My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 259 - Fake Snow In Glendale

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

On this week’s episode, Karen and Georgia cover the history of lobotomies and the Smuttynose Axe Murders.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And welcome. To my favorite murder. The podcast. That's Georgia Hartster. And that's Karen Kilgariff. How's it going, everybody? How are you? How are your parents?

How's your sister, your friends, your dog? Do you want to talk about your dog? Oh, well, just so happens, I have one now. And her name is Cookie as a little tribute to Elvis. And I think we fucking won the dog lottery. She's this little teeny tiny wire terrier. She's nine weeks old. She was found in the streets and Mutscouts rescued her.

I am, I just can't, I'm so happy. It's so, it turns out it's great having a puppy. It is. Yeah. It's really exciting. They're very cute. Yeah. I just kind of am watching because Dottie is right over your shoulder.

Oh, she's not. And it's like she's, it's like she's looking, she's listening to you tell the story. And then she's just like, uh-huh. I'll be over here. Oh, do you love that puppy? Oh, it brings you joy. She just turned around. Her back turned to me right now.

And how's, how's Cookie doing? Cookie's, can't wait to meet with the cats. Can't wait. She's definitely a chaser. So don't run, but Mimi is like excited. Mimi's not, what am I talking about? Mimi is fine. She's an alpha.

Dottie's trying to follow her lead. And it's been three days and they're already like kind of okay. So I'm looking forward to it. I like, I mean, they can always just go up high. That's the thing. The cats, they have this, the great advantage where it's like, They're learning that. Escape.

I can't wait till everyone's just in a fucking cuddle puddle. But I'm going to wait. I know it takes it. That's when the barking starts. Yes. Oh, yeah, it's fucking, it's, this is my first puppy. And it's my first like dog that's mine. You know, like I had an ex that I lived with who had a dog and my brother had a dog.

But this is like my first dog. Yeah. It's the best. Yeah. It feels like, it feels like a, I definitely think there would be no issue with me getting a like certified, um, what's it called when they take care of your, your, your anxiety. Um, and you can bring them on planes. Emotional support.

Yeah. Like I feel like it's obvious that going to emotionally support me and in life. Like great, you know what I mean? Fun. Lucky cookie. Yeah. Make the plan. Make the plan.

But I just feel like it brings me down a level of anxiety immediately, you know, so like, and she's tiny. I have to bring her everywhere. So it's like, it's just going to, it's going to be helpful once we start leaving the house again. Yeah. Right. These are your future plans.

Post your post quarantine plans. That's right. Of being the person that takes their dog everywhere. It's a blue vest on their dog. Oh. Oh, you mean like, I thought I was going to be like a hoodie or like a flight bomber jacket. You mean like an emotional support. No, that's, it just makes me think of this lady that we were in the, um, the, the, what

do you call it? Great cheesecake. Why? I want to call it the American cheesecake factory. Great cheesecake mistake. I think it's called. What's it called? Cheesecake factory.

Oh, there's no, there's nothing before it. There's no great about it. There's nothing great. I will say those. Yeah. Come to think of it. I mean, honestly, those avocado egg rolls are legit. Have you had them?

Oh, you don't like avocado? They know what they're doing. They know what they're doing there. There's, there's no, uh, there's the reason it's fucking packed and you have to have one of those weird buzzers and stand around. We were there waiting for a table one time and a lady walked in with this poodle with the blue vest on and immediately started yelling at everybody. That it was her emotional support dog.

And I literally, I looked at her like, lady, do not bring that over here. Like Los Angeles is chock full of these people where it's like. I need to explain to you how incredibly my emotions were. Right. We're, we're, look, we're all at the cheesecake factory that we all have emotions. No one's doing it. You don't need a pet. You're just here.

I definitely won't be one of those people if I'm going to bring my dog to a dining situation. I'm going to make sure that there's outdoor dining and dogs are allowed. And it's also not a global pandemic cause I'm just going to stay home in that case. Yeah. No, you're talking about 2023 and I hear you. I'm hearing it. I would never bring my dog to a cheesecake factory.

This is my emotional support avocado egg roll and it is gone. It's going to be great in 2023. Is that emotional people who need emotional support dogs for indoor restaurants? We can just, you can order it and have it delivered to your emotional support indoors and your emotional support home. And it ain't no thing. It ain't no thing. People will be, no, here's the thing.

Crappy people like me won't give a shit, but you could have a fucking emotional support donkey with hay in its mouth. And I'd be like, oh my God, that's so cute. I'm sorry about your feelings because it'll be so exciting. It'll be so exciting to be in public and be in a restaurant that it'll be like anything. Now, is the hay in the emotional support donkey's mouth emotional support hay? Cause I would be cute. Oh yeah.

That donkey is fucked up. That donkey is. Cause it gets brought to fucking human places. Those fountains are dancing. What's happening? There's fake snow and Glendale at Christmas and why are we even at a mall in Christmas? It's like the worst idea. It's too packed.

I'm so nervous. I'm just a donkey. Am I going to get fucking reindeer horns put on my head and you're going to pass me off as a reindeer and you're going to put like children on me. Please. Are you going to make me go to J crew and try on those really narrow pants? Like I don't, none of it, please. I just want to stay home and eat my emotional support.

Hey, please. Did you see that it actually hailed so hard? It looked like it was snowing in the Malibu Canyon. No. Cause. Yes. Like two days ago or three days ago. Can they handle mail a hail in Malibu?

I don't think so. They've been through so much. Um, they've had such a hard time, but it was really mind blowing, uh, video. You should try to look it up. I'm just saying that so that when you and I talk about how cold we are during this episode and the people in fucking know them Alaska are like, shut up. We're like, no, but there was hail. You don't understand.

I mean, the people one stayed over and wears one state over Oregon are like, shut the fuck up LA. This is, but it's everybody. I mean, everyone's more colder than us. Always. Every, but also everyone wants us to shut up because of our emotional support hail. It never ends with us. It's our emotional support podcast.

Deal with it. But it's really fucking cold. It's not that cold for us. For context. I think you're higher up and in the valley. And so you get a little, you get more cold. But listen, I'm always freezing my tits off. It's just, I'm saying for Los Angeles, which has been a blazing oven for the last 11 months.

Yeah. It's rough. Yeah. 53. I mean, I don't know. So what are you, I don't know. What are you doing to hibernate? While you,

So what are you doing this winter season? Can I ask you a question and I know the answer is going to be no. And I'm going to be angry because if it were asked to me in your situation, I would be saying, yes. I'll always have you got in your hot tub one fucking time. It's like, what's this? I know, right? No, but it's only because I don't really know how to turn it on.

That makes sense. I wouldn't. I wouldn't just even try to guess at all. It's like, there's a series of buttons and buttons and my pool tech has shown me how to do it. That's what they're called. That's great. Good for them. All right.

He knows the ton of shit way more than me and he showed me probably four times and I can't every time I go over there. It's a brand new scenario. Can I make a suggestion and this is write it down? No. Take a picture. Video it. Video it.

That's a great idea. I think that. Yeah. I've videoed some shit that I'm like, there's no way I would have remembered how to do this. And it's like, And I work and then you learn. Yeah. Actually, when I, well, yeah.

Yes. You can't talk about it. Well, it just sounded like a non non sequitur. Is that a thing? That when I was taking drumming lessons. Oh, what? Non sequitur. What's it called?

Oh, a non sequitur. Thank you. I thought you meant a non secreter. I was like, what? It's almost like half and half of that thing. Non sequitur. Well, when I was learning drumming a million years ago, I just take up, you know, an hour long drumming class and they teach me this whole thing.

And I'm like, great, I'm going to video you now. And that's the only way I, like, I wouldn't remember anything from the class. I would just like practice by watching the video. Right. So whatever. That's why I would tell our story. It's not that interesting. No, of him.

Doing it. That's why it was, that's why it was, that's why it was a non sequitur. This just wasn't that great. Nothing came with it. Were you in? Nothing happened. Was I, I'm just saying, were you into that drumming teacher?

Is that what we're actually talking about? No. Right. If you read heart, there was no sexual chemistry. Bless his heart. Bless his heart. Do you want me to go into a correction score? Oh, please.

I have one too. Okay. Good. Yeah. Cause we haven't, we haven't recorded in a while. So this is an old one, but from the last episode where we did record, I was talking about how much I loved the show, all things great and small, which I continue to love and I continue to recommend.

However. Oh. I was so proud because the, the season started in episode one in the train station in Glasgow, Scotland. Got it. Right. My sister city because I lived there for three and a half months or something like that. So I get real like Scotland proud when I see Scottish stuff.

I'm part of that. That's my neighborhood. And we've been there and we've been there since it's like not a foreign place. Well, it's foreign, but it's not a foreign place to us. Right. And, um, yeah. So I feel real like, uh, you know, a special citizen anyhow. Uh, so I explained this show and said that, that the young, uh, James Harriet gets on

the train and takes it north into the Scottish islands, basically, and didn't think twice about it. And essentially the reason, and this is what they call confirmation bias, I told it that way is because when I took the train in Scotland, I went north. So that's just like, that was my experience. So that must be what this TV show is. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I got a tweet from someone named Helen Liptrot, who literally just had the sentence, she just wrote the sentence or they just wrote the sentence, all things great and small is set in Yorkshire. Oh yeah, that's right. He takes the train south to England, to Yorkshire to work and that's where the entire incredibly famous book and television series is set in Yorkshire, England. So Helen, my apologies, uh, that was one of the, I don't know why, but it felt like one

of the harshest corrections of all time because there was no interest, no passion. Yes. It was almost like, now I have to come and tell you that. And it's personal too. Yeah. It's like no, like it's all cool. But people get a bit mistook in all the time and your friend, fucking California. But I wonder what like, if we were like, if someone from England were like, it takes place

in New York, we're like, no fucking doesn't it takes place in Cape Cod? How do you not know that? You know, like a thing like that, like what it would, what the equivalent would be us. Well we'd get that wrong too. That's true. That's the one thing we can really take into our heart. No matter what, if it's Canada, it's the U.S. and we don't fucking know. If it's Canada, whatever, then good for one province.

All right. Well, my correction. So Helen, Helen, my apologies. My correction, I think was actually really cool was like a learning experience for me. So remember how I was like making fun of microwaves for being that you could pre-program them from somewhere like, and you were like making your meatloaf on your way home from work? Sure. You turned on the microwave.

Well, it turns out that, so someone on Twitter or Instagram, I don't remember, no Instagram called BadassMother and that's bad with two Bs was like, hey, the reason that those are able to, the reason that those exist are for people who are visually impaired. And I was like, oh, what a great idea. I take it all back and I'm happy to hear that. That's a correction. It's not just some dumb fucking thing that the big microwave used to jack up the prices of microwaves and like make rich people feel okay about having a microwave.

You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Good to know. Should we talk briefly, spoiler free about the Night Soccer television show? It's been so long since I watched it.

I feel like I have so many notes at how good it was and like powerful, right? This is not, I mean, yeah. It was so well done. It was, people, here's the thing, true crime as a popular trend isn't going away anytime soon. No. And people are just getting better and better at it and like. Right.

And knowing what we actually want from it. That's a great point. It's really impressive and this series, I don't know about you, I binged it all the night it came out. No, we didn't do that, but we didn't like, and then Vince watched it too, which was like, which is always a good sign. He was like, I might not be able to get through this. Let's try it.

And then the next day was like, do you want to finish it? So that's always good. Yeah. He's willing to risk the door of it. I mean, the time and placiness of it is one of my favorite things about the good, true courts. Like here's what it was like back then and here's, and it's part of the reason everyone was terrified.

And it's, it was the first time that they were like, you know, we're just coming off of the hillside strangler, but this time people were like, you know, whatever the fuck is so good. It was amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It was, and the great Frank Salerno, the detective who basically worked on every famous murder case in Los Angeles in the seventies and eighties is a huge part of it.

And it's really cool to hear him talking and telling, and it was his case. They, yeah. But then they'll come again and being like, Hey, I'm a young guy, but fuck you. Here's what it is underdog city, smart as a fucking whip and like it wouldn't, I don't know if it would have been solved at least not when it was without him at all. Right? Of course not. No, no, no.

No. Incredible. Yeah. If you, if you are looking and you haven't watched it yet, which I don't know, I bet it got really good reviews. People probably have watched it, but definitely watch it. It's, it's a real binger. It's unbelievable.

It's so fun too. When you watch it, it's a thing from your town or your name, you know, Southern California and being like, I fucking grew up with that report. Tony Valdez. Oh my God. That was my fucking news guy. Yeah. And then Zoe Turr.

I was just amazed by, she's the one who started the helicopter news reporting. Yeah. Fascinating. Like just such a cool, such a cool story. You learn a ton. You do. It like, there's a lot. It's not just the crime.

It's the culture around the crime and it's, and then there's a bunch of survivors, and victims, families, like it's told very, it's very full story. It's not just, it's the way they're doing it these days. It's just beautifully done. Cool. What else are you watching? Yeah. Well, I, this is an old recommendation and I think people told us this like the first

time we went to the UK and this got recommended. I've known about it for a while, but I never found it. It's called Crime Story and it's on Amazon and it's from the, I think late eighties or early nineties. It's British and they're basically, I think they're hour long. I can't remember half hour hour, but they're basically a dramatized reenactment of a crime. Like beginning to end and it's like you're watching almost, almost like a soap opera kind of feel, but it's, you know, but it's very real.

No narration. No, not at all. It's just like an episode of something that you would see, except for there's no detective that comes in that's like, it's me, Inspector Morris or whatever. It's just all the people of the time. It's all real. And there's, I think there's six or maybe eight and I watched all of those because it was just like, oh my God, this really happened.

This really happened in each one. And they're really amazing and, you know, crazy. And like, we don't like dramatic reenactments of crimes, you know, like, I feel like we're all a little sick of that and it's all overdone and overdramatic. But if this one does it well, then that's like a huge deal. Well, because it's not a reenactment, reenactment is an accurate, it's a, it's a dramatized episodic of a true story. So they actually, in their great British way, produce it really well and there's nothing

reenactment about it. Cool. Okay. It's great. It's a really good storytelling. Okay. Let's see. What am I, I just looked down on my notes and saw that I wrote down the Korean translation

or our book came out in translation, translated in Korean. And our books in Korean. Our books in Korean. Did you get the copy? Alone. That's the, it's crazy. Yeah. Beautiful.

It has a really fascinating cover. We should post that so people can see. It's posted on Instagram and the translation for stay sexy and don't get murdered. And then the tagline is be a selfish bitch. Realistic fucking advice from your cool sisters. Can you imagine? Yes. There's some Korean 26 year old girls like in the books are like, what?

Be a selfish bitch. Get over here. I feel like this. This should be the name of whatever next book we write, but I don't know if that would sell. I don't know if I could see. It already is the name of a book we wrote. So you know what?

Your wish has come true. It fucking worked. Your wish is granted. Thank you. Oh, have you been watching season four, the new season of search party? No, I'm behind on search party. Oh, but fucking season after season, this show delivers for me. Like it is regularly the best fucking episode of anything I've seen.

And I'm so obsessed with it. The new season is incredible as always. Hold on one second. Let me, let me look this up really quick. Okay. So of course, John, John early is like one of my favorite fucking actors, comedic actors and him and Meredith Hagmer are like the fucking best comedy duo ever. But then in this season, Cole Escola, is that how you say it?

Yep. Cole Escola. One of my other, he haven't joined really my favorite comedic actors ever and he has played a prominent role in it and it's just twisted. It reminds me of misery kind of. It's just like so good. It just like delivers on every front for me. I think it's one of the best shows.

Nice. I have to catch up. But when it first came out, I felt like you saw it everywhere and maybe it's just because like we were outside. So I feel like it's not by me that we're that we're in season four already. They moved it to a new network. So I wonder if like that might be part of it, but and it's on, is it, oh, it's on HBO Max now.

Oh, cool. So that's cool. But I mean, please just like binge it. And like, I'm so, then it's told me he hadn't seen season one and I got excited that I got to watch it again because I've just absolutely fucking love it. That's it. Are you, do you like it though? Are you going to do it?

I'm not that big of a fan of it, but I, I slogged through it. But you got through. That's right. That amazing show. Because I love Elia Chakra. What else? Yeah. Everybody on that show.

So good. Oh, I was going to tell you about last night. My friend, Albertina, shout out, recommended this show that's on Hulu. And I, what I recommend right now is that you do not try to read anything about it and you do not try to look into it in any way. It's called in and of itself. I heard the same fucking thing. Don't read about it.

Okay. Don't read about it. Just watch it. It's on Hulu and in and of itself. It's basically a, it was a play and it was, it was taped and so whatever. So it's a little bit like going to a live performance, which is amazing. And this is all I'll say about it. It starts by saying, please turn off your phone.

Fun. And I was laying on the couch, of course, staring at my phone while I was waiting for this thing to start. And I literally was like, yes, I will, I've been waiting for someone to say that to me for nine fucking months. But also I don't want to over-hype it because I feel like the neutrality of not being sure and like having people just say anything and one way or the other about it is the best part and then you could just go have your own experience.

Yeah. I definitely hyped up search party, but I feel like it lives up to it where it's like, get excited. Search party is the fucking greatest and that's like, you can rely on it and it's amazing, but you don't, if you go watch it, like people have already seen it. I love it. So it's like an immersive experience kind of. I don't know why that, I just really like that phrase.

Yes. Well, yes, I think ultimately when it happened, it was. My friend made a movie and you know, when your friends make a thing and you're like, that guy made a thing and then you watch it and you're like, holy shit, that guy was more, I should have talked to him more at parties because I really tell, which isn't, it's actually a friend that I really like and I talk to at parties a lot because you can, you're at a party and you're awkward and you're like, oh, thank God, Kurt nails here. I can fucking have a conversation and like hide with someone.

So my friend, Courtney, I'll made a movie, which is like. You made an introduction. Thank you. You make movies? I didn't know. And it's called Derrick's Dead. It's on Amazon and it's so charming and sweet and Kurt stars in it and like wrote it. He probably directed it and I was like, oh fuck, you're so talented.

I don't. And Kyle Mazono's in it and she is the guest on, do you need to write this? Shut the fuck up. She comes to the door and delivers ashes. She's so funny. She's so deadpan in it. Yeah. Derrick's dead.

I highly recommend it. It's like, it's like charming and fun to watch, you know. Where is it playing? Um, Amazon and like YouTube and shit. Yeah. It's like, it's great. So good job, Kurt. Can't wait to see you at a fucking party again someday.

Okay. So can I tell you about this book that I listened to on, uh, man on, uh, it was an audio book and, um, my friend Allison Fields recommended it to me and it is called Attached and it's, uh, the authors are Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller. And it is one of those fucking self-help books where you're listening to it and you're like, holy shit, this is the thing I needed to hear. And it's basically about everybody, people's different attachment styles. Oh.

So either you're an anxious attach, you're an avoidant attach, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment or secure attachment. Who the fuck are you secure? I mean, show off. That's like, yeah, those are like, yeah, but if you are in any way kind of like having a hard time with either relationships, dating, where you think you're at, what you're trying to do, it is un fucking believable. It's called unattached and no, no, no, no, it's called it attached.

That's avoided. Attached. I'm obviously the most, what are you secure? I'm a cop. I'm mostly anxious. Okay. Okay. Attached.

So thank you for even suggesting that. It was a wonderful compliment. I mean, it's about a bunch of different things and I think it's, I was talking to my therapist about it this morning. She's like, oh, but it's not, everybody's not all one thing. You can be one thing. Right. There's some three categories of people, of course.

Yes. However. It's not about like, I know, I'm an introvert. Right. Well, I'm an extrovert or whatever. It's like, we're all, we all contain multitudes. But the theories behind it, because essentially, and I'll briefly tell you this, but they basically say if you're an anxious attachment person, then the best kind of person you can be with

obviously is secure. Definitely. Because they don't, they don't, right? It's me and Vince. Hi. Nice to meet you. They don't get defensive. You go through your thing.

They hang out and wait for you, whatever. But oftentimes anxious attachment are only attracted to avoidants who are the people who sit there doing everything to get away from you and you keep going. And it's after a while, that's what love feels like to you because it's a terrible reward. When they finally give you a little, you're like rewarded for your hard work. Which I think so many women are in this cycle right now where they think this is what love feels like. This is what excitement.

This is whatever. And when you're, when you first kind of start hanging out with a secure person, it's, there's no chemistry because they're just like, yeah, I'm super into you, what's going on. It's almost like you think you're bored, but it's not boredom, it's, it's reliability. You're learning how to be loved. And can I add, cause Vince is totally secure. I have anxious attachment. It really always helped that he was like that when, when someone doesn't flip, when you

don't, when someone doesn't fight with you or flip out with you or get upset that you are jealous or these, you think that they aren't passionate and don't love you as much. The only way you understand love is by fight, by having these things and it's always this and which is totally me and the guys I did when I was young. And then you realize, right, that like, yep, it just means they have their shit together and they love you enough that they know that that's not who you are. You're just kind of having a constant panic attack that you're not worthy of the love that you're like, why are they just being cool with me all the time?

You know what I mean? Did you write this book? Which is basically, it's like you're, you get triggered and then you're, well, you don't think you're worthy of love and someone treats you like you are, you think that they're fucking with you or they're lying or they're stupid or something's wrong with them or they're tricking you. Do I say tricking you? Right.

Okay, sorry. And then you also get mad because essentially it's you're fucked up and you have to admit you're fucked up. Yeah. And then that's that thing where if you're with someone else that's fucked up, you can always be like, look how fucked up. Instead of the person that's just hanging out where you're like, I'm always wrong. It's so frustrating.

So anyway, if you are in that spot attached, Georgia, it's, it's such an amazing, you're married. We're in therapy. I mean, we have a great relationship. We're in therapy because of these reasons and it is like, but I mean, but you're also in the ideal scenario where because people who are in these different places can grow out into other places because you wouldn't let, he wouldn't let me push him away in the beginning.

You know what I mean? Like he wouldn't let me, he got, um, he stood up for himself and was like, I'm not going to hook up with another girl and you need to stop treating me like I'm going to. And you're, and then I was like, I'm scared of that because if you're open about it and you're with someone, it's okay. But it's like, it's scary getting to the place where you know you're safe to actually tell those stories and be honest about your feelings is really hard. That's my, that's my recommendation.

It's that it's that good though. Like you're excited because it's that good. Just listen to it. I mean, you know what you're going to hear, but the shit, it fee, it just feels so nice to hear it. Yeah. That sounds great. Oh, should we just give a quick shout out to Kyle Russell, who did the lip sync from

the last episode that is still, the whole thing is hilarious. I don't know why lip syncs are so fucking funny, but they are, but the very end when I say, is that a fire? And you go, what? Like they're really high. Yeah. The way he does it is so it's, thank you, Kyle. That was such a delightful little thing.

So good. You know, he, he, he nails our facial expressions in a way that's like, that makes it so real. Like, like I didn't think about the fact that when I said what, it was off mic until he like turned his, it's just like some of these fucking tiktokers, man are brilliant. They know their shit. They know their shit. The only thing I'm worried about is he had glasses on for you. And I wonder if he thinks I'm your voice in your mind.

Excuse me. 20 fucking 20 over here. The only person. This girl doesn't need glasses. Can I just tell you, don't even pretend the only person in my family for generations that have Jews that have not needed glasses. And I really, yeah. Why?

I don't know. I probably eat paint chips as a kid and it just like gave me fucking supersonic sight or some shit licked my cat one too many times and got like some supersonic. You took that leg poisoning and you fucking made it work for your eyes. Turns out it's not all bad. The government. Get out of my paint chips, bitch. I want to eat them.

What if this was an ad for paint chips, a super stale ad for like that's our new merch paint chips, promo code murder. They're coming back. Is there tagline? They're coming back. Let it gas. They were around. They were around to take them away.

Let it gasoline. It's fat, baby. Asbestos. You never saw it coming. No. More lethal than ever. It's like forbidden merch. That's our new forbidden merch line.

Fuck you. Fuck you, the FDA. And then they never got out of prison, Karen and Georgia. We killed all those children with the paint. Toxic mold. Have you allegedly have you read the good news about toxic mold? Black mold. Get it in your system.

All right. Should we do a little news? Should we tighten our shit up? What about that stuff? Yeah. Where are you going to do a speaking of of something else? I'm just going to sit in this chit chat. Okay.

We have a podcast network because we are business women, turns out, who someone told us and we said, okay, and then we made an empire. So. Well, of all the many shows we have, look, there's a couple of great ones. First of all, I said no gifts has the great comedian, actress, writer, and America sweetheart, Naomi Paraget on it. And she is so fucking hilarious. She was, she, I retweeted a video that she put out on inauguration day where she was

like, Donald Trump, bye bitch, my fans, bye bitch. And she does like a 35 second song by bitching everyone from the last administration, which is pretty exciting. So yeah, I said no gifts is going to be a banger this week. Hey, you know, you know what other podcasts we have on our network? Just a little podcast called the per cast motherfuckers. Steven Ray Morris and Sarah have Justina Ireland on the show this week. And she's the author of the new Star Wars book, test of courage, which I think is such

a like, like obsessive cool thing, right? People love Star Wars. It's so good. It's so much fun. What kind of cat does she have? She has two cats named Jeff, Jeff and Jack, and then a dog named Sterling. And they all get along together. And it's really sweet.

Oh, I mean, I need tips and tricks. So that sounds perfect. Goals. Jack and Sterling cuddle up together and it's really sweet. Okay. I'm there. That's where you want to be. We also have had two premieres this week, which is very exciting.

The hilarious comedy podcast, Lady to Lady. I'll just do my own. I'm the guest on Lady to Lady for their premiere episode on the Exactly Right Network. They've been doing it for, I think, seven years, a long time. They've been killing it out there and we brought them, we brought them home to Exactly Right. We're so excited. And we talk about one of my favorite things that I've ever talked to anybody about, which

is the attempted cancellation of Grandpa Joe from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What? Is that his thing? Yeah, it's a very funny conversation. And those guys are the best. I got a listen. It's so funny. And the other, what's it called, premiere we have is the podcast Tenfold, More Wicked,

which season one was incredible and now season two is out. And host Kate Winkler-Dawson is dropping a new episode every Monday and season two is called The Body Snatcher and it's about Burke and Hare, who we've covered before, it's such a fascinating story. They're the most famous grave robbers of all time and they never actually grabbed a rave of shit. They actually did it in more than a fair. That's what you used to do as a robber nap rave.

And so it's a really fascinating story. These are really shitty people and it's old-timey and it's just a great listen. So check that out, Tenfold, More Wicked. And then if you go to, like, Exactly Right, the network page on iTunes, all of our podcasts are on there. There's so many fucking good ones. Anything you're interested in, like whether it's true crime or comedy or movies or, you know, a law and order SVU, you're going to find something that you love there.

And cool people. Yeah. Exactly right, ladies and gentlemen. That's right. Oh, and also we just came out with our own line of temporary tattoos while we're talking about the good news. You want to hear the good news? Temporary tattoos are in everybody.

I feel like Karen and I are going to have to cover up our lower back tattoos with our own podcast. Temporary tattoos, probably. How do you make a tramp stamp more shameful? Oh, you put your own podcast, temporary tattoo on top of you as a grown up purposely put yet another thing on top of the shame that you've been covering and hiding from boyfriends and not just anything, but but advertising for your own podcast. That's like wearing the band's shirt to the show, but you're in the band and you're wearing

your own, which apparently in the seventies, bands used to do all the time like you see a band, a band picture from like 1970, everyone's just like, hey, fucking Led Zeppelin's like wearing their own shirts. I guess it makes sense on like a selling merch level. And I do think that if I saw a comic wearing their own shirt while they're doing standup, I would think it's pretty funny. That is funny, right? Like Chris Fairbanks in his own merch would be pretty fucking hilarious.

I mean, the levels of irony are unmistakably hilarious and irony or is it you being this or, but if you're being that, then maybe on top of it, it's ironic or you know what I mean? What? Did I take Adderall today? No. Just two. All right.

Is it time to actually do the show 42 minutes in? Excuse me. Yes, Steven. Showtime. Showtime. Who's for Steven? It's dealer's choice because last week was a throwback where there wasn't any specific story.

Let's do, let's pick, like have Steven pick a number and just do it like that. Okay. Between one and ten. Sure. Five. Wait, no. Seven. You just did that wrong.

I know. Seven. Sorry. No. I'm picking the number, Steven. Why would you pick the number? Oh, no. I see.

Sorry. You're saying I pick a number and then you guess. Steven, did you just get super excited to pick a number? You were just like seven. Yes. I got excited. Sorry. Okay, let's now do it between ten and twenty.

It's going to be seven. Okay. I have a number. And it can't be seven. Yeah. Or have a seven in it. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. Let's say one number at the same time. One, two, three, twelve. Eight. Georgia. Georgia got a twelve. I get to pick that Karen goes first. Okay.

Okay, I'll go first. Time for a better cooking routine. Hello Fresh makes home cooking easy and affordable so you can stay on track and on budget in the new year. Hello Fresh meals are convenient, seasonal and delicious. Stay cozy all winter long with classic comfort foods available weekly. Why stop with just dinner? Now you can enjoy Hello Fresh's expanded menu of quick lunch solutions, weekend brunch,

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Fresh dot ca slash murder twenty with code murder twenty. That's up to twenty free meals plus free shipping on your first box when you go to Hello Fresh dot ca slash murder twenty and use code murder twenty. Goodbye. Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast against the odds. In our next season, three masked men hijack a school bus full of children in the sleepy farm town of Chowchilla, California. They bury the children and their bus driver deep underground, planning to hold them for

ransom. Local police and the FBI marshal a search effort, but the trail quickly runs dry as the air supply for the trapped children dwindles, a pair of unlikely heroes emerges. Follow against the odds wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Okay, so my story is a little bit out of left field, but I've been reading a lot about psychiatry lately and it's kind of been something I've been obsessed with. And so I thought, let's just do the history of lobotomies and see how that goes.

Wow. Okay. He did kill sure. There were a lot of people killed. So it's a horrible, horrible history and stories, right? Absolutely fits perfectly. And it's complex. So I got a bunch of information from this really great PBS documentary called the lobotomist,

a Wall Street Journal video called the lobotomy files and all things considered story called my lobotomy hosted by Howard Dully, which I highly recommend. The Journal of Neurosurgery article by James P. Caruso and Jason P. Sheenan and a KNO J.I. article by Carol Roach, House Stuff Works article by Shannon Freeman, a BBC article by Hugh Levenson, an article of the History Collection, NCBI.com article by Thomas A. Bann, Wikipedia. And then there's a podcast called Behind the Bastards, which is great. It's hosted by Robert Evans and this episode, there's a two part lobotomy episode, a lot

of history and it's the guest is Daniel Van Kirk, who's so funny. Do you know Robert Evans? Karen? He's like a comedian. No, but I've heard about Behind the Bastards, a lot of people like that podcast and have been talking about it. It's fun and funny. All right.

So before there were lobotomies, there was a Swiss psychiatrist in 1988 named Gottlieb Burkhart. He had never performed surgery before, but he believed that mental illness is caused by the actual structure of the brain. And all you have to do is to get in there and take out the bad parts to get things in the right order, as if it was like a car engine and you're just like ripping out the wires that aren't necessary, even though you don't really understand what the wires are for. And so he takes six of his patients with varying degrees of like mania, dementia, and paranoia.

And he cuts out chunks of their cerebral cortex, which is the thin layer that covers the brain. And not surprisingly, one patient goes into convulsions and dies. One seems better, but then takes his own life. Two of them were exactly the same, which is actually crazy considering an amateur surgeon had cut their fucking brain. And two simply got, quote, quieter. His systematic attempt at human psychosurgery performed in the 1880s through 1890s are experimental surgical forays, and they're largely condemned by psychiatrists at the time.

And they all like basically mock him to the point that he gives up, thankfully, on the whole thing. And in the subsequent decades, psychosurgery is attempted only once in a blue moon. But fast forward to the mid 1930s and Portuguese neurologist, Egos Moniz, who has similar beliefs as Burkhart, but as opposed to removing pieces of the brain, he leans more towards cutting the frontal lobe neural connections. So the frontal lobe is basically our control panel for emotions, for problem solving, memory, language judgment, and all the sexual desires and stuff.

It's the hardware that controls our personality. So Moniz thinks that this is where all the problems are. And in fact, and at the time, there are some Yale physiologists who take out the frontal lobes of chimpanzees and find that they actually chill out and they, they are like more easily led and they do what you tell them to do. So Moniz is into this. He comes up with the idea that maybe if you take out some of the white fibers from the frontal lobe on an actual human, it could have a similar effect.

So he enlists a colleague named Alneida Lima to test out his new, what he calls a leukotomy, like on 20 people who suffer from schizophrenia, anxiety, insomnia, hallucinations, and depression with the first surgery being done on a 63-year-old woman taking small corings of the patient's frontal lobes. So this is like a hardcore surgery where they like go and like drill into your head. And this woman definitely seems, you know, what they call more well-adjusted. And all in all 14 out of the 20 are reported as being initially cured or improved according to their standards.

So that doesn't, it's not, you know, kid tested mother approved. It's just like basic fucking, hey, they're better. So Moniz couldn't do these himself since he had had gout, which left his hands unusable. So he just told Lima what to do. And later they start cutting holes in the skull. Okay, here it gets gross trigger warning and inserting a wire loop into the brain and rotating it around just to break up the white matter connections. Some people are fine with this because it becomes actually pretty popular at the time

enough to win him the Nobel Prize in 1949, but he catches heat for it for the procedure because other people in the medical community are like, dude, you're not looking at the long term effects of this, or he's also not following up with any patients. And he's barely even keeping track of any of his patients information. So you probably shouldn't be doing this up until this point. The procedure is still referred to as a prefrontal lecotomy. So enter Walter Jackson Freeman, the second, who had become known as the father of what he coined the lobotomy.

Walter Freeman was born November 14th, 1895, and he raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His grandfather, William, Williams Keane, I'm going to guess it's just William Keane, was a well-known surgeon during the Civil War. So he's like respected and shit. And his father was also a very successful doctor, although it said that his dad hated being a doctor, hated his patients and urged his son not to enter the medical field because it sucked. So despite this, the young and super smart Walter Jackson Freeman, the second Dr. Freeman

attended Yale University beginning in 1912 and graduated in 1916, and he was just 21 years old. So he was very bright. He then moved to study neurology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. And while there, he studied the work of the student named William Spiller. And he was doing groundbreaking work in the new field of the neurological sciences and is credited by many in the world of psychology as being the founder of neurology. He earned his PhD in neuropathology.

And in 1924, Dr. Freeman relocates to Washington, D.C. and starts practicing as the first neurologist in the city. So this is like a brand new science. He gets a job at St. Elizabeth, which is then one of the nation's largest hospitals for the mentally ill. And at 28 years old, he's the hospital's youngest laboratory director in history. Like, what were we doing at 28 years old? It was not this.

To his horror, though, and like, you know, to his credit, he sees what's going on at St. Elizabeth and he's just horrified by it. He finds an institution that was essentially a dumping ground for the mentally ill. Patients here were suffering from a wide range of mental ailments. I mean, we're talking just depression and dementia and psychosis, all levels of mental illness. And a lot of them are just families not knowing what else to do with their family member and dumping them here, or they're not fitting into society and dumping them here.

They're not following rules, but also the severely mental ill who, you know, needed treatment. But unfortunately, there really wasn't a ton of treatments at the time. So everyone's just lumped together and they're housed, not treated. There was no serious, reliable treatment at the time, just experimental medications and procedures that had very little success rates, you know, when we're talking electric shock therapy, we're talking freeze and cold baths, and then they would just be restrained or, you know, left naked to so they wouldn't hurt themselves, quote unquote, and left in rooms.

It was just medieval. I mean, your mom probably witnessed some of this in the beginning of her career, right? Yeah. And that's why she got into it is because she had a relative who was schizophrenic and had, there was kind of no help for her. And that was, yeah, it's, it's a really, really dark. Yeah. It's so hard.

Definitely. So these hospitals, which were all over the country, were basically warehouses used to keep these people out of society's way. So in a way, Dr. Freeman initially, you know, was had his heart in the right place. He saw a problem and he instead of just wanting to study it for decades and decades, he wanted to solve it. And he had this like cockiness in that way. And so seeing these thousands and thousands of people who were suffering, he wanted them

to no longer live such hopeless lives in horrible conditions. But it seems like because he was, he was a super cocky person based on all accounts and perhaps a bit of a sociopath, depending on who you talk to, he didn't really think things through like the means to the end was not was more important than the end. You know what I mean? And he was very lenient on the meaning of success as far as treatments went. So Dr. Freeman was also a strange dude, colorful character. To me, he looks like a Neboshi Anton Leves from the Church of Satan.

Oh, okay. Is it the Church of Satan? Quite a combination. Yeah, it is. Like pointy goatee, dark hair, you know, he had, he had a look and he's known for being a bit of a show off as well. In the book, the lobotomist, the author Jack L. High tells a story about a dude who comes to Dr. Freeman for help when he gets, somehow gets a metal ring stuck around his dick.

Sounds like something sexual was going on, got a dick. Or he was just bored. You don't bear enough. I mean, who knows? So Dr. Freeman files the ring off, gets the ring off. The patient, for some fucking reason, wants the ring back, you know, it's a keepsake. And Dr. Freeman's like, nope, you can't have it back. It's now a surgical specimen, fucking finder's keepers or whatever.

So Dr. Freeman keeps the ring. He has a jeweler put it back together. He has it engraved with his family's crest and wears it on a gold chain around his neck for quote, many years. What? Uh-huh. So this is now. This is a picture, a Neveshi Anton Leves with a dick ring around his neck with his family.

All of the things I just said. Yeah, I, yeah. Yeah. Sucked up. Yeah. Also while working at Georgetown and George Washington University, all the students flocked to his lectures and classes and stuff because he had these performance-based autopsies that were described as quote, theatrical.

He starts wearing a big hat. He's got the goatee. He carries a cane. Sorry. Do you know what kind of hat? No. What kind of hat? It could be a fucking clown's hat.

I don't know. I mean, I would assume at the time it's like a, you know what I mean? Like a, I don't know. I'm sure we'll put a photo out of him. Not really. Cowboy? I don't think cowboy hats. It's just any hat is inappropriate at a knock-up seat.

Absolutely. It's insane. One I could name that would somehow be okay, except for that little blue Surgeon's cap that just sits right on there. Yeah. Yeah. That's all I'm looking for. But I don't think that's what would draw the teens or the students in to be watching

it. And then he carries a cane just because he thinks it looks cool, you know, like people who wear glasses that don't actually have any prescription of them. And of course he continues to showcase his gold dick ring and he wears gold chains on the outside of his medical clothing as well. So Dr. Okay. Yeah.

Here we go. Dr. Freeman had idolized the dude earlier, Dr. Moniz, who had become a mentor to him and who Freeman actually calls what it translates to his dear master. So he's like obsessed with this dude and like what he was doing for neuroscience. And he modifies Moniz's procedure and renames it the lobotomy. At some point, Dr. Freeman loses his license to perform surgery after a patient dies on the operating table. So like you better fucking quit it.

And he's like, I will. I won't do it myself. I'm going to get a friend to do it for me instead. So to legally perform his new treatment, he has to enlist the help of fellow neurosurgeon James Watts as a research partner. So he's, he's basically having this guy Watts do the procedure while he oversees it and tells him what to do because he's not allowed to touch patients, which should be a red like if you can't touch patients, it should be a pretty big, should be a period

on your career, you know, it's pretty, it's pretty integral to a doctor's job. So if you're not allowed to, you know, how about a review board or somebody steps in somewhere, let's put an addendum to your fucking firing papers. Also, you cannot be in the room. So on September 14th, 1936 at George Washington University, Freeman directed Watts through the very first prefrontal lobotomy in the United States on a housewife named Alice Hood Hammett of Topeka, Kansas. She had struggled with depression.

She tries to back out of the procedure. She actually doesn't want to do it because she doesn't want her head shaved, which is one of the things they had to do because they were still getting into the skull. And that's one of her anxieties is losing her hair. So she's like adamant that she doesn't want to happen. So Freeman promises her he'll only shave a small area. They put her to sleep against her will and then shave a large portion of her head anyway. So this guy was not like he wanted to help people, but it seemed like not for the right

reasons. It had nothing to do with them. You know what I mean? He wanted to help people, but it wasn't based on what they told him they needed or they didn't get to have a say. That's the part that like in all of this is that, you know how like Cropsey starts out and it's in that, it's at that state hospital that got, you know, the news reporters went in.

Like there's so much of that kind of like losing your own agency when you have these issues and doctors like the arrow where it was kind of like the doctors said it, so then you get no say. It's just very, yeah. It's very troubling. It's very upsetting. And it's also, what was I going to say, yeah, it's, there's no other cure. There's no cure for depression.

There's no treatment, not cure, of course, but there's no treatment for depression then. Like this is it. And they probably were like, this is the only way they're going to get back to a normal life. And unfortunately, yeah, it was the decision of the people who were quote unquote sane to allow these things to happen to their family members. This same, you know, whatever, but they have this agenda. Yeah. The creepy part is like they have this agenda of getting their research, you know, like

validated somehow or being a rising up in the ranks or whatever it was. I mean, yeah. There's no checks and balances. It seems like. You should be able to go. I don't want to do this anymore. And that should count. Yeah.

And, you know, that's ridiculous. Or I am depressed, but I could still function in society or no, I don't want to get married and have babies. But that doesn't mean, you know, it's, it's like depression also meant something different during those times than it does today or mania or psychosis, you know, was defined as just someone being defiant to, you know, the normal, the norms of the day. So after, so in under an hour still using an older procedure, she is lobotomized. And after she wakes up, she claims to be quote happy and doesn't even care that her head

was shaved anymore. So it's like, that's a success. She's not worried about her headshaving anymore. Her head being shaved anymore, which is like a loose definition on success, right? But after about a week, she can't speak very well and acts disoriented and agitated all the time. And the cocky Dr. Freeman still thinks he did an awesome job and declares her case of success and starts getting attention in publications like the Saturday evening post who reports

that quote, a world that once seemed the abode of misery, cruelty and hate is now radiant with sunshine and kindness. By November, only two months after performing their first lobotomy surgery, Freeman and Watts had already worked over 20 cases, including several follow-up operations. And by 1942, the due had performed over 200 lobotomy procedures and had published results claiming 63% of patients had improved, 24 were reported to be unchanged, and 14% were worse after surgery. That's a lot of people.

Then in 1946, after almost 10 years of performing lobotomies, Freeman begins performing what most people know today as the classical lobotomy, aka the transorbital lobotomy. So Freeman heard of a doctor in Italy named Amaro Fimberti, who operated on the brain through his patient's eye sockets, so instead of drilling into their head, they were able to access the brain without drilling into the skull. So instead of taking corings from the frontal lobes, which like you had to drill, it was like a huge procedure and surgical thing, like inpatient situation, Freeman's procedure severed the connection between the frontal lobes and the thalamus.

So Freeman formulates a new procedure called the transorbital lobotomy, aka the ice pick lobotomy, which is all the photos you see nowadays from back then are basically with the fucking picks coming out of their eyes, is that. So this procedure is done by first making the patient unconscious via electric shock, which in and of itself is traumatic, I would assume. And then inserting a metal pick, which he calls an orbit class into the corner of each eye socket, hammering it through the thin bone there with a metal mallet. The word crunch comes up a lot, which is fucking creepy.

And then moving it back and forth, severing the connections to the prefrontal cortex and the frontal lobes of the brain, scraping the white matter until it's no longer functional. Then they do the same thing through the other eye. It sounds horrific. It fucked a lot at 14% of people being, you know, not not taking it well is really bad. But it's not to say that there aren't some procedures that aren't actually successful, like when Dr. Freeman performs the very first actual lobotomy in the transorbital ice pick and mallet style in 1946 on a housewife named Ellen Inesco in 1946.

He had, quote, perfected the procedure just weeks before. From the PBS documentary, The Lobotomist, Ellen's daughter said that her mom changed for the better procedure, saying she never mentioned suicide again and saying her mom was violently suicidal up until that point. And telling NPR after the transorbital lobotomy, there was nothing. It stopped immediately. It was just peace. I don't know how to explain it to you.

It was like turning a coin over and that quick. And she said Dr. Freeman gave her her mother back. Before this procedure style, Freeman hasn't been able to perform the procedure on his own as it was surgery. So he wasn't a surgeon and was Anita James Watts every time it was performed. But this new fangled ice pick method turned it into an outpatient procedure since they weren't actually going into the skull. And so he could, you know, allegedly get away with doing it with just the help of a nurse.

So James Watts is like not fucking into this new way. It doesn't seem ethical or safe to him. He does not approve of the ice pick method. He calls it reckless and unsterile. They also fight over Freeman's idea that he thinks all psychiatrists should be able to perform this procedure on their patients like during their exam and in their office whenever they want. The two eventually part ways after Watts walks in on Dr. Freeman performing a transorbital

procedure without his knowledge in his like office one day, he had been doing them when he knew Dr. Watts wasn't going to be in because he knew he disapproved of it. But when Dr. Watts walks in on him doing it, Freeman is just like so oblivious to the wrongs that he's doing that he asks what he asks Watts to take a photo. He's like, oh, hey, now that you're here, fucking take a quick photo. James Watts is appalled by this recklessness. And so he's like, fuck this crazy shit. And he gets the hell out of Freeman's life.

But despite this and his horror by the early 1950s, lobotomies have become all the rage. Freeman loves performing them and just as much he loves the attention is bringing him because it's making him fucking famous at this point. He's still showing off. He turns his doctor's coat into a he cuts the sleeves off and turns it into a muscle t-shirt essentially, which is so tacky. And he's now nailing in the ice picks on both sides of the face at the same time, almost like a fucking like a party trick.

So it takes even quicker. He doesn't have to do one side than the other. And he partly wants to freak people out who are watching is one of the reasons he does it. So he lets an audience come and observe. It becomes like an assembly line to him. And during just a two week span in 1952, he performs 228 lobotomies in West Virginia alone and is performing them on people for as little a reason as that they are getting bad headaches.

So there's not a ton of oversight. The procedure takes less than 10 minutes. And so he really starts cranking them out. So despite the eventual bad rap and numerous cases of bad outcomes and even multiple deaths, surprisingly in a lot of instances, the procedure actually seems to be helpful. But sometimes they're just completely tragic and make people's already difficult lives even worse like the case of JFK's sister, Rosemary Kennedy. So throughout her life, the eldest daughter of the Kennedy clan and little sister to JFK,

Rosemary or Rosie, she had dealt with what was described as physical and mental development issues and reportedly we have seizures as well as violent outbursts against others. So in 1943, when she's 23, her super controlling and demanding and total piece of shit father, Joseph Kennedy, enlists Freeman and Watts who were still a team at the time. And James Watts later describes it to author Ronald Kessler as, quote, we went through the top of the head, I think Rosemary was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull.

It was near the front. It was on both sides. We put an instrument inside and as Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman talked to Rosemary and asked her some things like, you know, recite the Lord's prayer or to sing God bless America or count backwards. And then says, quote, we made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded. When Rosemary began to become incoherent, they stopped. The procedure is a huge failure and Rosemary's diminished to the mind of a two year old who

can't speak or walk and is incoherent. One of the Kennedy's nurses who watched the procedure is so disturbed by it that afterwards she quits working in medicine completely. Yeah. The ones happy and vivacious Rosemary Kennedy is immediately placed in psychiatric hospital for several years. She separated from the family until 1969. Her mom doesn't visit her for 20 years.

Her dad never does. And despite all this, Rosemary lives to be 68 years old and it said that her nieces and nephews tried to give her a normal life when they were older or, you know, take care of her and not make her stay in an institution. What makes this all even worse is that the actual case of Rosemary's mental issues is most likely traced back to when she was left in the birth canal during delivery for two hours, deprived of oxygen because her mother, Rose Kennedy, was instructed by nurses to keep her legs closed and not push until the doctor was available, which is so, I mean,

just tells you what medicine was like back then. It was barbaric. Her lobotomy wasn't made public until 1907. Another famous case is that of Howard Dully, who I mentioned earlier with the All Things Considered story, which you can find online. He's a pretty normal 12 year old boy. He gets into some basic trouble, but his mother died of cancer, his, his dad remarried and his stepmother is just a purely horrible woman.

She basically can't control this normal 12 year old boy who's probably grieving his mother. He she says she takes him to Dr. Freeman and says he won't bathe. He won't go to bed. He turns lights on in rooms when it's daylight outside. Like those are her reasons for why he's unruly and despite that he has a newspaper route and earns money and is trying to, like he is a responsible 12 year old boy. He just probably is sad and hates his stepmom.

However, she labels him a problem child and disrupts him to the family home and insists he needs a lobotomy. She forces him to meet with Dr. Freeman who says, quote, he is defiant. He is defiant at times. He has a vicious expression on his face some of the time and diagnosis him as schizophrenic. So a day after meeting him, uh, together they convince his father to, um, kind of allow the lobotomy to go forward. And so in December 1960, he performs the lobotomy on the preteen and Howard, I know.

And this is this episode of, uh, called my lobotomy, which you can look up on iTunes. It's him narrating his story of as an adult, he's, he's now, um, a bus driver and, um, he spent his teens after the lobotomy waking up, quote, like a zombie and really not even knowing what was going to happen to him or what happened to him. He commits some small crimes. He does some stints in jail. Sometimes he's homeless, but homeless, but as years pass, he gets his life together and he comes to an understanding that the lobotomy was not his fault and that it's his life's

path and he needs to deal with it. Um, he grows up to be a bus driver. He only tells his wife and if he close friends about the lobotomy he had, and actually you would never really know he had had it if you just met him, you know, so he's, he seemed a little dry, but not in a way that you'd be like, something's wrong with that guy. It's just like, it seems like just his personality. And so this beautiful story he does, um, on all things considered, he goes and speaks to his dad and is like, why did you allow this to happen?

The dad, and it's so, it's so heart wrenching and beautiful. And the dad's like, I got tricked. I didn't know, um, like really what was going to happen. He goes on to write an autobiography and tells his story to NPR. He tells him that his overbearing stepmother threatened that she would divorce his father if they didn't get the lobotomy done. And she was actually bummed that it didn't make him into a vegetable. And so as soon as it was over and he wasn't like essentially comatose, she kicked him

out of the house. So this woman is horrible. She kicked him out when he was like 12 years old. Yeah. Post or I don't know how long after, but like post lobotomy, the lobotomy didn't quote work, you know, and he's the youngest person that Dr. Freeman ever performed the procedure on. And it's like the fact that you would just be, the fact that he then was okay with it despite those reasonings, you know, and not ask this woman what, you know, try to help

this child just kind of shows how far he, he strayed from initially possibly wanting to help, you know? For sure. That's, yeah, that's, it's, this is so sinister. It's unbelievable. What? It's fucked up. In 1952, a surgeon and physiologist in the French army, Henry Le Borot, recognizes the

potential use of a new drug in psychiatry. And this is when Dr. Freeman's fucking reign finally starts to come to an end. When Thorazine is introduced to the public to treat a wide variety of mental disorders that normally would have left to suffer an institution for life such as psychosis, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, the treatment of mental patients is forever changed. And these barbaric methods are phased out. The first ant, it's the first anti-psychotic. It's the first like wonder pill that actually changed people's lives.

And it's on the World Health Organization list of essential medicines. Its introduction has been labeled as one of the great advances in the history of psychiatry and its instrumental in the development of neuropharmacology and its commercial success stimulated the development of other psychotropic drugs. So my life wouldn't be as good as it is if this happened. So because of this, Dr. Freeman's brain business starts to slow down. Society's exposure to the possible horrors of lobotomies has also grown as these stories become more and more prolific.

And it takes its toll on Dr. Freeman's business and public image. The book, the lobotomist shows a cocky Dr. Freeman posing for a photo during an ice pick procedure, which he gets every single for every single patient, including this kid, Howard Dully, the 12 year old, he goes back and looks at his files and finds a photo of him with the fucking pics in his eyes. So he gets a photo of every single one of them. And so in one of these procedures when he gets the photo taken and is distracted by it, it ends up killing the patient immediately because of his negligence.

So he finally hangs it up in 1967 when his last patient, Helen Mortensen, dies of a brain hemorrhage three days after her transorbital lobotomy. So he spent the better part of the rest of his life documenting old patients and giving speeches, essentially trying to convince the world that he was doing the right thing. And by the time of his death of cancer in 1972, Walter Freeman had performed lobotomies on around 2,500 patients across 23 states and overall approximately 60,000 lobotomies were performed between 1936 and 1956 because other people were doing them too in the US. Wall Street Journal did some research and found like confidential government records

and spoke to family members of veterans and found that lobotomies were given to hundreds of World War II vets who had returned from the war with serious psychiatric conditions. So like with Vietnam, you kind of equate them coming home and having some serious psychological issues. But World War II, they kind of like covered it up and were like, you're coming home to your family and everyone gets a house and everything's peachy keen and fine now. So they covered up all these lobotomies. And in fact, between April 1947 and September 1950, VA doctors lobotomized about 1,464 patients.

Henry Marsh, a top English neurosurgeon, said of lobotomies in 2001, quote, if you saw the patient after the operation, they'd seem all right. They'd walk and talk and say, thank you, doctor. The fact that they were totally ruined as social human beings probably didn't count. And then neurologist Dr. Elliot Valenstein said in his book called Great and Desperate Cures, there were some very unpleasant results, very tragic results and some excellent results and a lot in between. And then finally, his own son, Franklin Freeman said, quote, you could never talk about a

successful lobotomy. He might as well talk about a successful automobile accident. And that is a story of Dr. Walter Freeman and lobotomies. Wow. I know. I just hate the like that was back in a time where it's the same thing with priests or doctors. It was just like, I always put it's just like for in general, just like big white men who told everybody how it was going to be and no one, there was no way to advocate for yourself.

There was no, you just did what they said. And it was just kind of like their way or the highway. And if you had somebody that maybe, you know, maybe didn't have like their oath in mind when they treated every single person that just there's just nowhere to go. You can't get away from that. Absolutely. It's so horrible for you. And it went on for so long.

It's just so awful. Absolutely. Great job. Thank you. And I highly recommend reading the book. It's called Blue Dreams, The Science and Story of the Drugs That Changed Our Minds. It's by Lauren Slater and it's all about psychiatry and psychopharmacology and how it changed the world.

It's fascinating. Check it out. And thanks to my friend, Mike Burns, he did a great job researching this. Yeah, he did great. For such something so awful. Totally. Yeah. It's fascinating though.

I mean, like that's the thing. It's, it really happened and I've seen those pictures with the ice picks. It's just, I remember the first time, whatever I saw, the documentary or whatever it was, just being like, no, no, no, no. That doesn't go there. This I'm not doing. I can't. I can't.

I mean, I highly recommend such a bummer. The documentary is like a PBS one because there are tons of photographs and the stories of, I mean, it wasn't that long ago that it was just bar bar barric and it's, I think it hits home for a lot of people because it's stuff that we would have would have happened to us or someone we know, you know, at the time, it's like, we all know someone who has issues that gets in the way of their lives that they're luckily able to treat. And that wasn't the case back then. That's really sad.

Yeah. Yeah. Different times. Yeah. Yeah. Well, hold on. This is things to people like your mom last page for giving a shit. I mean, she told me shit.

She told me stories of the worst because she worked at a mental hospital in San Francisco, which in the sixties, like late the mid to late sixties, where she said that's when kind of like the, you know, the beginning of the like cultural revolution phase, that kind of stuff was starting to happen. And there were families that would just send their rebellious teenagers to mental hospital. So she she was like, so there would be these teenagers that got caught smoking pot that would get shipped to a mental hospital and be in the day room with people who are completely out psychotic.

Like she was like, it was it was terrible and it was super unfair and really been saying like that, you know, and probably just detrimental to their well being. Not. I mean, you know, hopefully there were people, staff members who understood that that but that that's the best version of housing, the housing issue of, you know, just sending people away to never see them again. Okay, so this, I first became aware of the murder that I'm doing this week, because I had to watch two listeners talk about it in front of me on Twitter, which, you know, I

have to say it didn't feel great. So first, Karina sent me a tweet that said, I'm begging you, please cover the smutty nose axe murders on the aisles of shoals in New Hampshire. I will send you every page of a book I have about it. I know you'll never come to New Hampshire. So you owe me this. And then here comes Emily, here comes, I know it's it, she, she came in hot. Then here comes Emily going, I've submitted this one like three times.

It's so interesting and it's got it all. And then Karina comes back and goes, it's our best hometown one. So I sent that exchange to Jay and said, will you please look up some information about the smutty nose axe? Ladies, this better be fucking great, or you're just banned. Can you imagine if I blame them and I'm about to tell you the most boring story of all time? Yeah, I like this is boring as shit. And then we're doing it because of these two guys.

They had to, no, so, so when we searched the Gmail, there was also Nicholas wrote in because it's his hometown. And so, but we also got information from murderbygaslight.com, our favorite, a great website for old murders and historical murders, such a good website and store and the person who runs that website is also an author. I've talked about them so many times, but so go there if you're looking for interesting new stories, old stories, but also newengland.com, thelineup.com, and of course, the great wikipedia.gov. Those are my sources, and also, so this is the email from Nicholas.

He said, so my hometown was a hundred and forty five years ago, but it's still good. I grew up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, along with the whole 11 miles of coastline that the state has right off the coast is an archipelago, I don't know how to pronounce that. Archipelago. Archipelago. Archipelago. Archipelago. Thank you.

We have a group of nine islands called the Isles of Shoals, one of which is called Smuddy Nose Island. At the time, there was a fishing village that was home to over 600 people, but advances in technology caused many traditional fishermen to abandon the island in favor of the mainland. This led to a total of five people, a group of Norwegian immigrants, to remain living on the island. Then he goes in to tell the entire story, but Nicholas, I'm just letting you kick this off and we'll get back to your email maybe a little bit later.

Essentially, it's the night of March 5th, 1873, and Karen Christensen has just finished her shift at the Appledore Hotel on Appledore Island, which is the largest island in this archipelago of nine islands. It's off the coast of both Maine and New Hampshire, so basically the state line runs through, so half of them are in one state and half are in the other. Karen heads to her sister, Marin, Hawn-Vent's house, which is on Smuddy Nose Island, which is just south of Appledore. There she's welcomed by her sister and her sister-in-law, Anna Tay Christensen.

Smuddy Nose Island is only about a half a mile long, it's less than half a mile wide. It got its name from a fisherman who saw the seaweed around the island and thought it looked like the Smuddy Nose of a giant sea creature. It's subject to cold, harsh winters, and the only people who ever really go there are fishermen passing through on fishing trips. In fact, no one lives there year round except for the Hawn-Vent family. Friends husband John Hawn-Vent and his brother Matthew along with Marin and Karen's brother Ivan, all those men are fishermen.

Everybody's brother or husband in this story is a fisherman. They're all away for the night in the mainland port city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. There they're waiting for a shipment of bait. It's a cold late winter night, so to keep warm all three women are sleeping on the first floor of this two-story house. Marin and Anate are sharing the first floor bedroom and Karen has set up a makeshift bed for herself in the kitchen because probably, I'm guessing that's where the wood burning stove is and that's where the snacks are.

I want both of those things right now. Yeah, right? Like just pull up to a nice kind of fire in the kitchen and then like maybe some crab cakes. A Doritos variety pack bed. Sure. Oh, crab cakes. No, no, no, crab cakes.

And in your bed, I mean, old-fashioned crab cake, modern. Okay, so around one in the morning, Karen wakes to the sound of the family dog, Ringya, who's barking. She looks up to see the silhouette of a man standing in the doorway, so she thinks it's her brother-in-law, John, coming home early, so she gets up. But this startles the man and in a panic, he grabs the closest heavy object he can find, which is a wooden chair, and he starts to beat her with it. As she believes it's John, she cries out, John is killing me, which wakes Marin up.

So Marin opens the bedroom door to find her sister battered and bloodied on the floor. The man freezes, which gives Marin the chance to grab Karen and drag her limp body into the bedroom and deadbolt it behind her, deadbolt the door behind her. So the man starts pounding on the bedroom door, Marin knowing it's only a matter of time before he breaks it down, tells the two other women they need to escape out the bedroom window and run. So Anate goes first, but as she lands outside, she sees the man coming outside too, and she watches as he grabs the axe the Hauntvent family keeps next to the house to break up

ice. And as he comes toward her with the axe, the moonlight brightens his face so she can see who's coming toward her, and she cries out, wait, now let's stop here so I can give you a little more backstory on this family. All right. That's a cliffhanger. That's a hilarious cliffhanger. I just made you go through.

Okay. So originally from Norway, John and Marin Hauntvent emigrated to America in 1866, hoping to find better opportunities for themselves. So they land in Boston, but they have a hard time adjusting to city life. So in 1868, they move up to the remote, smuddy nose island of Maine. So they rent this small red house on the island, and they're the only one that lives their year round. And they rent the house from the local family, the Latins, who also own and operate the Apple

Door Hotel on Apple Door Island. And it's the only hotel in the entire isles of Shoals. So John buys himself a schooner. He names it the Clara Bella, and he starts a fishing business. So every day at dawn, he sails out to the fishing grounds. He casts his nets, takes in the day's catch to Portsmouth, and then he sells what he caught at the market. And once his catch is sold, he uses part of his earnings to buy bait for the next day's

outing, and then he sails back home. And he soon becomes very successful. He's really good at this. So while Marin is proud of her husband's hard work and of the home that they now have, she feels really isolated on that island all alone with her dog. So she generally keeps good spirits, and she decorates the house. She cares for the home. She tends to plants that she keeps in the windowsill.

But her only company is Rinya, and she misses her family back in Norway. Luckily, John cares about his wife's feelings and listens when she tells him because he has a secure attachment style, and he doesn't get defensive when she tells him her troubles. Is this a fairytale? No, this can happen to you if you just read the book. So he sends word back to Norway and uses his hard earned money to pay for his brother, Matthew, and for Marin's sister, Karen, to come to America too and live with them on the island.

So they arrive in May of 1871. So Marin's thrilled to have her sister with her, but Karen is actually heartbroken over the end of a relationship back in Norway. So Marin determined to help her get over it and start her life anew, speaks with the Latins, and gets Karen a job working as a live-in maid at the Appledore Hotel. How Karen got her groove back. It's such an older sister move to be like, come keep me company on a deserted island. Are you bummed?

Okay, now you're a maid. Like, get over it. So controlling. Shut up. Yeah. Clean this. Attachment style, sister. So Matthew starts working for his brother John's fishing business, which is growing rapidly.

So it turns out John needs even more help to keep things running smoothly. So one day while at the market in Portsmouth, he meets another local fisherman named Louis Wagner and offers him a job. So Louis Wagner is a 28-year-old German fisherman with a thick accent who came to America around 1865. He's been fishing around the New England area for a while now, but he isn't making very much money. He's barely getting by.

And most of the other fishermen aren't really big fans of Louis. He seems to be like, he likes lurking in corners. He's always eavesdropping on conversations. So he's definitely not the killer, is what you're saying? No, no, no. Don't worry about this guy. Okay. This guy's just...

In fact, forget I'm even telling you. On his side. Okay. Okay. I don't know much about him, but John finds him friendly enough and needs the help. He also can't really afford to pay another full-time fisherman. So he offers Louis room and board at his house on Smuddy Nose Island. And then when Louis agrees to those terms, John doesn't hesitate because there's a free

creep for hire. Forget him into your... You get the cheapest possible person you can to do the job, and don't worry, and then don't worry. It's like just a lurker. Yes. Hit a lurker in the house. And you know what?

Actually, let him move in to your house with your wife and sister-in-law, too, would be a... Yeah. Because you don't know anything about him, and he's a lurker. It'll be fine. So Louis spends the summer of... Spends that summer of... Every fucking thing it says, it says 1972.

Jay? Jay? I think I... No, no, it was me. I think I went in and accidentally... It's 1872. So Louis spends the summer of 1872 working on the Clarabella with John and Matthew, although he often has to take days off because he has rheumatoid arthritis, but hey, so you get

what you pay for, John. So Marin cooks for everyone herself, John, Matthew, and Louis. Every day, the fork friends become very close, and Louis is accepted into the family. So then in October of 1872, Marin and Karen's brother, Ivan Christensen, moved to Smuddy Nose Island with his wife, Anate. They're newlyweds. They've been married less than a year, and they wanted to come to America, be close to their siblings, and be a part of John's growing fishing business.

So with more family coming to town, there's now five people living in the house on Smuddy Nose Island, and it's getting crowded. Louis sticks around for the next five weeks, but it soon becomes clear that John has more help than he needs, and he's kind of left out. So he takes the hint. He finds himself another job as a deckhand aboard the fishing schooner, the Addison Gilbert. So by November of that year, he's gone, and there seem to be no hard feelings. The Hauntbett family feels like they helped their friend, Louis, get back on his feet, and now he's on his way.

But soon after Louis joins the crew, the Addison Gilbert is wrecked in a terrible accident, and he's basically, he doesn't have a job again. So he's forced to go back to working the Portsmouth Wharfs, and it's bitter cold winter, of course makes it working even harder. By March of 1873, Louis is completely broke. He's three weeks behind on his rent. His shoes are worn down, his clothes are in tatters, and he's totally desperate. So now it's March 5th of 1873, and John and Matthew and Ivan arrive at Portsmouth to pick

up their bait for the next day, but when they go to get it, the shipment is coming up from Boston on the train, and it's delayed. So John finds another fisherman who he knows is going to be passing Smuddynose Island on his way home, and he asks him to stop and let Marin and Anate know that the men will have to spend the night in Portsmouth so that they can go pick up their bait the next morning. The fisherman agrees to do that, and as the guys are getting ready to settle in for the night, they bump into Louis. So they see that Louis is down on his luck, and so John offers to pay him to help them

bait the lines on the Clarabella in the morning. Louis agrees, but secretly, he's got other plans, because he now knows that John, Matthew, and Ivan will not be home that evening. And he also knows firsthand how lucrative John's fishing business has become. So around eight o'clock that night, Louis steals a rowboat from Portsmouth's Pickering Wharf, and he rows the, it's somewhere between six to 10 miles out to Smuddynose Island. I bet also, like, now as a dog owner, the dog knows him, so isn't going to freak out as much as it would with a stranger, you know what I mean?

Very true. Yeah, he just thinks, oh, this guy's coming back. He might even shake Waggy's tail, welcome him, be stoked. Did he always have treats in his pocket? Well... He always smelled like fish, let's tell you that. So it's, so that rowing of the boat is a five-hour journey across freezing waves and winds. When he arrives at Smuddynose, he docks his boat on the south side of the island, and

he trudges through the snow up to the Hauntvent's home. He enters quietly, planning to go find that money that he knows John has somewhere in that house. Always thinking that the women are asleep upstairs. So now we're back in from where I left you at the top. So Anate drops out the bedroom window, she sees the man who was inside the house coming around the corner holding the axe, and when the moonlight shines on his face, she cries out, Louis, Louis, Louis.

But before she can run or get away from him, he swings the axe high over his head and brings it right down on Anate's skull, crushing it in one blow. Oh my god. Marin is watching this from the bedroom window, and she, so she witnesses her sister-in-law's murder. She turns back into the bedroom, trying to figure out a way for her and her sister, Karen, to escape. But Karen is beaten so badly, she can't even stand up.

So Marin is tending to her sister, Louis comes back inside the house, and he starts swinging the axe at that door. So he's breaking his way into the room, Marin goes back to the window, she's trying to pull Karen out the window with her, and it's no use, she's dead weight. And by the time he breaks all the way into the room, she has to leave her sister behind. She grabs the dog, and she hops out the window, right as Louis swings the axe at her. He actually misses her just barely, and he hits the window sill instead right behind her.

So she's running off into the snow with the dog in her nightgown. And on a secluded fucking island. On a secluded fucking windswept island. She can hear Louis strangling Karen today. Yep. So she's searching for a good hiding spot on the island, and she's being careful to hold the dog close so he doesn't bark or give her away in any way. And first she goes into the chicken coop and she's hiding in there, and then she realizes

it's way too obvious, it's the first place he's going to check. And so she runs down to the docks to try to escape in the rowboat that he got there on. But the docks closest to their cottage are on the north side, and Louis intentionally docked on the south side so no one would see him. So there's no boat there. So without any options, she runs down the beach and hides behind a large rock on the west side of the island. It's right by the water.

And because she knows that the sound of crashing waves could mask any noise she might make or any barking that the dog might do. And just her nightgown and bare feet, Marin sits in the snow until the sunrise is holding the dog close to keep her warm. So Marin was right. Louis did search the building surrounding the house for her, he couldn't find her anywhere. He goes back to the Haunt Vets house where there are two dead women's bodies. He brews himself some tea, he fixes himself a snack, he ransacks the place looking for

cash. He finds $16, which is the equivalent of about $360 today. And then he rose back to Portsmouth before sunrise. So around 8 a.m., she's unsure whether or not Louis is still on the island, but Marin runs across the breakwater to Malaga Island, which is northwest of Smuddy Nose. And she's now close to Appledore Island that she can actually shout to the shores. And some kids who are outside playing hear her yelling and they run inside and get their dad.

Good boy. Good boys and girls. Yes. Good kids. And their dad, Yorga Ingerbretzen, he rose across the Smuddy Nose, rescues Marin, brings her back to Appledore Island, and Yorga and some other men from Appledore go back over to Smuddy Nose Island to search for the sign of the killer. They don't find anyone there.

They come back to Appledore and continue their search, thinking maybe he hopped islands and came over to Appledore. And then they leave a signal on the shores of Smuddy Nose so that when John, Matthew, and Ivan return from fishing, they know to come straight back to Appledore. So a few hours later, the men see the sign. John continues on sailing the Clara Bella to Smuddy Nose's harbor. But when Matthew and Ivan, they take the tender, which is what they call a little boat that crewmen use between ships, they row that to Appledore Island, find Marin, and she tells

them the horrible news of what happened. So they're fueled with rage and grief and confusion. They rush back to Smuddy Nose Island, and they get there almost the same time that John gets there, and all three of them run to the Little Red Cottage and find the horrific scene exactly as Marin had described it happening. So that evening, the coroner comes, and Marin and John go back to Portsmouth with him and report the murders to the authorities and give them Lewis's name. And of course, the newspapers run the story immediately.

Within hours of the murders, the story has spread all over the region. So the morning of the murders, Lewis rows back home. He eats breakfast like nothing happened. The people who see him row into the harbor say he looks down like he hasn't slept all night. But after breakfast, he packs a bag and he takes the 9 a.m. train to Boston. And when he gets there, he uses some of the stolen money to get a haircut. He shaves his beard and he buys himself a new suit.

What word about the murders has already gotten to Boston, so he makes the mistake of going back to his old neighborhood in the North End, where everybody recognizes him despite his cleaned up disguise. So he's arrested, he's taken back to Portsmouth. Now an angry mob is waiting there with torches and pitchforks waiting for him. They want to kill him, obviously. He's walked through them, thrown in jail, and then he's extradited to a more secure prison in Alfred, Maine.

So Lewis Wagner's trial begins three months later on June 9th, 1873. There's a ton of evidence against him. There's his bloody shirt that he hid in his boarding room. There's the fact that $16 was stolen from the Haunt Vets and his suit cost $15. And there's one of Marin's nightgown buttons that police find in Lewis's pocket change. So very damning evidence. But he insists he's innocent, even though his alibi is really flimsy. He claims that he was baiting lines for one of the captains, but he can't remember the

name of the captain or the boat. He says he was drinking at a bar in Portsmouth that night, got drunk and slept outside, but he can't remember the name of the bar or describe its location. And there's no witnesses to corroborate his story. Goodbye. And nine days later on June 17th, 1873, after 55 minutes of deliberation, the jury finds Lewis Wagner guilty of the premeditated murders of Karen and Annette Christensen. And he's sentenced to death by hanging.

Okay, so even after his guilty verdict and sentencing, Lewis continues to maintain his innocence, even in the face of the overwhelming evidence. His continual denial causes some people to consider other possibilities. Don't do that. Let me do that. Okay. So one theory is that John Haunt Vent was actually the killer, since Karen initially cried out, John is killing me when the man first began his attack.

And the only survivor is his own wife, Marin, but there are several eyewitnesses who attest to John being in Portsmouth on the nine of the murders, and he has no motive to kill his own family members. Another theory is that Marin is the murderer. I was that that crossed my mind that maybe other people thought that or maybe they were having an affair or something, but that's just like one guy can do it alone. They don't need a fucking accomplice, you know what I mean? Lewis was the name of the killer.

Lewis can do it on his own. He doesn't need a nefarious accomplice, right? No, but this theory is that she's the murderer by herself. And the testimony, like so basically because her testimony is the only eyewitness account, in theory, it would have been easier for her to commit the murders than a man traveling in from Portsmouth by rowboat because that ride is so terrible and long. Sure. Yeah, but he had opportunity because he knew that husbands weren't going to be there.

And they also say there's no way she could, some people say there's no way she could have survived a night exposed to the elements in just a nightgown. To them, I say, how dare you discount the power of Ringya, who was there with her. That dog saved her life. As a dog owner, I'm offended. I'm highly offended by that. Get used to saying that because you're going to have to say it all the time. This is like, excuse me, excuse me, I'm a canine lover and so I'd like you to take

that back. Okay. So despite all these rumors, the guilty verdict stands, but on June 18th, 1873, the day after his sentencing, Lewis acts on his escape plan and he, it's one he'd been planning since he arrived at the prison in Maine. He places a stool along with some other stuff that he had lying around his cell under the blanket to make it look like he was in bed sleeping. Classic.

The classic move, right? And then it's 3 a.m. He used the end of a wooden toothbrush, picked the lock on his cell and makes a getaway during the guard's 3 a.m. break. And now he's too scared to travel through the woods, which I think is kind of a hilarious detail. Oh, he's scared. What is it, like a, some kind of a raccoon going to get you? Oh no, I was scared of the big bed murderer.

So he goes down the road in the middle of the night. He gets to a farm. The farmer who has no idea who he is or what, the fact that he broke out of prison or anything welcomes him inside. And so he actually ends up staying there for a couple of days. But then a group of vigilantes finds out that he's there and circle up and he has taken back to prison. The vigilantes will fucking get you every time.

They're not having it. So this is from Nicholas's email. He says, a bit about Wagner. He was handsome and apparently very gregarious, but he was known to all caps have trouble keeping eye contact during conversation and then there's like five exclamation points. He says, and I refuse to believe that being a fisherman in the late 1800s didn't come with a little cranial injury every now and again. But despite the mob that tried to lynch him, he was the straight up Charles Manson of his

day where he'd received fan mail in prison and would have people trying to visit him while he awaited trial and literally had a following of whack jobs who were convinced he was innocent. Do you know who I'm picturing? Playing him, Michael Shannon. Yeah. Right? From Boardwalk Empire and every other time he's a villain.

And every other role and every other thing he's ever played. And one of the more shocking and bizarre sex scenes from A Shape of Water, The Shape of Water. Do you remember that? Troubling movie. Fair. His butt, he's fucking his wife in the strangest way and it was really like a, it was like a hard cut to this scene where I was just like, hold the phone every, what are we watching?

Aggressively awkward sex right now in this like weird 50s book. Bossy sex? Yeah. What's happening? Yeah. Anyway. Trigger warning. To this day, there are those who insist Lewis Wagner was framed and his German descent

made him an easy scapegoat. Speculation also comes up whether it's physically possible to row the 10 miles to and from the islands in the time span where the murders happened. And then parentheses, Nicholas says it can, especially for someone as sea hardened as Wagner. Nicholas, thank you for your classic New Hampshire storytelling. It really added. Okay.

So on June 25th, now we're out of Nicholas's email. That's over. Okay. On June 25th, 1875, Lewis Wagner is taken to the state prison at Thomaston, Maine where he is hanged alongside another man who's also guilty of murder. As for Marin and John Hauntfett, they move off of the Isles of Shoals for good. They find themselves a new home in Portsmouth where John keeps up his fishing business until the end of their lives.

Ivan is destroyed by the murder of his wife, Anate, and he decides to stay in the Isles, but he moves to Appledore Island. He takes up work as a carpenter, but he's of course forever changed by his loss. The once good spirited Ivan hardly talks to anyone. He avoids eye contact. He keeps his head down and just works. And after the summer of 1873, he ends up moving back to Norway and he loses touch with Marin and John completely.

Then three years later, Marin dies of natural causes. And at the time, several newspapers print a completely unsubstantiated rumor saying that Marin confessed to the murders on her deathbed, which then, which then, those theories that defended Lewis Wagner. Ivan is basically one last blow to the only witness and sole survivor of this terrible axe murder. Yeah, who tried to save her sister out of a window and couldn't. And she gets blamed for it?

What a bummer. So the big rock where Marin hid the night of the axe murders is now called Marin's Rock on that island. The Little Red Cottage burned down several years after the murders, and now you can only see the Stone Foundation on the island. And that is Karina and Emily and Nicholas's horrible hometown story, The Smuddy Knows Axe Murders. Wow.

I mean, that was, that was a good one. It was horrible. You know, it was a horrible good one. That was like a... It was a good one. It really, I think they were all right that it had a lot of really compelling elements and just that idea of her having to jump out the window when her sister and sister-in-law have been murdered and then she's trying to figure out where to hide in the snow.

And can we say, also, she took the dog. She couldn't save her sister. She saved the dog, which is like such a heroic, I mean, it, you know, it's like, she, I don't think that someone who was like killing everyone was just like, oh, and then I'm gonna take the dog though. Like, that's just like the saddest thing that she couldn't save her sister. She couldn't save her sister-in-law and she saved the one thing she could, which was the dog.

It's just like incredible. Yeah. Poor thing. Yeah. Poor thing. Great job. Thank you. Should we do like one hometown each?

I mean, one fucking hooray. Okay. Let's do it. Go ahead. You go first. This is from Maya George on Instagram. My fucking hooray this week is that I was recently admitted to my top choice law school, the University of Iowa College of Law.

I was the only, it was the only school I applied to and I was thrilled to hear back less than two weeks after submitting my application, smart person. Imposter syndrome is a condition I know all too well and this acceptance went a long way to reminding me that I am capable and I look forward to advocating for the environment through the law, SSDGM. Awesome. Congratulations. Good job, Maya.

Find your murderinos at what was it called? The University of Iowa College of Law. Yeah. Okay, let's see. This one is from Moni and it's fucking hooray. Side effect of COVID vaccine is serotonin. What? Hello all.

It is safe to say that being a single night shift ICU nurse during the pandemic has been a journey. Oh boy. Quiet cries on drives home, sleeping through the day and drive through meals paired with a bottle of wine has been most of my last year. The day I lost my first patient to COVID, my closet shelf fell down from the sheer weight of my coping mechanism shopping. It was too much to handle and I just closed the door and figured I would deal with it

someday. But I have been unable to deal with this closet of shit for over a year. However, the other day I got my second COVID vaccine and my anxiety slash depression has lightened enough to deal with this closet and it is finally fixed. I don't need any accolades for working through this. I love my job and it is my purpose in this life. But this pandemic has emotionally destroyed me and many other frontline workers. The vaccine finally rolling out.

Me finally have the energy to doing something about my closet and my fellow healthcare workers feeling actually protected for the first time is a huge fucking hooray. I'm sure my therapist will unpack this all this week as I've been hiding the closet situation from her. Amen. But I wanted my favorite ladies to know first. Thanks for all you do, Em. Em.

Sweet. Oh my God. I don't want to get like, I know you don't want to hear it all the time, but thanks for all you fucking do. My God. Yeah, that's a beautifully written message and it makes us very happy to the idea that frontline workers are finally getting relief and getting what they need is the best. Thank God.

All right. Yeah. So, mine is from DD0323 on Instagram. My fucking hooray is I am pregnant with my first child, a baby girl. Being pregnant during a pandemic can be really tough and isolating at times. I had my 20 week anatomy scan on January 20th. I also happened to live in the suburbs of DC, so not like that day wasn't already exciting enough.

The scan showed that baby girl is, for lack of a better term, absolutely perfect and developing the way she should. I was overwhelmed with emotions after getting that news, but then tuning in to the inauguration coverage and knowing that my baby girl will not know in America where a woman has never been vice president is just amazing. Wow. I have so much hope for the future of our country and know that my baby girl has these incredible female role models to look up to and then a bunch of happy smiling, crying,

amazing emojis. Yay. Congratulations, DD. Congratulations. That's... Their name's DD. Her name's DD. Well, her Instagram name is D-E-E-E-D-E-E-0-3-2-3.

Amazing. Because mine is also from a D. This is from D-E-E-S. And it just says, my fucking hooray, we're finally pouring the slab on my first project as a builder, female, disabled, and they said I couldn't do it. Well fuck everyone and do it anyway. Oh my God, why are these all going to make me cry tonight? So good. Wow.

Fucking hooray. Hell fucking yeah. Let's... Thanks for sending this in, you guys. Thank you so much letting us share those. I hope you all know that you're supporting and fucking giving hope to so many other people and I know people read the hashtag fucking hooray and they're just like so supportive of each other.

It's so important. It's a fucking new day, I mean everything's really nice and we can all get there together. I'm so excited. It's amazing. Yeah, there's really good news out there and we just have to remind each other every day it gets better and yeah, so cool. So thanks for listening and thank you guys for being here with us as we do this and stay sexy.

And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Goodbye. Elvis. Do you want a cookie? No, no, no, no, no, no.