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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder the most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about him. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 5: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 5: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 5: journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 6: Good Evening. A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of
Speaker 6: the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of US crime.
Speaker 6: A nineteenth century female serial killer whose victims included three
Speaker 6: husbands and six of her own children. A Gilded Age
Speaker 6: bluebeard who did away with as many as fifty wives
Speaker 6: throughout the country. A decorated World War One hero who
Speaker 6: orchestrated a murder that stunned jazz age America. While other
Speaker 6: infamous homicides from the same eras the Lizzie Borden slangs,
Speaker 6: for example, or the thrill killing committed by Leopold and Loeb,
Speaker 6: have entered into our cultural mythology, these four equally sensational
Speaker 6: crimes have largely faded from public memory. A quartette of
Speaker 6: gripping historical true crime narratives. Butcher's Work restores these once
Speaker 6: notorious cases to vimid, dramatic life. The book that we're
Speaker 6: featuring this evening is Butcher's work, True Crime Tales of
Speaker 6: American Murder and Madness, with my special guests, retired professor
Speaker 6: and author Harold Scheckter. Welcome back to the program, and
Speaker 6: thank you very much for this interview. Harold Scheckter, Well,
Speaker 6: thank you for inviting me. Always happy to be here.
Speaker 6: It's always a pleasure to get to talk to you.
Speaker 6: And congratulations on this recent book, Butcher's Work.
Speaker 7: Thank you.
Speaker 6: First off, tell us about the four tales that are included.
Speaker 6: What are the names of the four parts?
Speaker 7: If you don't mind, well, I'll tell you the subject.
Speaker 7: First one is a case of Anton Probes. Actually that
Speaker 7: part is called Butcher's Work, which is a title of
Speaker 7: the whole book. You know, as you said in the introduction,
Speaker 7: I mean Probes committed arguably the most horrific mass murder
Speaker 7: of the American nineteenth century. Yes, a second part, called
Speaker 7: The Poison Fiend, is about a female serial killer named
Speaker 7: Lydia Sherman. Who, as you also indicated, poison three husbands
Speaker 7: and six of her own children. The third part, which
Speaker 7: I call Lady Killer, is about this infamous Bluebeard killer
Speaker 7: of the late nineteenth century. Name well, he had went
Speaker 7: by various names, but the one that's kind of gone
Speaker 7: down in the history books is Johann Hawk. And the
Speaker 7: last case, which I call the Ragged Stranger for reasons
Speaker 7: I will go on to explain, is about a World
Speaker 7: War One hero named Carl Wanderer, who, as you also indicated,
Speaker 7: orchestrated the murder of his wife and that became this
Speaker 7: very very sensational case in Chicago in the early nineteen twenties.
Speaker 6: Let's get to you right in the forward, which is
Speaker 6: very very interesting and sets the reader to understand why
Speaker 6: you pick these four stories in particular. In December nineteen
Speaker 6: twenty seven, you're write a person named William Edward Hickman,
Speaker 6: a nineteen year old, hatched a kidnapping scheme to come
Speaker 6: up with tuition for his dream, which was seminary school. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and he went and he presented himself at the Mount
Speaker 6: Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles. Tell us what
Speaker 6: he said to the secretary, what he did was what
Speaker 6: was he there for.
Speaker 7: He was there in order to abduct the daughter of
Speaker 7: a bank president. President of a bank he once worked out,
Speaker 7: and her name was Marion Parker. And he managed to
Speaker 7: let the school administrators he was posing as someone who
Speaker 7: is going to take her. He said her father was
Speaker 7: in a car accident. Anyway, they let her go with him.
Speaker 7: He kept her captive and sent ransom notes to her father.
Speaker 7: And while he had her in captivity, he treated her
Speaker 7: very well, you know, comparatively speaking. You know, he would
Speaker 7: when she got bored, he would take her out to drives.
Speaker 7: He would buy her ice cream. Then, when the father
Speaker 7: finally agreed to meet his ransom demands, they arranged for
Speaker 7: a place to meet Hickman, who signed a lot of
Speaker 7: his letters the Fox. He liked to call himself the Fox.
Speaker 7: The arranger was that they were going to both drive
Speaker 7: up separately in cars. Father would hand over the money.
Speaker 7: Hickman would then let the little girl out of a
Speaker 7: car and drive away. So the father showed up handed
Speaker 7: Hickman the bag of money. The father could see in
Speaker 7: the back of the car or a passenger seat. I think, actually,
Speaker 7: you know, it looked, you know, his daughter, her eyes
Speaker 7: were open, But as soon as he handed the money
Speaker 7: to Hickman, Hickman lost the little girl out of the car,
Speaker 7: and it turned out that Marion. He had killed Marion,
Speaker 7: disemboweled her, cut off her limbs, and sown her eyes
Speaker 7: open to make it look as if sure alive. You know,
Speaker 7: this incredibly unspeakable crime. It's not even possible to imagine
Speaker 7: how her father would have reacted. Anyway, when Hickman was caught,
Speaker 7: he sort of boasted that he was going to be
Speaker 7: remembered even more than Leopold and Loeb, And in many
Speaker 7: ways his crime was much more horrific than Leopold and Loeb's.
Speaker 7: I mean, Leopold and Loeb, you know, it was an
Speaker 7: awful crime. Yes, they also abducted a young boy and
Speaker 7: murdered him, but again, I mean, the grotesque nature of
Speaker 7: what Hickman did really unparalleled in the annals of American crime.
Speaker 7: So it was not an unreasonable expectation that he would
Speaker 7: be remembered the way Leopold and lob were. But in
Speaker 7: fact he's been totally relegated to obscurity, whereas Leopold and
Speaker 7: Loeb and become part of cultural mythology. Movies, have been
Speaker 7: made about from Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and a movie called Compulsion,
Speaker 7: which was based on a best selling book by Meyer. Eleven.
Speaker 7: There have been a number of movies made about Leopold
Speaker 7: and Love. You know, their crime is considered to be
Speaker 7: one of the great crimes of the twentieth century. So
Speaker 7: what this illustrates to me something I've been interested in
Speaker 7: for a very long time, which is why among really
Speaker 7: I have to say, the countless numbers of horrific crimes
Speaker 7: that occur, crimes that very sensational in their own time
Speaker 7: and place that garner a lot of media attention, why
Speaker 7: they fade into obscurity, and why this infinitesimal number of
Speaker 7: other crimes, many of which are less horrific than these
Speaker 7: other crimes, become, as they say, these permanent parts of
Speaker 7: our criminal mythology. My previous book, Maniac, which is about
Speaker 7: a guy named Andrew Keiho who in nineteen twenty seven
Speaker 7: blew up the new public school in this small town
Speaker 7: of Bath, Michigan, killing care I think thirty eight children,
Speaker 7: a number of teachers. You know, this most horrific school
Speaker 7: massacre in our history that's been totally forgotten, even people
Speaker 7: who live in Michigan. Many of them have ever heard
Speaker 7: of it. So so that was, you know, my motive
Speaker 7: for resurrecting these other crimes. You know, all four crimes
Speaker 7: that I cover in the book, Butcher's work were great
Speaker 7: media sensations. You know, some were covered by the international press,
Speaker 7: and yet you know, after a very short while they
Speaker 7: were relegated to total obscurity. And you know, they're all
Speaker 7: very compelling stories. So yeah, I decided to write a
Speaker 7: book about them.
Speaker 6: You write about why this might occur, and some crimes
Speaker 6: symbolize a what you call a shadow of a given moment. Yeah,
Speaker 6: can you explain, Well, I.
Speaker 7: Mean, I think the crimes that do you know, grip
Speaker 7: of the national psyche, let's say there was I have
Speaker 7: some symbolic meaning for the time, and that reflect you know,
Speaker 7: these free floating fears and anxieties of the moment. For instance,
Speaker 7: in the case I just mentioned the Andrew Keijo case,
Speaker 7: which happened in nineteen twenty seven, you know, school massacres
Speaker 7: and suicide bombings, because that also featured in the case.
Speaker 7: You know, these weren't the kinds of crimes that Americans
Speaker 7: of the time were particularly concerned about. You know, it
Speaker 7: just seems so weird and anomalous that it didn't really
Speaker 7: strike a deep chord with the public. There was a
Speaker 7: recognition that it was a horrendous crime. I mean, it
Speaker 7: was covered in the front page of the New York Times,
Speaker 7: you know, but again, it didn't somehow embody the deepest
Speaker 7: fears and anxieties of that cultural moment, whereas Leopold and Low,
Speaker 7: for example, they to my mind, what made them such
Speaker 7: powerful symbols is that they seem to personify this great
Speaker 7: anxiety that was rife in the culture at that time.
Speaker 7: You know, this is the jazz age, you know, when
Speaker 7: this this great social revolution was going on, and there
Speaker 7: was this widespread among Middle America well among a lot
Speaker 7: of adults about what they call the flaming youth, you know,
Speaker 7: the out of control young people who are living these
Speaker 7: degenerate lives. And Leopold and Lobe seemed to be the
Speaker 7: nightmarish realization of that anxiety, you know, the same way
Speaker 7: that Charles Manson the sixties seemed like every parent's worst
Speaker 7: nightmare of sex and the blood crazed hippies come to life.
Speaker 7: So I think it has a lot to do with
Speaker 7: that's what I meant by the shadow side of the culture,
Speaker 7: you know, these dark, underlying fears, and then suddenly some
Speaker 7: crime is committed that seems to be the confirmation, you know,
Speaker 7: of all these nightmares. Yes, that becomes very significant part
Speaker 7: of the history of the moment.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about Anton Probst and in eighteen sixty three,
Speaker 6: he arrives in the port of New York along with
Speaker 6: many other people, and right at this receiving center. There's
Speaker 6: some opportunity right away as soon as he gets into
Speaker 6: the country. Tell us what happens soon as he does
Speaker 6: Anton Probe get into the country and what does he do?
Speaker 7: Well? Probes derived you know, thought height of the Civil
Speaker 7: War and when immigrants would arrive in New York City,
Speaker 7: there are all these recruiting stations that were set up
Speaker 7: right at the waterfront, and as soon as these young
Speaker 7: men would get off the boat, they would be approached
Speaker 7: by recruiting agents who would offer them a bounty, a
Speaker 7: few hundred dollars, as I remember, you know, sign up
Speaker 7: for some regiment. So that's what happened with Probes. He immediately,
Speaker 7: you know, became a soldier in the Union Army during
Speaker 7: the Civil War. But he also became what was called
Speaker 7: a bounty jumper. There were these young men who would
Speaker 7: sign up for one regiment, collect this bounty and then dessert,
Speaker 7: and then go and sign up with another regiment, collect
Speaker 7: the bounty, dessert, et cetera, et cetera. Some of them,
Speaker 7: you know, manage to make a lot of money doing that.
Speaker 7: So you know, that seems to be the case with
Speaker 7: Propes too. We don't know a whole lot about his
Speaker 7: background in Germany, but certainly from all the evidence of
Speaker 7: his life in America, he was just all he cared
Speaker 7: about was satisfying his own appetites, mostly for liquor and prostitutes.
Speaker 6: He talked about after the war ended in eighteen sixty five,
Speaker 6: and he had shot his right thumb off to avoid service.
Speaker 6: So that's sort of talked about his character. But in
Speaker 6: eighteen sixty five, he was trapping around, as you right,
Speaker 6: and he ended up at the farmstead of a person
Speaker 6: named Christopher Deering and his family. Yes, so he asked
Speaker 6: him if they're looking for any workers, and he was
Speaker 6: hired on for fifteen dollars a month at that time.
Speaker 6: Tell us how long he lasted did you say? Three weeks?
Speaker 6: He lasted what was the reason for that and what
Speaker 6: did he do afterwards?
Speaker 7: Well, he apparently Christopher Deering himself, you know, it was
Speaker 7: a very tolerant, humane individual and took pity on Probes.
Speaker 7: But Probes was a whiner and a grumbler and not
Speaker 7: really much given to hard work. And the story Probes
Speaker 7: told was he left because Deering had asked him to.
Speaker 7: He was hired as a farm hand do some work
Speaker 7: in the rain. And there's also some indication that Dearing's wife,
Speaker 7: you know, that Probes kind of creeped out Dearing's wife
Speaker 7: and she was just kind of uncomfortable having him around. Obviously,
Speaker 7: her instincts turned out to be correct, although too late.
Speaker 7: So yeah, so he was let go, and then, you know,
Speaker 7: then he bummed around for a while, but again hard
Speaker 7: to entirely trace his movements, you know. But again, Probes
Speaker 7: was the kind of person who would work at a job,
Speaker 7: blow all his money, gambling and drinking and whirring, and
Speaker 7: then go look somewhere else for another job. They were
Speaker 7: at some point he ended up back of the Deering farm,
Speaker 7: and Deering, out of what turned out to be a
Speaker 7: very misguided charity, re hired him, though at a slightly
Speaker 7: lower salary.
Speaker 6: You right that he hired him again for this ten
Speaker 6: dollars a month rather than the fifteen dollars. But the
Speaker 6: one thing that Anton Probes had noticed the first time
Speaker 6: he was there for the first three weeks of employment,
Speaker 6: he had noticed something about this Christopher Dearing that he
Speaker 6: kept in his mind and especially factored in his decision
Speaker 6: to come back the second time.
Speaker 7: As you write, well, Deering had a partner who staked
Speaker 7: him in this cattle business. And you know there were
Speaker 7: times when Deering had a significant amount of money round
Speaker 7: in order to purchase stock and so on livestock. And yeah,
Speaker 7: Probes apparently Props was under the impression, again incorrect, that
Speaker 7: Deering always had a lot of money in his house.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Now, on April seventh, you write that Christopher Deering
Speaker 6: went for his weekly three mile trip to town, but
Speaker 6: on this particular date he was also to pick up
Speaker 6: a relative at again that was arriving by boat and
Speaker 6: Elizabeth Dolan, and Probes was working with another hand there,
Speaker 6: ranch hand Cornelius Kerry or another farmhand, Corne Carrier. There
Speaker 6: was the four kids, the two employees, and Christopher Dearing
Speaker 6: and his wife. Well, anyway, the wife was left back
Speaker 6: at the farm when he picked up his relative at
Speaker 6: the boat, and then they returned to the farm. What
Speaker 6: did they realize?
Speaker 7: So, as you say, Deering went off on this weekly
Speaker 7: errand into Philadelphia. They were living in a kind of
Speaker 7: remote area called the Neck, and he was going to
Speaker 7: have some business with his partner and then pick up
Speaker 7: this relative of his who was coming for a visit.
Speaker 7: When and again he left behind his wife I guess
Speaker 7: four children, including an infant in her crib. One of
Speaker 7: the children was off visiting his grandfather. And during this
Speaker 7: young branchand who knew Probes very well. In fact, in
Speaker 7: a way that was not uncommon at the time, they
Speaker 7: shared a bed in the Deering house. Anyway, the way
Speaker 7: right the book, I then cut to the discovery shortly thereafter.
Speaker 7: I don't know if it's the next day or two
Speaker 7: days later. Some neighbors became a little suspicious, because you know,
Speaker 7: they hadn't seen any members of the family for a while.
Speaker 7: Went over to the Deering farm and they discovered Christopher Dearing,
Speaker 7: his relative, his wife, and the four children, including the infant,
Speaker 7: all slaughtered. They'd all been slaughtered with an axe, except
Speaker 7: for the infant. I think the infant had her head
Speaker 7: bashed in, although maybe that was also a the axe.
Speaker 7: But anyway, you know, this pile of mangled, slaughtered bodies, yes,
Speaker 7: that had been putting the hate in the barn. Cornelius,
Speaker 7: the young Cornelius was missing, and it became you know,
Speaker 7: and the only one who was not around was Anton
Speaker 7: Probes Cornelius would subsequently be Cornelius's body. He had also
Speaker 7: been axe murdered, was subsequently found in a haystack some
Speaker 7: distance from the house. So again this is this horrific
Speaker 7: mass murder of the complete extermination of this entire family
Speaker 7: except for the one kid who was lucky enough to
Speaker 7: be away visiting his grandfather. Plus this adolescent I think
Speaker 7: Cornelius was still in his change as our member or
Speaker 7: in any case, you know, very very young, maybe his
Speaker 7: early twenties. So this horrific mass slaughter, and you know,
Speaker 7: in Probes and Probes was gone, and of course immediately
Speaker 7: led to the search for Probes. He had again, this
Speaker 7: is a number of days later, he had enough of
Speaker 7: a head start the police and the citizens of Philadelphia,
Speaker 7: you know, figured he'd really put a lot of distance
Speaker 7: between himself and this horrific crime even returned to Germany,
Speaker 7: you know, but Probes being this dull minded individual again
Speaker 7: who was unable, you know, to think beyond his next
Speaker 7: drink and his next night with a prostitute, had just
Speaker 7: gone back to Philadelphia and was living in a boarding
Speaker 7: house and lived in a tavern for a while, and
Speaker 7: he was recognized and arrested in short order, you right.
Speaker 6: One of the more fascinating parts or aspects of the
Speaker 6: story is that there was an autopsy set up to
Speaker 6: be conducted, and there was a mob of people really
Speaker 6: wanting to see the victims, and they gather outside this building.
Speaker 6: So very very strange, you.
Speaker 7: Know, not really strange for better or worse. That's a
Speaker 7: very very common occurrence when there are sensational crimes. You know.
Speaker 7: One of the cases I wrote about before, I think
Speaker 7: you and I had spoken about it was this female
Speaker 7: serial murderer in Indiana named Bell Gunnis, Yes, who operated
Speaker 7: what came to be called this murder farm. She would
Speaker 7: lure she was Norwegian, and she would after, you know,
Speaker 7: killing a number of husbands for the insurance money. She
Speaker 7: was living alone in this farm, and she would place
Speaker 7: classified advertisements in these Scandinavian language newspapers and lure these men,
Speaker 7: lonely men bachelor to her farm with the promise of
Speaker 7: marrying them and having them become part owners of the farm.
Speaker 7: And then she would murder them and rob them and
Speaker 7: cut up their bodies and bury them in her yard.
Speaker 7: And when her crimes were discovered and they dug up
Speaker 7: all these dismembered body parts, they stuck for a while,
Speaker 7: you know, they stuck the body parts in an outbuilding
Speaker 7: for a while. And the Sunday, the weekend after these
Speaker 7: cars were discovered, thousands of people showed up at her farm.
Speaker 7: They're actually postcards you can buy on eBay showing these
Speaker 7: long lines of people, men, women, children standing outside this outbuilding,
Speaker 7: you know, waiting to file in and get a look
Speaker 7: at these horrible remains. It looks like they're online for
Speaker 7: a Disneyland ride or something.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 7: I mean, there are a lot, a lot of examples
Speaker 7: of that. You know, people are just drawn by this
Speaker 7: very morbid curiosity to these scenes, and they often want
Speaker 7: to see you know, back I'm sure you know, back
Speaker 7: in the Old West, when they would kill an outlaw,
Speaker 7: this was in the clint would move the unforgiven, you know,
Speaker 7: they would put the outlaws corpse on display, you know,
Speaker 7: for people to look at.
Speaker 6: And so.
Speaker 7: That was the kind of carnivalesque atmosphere where you had
Speaker 7: all these people flocking to the crime scene and also
Speaker 7: to come away with these ghoulish souvenirs. You know, people
Speaker 7: would come away with like bloodcake, pieces of the hay.
Speaker 7: There have been crimes, you know, where these morbid sightseers
Speaker 7: taken a part of house where a crime occurred.
Speaker 6: You know. So the souvenir, yes, you read about him
Speaker 6: finally being arrested with some keen police work in terms
Speaker 6: of spotting a suspicious character outside while they were talking,
Speaker 6: and so they finally have them. And of course he
Speaker 6: says that he killed the farm hand, but he didn't
Speaker 6: kill the rest them, and they said who did, and
Speaker 6: he came up with a name, Jacob Younger. So he
Speaker 6: gave a description of this Jacob Younger. And this mob,
Speaker 6: this very adamant mob, actually might have tried to grab
Speaker 6: the wrong person in their pursuit for this suspect. But
Speaker 6: within a few days the police believed that there really
Speaker 6: isn't any accomplice. They realize this guy's a congenital liars,
Speaker 6: you right, and they are just set to indict him
Speaker 6: and take him to trial. And what you write is
Speaker 6: that once he realizes the mobs that are there for him,
Speaker 6: again very much like a psychopathic mindset, he is enjoying
Speaker 6: himself and joined the limelight.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, yeah, he had his photograph taken and you know,
Speaker 7: which was then made up into these cabinet cards and
Speaker 7: sold as souvenirs. But yeah, I mean again, Probes is
Speaker 7: not unique in claiming that there was another accomplice involved
Speaker 7: who really did the dirty work. But one of the
Speaker 7: reasons authorities doubted him was they just partly couldn't believe,
Speaker 7: you know, that there would be two human beings who
Speaker 7: could commit such an incredible atrocity. Right, So he was,
Speaker 7: you know, tried, very sensational trial. There are all these
Speaker 7: you know, we tend to think of true crime as
Speaker 7: a kind of recent phenomenon, but crime publications really go
Speaker 7: back almost to the invention of the printing press, and
Speaker 7: back in Probe's time. You know, they would churn out
Speaker 7: these hack writers, you know, would churn out these crime pamphlets,
Speaker 7: many of them actually, I mean I own one on Probes,
Speaker 7: which is very useful to me in my writing. You know,
Speaker 7: sometimes there are complete transcripts of the trials. So Probes
Speaker 7: has tried, convicted, and finally when he was in prison
Speaker 7: and awaiting execution, you know, he decided to confess. And
Speaker 7: you know, his confession wasn't incredibly shocking. I mean, what
Speaker 7: he said was that he decided to rob Deering, but
Speaker 7: then you didn't want to leave any witnesses. Basically what
Speaker 7: he did was when Deering was off, first he killed
Speaker 7: Cornelius and shoved his corpse in a haystaff. Then he
Speaker 7: went back to the house and he would call each
Speaker 7: member of the family one by one into the barn
Speaker 7: under some pretext, and as soon as they entered, he
Speaker 7: would bring them with an axe by the body.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 7: Then he'd go and you know tell he'd kill them,
Speaker 7: kill the mother. I think he killed the mother first,
Speaker 7: telling her that there was some trouble with a caf
Speaker 7: or something in the barn. And then he would go
Speaker 7: and get a kid and said, hey, your mother wants
Speaker 7: to see you. Kid would go into the barn, Propes
Speaker 7: would murder the kid, shove the body under the hay
Speaker 7: you know, he did this repeatedly. Then when Deering and
Speaker 7: his his cousin came back ropes Learnd deering into the
Speaker 7: barn and killed him, and then he killed the cousin.
Speaker 7: It was just this incredibly, incredibly horrific, methodical slaughter of
Speaker 7: this family, one at a time. So his account of
Speaker 7: the murders, which he delivered this completely unemotional, matter of
Speaker 7: fact way, that apparently made it even more chilling to
Speaker 7: hear by prrogators. When I researched and wrote the book,
Speaker 7: I came to believe that it was arguably the most
Speaker 7: monstrous mass murder of the American nineteenth century.
Speaker 6: Yes, absolutely, let's use this as an opportunity, Harold, to
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Speaker 6: In December eighteen seventy four, the Detroit Free Press reported
Speaker 6: on the string of strange medical cases that had recently
Speaker 6: appeared in different parts of the state illnesses and afflictions.
Speaker 6: The physicians were called in to examine these patients, and
Speaker 6: they all had offered different diagnoses, including spinal fever and
Speaker 6: rheumatism of the heart. The cause, the true cause, you
Speaker 6: write was the sickness was the wallpaper and the pigment
Speaker 6: used to produce the color contained a large amount of arsenic.
Speaker 6: And you write about arsenic being a common ingredient and
Speaker 6: amazing array of articles. He was even bizarrely popular as
Speaker 6: a Victorian beauty product and gained a reputation as a
Speaker 6: cosmetic wonder drug. But it was also used to kill rats.
Speaker 6: And for a penny, you write that you could kill
Speaker 6: buy enough poison arsenic poison to kill fifty people. Let's
Speaker 6: talk about Lydia Sherman born Lydia Danberry and her experiences
Speaker 6: with arsenic.
Speaker 7: Well, let me begin by saying that my interest in
Speaker 7: Lydia Sherman began number of years ago, actually when I
Speaker 7: was writing a book about another notorious female poisoner named
Speaker 7: Jane Toppen. And the reason I was drawn to that
Speaker 7: case was because I had become very interested in the
Speaker 7: whole question of female serial murder. Because the time I
Speaker 7: was writing this, he received wisdom was there was no
Speaker 7: such thing as a woman serial killer. Aileen Warnos, you know,
Speaker 7: supposedly was the first female serial killer, although in many
Speaker 7: ways she didn't even really fit in my mind, the
Speaker 7: profile of what a serial killer is. But anyway, what
Speaker 7: I came to discover is, you know that there were many,
Speaker 7: many women serial killers. It's just that they don't commit
Speaker 7: their crimes in the same way that male serial killers do.
Speaker 7: This kind of a gender difference.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 7: In my book, I argue that as a famous culture
Speaker 7: critical Podlew says, there's no female Jack the Ripper, which
Speaker 7: is true, but that doesn't mean there are no female
Speaker 7: serial killers. It just means that kind of sexual mutile
Speaker 7: relation murder is not the kind of serial murder the
Speaker 7: female serial killers engage in, right, you know, that is
Speaker 7: a strictly male phenomenon, and I think it correlates, you know,
Speaker 7: since I think it correlates in general male sexual behavior women.
Speaker 7: There have been many female serial killers. Again, back in
Speaker 7: the nineteenth century, you know, their preferred method was to
Speaker 7: poison their victims. And what I argued my book is
Speaker 7: that one could argue that these female poisoners were even
Speaker 7: more sadistic than somebody like Jack the Ripper. Yes, because
Speaker 7: Jack the Ripper killed his victims very swiftly. All of
Speaker 7: the atrocities he perpetrated on their bodies were done post mortem,
Speaker 7: you know, so you know, he was obviously doing these
Speaker 7: appalling things, but he was giving them to corpses. He
Speaker 7: wasn't belonging their deaths, whereas with these female poisoners, you know,
Speaker 7: they will sometimes subject subject their victims to days or
Speaker 7: even weeks, you know, the slow, agonizing death before they
Speaker 7: put them to death. And the other thing about female
Speaker 7: serial killers, which again makes them arguably even scarier than men,
Speaker 7: is that their victims tend to be very close family members.
Speaker 7: You know, They're not into killing strangers the way male
Speaker 7: serial killers tend to be. Right, they murder husbands, they
Speaker 7: murder siblings, they murder children. So yeah, so Jane Topp,
Speaker 7: And so there were a number of these very sensational
Speaker 7: cases back in the late nineteenth century of what the
Speaker 7: press would call these American borges, referring back to you know,
Speaker 7: the legendary Renaissance poison Lucretia Borger. You know, so Lydia
Speaker 7: Sherman was typical of her breed. She was a woman
Speaker 7: who the course of her adult life, you know, at
Speaker 7: first she was married. She was married at first at
Speaker 7: a young age. Who guy named Edward Struck who was
Speaker 7: and became a New York City policeman, but then was
Speaker 7: fired in disgrace and sank into you know, this very
Speaker 7: very deep clinical depression, you know, to a point where
Speaker 7: he was just completely bedridden really, and she decided, if
Speaker 7: you want to take care of him anymore, So he
Speaker 7: became her first victim. Every time Lydia seemed to face
Speaker 7: some sort of you know, when things became too hard
Speaker 7: for her. You know, she was left with all these kids.
Speaker 7: I think there were six children, maybe remember well whatever
Speaker 7: I mean, she ended up killing all her kids, yes,
Speaker 7: you know, because it was just too hard for her
Speaker 7: to take care of her kids, absolutely, you know, one
Speaker 7: by one. You know, as long as some of the
Speaker 7: older ones were capable of working and bringing some money,
Speaker 7: you know, they were safe. But as soon as anything happened,
Speaker 7: if one of them fell ill, you know, one of
Speaker 7: them stopped being able to pull his own fight or
Speaker 7: her financial weight, or if one of the little ones
Speaker 7: you know, became ill and needed too much attention, she
Speaker 7: would start feeding the marsnick and again they would all
Speaker 7: suffer these agonizing death I mean One of the things
Speaker 7: that I learned from writing these books is that we're
Speaker 7: very lucky, all of us, to be alive now in
Speaker 7: terms of medicines, because medicine was in such a primitive
Speaker 7: state then a all of these toxins you know, or
Speaker 7: I mean arsenic was just sold openly. You know again
Speaker 7: if you want to, I mean, a lot of these poisoners,
Speaker 7: as you said, these field coises, you know, just go
Speaker 7: to the pharmacy and you know, say they need a
Speaker 7: bunch of arsenic to kill their raths or something. But
Speaker 7: it wasn't just that. It was that, you know, medications,
Speaker 7: you know, would contain these poisonous substances. Strict nine was
Speaker 7: an ingredient some medications. You read these early medical manuals
Speaker 7: and medical manuals from back then. You know, it's like
Speaker 7: if your kid has a whipping cough, just give them
Speaker 7: a tea spoon of form aldhyde, you know, stuff like that.
Speaker 7: And also, you know, the doctors just constantly misdiagnosed these things.
Speaker 7: You know, some young woman would suddenly be stricken and
Speaker 7: die and they would diagnose it is nearthritis or you know,
Speaker 7: malaria or whatever. So these women could get away with
Speaker 7: committing these murders for a very long time. As Jane,
Speaker 7: you know, she then got married to another guy, an
Speaker 7: older man named Herlbert. She ended up murdering him when
Speaker 7: he became a little incapacitated. She murdered her third husband,
Speaker 7: whose name was Sherman, and a couple of his kids.
Speaker 7: So I can't remember her her total number. Maybe you'd.
Speaker 6: Be husband's seven children, they say, or.
Speaker 7: You know, eventually, what happens in these or when you
Speaker 7: look back these cases is finally somebody gets suspicious, relative
Speaker 7: or a friend you know, will notice, Hey, this, you know,
Speaker 7: my sister was really healthy yesterday and suddenly today she
Speaker 7: looks like she had died, you know, my brother in
Speaker 7: law whatever, you know. And then they did have tests
Speaker 7: that would you know, could determine the presence of arsenic in.
Speaker 7: So what happened to Jane and you know, ended up
Speaker 7: happening to a lot of these female poisons at the time.
Speaker 7: You know, they just they can't stop doing it, you know,
Speaker 7: to some extent. There's often a mercenary component, you know,
Speaker 7: because they're collecting on insurance policies. But some of these
Speaker 7: women and Lydia included, I mean, you know, they reach
Speaker 7: a point after a while where they really don't need
Speaker 7: the money. You know, they've just become addicted to murder
Speaker 7: and are obviously deriving, you know, some other satisfaction from
Speaker 7: not only killing their closest relatives, but from watching them suffer.
Speaker 7: So that that sadistic component is what they share with
Speaker 7: male serial killers. And again, I mean there's some of
Speaker 7: the crimes they commit are worse than somebody like Jack
Speaker 7: the Ripper, you know, because again you're sitting at the bedside,
Speaker 7: you know, of one of your children, you know, watching
Speaker 7: them undergo these agonies for days, you know, before before
Speaker 7: you find administer a lethal dose and put them out
Speaker 7: of their misery. Anyway, So yeah, so that was Lydia Sherman.
Speaker 7: She ended up try to arrest and she actually managed
Speaker 7: to escape at one point, but was promptly rearrested and
Speaker 7: spent the rest of her life incarcerated.
Speaker 6: What's fascinating is that not only does she dup these doctors.
Speaker 6: You say that the state of medicine was primitive, but
Speaker 6: each time she conned all of these people by playing,
Speaker 6: as you write, the real attentive and concerned person, tending
Speaker 6: to her husband, tending to the children, tending to others.
Speaker 6: But she d one of these doctors so badly that
Speaker 6: he recommended she be hired as a nurse, and she
Speaker 6: became a professional nurse for a short period of time,
Speaker 6: didn't she incredible?
Speaker 7: One of those ironies. Yes, she became a healthcare worker again.
Speaker 7: You know, like so many psychopaths. I mean, it's one
Speaker 7: of the defining characteristics of these kinds of psychopaths is
Speaker 7: you know that they're very, very very skilled at feigning
Speaker 7: you know, normal human behavior. You know, there's a famous
Speaker 7: psychiatrist named Coleckley, Harvey Kleckley. You know, coin this phrase
Speaker 7: the mask of sanity. So Jane put on this very
Speaker 7: very convincing mask. But again, you know, that's exactly what
Speaker 7: enables serial murderers to get away with their crimes for
Speaker 7: so long, because they seem so normal that nobody can
Speaker 7: detect the malevolence. You know, that's really underneath all that.
Speaker 6: In this story as well, there is this startling confession.
Speaker 6: She says she has a religious conversion and decides to
Speaker 6: do again another detailed confession, and she delivers, doesn't she.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I mean those crime pamphlets you can actually
Speaker 7: nowadays find them online. I'm pretty sure. The Lydia Sherman
Speaker 7: one is available online for any of their interested listeners.
Speaker 7: And you know, they're very, very fascinating documents. Again, invaluable
Speaker 7: help to someone like me because they often they'll have
Speaker 7: pretty accurate biographies life stories of the killers, and then
Speaker 7: they'll have very detailed transcripts of the trials and in
Speaker 7: many cases you know, the perpetrator's confessions. Plus some of
Speaker 7: them are illustrated interesting ways. But again, yeah, these those
Speaker 7: are the instant true crime books of the time, you know,
Speaker 7: equivalent to the kinds of paperback true crime books that
Speaker 7: at least going back to the beginning of paperback book
Speaker 7: publishing I guess in the forties and fifties you know,
Speaker 7: have always been rushed out on the heels of sensational current.
Speaker 6: Let's just says as an opportunity to stop for a
Speaker 6: second for these messages.
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Speaker 6: Now let's talk about part three and what you call
Speaker 6: Lady Killer. And this is a summer of eighteen ninety five.
Speaker 6: The nation is shocked by reports of a horrific discovery
Speaker 6: in Chicago, and of course we're talking about HH Holmes
Speaker 6: and the Castle of Horrors. But in that time, when
Speaker 6: the arrested Holmes, he tried to cast the blame on
Speaker 6: some of his most heinous crimes on an accomplice named
Speaker 6: Edward Hatch, saying he was the henchman, and there was
Speaker 6: a concerted efforts you write to locate the man. He
Speaker 6: was also known as Johann Hawk, and they termed him
Speaker 6: the new HH Holmes. So tell us a little bit
Speaker 6: about Johann Hawk and his behavior.
Speaker 7: A hawk was a type of serial murder known as
Speaker 7: a blue beard, named after the famous fairy tale by
Speaker 7: the French writer Cal's Pirot, appeared in Perrot's collection of
Speaker 7: what he called Mother Goose Stories. Blue In the fairy
Speaker 7: tells this aristocrat with the blue beard, who, because of
Speaker 7: his wealth, managers to marry a string of young women
Speaker 7: and the story he brings them to his castle. Then
Speaker 7: he says he has to go in a trip. He
Speaker 7: leaves them with a key ring, says they could go
Speaker 7: to anywhere in the castle they want to, except for
Speaker 7: this one forbidden room. And naturally, you know, the women
Speaker 7: go into the room and what they discover there are
Speaker 7: the dismembered corpses of all his previous wives. And then
Speaker 7: when he returns and discovers they disobeyed him, you know,
Speaker 7: they meet the same fate. So the term bluebeard has
Speaker 7: come to be applied. Well, blue beard is, you know,
Speaker 7: is the male equivalent of a killer like Lydia Sherman right,
Speaker 7: bluebeard killers. The blue beard serial murder refers to a
Speaker 7: man who murders a succession of wives, marries a succession
Speaker 7: of wives, and murderism often for a mercenary game. There's
Speaker 7: been a number of very very sensational Bluebeard killers. There
Speaker 7: was at one in France name Henri land Drew. You know,
Speaker 7: there've been others in America. Ach was an especially prolific
Speaker 7: specimen who would He was a German immigrant, went by
Speaker 7: various aliases, and he spent his career really going around
Speaker 7: the country He was not a particularly good looking man,
Speaker 7: but he talked a good line. He would prey on
Speaker 7: primarily these German widows, who he would determine before marrying
Speaker 7: them had a certain amount of money in the bank,
Speaker 7: and he would wed them and within you know, very
Speaker 7: short time the wedding, managed to get hold of their
Speaker 7: money by various means. You know, many of them he
Speaker 7: just he would just rob and disappear. But in a
Speaker 7: number of cases, and it's not exactly known how many
Speaker 7: he would, he would actually murder the women again by
Speaker 7: administering poison to them, and you know, when they fell ill,
Speaker 7: he would like lydia sharan, you know, minister to them
Speaker 7: lovingly and make sure they always took their medicine, which
Speaker 7: he also made sure nobody else ever gave them but him,
Speaker 7: because there was always spiked with poison. And again, he
Speaker 7: committed these crimes all over the country under all kinds
Speaker 7: of different names. So he got away with it for
Speaker 7: a long time until he was finally tracked down. There
Speaker 7: was a reverend in I guess it was West Virginia
Speaker 7: who became very suspicious of him after one of his
Speaker 7: parishioners who had just gotten married to Hawk and it
Speaker 7: had been this healthy woman excuse me. He suddenly fell
Speaker 7: fellow and died. And it was largely through his efforts,
Speaker 7: unrelenting efforts, that Hawk was finally identified and caught and
Speaker 7: tried for his crimes, you know, and he also very
Speaker 7: much enjoyed the limelight that he achieved. But yeah, he's
Speaker 7: one of the most infamous Bluebeard killers in our history.
Speaker 7: By the way, what you again by talking about where
Speaker 7: Holmes blamed this accomplice name Hatch again very much the
Speaker 7: way Probes blamed this imaginary accomplice. But there were some
Speaker 7: theories that Hawk was Hatch because Hawk was in Chicago
Speaker 7: at the time that Holmes was operating there, and of
Speaker 7: course Holmes himself was something of a Bluebeard killer. But
Speaker 7: there's no evidence. I mean, well, you know, Hatch didn't
Speaker 7: even exist. He was just an imaginary scapegoat for Home.
Speaker 6: You do write that there was someone that said that
Speaker 6: he had spoke about spending an evening or some time
Speaker 6: at this hotel of HH Holmes.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but again, I mean there's so much, I mean,
Speaker 7: so much was certain about Homes at the time. You know,
Speaker 7: there's complete nations again talk about shamelessness. You know, people
Speaker 7: like Hurst, people like Pulletzer, the great masters of yellow
Speaker 7: journalism back then. You really have to take almost everything
Speaker 7: that appears in their papers with a large rain of salt.
Speaker 6: You do, right though, though, that hatch attracted three thousand people,
Speaker 6: mostly women, young women, and this you write, this morbid
Speaker 6: hungry mob was awaiting his arrival at both police stations.
Speaker 6: So these people wanted to get a glimpse of this
Speaker 6: what they considered a celebrity. And you continue and write
Speaker 6: very much paralleling what we think is modern behavior on
Speaker 6: behalf of true crime fans, women interested in murderers as celebrities.
Speaker 6: That he received all of these valentines and handkerchief waiving
Speaker 6: women in Belleville, Ohio when he was on the train,
Speaker 6: so very much highly anticipated. He became a celebrity at
Speaker 6: that time.
Speaker 7: Well, that's very typical, you know, of these syracle is't
Speaker 7: that Almost every case I've written about where there's been
Speaker 7: a male serial killer, whatever trial, most of the spectators
Speaker 7: who turn out are women. And I'm sure you're aware
Speaker 7: of the whole phenomenon of serial killer groups and so on.
Speaker 7: You know, no matter how horrific and repulse of you know,
Speaker 7: have some of these serial killers who could never get
Speaker 7: a date, and then as soon as they are revealed
Speaker 7: as serial murderers to get all these marriage proposals. Yes,
Speaker 7: it's incredible. Sometimes do get married. So yeah, I mean
Speaker 7: there's nothing unusual about that. We will leave it up
Speaker 7: to the psychiatrist to decide what that's all about, but
Speaker 7: have my own theories. But anyways, so yeah, that's very
Speaker 7: very typical.
Speaker 6: Absolutely. I want to thank you very much Harold Checkter
Speaker 6: for coming on and talking about your latest butcher's work,
Speaker 6: True Crime Tales of American Murder and Madness. Thank you
Speaker 6: so much for this interview, and for people that want
Speaker 6: to take a look, they could go to Amazon and
Speaker 6: see all the rest of your work, which is numerous books.
Speaker 6: I don't even know how many by now, but again,
Speaker 6: they could go to Amazon and see your latest butcher's work,
Speaker 6: True Crime Tales of American Murder and Madness. Thank you
Speaker 6: so much for this interview, Harold Scheckter. You have a
Speaker 6: great evening.
Speaker 7: Thank you, good night, Thank you Andrew too, Thank you