hour Mysteries or're, you know, you're, you're watching the
Starting point is 00:32:25 history channel and, and why don't you think about writing in that genre and see how you like it. And I, it just fits me so well. It fits my personality so well. I joke that if I could have a gas lamp in every single room of our house and it weren't going to be a hazard. It's important to me. I like creepiness, but I also love history. I love creepy history, but there's so much to be learned from it that is serious. That's not just entertainment value for being spooky or scary, but I think we can just learn so much from it. Well, your book is called All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind. And I really think people are going to enjoy it. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's been quite a journey for me, but I love it. This is a book that I have thought about for so long and I have lived with Edward Ruloff for so long that I'm so happy that it's finally out. Edward Ruloff for so long that I'm so happy that it's finally out.
Starting point is 00:33:31 And tell everybody where they can listen to your three podcasts. You think I am a crazy podcaster. Three podcasts. What are they called and where can they find them? The first one is Tenfold More Wicked. That was my original podcast and it's documentary style. So I'll take a crime from history that probably you've never heard of before. I visit with the family and there are six episodes. I style it very much after the old CBS radio shows where we have effects, people walking in snow, and you feel like you're there. I have a composer who composes original music from whatever time period we're in. And then we learn about history. That starts usually in like the end of January and goes for about six months. And then the second podcast is called Wicked Words. And that is
Starting point is 00:34:12 what's happening right now. Wicked Words is where I interview writers about their best true crime stories. And then the one that just started in September is called Buried Bones. And you have interviewed, I think, Paul Holes before. I have. Paul Holes is my buddy. He's a forensic detective type guy. He's an investigator who helped solve the Golden State killer case. And he and I dissect, we like to say, dissect history's most important cases that you've never heard of. Some of them are cold and some of them aren't. And it's so funny to see Paul just try to understand when I'm unraveling this case and he's saying, but wait a second. And I'll say, you just have to wait and I'll tell you what happens. And, you know, he'll come to a conclusion and then sometimes he's wrong and sometimes he's right. And oftentimes we'll say, boy, they really missed the mark in 1812 when we talked about this case. So that
Starting point is 00:35:06 Buried Bones, all three of these shows are on the Exactly Right Network. If any of your listeners have ever heard of My Favorite Murder, it's that same network. So yeah, it's been wonderful. It is true crime all the time for me. Well, I can't wait for people to read All That Is Wicked and to keep listening to your shows. They're just fantastically done. They're just really top shelf. So congrats on all of your success. Thank you. I appreciate you having me here.
Starting point is 00:35:35 Always a pleasure. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or a review or sharing a link to it on your social media? All of those things help podcasters out so much. Here's Where It Gets Interesting is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson.
Starting point is 00:35:58 Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. See you again soon.

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