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Speaker 4: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 4: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 4: written about them, Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker, DTK. Every
Speaker 4: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 4: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 4: journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 9: Good evening. When you think of serial killers throughout history,
Speaker 9: the names that come to mind are ones like Jack
Speaker 9: the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what
Speaker 9: about Tillie Kilmick Kate Bender. The narrative we're comfortable with
Speaker 9: is the one where women are the victims of violent crime,
Speaker 9: not the perpetrators. In fact, serial killers are thought to
Speaker 9: be so universally overwhelmingly male that in nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 9: FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference
Speaker 9: there are no female serial killers. Lady Killers. Based on
Speaker 9: the popular online series that appeared on Jezebel and the
Speaker 9: Hairpin disputes that claim and offers fourteen gruesome examples as evidence.
Speaker 9: Though largely forgotten by history, female serial killers such as
Speaker 9: Urzebet Bathory, Nanni Das, Marianne Cotton, and Darra Nikolovna Saltakova
Speaker 9: rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite for destruction.
Speaker 9: Each chapter explores the crimes and history of a different
Speaker 9: subject and then proceeds to unpack back her legacy and
Speaker 9: her portrayal in the media, as well as the stereotypes
Speaker 9: and sexist cliches then inevitably surround her. The first book
Speaker 9: to examine female serial killers through a feminist lens with
Speaker 9: a witty and dryly humorous tone, Lady Killers dismisses easy
Speaker 9: explanations she was hormonal, she did it for love, a
Speaker 9: man made her do it, and tire tropes she was
Speaker 9: a female fit, a femme fetale, a black widow, a witch.
Speaker 9: Delving into the complex reality of female aggression and predation,
Speaker 9: Featuring fourteen illustrations from Dame Darcy, Lady Killers is a
Speaker 9: blood curdling, insightful, and irresistible journey into the heart of darkness.
Speaker 9: The book that we're featuring this evening is Lady Killers,
Speaker 9: Deadly Women Throughout History, with my special guests, journalist and
Speaker 9: author Tory Telfer. Welcome to the program, and thank you
Speaker 9: very much for a Greenness interview. Tory Telfer, Hi, thank
Speaker 9: you so much for having me. Thank you so much.
Speaker 9: This really is quite eye opening. We more than alluded
Speaker 9: it to it in the introduction. I want to ask
Speaker 9: a little bit about, because we put it in the introduction,
Speaker 9: about Jezebel and the Hairpin, the online series, and how
Speaker 9: this was based on the popular online series, and where
Speaker 9: you dispute the claim that there are no female serial killers.
Speaker 9: So tell us a little bit about your background and
Speaker 9: how you came to this writing Lady Killers, and tell
Speaker 9: us a little bit about Jezebel and the Hairpin and
Speaker 9: this idea that you wanted to spell in this book
Speaker 9: Lady Killers.
Speaker 5: Sure well, I before I started writing about female serial killers,
Speaker 5: I was just kind of starting out as a freelance
Speaker 5: writer after working and publishing and doing some time in
Speaker 5: an MFA, and I really wanted a column. In my
Speaker 5: mind that was like the coolest thing ever. So when
Speaker 5: I saw that this website called The All was looking
Speaker 5: for historical columns. I racked my brain to think what
Speaker 5: would be fun to write about, and I thought of
Speaker 5: female serial killers because I've always liked creepy history. I've
Speaker 5: always liked weird history, and I've always liked sort of
Speaker 5: deranged individuals that history has overlooked. So I pitched the
Speaker 5: idea to the All and they shot it over to
Speaker 5: their sister site, The Hairpin, and that's where it started.
Speaker 5: And I was really pleased how much people liked it.
Speaker 5: I think, you know, as you probably know, women love
Speaker 5: true crime, and I just had all these amazing readers
Speaker 5: who who really enjoyed reading about these killer women. And
Speaker 5: then the reason it ended up on Jezebel is because
Speaker 5: my editor at The Hairpin moved to Jezebel, so she
Speaker 5: took their home fair, which is nice. And I only
Speaker 5: ever did four installments of those, and then I started
Speaker 5: working on the book. But all of those columns are
Speaker 5: in the book, but in a more updated format with
Speaker 5: new research and I think some smarter conclusions. So it
Speaker 5: was a fun process.
Speaker 9: Absolutely. So you came to write Lady Killers and tell
Speaker 9: us the criteria for inclusion in this what you were
Speaker 9: looking for? What was the sort of breath of variety's
Speaker 9: you were going to display in this book. Tell us
Speaker 9: some of the criteria for stories that were included in
Speaker 9: this book.
Speaker 5: I'm so glad you asked that, because I thought long
Speaker 5: and hard about it, and no one ever asked me that.
Speaker 5: So I had many criteria in my head. I only
Speaker 5: wanted to do quote unquote vintage serial Killers because I
Speaker 5: wanted to keep it more of a spooky book rather
Speaker 5: than it. Oh man, this world we live in is
Speaker 5: so depressing book. So I stopped. I stopped in the
Speaker 5: nineteen fifties. You know, the world was very different back then.
Speaker 5: The serial killer from the fifties just just feels different
Speaker 5: than Eileen Werno's or someone else. So I had that.
Speaker 5: I also tried to make it as diverse as possible
Speaker 5: in terms of time period, country of origin, method of
Speaker 5: killing class. You know, serial killers both male and female
Speaker 5: are very white. But I managed to find a little
Speaker 5: diversity there. And so I was kind of looking at
Speaker 5: when I had my women, when I had some of
Speaker 5: the women I would have to like. Whoever else I
Speaker 5: wanted to include had to sort of fit into the
Speaker 5: ones that were already in there. If that makes sense, sure,
Speaker 5: and I just I also just kind of looked for
Speaker 5: ones that just made me excited and intrigued me. And
Speaker 5: that's really you know, you just sort of know when
Speaker 5: you come across a serial killer that you want to
Speaker 5: learn more about. That's kind of a personal criteria that
Speaker 5: I can't really articulate. But just all the women in
Speaker 5: this book, there's just something about their stories that I
Speaker 5: was like, ooh, that's she sounds complicated or something. So
Speaker 5: I think that that was all.
Speaker 9: You also really go out of your way to find stories.
Speaker 9: Well not only that had a huge myth, and the
Speaker 9: mythology grew and the story, as they often do, grows
Speaker 9: and a lot of misinformation comes from that. So there's
Speaker 9: a lot of myths. And then the spelling of the
Speaker 9: myths in this book isn't there. So there's a lot
Speaker 9: of really what we thought was a story is not
Speaker 9: the story, and that's going to be frustrated in the
Speaker 9: first story we talk about with his Erzabit Bathory. But
Speaker 9: before we get to that, is there some other theme,
Speaker 9: like when you talk about nineteen ninety eight, you know,
Speaker 9: the famous profiler Roy Hazel would declaring that there are
Speaker 9: no female serial killers, and then you say, well, we
Speaker 9: can find fourteen. There's a little bit more discussed in
Speaker 9: this book than you just happen to find fourteen female
Speaker 9: serial killers. So respond to that statement, I have and
Speaker 9: compared to what Roy hazel would sayd in nineteen ninety
Speaker 9: eight and what you.
Speaker 5: Found, oh, I found way more than fourteen female serial killers.
Speaker 5: I think what Roy hazel Wood was saying, I mean,
Speaker 5: people use that quote all the time to show that
Speaker 5: he was wrong, So I do feel bad for him.
Speaker 5: I think what he was saying is, I think he
Speaker 5: was thinking of serial killing in a more narrow sense,
Speaker 5: like you know, the serial killer who kind of stalks, rapes,
Speaker 5: violently kills strangers. And there aren't I mean, aside from
Speaker 5: Eileen Werenas, there really aren't too many women who kill
Speaker 5: like that. But all the serial killing is is, you know,
Speaker 5: I would say, I think the XBI says too, killing
Speaker 5: three or more people with a cooling off period in between.
Speaker 5: So just because women are poisoning people and that's maybe
Speaker 5: not as quote unquote scary, that doesn't mean they're not
Speaker 5: a serial killer. I mean, you poison three people with
Speaker 5: a cooling off period in between, you're totally a serial killer.
Speaker 5: And so I think that's why people, you know, have
Speaker 5: thoughts that there haven't been any historically. Does that answer
Speaker 5: your question?
Speaker 9: Yes, certainly. Now let's talk about the first subject here,
Speaker 9: and this is the one where you talk about at
Speaker 9: eight black metal bands. There's been movies, there's been so
Speaker 9: many things, and there's such a mythology about Urzebete Bathory.
Speaker 9: You dispel some of the myths, but let's go back
Speaker 9: to what you knew about her, because you say she's
Speaker 9: been memorialized, sexualized, and vamporized since records of her trial
Speaker 9: were discovered in the seventeen twenties, and you say she's
Speaker 9: the grand Dame of serial killers. So talk about she
Speaker 9: was born in fifteen sixty, talk about her life, some
Speaker 9: of the things that shaped her, Talk about as you
Speaker 9: do about the peasants, and you talk about at some
Speaker 9: point where they have even less rights than they did
Speaker 9: when we open this story. So tell us a little
Speaker 9: bit about as you do, about her early life and
Speaker 9: the society that she was born into and was surrounded.
Speaker 5: By great sure so, Urzabet Bathory was born into a
Speaker 5: very very wealthy, very Hungarian family in fifteen sixty. She
Speaker 5: was a lucky girl in a way. She was highly educated,
Speaker 5: just given the best of everything, but she had issues
Speaker 5: as a young child, and you know, we can speculate,
Speaker 5: we don't really know exactly what they were. Some people
Speaker 5: think that her parents might have been cousins, so she
Speaker 5: might have had some sort of I don't know, noble
Speaker 5: illness that happens in that way. Some people there are
Speaker 5: rumors that she had epileptic fits. Of course, none of
Speaker 5: these are things to turn someone into a serial killer.
Speaker 5: But she also seemed to have a penchant for violence.
Speaker 5: It was a violent time back then, and she would
Speaker 5: have seen a lot of violence. She probably would have
Speaker 5: seen some public executions. There's a rumor that she saw
Speaker 5: a peasant who had been accused of stealing, that she
Speaker 5: saw him being sewn alive into the belly of a horse,
Speaker 5: which is almost worse for the horse, and she laughed
Speaker 5: and cackled. I mean, you have to be really careful
Speaker 5: with these things, because it's like it's sort of a hindsight.
Speaker 5: It's twenty twenty with serial killers type of thing, Like,
Speaker 5: how do we know she actually cackled diabolically when she
Speaker 5: saw this peasant being sewn into the belly of a horse.
Speaker 5: Do we just think that because we know about her
Speaker 5: later crimes. But there are a lot of there's a
Speaker 5: lot of rumors in folklore about her early life as
Speaker 5: kind of troubled and violent, but also very privileged and wealthy.
Speaker 5: So she got engaged when she was four, No, when
Speaker 5: she was ten. She got engaged when she was ten
Speaker 5: to a fifteen year old son of another incredibly wealthy family.
Speaker 5: So they were like this superstar match. And there's a
Speaker 5: rumor that while they were engaged or so, that took
Speaker 5: a lover this peasant boy and became pregnant by him,
Speaker 5: and the peasant boy got caught and got thrown to
Speaker 5: the wolves by her fiance. So it's all very violent stuff,
Speaker 5: and as you'll see, it's starting to get kind of sexual.
Speaker 5: So anyway, her fiance was named sarrienk Not not Dusty,
Speaker 5: I'm not. I'm not used to saying these names out last,
Speaker 5: just writing them. So he was a violent man himself.
Speaker 5: He was a sort of career warrior and he was
Speaker 5: constantly going off to battle. So the two of them
Speaker 5: didn't see each other very much during their during their
Speaker 5: whole marriage. It took them ten years to have their
Speaker 5: first child, which was really unusual for the time. You know,
Speaker 5: that wasn't that wasn't what a wife was supposed to do.
Speaker 5: And I hate to keep saying rumor says, but a
Speaker 5: lot of this is rumor. Rumor has it that her husband, Farreank,
Speaker 5: would learn torture and just sort of terrible cruel things
Speaker 5: when he was away at war and would come back
Speaker 5: and teach these things to his wife, who also who
Speaker 5: was developing a statistic streak, so he would he would
Speaker 5: teach her how to torture her servant girl. He would
Speaker 5: teach her these very creative punishments where he would cover
Speaker 5: a girl with honey and force her to stand outside
Speaker 5: naked and just get stung by bees and bugs. He
Speaker 5: also apparently gave her this romantic gift of a glove
Speaker 5: with claws attached that she could wear and just splash
Speaker 5: at her servants if the mood struck. So I think
Speaker 5: we kind of had these two sociopaths who happened to
Speaker 5: get married to each other and encouraged each other, and
Speaker 5: it was kind of their way of bonding because they
Speaker 5: didn't often see each other. And while all this is happening,
Speaker 5: they're getting incredibly wealthy because pharrenk is going off and
Speaker 5: he's fighting Let's see, I think he's fighting the Ottomans,
Speaker 5: and so he's like sending back these streams of treasure
Speaker 5: back to or said it. And it turns out that
Speaker 5: they get so wealthy that the King of Hungary actually
Speaker 5: has to borrow from them. So they're not only rich,
Speaker 5: but they're sort of in this very powerful political position
Speaker 5: where the king is in their debts. So you can
Speaker 5: sort of imagine how that could go to the head
Speaker 5: of someone who's already got some sociopathic, narcissistic tendencies.
Speaker 9: You talk about he is called because of his great
Speaker 9: valor and his ability to always be in war at war,
Speaker 9: he was called the Black Knight. You say that, no
Speaker 9: matter what, if some of this stuff is exaggerated, you
Speaker 9: don't get that name the Black Knight for nothing. And
Speaker 9: you talk about as well as that there was an
Speaker 9: unpayable like not only did they borrow money to the
Speaker 9: king over and over again, it was an unpayable debt
Speaker 9: when the Black Knight finally died in sixteen oh four.
Speaker 9: But you talk about that there was some people that
Speaker 9: moved into the house and Darvolia. They also had this
Speaker 9: you talk about and again this is some of the
Speaker 9: stuff that this is why this woman is so infamous.
Speaker 9: Talk about a torture chamber in this castle that he
Speaker 9: has given her his wife, and then she has this
Speaker 9: assistant Darvola. So and also what we haven't explained is
Speaker 9: how is it that the you know the time, is
Speaker 9: that the peasants are so dispensable. What is it? As
Speaker 9: you explain in the book, the status of the peasant
Speaker 9: enables this person not only to be able to do
Speaker 9: whatever they want, but literally do whatever they want, no
Speaker 9: matter what happens. So explain that as you do in
Speaker 9: the book.
Speaker 5: Yes, so that is I forgot about that. That's an
Speaker 5: important thing. So Hungarian peasants back then they just they
Speaker 5: just had no rights. Nobles had all the rights. So
Speaker 5: a noble could do whatever they wanted to their their servants.
Speaker 5: And it wasn't just that the law would look the
Speaker 5: other way. It was just totally fine because the peasants
Speaker 5: are the property of the nobles, and you can do
Speaker 5: whatever you want your property, said the law.
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Speaker 6: No necessary for eighteen plus sursis plus servant girls.
Speaker 5: She had several castles. You can imagine the huge staff
Speaker 5: that it would take to run all those places. And
Speaker 5: she had all these servant girls, and she had this
Speaker 5: one castle in particular that was given to her as
Speaker 5: a wedding gift. Now, the torture chambers I don't think
Speaker 5: started until her husband died and she was in her forties,
Speaker 5: but the violence was definitely simmering before then. And yeah,
Speaker 5: before her husband died, she had this this kind of
Speaker 5: I don't know what to call her, this creepy friend
Speaker 5: slash peasant woman move in named Anna Darvoglia, and the
Speaker 5: locals of the town really didn't like her. They described
Speaker 5: her as a wild beast in female form, and she
Speaker 5: was just a bad influence on Ursabet, and she moved
Speaker 5: into the castle and the servant, the servants started seeing
Speaker 5: or Sabbat's personality start to change, and then her husband died.
Speaker 5: Should I move on to that time in her life?
Speaker 9: Certainly? And you also talk about as well that there's
Speaker 9: a not only were the parents finding and knowing that
Speaker 9: their their peasant daughters, that something was going on at
Speaker 9: the castle, at the castle with Pathory, but also that
Speaker 9: a local pastor had enough guts to confront her. And
Speaker 9: you say that Nadaski, Nadaski had enough influence to comment
Speaker 9: at that time, but it was well known what was
Speaker 9: going on, it seemed at this castle.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, the rumors were flying, people were seeing frightening
Speaker 5: sights like girls with marks on their faces, girls with
Speaker 5: black and brewed black and blue body, just these terrified,
Speaker 5: abused girls coming in and out of Ursabeth's castle. So yes,
Speaker 5: a local pastor at one point actually had the goal
Speaker 5: and the bravery to pull her aside. And just remember
Speaker 5: how powerful she was and how little power a local
Speaker 5: pastor would have, and he just kind of said, like, listen,
Speaker 5: you got it. This isn't right. You know, you can't
Speaker 5: you have to stop doing this, like this isn't right
Speaker 5: in the eyes of God, and she got really angry
Speaker 5: and just hissed at him that you know, she was powerful,
Speaker 5: she was untouchable. He couldn't do anything. And yeah, her
Speaker 5: husband did manage while he was alive to kind of
Speaker 5: squelch those rumors and keep things under control, but that
Speaker 5: all ended when he died in sixteen oh four, when
Speaker 5: Ursabette was forty four years old, and that was one
Speaker 5: thing started getting really oh go ahead, no, go ahead,
Speaker 5: I was just gonna say. That's when things started getting terrible, terrible, awful,
Speaker 5: awful for her servant girls. And that's when you know
Speaker 5: the rumor in the confessions that the servants who helped
Speaker 5: her torture, in the confessions that they gave at the
Speaker 5: end of their life, they say that this is like
Speaker 5: a real changing point in her personality. And you know,
Speaker 5: maybe it was that her husband was gone and she
Speaker 5: suddenly had all this pressure completely on her shoulders to
Speaker 5: manage all these estates, to manage all these people. You know,
Speaker 5: maybe she was mentally cracking in some way. And then
Speaker 5: there's also speculation that she hated getting older and wanted
Speaker 5: to stay young forever. I mean, that is mostly just
Speaker 5: goth rumors, but you know, that's another thing to throw
Speaker 5: into the pot.
Speaker 9: What you would write about is that she had assembled
Speaker 9: the virtual torture squad with this Elana Joe, a woman
Speaker 9: named dorka wash woman named Cataline, and some young boy
Speaker 9: inmed Fitsko and der Voglia. So what torture did they specifically?
Speaker 9: Like you talk about the myth and what people think
Speaker 9: they know, and we talk about the blood bath and
Speaker 9: her request for youth, but what did you find out?
Speaker 9: Because again this is public, this was records that surfaced
Speaker 9: in the seventeen twenties. Like you say, these people testified,
Speaker 9: So tell us what these servants said about the kind
Speaker 9: of torture and the things that they did do in
Speaker 9: reality to these women.
Speaker 5: Sure, so, yeah, she had these trusted servants who would
Speaker 5: help her torture and these were not These women definitely
Speaker 5: enjoyed it too. These were not servants who she was
Speaker 5: necessarily forcing to do this. I mean, I'm sure she's
Speaker 5: forcing them to some extent, but they got sadistic pleasure
Speaker 5: from the torture. And what they confessed to years later
Speaker 5: was that Ursabet was very creative in her torture. So
Speaker 5: if someone was stewing and made a stewing mistake, she
Speaker 5: would start by maybe snatching their needle and shoving it
Speaker 5: into the girl's hand, and then she would say, if
Speaker 5: it hurts the whore, she can pluck it out, and
Speaker 5: then the girl would pluck it out, and Ursabette would
Speaker 5: come at her with shears or something and cut off
Speaker 5: her fingers. So she would play these nine games with
Speaker 5: her girls and do these quote unquote little things for
Speaker 5: them to hurt them compared to what happened later, But
Speaker 5: a lot of what went on in these torture chambers
Speaker 5: was truly tortured to the point of death. She would
Speaker 5: beat and beat and beat them all. Her torture squad
Speaker 5: would help. They'd beat the girls with irons, they would
Speaker 5: burn them. There was testimony that they would use pincers
Speaker 5: to rip out chunks of flesh. They would lash them.
Speaker 5: Just a lot of brutalizing the body to the point
Speaker 5: of where it wasn't recognizable, and a lot of bloodshed.
Speaker 5: And it was just like an obsession for Usa that
Speaker 5: she couldn't She would get very anxious after socializing and
Speaker 5: she would need to come home and torture or one
Speaker 5: of her servants, one of the torture squad servants said
Speaker 5: she couldn't eat or drink until she had seen one
Speaker 5: of her maids killed in a bloody way. So very
Speaker 5: story stuff.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you talk in the book that it gets so
Speaker 9: bad that everybody knows what's going on, and she's throwing
Speaker 9: the bodies to the wolves, and the peasant women in
Speaker 9: the town are hiding their daughters because when she comes
Speaker 9: in town looking for workers. So in her again somewhat madness, certainly,
Speaker 9: she has this genaesium plan where people don't care about
Speaker 9: the peasants and then there's the nobles, but she's still
Speaker 9: regardless of that, decides to create this genaesium. So tell
Speaker 9: us about this genasium and what her plan is. And
Speaker 9: this is the beginning of the downfall with this idea.
Speaker 5: Yes, so the genaesium is her the world's worst startup idea. Basically,
Speaker 5: as you said, she's running out of girls to kill,
Speaker 5: she's running out of peasants to kill. So she decides, hm,
Speaker 5: who's left, Well, I could get some of the daughters
Speaker 5: of my noble friends. But of course she's gonna have
Speaker 5: to come up with a sneaky plan to get those daughters.
Speaker 5: Noblemen aren't just gonna let their daughters go wherever. So
Speaker 5: she tells everyone that she's opening this finishing school. It
Speaker 5: was called a genasium, and you know, she lures these
Speaker 5: young noble women in and she's promising that she's gonna,
Speaker 5: I don't know, teach them good posture and how which
Speaker 5: forks you use and how to sit up straight or whatever.
Speaker 5: And she hasn't really fought out the plan past that
Speaker 5: she didn't the plan was clearly doomed because you know,
Speaker 5: the law might not protect peasants, but the law certainly
Speaker 5: protects nobles, and noble parents certainly have resources that peasant
Speaker 5: parents didn't. So she hasn't thought this plan through. She's
Speaker 5: just got this blood lust happening. So she ushers these
Speaker 5: young noble girls in, kills them all, and then she's
Speaker 5: sort of like, whoops. The parents are mad, they're wondering
Speaker 5: where their daughters went. I've gotta I've gotta throw them
Speaker 5: off the scent. So you can tell her she's really
Speaker 5: cracking because she comes up with this elaborate story where
Speaker 5: she says, okay, here's what happened one of the girls
Speaker 5: stole everyone's jewelry because she was really she was really
Speaker 5: jealous about it. And I'm sorry, that's not it's even worse.
Speaker 5: It wasn't that the girl stole the jewelry. It's that
Speaker 5: the girls one of the girls was jealous of everyone's jewelry,
Speaker 5: and so she murdered everyone else because she couldn't have
Speaker 5: their jewels. She was so jealous, and then she was
Speaker 5: so sad that she murdered everyone that she herself committed.
Speaker 5: So the parents hear this story and they're like, that
Speaker 5: definitely didn't happen. We have a mad woman on our hands. No,
Speaker 5: you can just imagine hearing some you know, trembling, pale
Speaker 5: faced Hungarian countess telling you that story and how terrified
Speaker 5: you would be. So that wasn't exactly what led to
Speaker 5: legal action being taken against her, but that didn't help.
Speaker 5: And and like you said, her down, Paul was starting.
Speaker 9: You talk about how this man named Thurzo has the
Speaker 9: authority to look into it as it comes to this attention.
Speaker 9: But he happens to be Nadasti's best friend, so he
Speaker 9: has to proceed very cautiously and respectfully as his friend's wife.
Speaker 9: So he what he does. He writes a letter to
Speaker 9: Bathory's son on how to proceed. So, what is It's
Speaker 9: very telling as you write a book. What does Bathory's
Speaker 9: son say about her guilt or innocence and how to
Speaker 9: and how does he choose to proceed? How does he
Speaker 9: suggest they that Thurzele proceeds?
Speaker 5: The son says, the son doesn't protest. The son doesn't
Speaker 5: say anything like, how dare you bring these outrageous accusations
Speaker 5: against my mother? It's actually her son in law. He
Speaker 5: just the family members, the children, They just say, listen,
Speaker 5: you can investigate her, you can do what you need
Speaker 5: to do, just don't bring her to trial. We don't
Speaker 5: want a public spectacle. We don't want her standing up
Speaker 5: there and ranting on about the girl and the murder suicide.
Speaker 5: You know, we just we don't want to be shamed.
Speaker 5: So yeah, the son in law literally wrote, public punishment
Speaker 5: would shame us all. And as I say, I think
Speaker 5: that's telling because to me, it says that they suspected
Speaker 5: or they knew because they weren't flustered. They were almost
Speaker 5: resigned to this idea that she was going to get caught,
Speaker 5: and they just didn't want to be embarrassed. It's pretty damning.
Speaker 5: I think.
Speaker 9: You talk about the four accomplices that trial claimed there
Speaker 9: was thirty to fifty victims. The king had heard that
Speaker 9: there was three hundred. Tell us a little bit about
Speaker 9: this trial, and tell us about what the public at
Speaker 9: this trial or what was she depicted as.
Speaker 5: So the trial, so what happened was or so that
Speaker 5: was never you know, brought onto the stand or whatever,
Speaker 5: but her torture squad of four was and they were tortured,
Speaker 5: and they were confessions are extracted, and then they were
Speaker 5: the only ones. All in all, three hundred and six
Speaker 5: people testified against her. This wasn't necessarily that they got
Speaker 5: up on the stand and testified, but that there's O
Speaker 5: who you mentioned earlier, who was sort of leading the
Speaker 5: charge against her. He I guess you could call it
Speaker 5: due diligence fifteen hundred style. He went around and collected
Speaker 5: all the evidence he could before bringing an accusation against her.
Speaker 5: So three hundred and six people gave evidence. But as
Speaker 5: we've touched on before earlier, the most absolutely, the most
Speaker 5: damning testimony came from her torture squad, and they were
Speaker 5: the ones who were saying, you know, she's tearing out
Speaker 5: chunks of flesh. She's beating these girls until their bloody
Speaker 5: bodies burst. She's beating them so hard that she herself
Speaker 5: was covered in blood. She's torturing them ten times a day.
Speaker 5: This is all coming out of her servant's mouths. It's
Speaker 5: very damning. And yeah, there was no number of dead
Speaker 5: girls that was ever really officially decided upon. The rumors
Speaker 5: were flying one young witness that there were six hundred,
Speaker 5: and then the accomplices of the in the torture squad
Speaker 5: did put it lower around thirty to fifty. Still a
Speaker 5: huge number of victims for a serial killer. So that
Speaker 5: was what happened on the witness stand. And then let's see,
Speaker 5: three of the torture squad were executed, and then one woman, Kataline,
Speaker 5: who had always been more soft hearted and always been
Speaker 5: more reluctant, she was thrown into jail. And then what
Speaker 5: happened to ursa bet as she was never taken to trial,
Speaker 5: as was promised to her son and son in law,
Speaker 5: but she was imprisoned in her own castle and she
Speaker 5: was literally bricked up in a room with a little
Speaker 5: swat to get food through. It was a Gothic Gothic punishment,
Speaker 5: very befitting our Gothic Hungarian countess.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and she always maintained her innocence, you say, and
Speaker 9: she was depicted as a beast, basically memorializes that as
Speaker 9: a beast. And you say, one very interesting thing that
Speaker 9: her crypt in nineteen ninety five. Tell us about her
Speaker 9: crypt in nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 5: Sure, so her crypt, her body was moved at least once,
Speaker 5: because at first she was buried in holy ground and
Speaker 5: the residents were like, oh no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 5: Her body was moved to the bathroom crypt and it
Speaker 5: was open nineteen ninety five, and they didn't find a
Speaker 5: single sign that her body was ever there. So she
Speaker 5: could be among us today, We don't know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you talk about the myth that everybody has heard about,
Speaker 9: and we'll just get to it, the blood bath that
Speaker 9: she was killing, spilling the blood, bathing in it to
Speaker 9: remain young forever. Tell us about what you found about
Speaker 9: the myth. And yeah, as you do, you offer reasons
Speaker 9: why this myth may have emerged.
Speaker 5: Yes, so the popular myth is yes, she did it
Speaker 5: all for vanity, because she needed virgin blood to bathe in.
Speaker 5: I don't think I even mentioned this in the book.
Speaker 5: But one of the reasons that can't be true is
Speaker 5: because this is so gross. But apparently blood congeals very
Speaker 5: fast and you can't like collect it and bathe in it.
Speaker 5: But basically what happened was the guy who rediscovered her
Speaker 5: trial transcript in the seventeen twenties was a Jesuit scholar,
Speaker 5: and he's sort of the one we have to think
Speaker 5: that we know about her at all, but he's also
Speaker 5: the one we have to not thank for some of
Speaker 5: these legends. So he the blood bathroomor I don't know why,
Speaker 5: but it first appears in the book he wrote, and
Speaker 5: it does not appear in the trial transcripts, and but
Speaker 5: people have watched on to it. I mean, it's compelling,
Speaker 5: it's fascinating, it's creepy, it makes it explains why she
Speaker 5: did what she did. You know, well, oh, she was vain,
Speaker 5: she needed virgin blood, and the bloodbathrumor is become like
Speaker 5: part of her symbol. So there are a lot of
Speaker 5: black metal songs about her, and they mentioned bloodbaths. There's
Speaker 5: a lot of art about her, and she's always in
Speaker 5: a bloodbath. That sort of become the number one thing
Speaker 5: people think about when they think about verst of that bassory,
Speaker 5: But there's no proof that it's true, and there's a
Speaker 5: lot of there's a lot of proof that it's not true,
Speaker 5: like the fact that it's not mentioned in the trial,
Speaker 5: or like the fact that some of her torture squad
Speaker 5: mentioned her beating these girls so badly that her blood
Speaker 5: or that her shirt would get drenched in blood and
Speaker 5: she would have to stop the torture and go change.
Speaker 5: So you know, she's clearly not collecting the blood if
Speaker 5: that's what she's doing, She's just it's just sort of
Speaker 5: like a gross side effect. So yeah, the blood baths
Speaker 5: are not true, as much as you know, it would
Speaker 5: make for a spooky story.
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Speaker 9: And what do you conclude with this story? What did
Speaker 9: you come away with? I guess and what do you
Speaker 9: leave for the reader as sort of a conclusion on
Speaker 9: this incredible again the grand name of serial killers? What
Speaker 9: do we take away from this story?
Speaker 5: Well, a, humans are terrifying and history is weird. But
Speaker 5: mostly what I took away was that people we tend
Speaker 5: to sexualize our female serial killers as a way to
Speaker 5: deal with them and to make them less scary and
Speaker 5: to understand them. Ursabet is incredibly sexualized. You know her legend.
Speaker 5: I mean, if you just as I say in the book,
Speaker 5: if you just run a Google image search on her,
Speaker 5: she's like nude and all the images, so she's just
Speaker 5: become like this ooh, sexy vampire. Maybe she was a lesbian,
Speaker 5: like this tittilating figure. And I think that's stupid because
Speaker 5: for trial transcripts, you know, if you read them, they
Speaker 5: didn't that's not what she was.
Speaker 10: She was a sadist, and she was a psychopath.
Speaker 5: And she was a terrible person, and to me, it's like,
Speaker 5: you don't have to sexualize her to make her story
Speaker 5: compelling or interesting or creepy. It's terrifying as it is.
Speaker 5: It's even scarier for me if she's just if we
Speaker 5: just treat her as the evil Countess that she was
Speaker 5: the blood Countess, rather than like this symbol of oh,
Speaker 5: kind of a vampire and kind of I think we
Speaker 5: should just like space the potential of your evil. They're
Speaker 5: dead in the eye and that's terrifying enough.
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Speaker 9: to cook. We talked about at length about Bathory, and
Speaker 9: this is just the introduction. This is one of the
Speaker 9: many chapters is in your book. Let's move on to
Speaker 9: a chapter you call the Worst Woman on Earth. Lizzie Holliday.
Speaker 9: And this is in late eighteen hundred. So Lizzie is
Speaker 9: serving time for Arson in a Pennsylvania East State penn attentiary.
Speaker 9: And you say he's a model prisoner. So take us
Speaker 9: back to this story Lizzie Halliday the Worst Woman on Earth,
Speaker 9: and tell us a little bit about Lizzie Halliday and
Speaker 9: why on earth she'd be called the worst woman on Earth.
Speaker 5: Awesome, Wow, I love livesay Holiday story in a morbid way.
Speaker 5: She was called the worst woman on Earth by many newspapers,
Speaker 5: including the New York Times. So when we meet Lizzie
Speaker 5: Holliday in this chapter, she is doing time for Arson,
Speaker 5: as you said, and she's doing just sign to the
Speaker 5: two year sentence, and right before she's about to be released,
Speaker 5: she just kind of switched flips and she starts acting insane.
Speaker 5: And so she gets transferred to an asylum and does
Speaker 5: the rest of her sentence there and then she walks free.
Speaker 5: She gets out of the asylum, she goes straight to
Speaker 5: this little town in Pennsylvania called Newburgh and meets an
Speaker 5: older man who is looking for like a housekeeper, and
Speaker 5: she kind of charms him, even though she's definitely a
Speaker 5: weird person her whole life. People were both interested in
Speaker 5: her and repelled by her. She charms him and she
Speaker 5: gets the job, and then soon enough he's like, well,
Speaker 5: if I marry her, it's cheaper, I don't have to
Speaker 5: pay her the forty dollars a week or whatever he's
Speaker 5: paying her. So they get married. And there they get married, and.
Speaker 10: This guy's name is Paul Halliday.
Speaker 5: He already has a bunch of kids. His kids do
Speaker 5: not like Lizzie. They think she's weird. They don't understand
Speaker 5: why she suddenly in their lives. They're just very confused.
Speaker 5: Paul Holliday also has a son who is handicapped and
Speaker 5: still lives at home with him, and Lizzie comes into
Speaker 5: their lives and it is the worst thing ever, one
Speaker 5: of the many crazy things she did. While Paul Holliday
Speaker 5: was still alive, was burned down his entire house with
Speaker 5: his poor son inside. And when they came racing back
Speaker 5: and saw the rubble, Lizzie was standing there and she
Speaker 5: had She claimed, oh, he died trying to save me.
Speaker 5: He went back into the fire to try and save me.
Speaker 5: But somehow they could tell from the sun's bedroom door
Speaker 5: it was locked and Lizzie had the key with her,
Speaker 5: so they could tell she had her locked this poor
Speaker 5: son in there and he had died. So that's like
Speaker 5: her first murder that barely even gets mentioned because she
Speaker 5: there were so many more. But basically, Lizzie is from Ireland,
Speaker 5: very originally as a young child. She came over to
Speaker 5: the US when she was young, and her family kind
Speaker 5: of lost touch with her because she was always difficult,
Speaker 5: troublesome too much. She would get very angry at you.
Speaker 5: She would she attacked some of her family members, but
Speaker 5: she also loved them very deeply. She was just unpredictable
Speaker 5: and wasn't that much fun to have around. I think
Speaker 5: she was married with it five times. She went through
Speaker 5: all these marriages, often with older men, that ended really poorly.
Speaker 5: No one died yet, but they were just filled with
Speaker 5: drama and screaming, and in some of those marriages they
Speaker 5: were both terrified of each other and bad news all around.
Speaker 5: So oh, and over this period, there's so many details
Speaker 5: in her story, so please sedat me if I'm getting
Speaker 5: bogged down. But she had a son with one of
Speaker 5: these men, and he was taken from her when she
Speaker 5: went to jail for arson this was a separate thing
Speaker 5: of arson. This wasn't the arson where she killed Paul
Speaker 5: Holiday's son. And while she was in jail, her son
Speaker 5: was given away to Foster Home and she was never
Speaker 5: able to find him. So that was, you know, one
Speaker 5: of the early tragedies of her life.
Speaker 9: You say there was, only it was only a month
Speaker 9: after she had burned down the house, she burnt down
Speaker 9: the barn and the mill, and declaring that he needed
Speaker 9: a new one anyway, and then she ran off with
Speaker 9: another man, and then she was hadn't thrown back in
Speaker 9: jail where apparently again she was acting insane, pulling out
Speaker 9: her hair and screaming, and that thought her acquitted of
Speaker 9: those charges, and then yes, and she go ahead.
Speaker 5: So so that was sort of a classic Lizzy thing,
Speaker 5: do something really wild it didn't really make sense, get
Speaker 5: thrown into jail, start screaming, get transferred to the asylum.
Speaker 5: And while that happened, her husband, Paul, this latest husband,
Speaker 5: was like, oh no, she's perfectly sane, don't listen to her.
Speaker 5: So she stayed at the asylum for a year and
Speaker 5: then the doctor said she's cured, and she got out,
Speaker 5: and another year passed and then Paul Holliday goes missing,
Speaker 5: and Lizzie says that he's gone on a business trip.
Speaker 5: So he's gone, He's gone, I'll be back soon, but
Speaker 5: everyone is suspicious. Her neighbors have heard really strange sounds
Speaker 5: coming from the farm at night. Paul Holliday's kids were
Speaker 5: never cool with her, so instantly they're like, I don't
Speaker 5: like this. We don't know where dad is. So basically
Speaker 5: what happens is these neighbors decide that they're going to
Speaker 5: search the farm and see if they can find poor
Speaker 5: Paul Halliday anywhere. And what happens is they search the
Speaker 5: farm house, they don't find anything. They search the barn
Speaker 5: and they find this big pile of straw, and underneath
Speaker 5: the straw there's like garbage. And then underneath the garbage
Speaker 5: they find two bodies. They're looking for one and they
Speaker 5: find two, and these are two bodies of women. So
Speaker 5: that was when the town and the police, who quickly
Speaker 5: got involved, knew that they had sort of an exceptional
Speaker 5: case on their hands. This wasn't just one of your husband,
Speaker 5: you know, wife kills husband in a fit of rage,
Speaker 5: but this was a far bigger crime than that.
Speaker 9: Now, what happens with the search for Paul Holliday after
Speaker 9: they find these bodies, How does it? How do police
Speaker 9: proceed in? What happens with Lizzie Halliday?
Speaker 5: So the police let's see timeline, so they Lizzie gets
Speaker 5: thrown into jail. But what happens before that, after when
Speaker 5: they're searching for when they're searching the farm, right before
Speaker 5: they find these two female bodies, is that Lizzy starts
Speaker 5: acting really strange. She screams at the police that they
Speaker 5: can't come in. Then she starts talking about how she
Speaker 5: has bugs calling all over her and she's trying to
Speaker 5: pick them off. She just like starts acting weird, but
Speaker 5: people report that she has this clever look in her eyes,
Speaker 5: so they aren't convinced that she's not acting. So she
Speaker 5: gets blocked up put in jail, where she starts immediately
Speaker 5: doing her thing where she's screaming and she's being very performative.
Speaker 5: And meanwhile, Paul Holliday's kids are still worried about their father.
Speaker 5: So one of the boys goes over to search the
Speaker 5: farm with a friends, very worried about what he might find.
Speaker 5: What he finds is that there's a floorboard in the
Speaker 5: kitchen that looks a little unusual. He lifted up the
Speaker 5: dirt underneath has been disturbed, and they sort of he
Speaker 5: and his friend put a like a metal rod down
Speaker 5: to kind of see what's down there, and they hit
Speaker 5: something that's sort of firm but also soft in a way,
Speaker 5: and I assume they went screaming out of their and
Speaker 5: their worst fears were confirmed when it's dug up and
Speaker 5: it's the body of Paul Holliday, their dad, and he's
Speaker 5: been shot and he's been hit beaten in the head
Speaker 5: so hard that his left eye had fallen out of
Speaker 5: a socket. So now she's got three bodies kind of around.
Speaker 5: So she's in jail now, and there's these three bodies
Speaker 5: that have been found around her home and her farm,
Speaker 5: and people immediately start questioning whether or not she's insane,
Speaker 5: because I mean, we still have, you know, the insanity plea.
Speaker 5: People are very conflicted by her because she's doing these
Speaker 5: things that we think of as what someone who's not
Speaker 5: in their right mind would do, Like she's raving and
Speaker 5: screaming and picking at her clothes and froughing is a
Speaker 5: mouth more or less. But then people also sometimes catch
Speaker 5: her in moments where she seems like she knows what's
Speaker 5: going on, Like, you know, if she doesn't know anyone's watching,
Speaker 5: she'll just sit on her bed very quietly. Once she
Speaker 5: knows someone's watching, she'll start to scream and tear at
Speaker 5: her hair and stuff. And she has this knowing look
Speaker 5: in her eye sometimes that people point at. So people
Speaker 5: don't know what to make of her, and people really
Speaker 5: never never do. It's the theme that haunts her whole
Speaker 5: career as a serial killer. It's people don't know if
Speaker 5: she was insane or not. And so the bodies of
Speaker 5: the women are identified, and they're they're sort of random,
Speaker 5: like they're not even really her neighbors. They live in
Speaker 5: a nearby town, and it's a mother and a daughter,
Speaker 5: and she basically lured them over to her house one
Speaker 5: after the other on the pretense that she wanted to
Speaker 5: hire a meeting woman. And she said her name was
Speaker 5: missus Smith. And you know, we don't there are no
Speaker 5: witnesses from the night they died, so we don't know
Speaker 5: exactly what went down. But she had shot them in
Speaker 5: the heart and wrapped them up and put cloth around
Speaker 5: their heads, which is so creepy, and wrap them up
Speaker 5: and drag them to the barn and put them under
Speaker 5: the hay. So all that is that their identity comes out.
Speaker 5: And as the as she's being held in jail and
Speaker 5: the trial is getting underway, and then the trial is
Speaker 5: a lot of speculation about her mental state, and you know,
Speaker 5: the prosecution has doctors go in and examine her, and
Speaker 5: she flies at one of them with she picks up
Speaker 5: the lid off her toilet and her jail cell and
Speaker 5: tries to crack his head open, and she raves at them,
Speaker 5: and she talks about the Holy Spirit and the number thirteen,
Speaker 5: and she says there's a river running outside of her
Speaker 5: cell door, and they're not convinced. One of them says
Speaker 5: that she's overdoing the art, which I love. He's just like, no,
Speaker 5: you're trying too hard. So basically what happens. But she
Speaker 5: has this great lawyer. I love her defense layer. There
Speaker 5: are a lot of really sweet, well meaning defense lawyers
Speaker 5: in this book who are just like you can just
Speaker 5: tell they were very empathetic people. And her defense lawyer
Speaker 5: is just like everyone looks. She's completely friendless. She's silent,
Speaker 5: she's not speaking for herself, She's completely silent in this courtroom.
Speaker 5: She's just this pitiful figure, and she's clearly insane because
Speaker 5: there's absolutely no motive for this crime of the two
Speaker 5: of killing the two women, and a motiveless crime is
Speaker 5: an insane crime, is basically his argument. But the jury
Speaker 5: does not buy that argument. The jury debates her a
Speaker 5: couple of hours, and then they come out and they
Speaker 5: say guilty of murder in the first degree and not
Speaker 5: insane in the slightest And I think that no. I
Speaker 5: know for a fact that with that verdict came the
Speaker 5: electric chair, and that would have made her the first
Speaker 5: woman to ever die in the electric chair, I believe,
Speaker 5: And in fact, the sort of monumentousness of that idea
Speaker 5: that she would be the first woman in the electric
Speaker 5: chair changed people's minds. Immediately after the verdict was handed down,
Speaker 5: People all of a sudden, we're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, okay,
Speaker 5: we weren't sure that she was insane, but we didn't
Speaker 5: actually think she should get the death penalty. It suddenly
Speaker 5: started seeming too serious and just too terrible to people,
Speaker 5: and so people started petitioning the governor. The governor of
Speaker 5: New York I think to take another look into her case,
Speaker 5: and he listened, and he actually appointed this special commission
Speaker 5: of doctors who were, you know, I guess, less biased
Speaker 5: than the prosecutions doctors to inspect Lollie Holiday and sort
Speaker 5: of hand down a new verdict on her sanity. And
Speaker 5: these doctors are also really great. They were appalled at
Speaker 5: how the trial went down. The trial was way too sensational.
Speaker 5: They said, it was just too much of the public
Speaker 5: screaming that she was saying and she needed the death penalty,
Speaker 5: and just too much drama, and it wasn't like a
Speaker 5: fair scientific examination of her mental states. And basically, what
Speaker 5: this new special Commission of doctors decided, and this is
Speaker 5: what I believe too of Lizzie Holliday, is that she
Speaker 5: was a smart woman. She was not completely clueless. She
Speaker 5: knew what she was doing because not only could she
Speaker 5: maintain sort of a normal life and social appointments and
Speaker 5: pay her bills, but the crimes were well executed. She
Speaker 5: hid the bodies, she killed normal people. This wasn't the
Speaker 5: work of someone just kind of raving around with a
Speaker 5: gun in her hand and no idea where she was.
Speaker 5: So they acknowledged that she was smart and she was
Speaker 5: with it in some way, but they said that she
Speaker 5: had something called conscious impulsive insanity, which was kind of
Speaker 5: violence that just burst from her that she couldn't help,
Speaker 5: and she was sort of, yeah, she was helpless in
Speaker 5: the face of her own violence. So they couldn't They
Speaker 5: said that they couldn't decide if she knew that what
Speaker 5: she was doing was wrong, but they were positive that
Speaker 5: she was unable to stop herself from doing it, and
Speaker 5: so they declared her insane, which got her off the
Speaker 5: electric chair, got her out of the electric chair, and
Speaker 5: got her life in the insane asylum at this town
Speaker 5: called Mattiawan. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.
Speaker 9: You talk in the book, though, and I thought it
Speaker 9: very interesting with the parallels today, that people were at
Speaker 9: that time, despite the description of insanity a lot of
Speaker 9: symptoms of insanity or characteristics that would be linked to insanity,
Speaker 9: or that they were really afraid that she would be
Speaker 9: deemed insane and it was just a dodge her physiction
Speaker 9: and that she would be somehow let out. And as
Speaker 9: you just said, she was sentenced to never get out
Speaker 9: of the insane asylum. So people even at that time
Speaker 9: were afraid that people might dodge justice by the insanity
Speaker 9: defense you also talk about very interesting character. Also was
Speaker 9: a intrepid girl reporter that she was already did investigations
Speaker 9: into the women's lunatic asylum on Blackwells Island. And she
Speaker 9: was named Nellie Bly and she had interviewed Lizzie Holiday.
Speaker 9: So what is some of the stuff, as you write
Speaker 9: in the book, that she got Lizzie to say or
Speaker 9: what Lizzie did say to her?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Nellie, Yeah, Nellie Bly is amazing. Maybe some of
Speaker 5: you have heard of her before. She's kind of like
Speaker 5: a cult figure in Journalism's very cool, and yeah, she
Speaker 5: scored these this two part exclusive interview with Lizzie. So
Speaker 5: it's awesome because it's one of the few cases where
Speaker 5: we have, you know, quotes from the killer from the
Speaker 5: sources that we can trust. So basically, she finally got
Speaker 5: Lizzie to talk about the crimes. It took her a
Speaker 5: long time. Lizzie just wants to talk about her finances.
Speaker 5: She wanted to talk about, you know, make sure you
Speaker 5: get my horse to go, you know, she just wanted
Speaker 5: to talk business in a weird way. But Nellie finally
Speaker 5: got her to talk about the crimes and what Lizzie
Speaker 5: did was, and she does this a couple times in
Speaker 5: her life. Is she kind of acknowledges that she was there,
Speaker 5: but she uses very passive language and says that some
Speaker 5: shadowy other figure did it. It's really weird because you know,
Speaker 5: if you were gonna, if you were completely with it,
Speaker 5: you would just deny that you were anywhere near the
Speaker 5: scene of the crime, I assume, But.
Speaker 10: She says, she says that there was this quote unquote gang.
Speaker 10: She doesn't really say who or why, but this gang
Speaker 10: came by and killed these two women, and Lizzie didn't
Speaker 10: even know that it had happened because she was corformed.
Speaker 10: But when she woke up, the women were gone.
Speaker 5: And even though there were you know, bloodstains on her
Speaker 5: carpet and bullet holes in her walls, she was just like, well,
Speaker 5: they've probably left, and just went on with her day.
Speaker 5: And so, of course journalist Nelly is like very skeptical
Speaker 5: because it's just a crazy story, I mean, core a
Speaker 5: form and a mysterious gang showing up to murder, and
Speaker 5: she pushes and pushes to get a confession out of Lizzie,
Speaker 5: and finally she can't get a confession. So finally Nellie
Speaker 5: says I believe that you and you alone killed your
Speaker 5: husband and these women and buried them. I don't believe
Speaker 5: you were ever insane one moment in your life, and
Speaker 5: that you are the shrewdest and most wonderful woman criminal
Speaker 5: of the world has ever known. And creepy Lizzie just
Speaker 5: gave her a big old smile and didn't say anything.
Speaker 5: And then Nellie goes, did you or did you not
Speaker 5: kill these people? And Lizzie says, some other time. My
Speaker 5: head feels bad now some other times, And then Nellie's
Speaker 5: about to leave, but she decides to try one more time,
Speaker 5: and she just asks, do you repent of your crimes?
Speaker 5: Do you think you did something wrong? And Lizzie says,
Speaker 5: God will send you back to me, and that's her
Speaker 5: last blind and Nellie, which is so creepy. And in
Speaker 5: the article, Nelly says she left the prison with a
Speaker 5: little chill running to her body.
Speaker 9: You talk about her time in the insane asylum of
Speaker 9: Mattawan mattia Wan, and you talk about a woman named
Speaker 9: Nellie Wicks, one of the attendants, only twenty four years old.
Speaker 9: So tell us about the continuing sag of Lizzie Halliday
Speaker 9: once she's locked up. There's all kinds of incidents, seasoned
Speaker 9: solitary confinement for attacks, but tell us about what happens.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, So by the time Nellie Wicks comes into
Speaker 5: Lizzie's life, Lizzie has been in prison for a long time,
Speaker 5: a couple decades. She's in her mid forties, and she's
Speaker 5: you know, gained weight. She used to starve herself and
Speaker 5: be really skinny, and now she's just kind of like
Speaker 5: comfortable and peace full, and it's like, oh, that's that
Speaker 5: old murderess Lizzie Holliday. You know, that's sort of the
Speaker 5: vibe in the asylum. People aren't scared of her. She's
Speaker 5: given sewing privileges, so she has a little basket of supplies.
Speaker 5: And Nellie Wicks is the head attendant of the women's
Speaker 5: department there, and she's just a great the great girl,
Speaker 5: great worker, and she has dreams of leaving the asylum
Speaker 5: and training to be a nurse. But in the meantime
Speaker 5: she's doing it great. She's doing great work in the asylum.
Speaker 5: So Lizzie and Nelly get very close, and Nellie just
Speaker 5: trusts Lizzie. She thinks that her violent days are over,
Speaker 5: and she thinks they have a special bond, which they do,
Speaker 5: but it's a special creepy bond. So finally Nellie gets
Speaker 5: the news that she's you know, she gets into a
Speaker 5: nursing school or whatever. So she comes into the asylum
Speaker 5: and she tells everyone, yeah, I'm leaving to pursue my dreams.
Speaker 5: And Lizzie really does not like this, and Lizzie begs
Speaker 5: her not to go, begs her not to go, and
Speaker 5: Wick says, you know, I have to go, but everything's
Speaker 5: gonna be fine, and Lizzie starts murdering, sorry, it's Fridian slip.
Speaker 5: Lizzie starts murmuring, oh, I'm gonna kill her if she goes.
Speaker 5: But that was Lizzie. People were used to her making threats.
Speaker 5: She talks about murdering people under her breath all the time,
Speaker 5: and she never did anything, so people didn't think anything
Speaker 5: of it, which was a huge mistake. So one day
Speaker 5: before Nellie's last day at work, Lizzie takes her gets
Speaker 5: her basket of sewing supplies and she gets the scissors
Speaker 5: out of it and she follows Nellie into the woman's
Speaker 5: bathroom and Nellie doesn't see that she's there, and Lizzie
Speaker 5: springs up behind her and starts beating her to the
Speaker 5: floor and grabs the keys and locks from Nellie's you know,
Speaker 5: belt or whatever, and locks the door from the inside
Speaker 5: and begins to stab Nellie. And she stabs her over
Speaker 5: two hundred times in the face and the heart and
Speaker 5: the neck, and by the time the other attendants at
Speaker 5: the asylum here her screaming and managed to break down
Speaker 5: the door. She's unconscious and bleeding out, and she dies
Speaker 5: twenty minutes later. And actually Nelly became because of that.
Speaker 5: Nelly became the first known female law enforcement officer in
Speaker 5: the US to be killed in the line of duty.
Speaker 5: And someone asked, Lizzie, why did you do that? She
Speaker 5: was your friend. You guys got a little like, how
Speaker 5: could you do something this awful? And Lizzy said, she
Speaker 5: tried to leave me. Yeah, incredible, terrible.
Speaker 9: Now what did they think? And now that she's in
Speaker 9: insane asylum, kills a law enforcement person, a twenty four
Speaker 9: year old person with her life ahead of her, what
Speaker 9: do they do now? As this asylum, what do they
Speaker 9: think about her?
Speaker 5: Insane?
Speaker 9: Now they believe she's insane, Now what do they do?
Speaker 5: Well, I'm pretty sure she goes back into solitary confinement.
Speaker 5: She's already done a stint in there for attacking another
Speaker 5: female attendant years before. But yeah, they believe she's insane.
Speaker 5: I think the people at the asylum always thought that
Speaker 5: she was insane, but they had thought that she had
Speaker 5: just calmed down and she wasn't violent anymore. But you know,
Speaker 5: she's already in the she's already in the asylum of
Speaker 5: her life, so there's really not much they can do,
Speaker 5: and she just lives out the rest of her days there.
Speaker 5: Nelly was her last murder. I think that makes her
Speaker 5: fifth murder. She had attempted to kill a sixth person,
Speaker 5: but so Nelly was her last murder. And something that's
Speaker 5: unique about Lizzie is that it's the randomness of her killing.
Speaker 5: I mean there's no you know, a lot of people
Speaker 5: kill family members or like Ted Bundy, like Brunette girls,
Speaker 5: but Lizzie was just such a random killer. You know,
Speaker 5: a husband here, some neighbors there, you know of what
Speaker 5: would you call Nelly, like sort of almost a supervisor
Speaker 5: figure there. Just really scary. But yeah, she stayed in
Speaker 5: the asylum for the rest of her life and she died.
Speaker 5: Let me look up where she died. I forgot. I
Speaker 5: think she was in her sixties. She was fifty eight.
Speaker 5: So she was in the asylum after killing Nellie for
Speaker 5: a decade and a half.
Speaker 9: I think, and just there you talk about the title
Speaker 9: that evolved, the Worst Woman on Earth, and you talk
Speaker 9: about the media sensation, and it was a newspaper headlines
Speaker 9: tell us a little bit about how big this story was,
Speaker 9: and again, where this worst woman on Earth? And how
Speaker 9: big was that? How important was this story? How far
Speaker 9: did it go around the world.
Speaker 5: It was a huge, huge story, especially when she was
Speaker 5: captured the first time for killing her the two neighbor women,
Speaker 5: and her husband. It was, you know, people panicked. People
Speaker 5: thought she was just the most terrible freak show horror
Speaker 5: they'd ever seen. And it got so bad that people
Speaker 5: rumors started flying around that she was actually Jack the
Speaker 5: Ripper and that she had just you know, done her
Speaker 5: crimes in England and then come over to America to
Speaker 5: kill more people. So yeah, it was absolutely a huge story.
Speaker 5: And then she was still famous. I mean, she became
Speaker 5: a celebrity like serial killers often do, and she was
Speaker 5: still famous when she was doing her years in the
Speaker 5: asylum before she killed Nelly, who journalists would occasionally come
Speaker 5: out there and check up on her, kind of write
Speaker 5: an update, but by the time she was dead, she
Speaker 5: was pretty much forgotten. So this worst Woman on Earth,
Speaker 5: I couldn't find.
Speaker 11: You know, the first publication to give for that title,
Speaker 11: but it was so it was at least ubiquitous enough
Speaker 11: that when The New York Times reported her death, they
Speaker 11: referred to her as someone who had been called the
Speaker 11: worst woman on Earth.
Speaker 5: So I think it was just kind of floating around
Speaker 5: in the zeitgeist back then. And I think that's an
Speaker 5: interesting title because I mean, we've just talked about Bathory,
Speaker 5: who you know, probably killed more people if her story
Speaker 5: is true, and so it's like, well, she wasn't the
Speaker 5: worst woman on Earth if we're going to rank killings.
Speaker 5: You know, she didn't claim the most victims, and she
Speaker 5: was insane in her way. She had this conscious, impulsive insanity,
Speaker 5: you know, I don't know, I don't I didn't want
Speaker 5: to diagnose her with like a term we would use today,
Speaker 5: but she wasn't sane. So it's just interesting that she
Speaker 5: got called the worst on Earth. And I think it
Speaker 5: shows how just horrified people were of her and how
Speaker 5: grossed out they were of her. There was a lot
Speaker 5: of referring to her as an animal or this sort
Speaker 5: of wild, feral beast, which they said about Bathory too. Actually,
Speaker 5: so yeah, those I think there's a lot to say
Speaker 5: about the fact that she was called the worst woman
Speaker 5: on earth or absolutely.
Speaker 9: You take us now to a story called Viper. So
Speaker 9: you talk and take us to Egypt and Alexandria, and
Speaker 9: you talk about two sisters or two women, Raya and Sequina.
Speaker 9: So tell us a little bit about the time in
Speaker 9: Alexandria and where what what time period we're talking about
Speaker 9: here first, and tell us a little bit about sort
Speaker 9: of a little bit of a background there that would
Speaker 9: set up the situation for Raya and Sequina at that time.
Speaker 5: Sure, and yeah, there were Yeah, So World War One
Speaker 5: has just ended. We're in Alexandria in Egypt, and times
Speaker 5: are very tense. Not only are gender roles changing as
Speaker 5: they were in many, you know, many countries across the
Speaker 5: world at that time, but this huge, devastating war has
Speaker 5: just ended, and the Egyptian people are thinking, Okay, the
Speaker 5: British troops are supposed to leave. Now, We're supposed to
Speaker 5: become a self governing nation. This is what we're promised,
Speaker 5: and they don't see that happening. So this is like
Speaker 5: nineteen nineteen, I think, and Alexandria is very tense. There's
Speaker 5: a lot of riots, there's a lot of violence breaking out,
Speaker 5: there's strikes going out. The Egyptian people, the Alexandrian people
Speaker 5: are very angry at the authorities. And because of all
Speaker 5: this violence, the police are kind of distracted. And so
Speaker 5: our tale takes place in the poorest district of Alexandria,
Speaker 5: which is called a Laban. And not only are the
Speaker 5: police distracted by these riots and demonstrations, but the police
Speaker 5: were never paying that much attention to this district in
Speaker 5: the first place, because I mean, we've you know, we've
Speaker 5: seen how this go. You know, the poorer districts, the
Speaker 5: poorer places tend to just sort of slip through the cracks.
Speaker 5: The authorities don't really care if a dead body turns
Speaker 5: up here or there. So Riya and Sakina are sisters,
Speaker 5: and we there's one. I don't know a ton about
Speaker 5: their early lives. I will say there is a great
Speaker 5: book about them that is very well researched, and it
Speaker 5: is in Arabic, and I cannot find a translation of it,
Speaker 5: but it is in the footnotes or it is in
Speaker 5: the end notes of this chapter, so if anyone wants
Speaker 5: to dive into them further. But basically, they came from
Speaker 5: a broken home with a narcissistic mom, and they just
Speaker 5: kind of moved around Upper Egypt a lot and lived
Speaker 5: this sort of transient lifestyle with full of petty crime.
Speaker 5: So they were just they were petty criminals from early on,
Speaker 5: but they were also very well, it's not either or
Speaker 5: they were petty criminals, and they were very enterprising. They
Speaker 5: were kind of like entrepreneurs. They were hustlers. They always
Speaker 5: had a scheme going to make money, and they got
Speaker 5: into the brothel business because it was lucrative because they
Speaker 5: lived near these British camps and the British soldiers were
Speaker 5: happy to frequent these brothels. So for a while they
Speaker 5: were making a lot of money, and they had husbands
Speaker 5: who were kind of secondary characters because it honestly seemed
Speaker 5: like Ryan Sequino or the brains behind the operations. But
Speaker 5: what happened after World War One and all this tension
Speaker 5: was that they started making less money with these brothels,
Speaker 5: and basically they just power dynamics were shifting both in
Speaker 5: the world and in the city and in the microcosm
Speaker 5: of their neighborhood and their brothels. And it's complicated, but
Speaker 5: that led to violence because they, especially Riah, the older sister,
Speaker 5: was very paranoid and was very what's the word for
Speaker 5: when you just you think everyone's out to get I
Speaker 5: guess literally paranoid. She just was suspicious. She always thought
Speaker 5: people owed her money or the people were trying to
Speaker 5: con her. So what happened was their girl, you know,
Speaker 5: the sex workers, the girls that worked at their brothels.
Speaker 5: Were back in the good old days of World War One,
Speaker 5: when they were making a ton of money, they were
Speaker 5: able to buy their girls gold bracelets, which was sort
Speaker 5: of the thing to where as, you know, to advertise
Speaker 5: yourself to the Johns, you wanted as many gold bracelets
Speaker 5: and gold jewelry as possible. And then when time started
Speaker 5: getting tougher after World War One, when they were making
Speaker 5: less money, Rya started getting really suspicious, like she would
Speaker 5: the girls had to buy their own bracelets, and she
Speaker 5: would get really suspicious that maybe they'd gotten money for
Speaker 5: an encounter with a client and hadn't given ray or
Speaker 5: her cut. So it all kind of happened around gold.
Speaker 5: And the rumor that's endured that I don't really think
Speaker 5: is true is that Ryan Sequina would actually start hunting
Speaker 5: down women who were wearing a lot of gold in
Speaker 5: the marketplace, just random women, and lure them back to
Speaker 5: their apartment and apply them with drugged wine. Should I
Speaker 5: get to the crimes or is there anything you want
Speaker 5: to talk about before? I?
Speaker 9: Well, it seems like very similar again because the you
Speaker 9: talk about people looking the other way and not noticing,
Speaker 9: and there is a society at that time, at the time,
Speaker 9: there was people that went unnoticed, and so they were
Speaker 9: able to do that. So and it seems like what
Speaker 9: you talk about is that Ray and Seqina had been
Speaker 9: hauled off to the police before for questioning. And it
Speaker 9: have been numerous times, numerous missing women, but they had
Speaker 9: always they had always managed to convince the police they
Speaker 9: had nothing to do with the cases. So tell us
Speaker 9: how everything comes undone?
Speaker 5: Sure? So, yeah, women start to go missing and people
Speaker 5: start to complain maybe a family member here and neighbor there,
Speaker 5: and yes, the police do occasionally. Oh what happens is
Speaker 5: there's the common threat in a lot of these missing
Speaker 5: cases is oh, they were last scene with Seqina. Oh,
Speaker 5: they were last sing with Riya. But the sisters managed
Speaker 5: to talk the right out of it, especially Sequina, who
Speaker 5: is just kind of the more outgoing, clever, brave one
Speaker 5: and exactly like you said, I mean, the police didn't
Speaker 5: care about the inhabitants of this neighborhood. They didn't this
Speaker 5: a Labon was a poor district, and it was also
Speaker 5: kind of if you were like a European sailor, it
Speaker 5: was where you went to find vice. You know, you
Speaker 5: could find some drugs and some boods and some women
Speaker 5: and the police didn't care. And I mean we see
Speaker 5: this throughout history in cases where the victims are prostitutes
Speaker 5: or sex workers. You know, it's you just they people
Speaker 5: don't care as much as when it's like the cheerleader
Speaker 5: from the Chicago suburb or whatever. Sure, there's a sense
Speaker 5: that these people are disposable. And there's a sense too,
Speaker 5: I think that Ryan Sequina were disposable. So yeah, the
Speaker 5: police are not doing a good job here. There's a
Speaker 5: lot of shady stuff happening and they're just kind of
Speaker 5: ignoring it and what's really happening or Okay, so I'll jump,
Speaker 5: I'll jump ahead to how it really started to unravel. Basically,
Speaker 5: neighbors this is so gross. But neighbors start to complain
Speaker 5: that Riat's house smells really awful. There's this the caying
Speaker 5: stench coming from it, and no matter how much incense
Speaker 5: she burns, she can't hide the stench. And Raya's like, well,
Speaker 5: people drink here, it's we have parties here. It gets
Speaker 5: thirty people are like, oh, so the police are getting
Speaker 5: complaints about that. And then simultaneously, in a house that
Speaker 5: Sekina used to live in, uh, the owners decide to
Speaker 5: redo the pipes, and so they're digging into the floor
Speaker 5: and the guy who they've it's their cousin they've hired
Speaker 5: to dig up the floor hits something hard and it's
Speaker 5: a human arm. So sort of at the same time,
Speaker 5: Sequina's old apartment floor is dug up and they find
Speaker 5: bodies under it, and then Raya's apartment, with all the
Speaker 5: accusations that it's smell bad, is dug up and they
Speaker 5: find bodies under the floor, and they even find a
Speaker 5: couple bodies under the floor of their old land lady.
Speaker 5: So all of a sudden, it all kind of snaps
Speaker 5: into focus for the police, and they're like, Okay, we've
Speaker 5: had all these missing women, we've had these reports of
Speaker 5: missing women, and now we've got like these seventeen bodies
Speaker 5: and they're in the they're all connected to these sisters.
Speaker 5: So the sisters get dragged in for questioning and Sakina
Speaker 5: manages to deny, deny, deny, but apparently Riah, the older sister,
Speaker 5: ends up breaking and that kind of dooms them both
Speaker 5: and she confesses.
Speaker 9: You talk about to the media response. The newspapers even
Speaker 9: published photos of the victims, and they find some of
Speaker 9: these victims are skeletal remains only.
Speaker 5: Mm hmm. Yeah. That's really sad to me because well,
Speaker 5: I mean, can you imagine seeing a photo of skeletal
Speaker 5: remains published in the papers today? But it really it
Speaker 5: really shook the neighborhood because it was like, Okay, not
Speaker 5: only did this horrible crime happen right here under our noses,
Speaker 5: but the fact that these bodies were there for so
Speaker 5: long that they've turned into skeletons or like some of them,
Speaker 5: it sort of started to mummify.
Speaker 2: I mean, that.
Speaker 5: Showed that was just graphic visual evidence of how long
Speaker 5: the police had not cared, how long the police had
Speaker 5: not been doing their jobs. They had not been doing
Speaker 5: their jobs for long enough for a female body to
Speaker 5: turn into a mommified skeleton was just a little hair
Speaker 5: attached to the skull. I mean, it was like this
Speaker 5: really gruesome, obvious sign of the police not caring. So
Speaker 5: the journalists at the time there were some impassion and
Speaker 5: very sad editorials written, and one of them said the
Speaker 5: common refrain was just like where are the police or
Speaker 5: the police? One of them said, where are the police
Speaker 5: when these crimes are committed? Some of these bodies have
Speaker 5: turned into skeletons, showing that the victims were murdered a
Speaker 5: long time ago. So, yeah, it was that sense of
Speaker 5: abandonment by the authorities in that sense that no one
Speaker 5: cares about these victims, and no one cares about us,
Speaker 5: the neighborhood where these crimes have been happening.
Speaker 9: You also say that it seemed at the time, nineteen
Speaker 9: twenties Egypt, that glaring It was a glaring symbol of
Speaker 9: everything that was wrong with a society where women walked
Speaker 9: unveiled through the streets.
Speaker 5: Yes, that is what the papers bought, like, that is
Speaker 5: what society thought that or yeah, let me back up Basically,
Speaker 5: the sisters became so infamous so fast, even though there's
Speaker 5: plenty of evidence that their husbands were involved in the killing,
Speaker 5: and that these two men who are kind of the
Speaker 5: bodyguards of the brothels, were also involved. So there were
Speaker 5: six people accused of the crimes, but the men were
Speaker 5: just totally forgotten because it was like these killing sisters
Speaker 5: were I mean, they were so perfect for the headlines,
Speaker 5: and yeah, they turned into these symbols. The case ballooned
Speaker 5: beyond the facts of the crime, and they turned into
Speaker 5: these symbols for this decline and female morality. So these
Speaker 5: editorials were written like that really blamed the victims for
Speaker 5: sort of getting themselves to the point in society where
Speaker 5: they would even encounter a Riah or a Sakina, blaming
Speaker 5: the victims for moral failings, for walking down the streets
Speaker 5: where people like Ryan and Saquina lurked. And so it
Speaker 5: was like, you know, Egypt and Alexandria was already in
Speaker 5: a place of anxiety about the fact that women's roles
Speaker 5: were changing and women were walking around and being a
Speaker 5: little bit more free and maybe even frequenting cafes and bars,
Speaker 5: and so this case was like a perfect warning sign,
Speaker 5: I guess for people who wanted to argue that when
Speaker 5: shouldn't be allowed to walk around the streets, because it
Speaker 5: was like, well, look at what happens you walk, and
Speaker 5: you walk around the streets of Alaban as a woman,
Speaker 5: you get yourself murdered. So yeah, it became this, They
Speaker 5: became this pawn in a cultural battle. I guess you
Speaker 5: could say about female morality.
Speaker 9: You also talk about them being portrayed as beast with
Speaker 9: claws towering over a trembling girl and hissing, no escape
Speaker 9: for you from my talons, And there's all kinds of
Speaker 9: inhuman depiction beasts and foxes and wolves, and you say
Speaker 9: that there is even a rumor that Ray and Ryan
Speaker 9: Sequina were being displayed at the zoo, and people ran
Speaker 9: to the zoo to make, you know, to see if
Speaker 9: that was the case. But you also talk about the
Speaker 9: women's crimes generally demand an element of mercy. Was that
Speaker 9: the case in this case.
Speaker 5: That this was not the case. So the prosecutor was
Speaker 5: arguing that these sisters should get the death penalty, even
Speaker 5: though no woman in Egypt had gotten the death penalty before.
Speaker 5: And what he said was, okay, we had reasons for
Speaker 5: not giving them the death penalty in the past. First
Speaker 5: of all, women's crimes generally demand an element of mercy,
Speaker 5: and he meant he was talking about crimes where you know,
Speaker 5: sort of you kill. Well, his example was when a
Speaker 5: woman is when women are driven to kill their husband's
Speaker 5: second wives, which is sort of a dumb example, but
Speaker 5: you know, he's talking about things where there's sort of
Speaker 5: an emotional reason or something like jealousy or abuse, or
Speaker 5: not that abuse is an emotional reason, but he's saying, Okay,
Speaker 5: women's crimes generally demand an element of mercy. But Yenza
Speaker 5: China's crimes were not done in self defense or jealousy
Speaker 5: or anything, and so they don't deserve compassion. And he
Speaker 5: also said that the death penalty used to be a
Speaker 5: public thing, and so that was reason enough not to
Speaker 5: give it to a woman because you didn't want to
Speaker 5: have society see woman be Hong. But now the death
Speaker 5: penalty had been taken sort of folded inside the prison,
Speaker 5: and so he was like, so reason number two for
Speaker 5: not killing a woman is gone, so we should give
Speaker 5: them the death penalty. And indeed they did get the
Speaker 5: death penalty. Whose argument was effective and people were so
Speaker 5: horrified by them, and actually all six of them got
Speaker 5: the death penalty. So the sisters, their husbands, and these
Speaker 5: two bodyguards who were implicated in the crimes.
Speaker 9: You say that right after the sisters were hung or hanged,
Speaker 9: they entered into public mythology almost immediately six months after
Speaker 9: their death. Talk about some of the things that how
Speaker 9: they entered mythology by virtue of.
Speaker 5: Sure. So to this day there there they kind of
Speaker 5: haunt Egypt. You know, I've spoken to a couple of
Speaker 5: people from Egypt and they've said that Ryan Takin are
Speaker 5: like they still these figures of evil. They immediately started
Speaker 5: or people immediately started putting them in plays or poems
Speaker 5: or books, so they immediately became characters. There was a
Speaker 5: film from nineteen fifty three called Ryan Sequina that showed
Speaker 5: the police as these heroes who caught the sisters just
Speaker 5: in time before they were about to do their final murder.
Speaker 5: Obviously that's a little propaganda ish, because as we know,
Speaker 5: that's not what happened with the police. They were in
Speaker 5: a TV show in I want to say, two thousand
Speaker 5: and five, and my friend has watched it and I've
Speaker 5: just been apparently it's just like really pulpy and hilarious.
Speaker 5: So yeah, they were in a lot of a lot
Speaker 5: of sort of popular culture things, and their legend definitely
Speaker 5: spread all across Egypt and I think remains that way
Speaker 5: to this day.
Speaker 9: You have some quotes from her as well that Sekina
Speaker 9: one of the guards when they were taken for their execution,
Speaker 9: he said, tough enough, be strong. What did Sequina say
Speaker 9: to him? Which is demonstrative of her defiance.
Speaker 5: Sequina when the guard told her that, she kind of
Speaker 5: snarled and she said, I am a strong woman. If
Speaker 5: I can take on a hundred, I can take on
Speaker 5: a thousand. And then a little bit later she said,
Speaker 5: I murdered. I murdered, but it's okay because I fooled
Speaker 5: the government of a Labah. And then as she was
Speaker 5: nearing the uh, what's it called the gallows, she said,
Speaker 5: this is a place where strong one, this is a
Speaker 5: place where strong people stand. I'm a strong woman, and
Speaker 5: I've done things that even men can't do, and I
Speaker 5: mean very impressive bowld fiery words, and oddly enough, when
Speaker 5: those words are published, people, a certain type of person
Speaker 5: who is maybe a little bit more anti establishment, was like, oh,
Speaker 5: I'm kind of liking Sechina. Now she's sort of this
Speaker 5: anti establishment hero. And those are also some embarrassing final
Speaker 5: words for the police and the government, who because that's
Speaker 5: exactly what happened. She did fool the police, She did
Speaker 5: fool the government for a long time by being this
Speaker 5: strong woman. I mean, you know, I don't want to
Speaker 5: praise what she did at all, but she did. She
Speaker 5: did kind of con the system, and so I think
Speaker 5: people were weirdly impressed by her final words, and like, Okay,
Speaker 5: she's not just some you know, shrinking violet whose husband
Speaker 5: manipulated her into killing or something. She's she's a strong woman,
Speaker 5: as she says.
Speaker 9: Defy it to the end. Absolutely, and they've become the
Speaker 9: they become boogieman in their home country. The Rayah and
Speaker 9: Sechina will get you, the mothers tell their young daughters
Speaker 9: to this day.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's creepy and fascinating.
Speaker 9: Absolutely. Now we don't have any more time to go
Speaker 9: into the other stories, but maybe you can just tell
Speaker 9: us how we might be able to get this book.
Speaker 9: If you have a Facebook page, I know this is
Speaker 9: a Harper perennial release, yes, and if you do any
Speaker 9: Twitter or how people might find out about this work.
Speaker 9: And also if you do any social media at all,
Speaker 9: let us know about that.
Speaker 5: Oh sure, thanks, yes, yes you can pre order it.
Speaker 5: It comes out October tenth, and you can pre order
Speaker 5: it now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indie bound Her
Speaker 5: per Perennials, website, Apple, really anywhere. I think if you
Speaker 5: Google it should come up pretty easily. And then yes
Speaker 5: I would for social things, I would just go to
Speaker 5: my website Tori Telford dot com, which I am redoing,
Speaker 5: but it's still there. And I have a newsletter and
Speaker 5: you know, you can follow me on Goodreads or Instagram
Speaker 5: or whatever, and yeah, that would be great. And if
Speaker 5: anyone's in Chicago, I have the launch is happening on
Speaker 5: October tenth, and the details are on my website. So
Speaker 5: I'm excited about that absolutely.
Speaker 9: And also you have some we we just talked about
Speaker 9: in the introduction to You have some very very interesting
Speaker 9: illustrations by Dame Darcy that are included in your book.
Speaker 9: And also I wanted to thank you very much for
Speaker 9: coming on and talk about lady killers deadly women throughout history.
Speaker 9: It's been a real pleasure and I want to thank
Speaker 9: you very much.
Speaker 5: Oh, thank you. I appreciate it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and I hope you we hope to talk to
Speaker 9: you again. And thank you very much for coming on
Speaker 9: and talking about lady killers. And you have a great evening.
Speaker 11: Good night you too, good night, thank you.