19th Century Serial Killers

The term serial killer wasn't common until the 1970s, and serial killings reached a peak in the last three decades of the 20th century. This has led to a misunderstanding of the history of serial killers. As today, many put blame on urbanization or moral failings of Western society or liberal upbringing. Conservative upbringing. Blame has been thrown around every direction you can imagine. But the truth is that humans haven't changed. Our psychological makeup didn't change in the 20th century.

Psychosis in mental illness isn't new. We just understand it a little bit better. And we have access to records and mass media. That's why serial killers are not an invention of the 20th century. Evil isn't new. There have always been killers lurking in the shadows. On this episode, we look at some notorious serial murders of the 19th century and ask, Is there anything we can continue to learn from these terrible cases? This is a study of strange. Yeah, let's do it. Thanks for having me.

Of course. So welcome to the show, everyone. I'm Michael May. And joining me is my my friend Bridget Weitzel and Bridget. Thank you, first of all, for for coming on the show. And I've wanted to have you're one of the people where I'm like, okay, if I do a show like this, I got to have Bridget on. It's nice. Why is that, Michael? Well, it's because I know that you have an interest in kind of, like, true crime stuff, and. Yeah, yeah.

And we've we haven't talked about it a lot over the years, but I definitely know that that is true. But what yeah. What are you interested in in terms of like the true crime type stories or programs or shows or documentaries. Yeah. What fascinates you about that genre of content? I think there's two aspects to it that get me. The first is what in the world can make somebody go off the rails so hard, right?

Like, yeah, it's just such a foreign concept to me to be that upset or to just be that dark that you do some of the things that people do. But then the other aspect of it that I find super interesting, because I'm a documentary person, I read the true crime nonfiction books and I watch the documentaries. And the other aspect is the detective work, right? How do they get caught? Where where's the science behind this?

You know, the stories that there's so many layers, the stories that people tell to protect the bad guys versus, you know, who's going to give them up. And the way that police and detectives and forensic scientists, the way that their brains have to work to put these bizarre bits and pieces of non logical things together is also fascinating. Yeah, it's all fascinating.

And people, because there are some people that kind of deride fans of true crime, they think we're all like, we're terrible people that are interested in these dark, likable things. And it's like, no, there is there is a fascination with the for me anyway, that the psychological element of what would make somebody do these type of things but there's also the mystery fan in me just loves the detective work like how are people solving these things? So what you said is actually perfect for today.

So I'm even more excited now to have you on because this episode is going to be a little different. I'm going to do it. This is like a Cliff Notes version of Love. It, right? Okay. So it's six different serial killer cases, all from the 1800s. Okay. And and part of that is just a lot of the kind of true crime I get more interested in is older stuff because I'm always like, Oh, that happened back then. But how did how did they even go about investigating that? It just intrigues me.

And the other thing that was like a big inspiration for this show specifically is I do like the stories that kind of get overlooked. There are popular, popular, true crime stories that get told over and over and over and over again. And look, that's fine because I still consume all those things do. But it's like there are there are these kind of stories that get overlooked. So today, yeah, we're looking at six different serial killer cases from the 1800s. Three of them have been solved.

Three of them have not. So it's a nice comparison to sayings. And yeah, so I think they'll hit all the things that you like in in true crime. And you may have even heard of some of these. They're not all completely like unknown stories they are, or they're just not as popular as other ones. And also this kind of came about because I am researching an episode about the bloody benders. Do you know who they are? No. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's a good present. It totally, totally is a punk band name.

They were in 1862, 72. I forget the year right now, but they're a family or they may not have actually been blood related, but they call them a family. They lived in a cabin in Kansas and they would take in travelers who would, you know, stay the night or get food. And essentially someone in the family would sneak up behind them, hit them on the head, steal their stuff, kill them, and they escaped. And and it is there's been documentaries.

I think there's even been like scripted movies, you know, where people try to tell the story of these this crazy family. But yeah, I'm researching that that episode, and it's going to take me a while because there's a lot to go into. But I kept coming across these other stories of serial killers in the 1800s. I was like, Oh, I just want to I just want to share these. Even if it is a CliffsNotes version. That's awesome. Yeah, that is what we're doing today.

So before we dove in real quick, if everybody's enjoying the show, please make sure to subscribe, rate and review. And also on Patreon, I have a couple of new stuff coming out in December. It's now it's the week of Thanksgiving right now. So in a week or two, there will be some some new content on Patriots. And please, everybody, check that out through our website. A study of strange com. Yeah. All right. Where am I? In my will is now Bridget. I've already started taking notes, Mikey.

I've already written down bloody benders. I need to. Know. Oh, nice. Oh, you'll love it. It is. It is very fascinating. Yeah, I'll just dove in. I have all these other little, like, things that I wrote down in my notes of, like, a mention how Jack the Ripper is famous. But like, all these other people that are just as crazy aren't. But that's the gist of it. So I can just skip over that. Jack the Ripper, by the way, will come up like three or four times today because a couple of. The he's not.

You can't not in the 19th century. And there's people we love to tell stories, people. So we a lot of people connect serial killers from back then and they just assume, oh, that's Jack the Ripper to those killings over there. That's also Jack the Ripper. So I have a number of people today. They're like, there are theories that some of these folks are also Jack the Ripper. I do not believe that. But we'll get to that when I get there.

Awesome. Yeah. So I'm going to start with the solved cases and these are not in any chronological order. Okay. It's just in the order I wrote them down. And so we're going to start with the Kelly family and the Kelly family. This took place in 1887. And what when you read about it, people always call it Kansas. And this is very similar to the bloody Bender story as well. In fact, I think the Kelly family learned about the bloody benders and copied them. Oh, that is my own personal theory.

So it's full of serial killing school. A serial killing. So the Kelly family's 1887, when you always read it and they always say Kansas and it's actually not true. This is, you know, pre pre a lot of states out west. And it was an area called No Man's Land. They may still call it that, but it's what today is the Oklahoma Panhandle. And back then there was talk of it becoming part of Kansas. But at the time it was just public land. It was just sort of unnamed, no man's land like they called it.

And this family, they moved in from Pennsylvania, or so they say. And everybody in this area of the country at that time, there's a lot of the homesteaders, there's a lot of people, even when there wasn't an area where people could homestead, they would still cultivate the land, build something in hopes that one day the government would be like, okay, that's yours. And so you have a lot of people trying to land, grab and also people moving west.

So after this is after the Civil War, a lot of people are migrating west and you have to go through Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma. You have to go that way. So there's a lot of travelers and in a way, it's kind of like the perfect place for serial killers because track is good. Yeah. Travelers, they need help. No one knows they're there. No one has cell phones. So, you know, you can't contact anybody. And people would go missing.

Lots of people would go missing all the time from probably a lot of times just natural reasons. They get lost, you know, fall ill and, you know, long travels or killed from Native Americans like all this kind of stuff was very real. And so anyway, the Catholic Kelly family moved to this area and it was near a town called Oak City. And this is about 25 miles away from present day Beaver, Oklahoma. The family had four people in it. There was William Kelly, sort of the patriarch of the family.

He was around 55. He had his wife, Kate, son, Bill, sometimes called Billy, who was around 20, and their daughter Kate, who is 18. I've also read 19 and sometimes 17. So somewhere around that age. Yeah. And the family put down roots. They built like a little cabin. And this, all this, their whole story, by the way, happens in like the last 3 to 4 months of 1887 and happens very quickly.

So they build this cabin, they try to get into the cattle business, but then they focus more on turning their cabin into a bit of like a tavern so travelers could get a place to eat, stay the night again. A lot of people are moving west, so it's nice to be able to offer that, make some money. It's very smart, good, good business people.

Definitely. However, by like December ish, a lot of locals and Oak City and the surrounding area start to notice that, wait, there's a lot of people that are going missing, like a lot more than normal. They don't suspect the Kelley family of anything, by the way. They're totally fine with the Kelley family. Until one day a guy named Steve Gregg came by the property. He was a traveler. He had stayed there before and gotten some warm food and, you know, may have even stayed the night.

So he was going to stop in again. And when he showed up, no one was there. The Kelley family was gone. And he kind of stumbled across something terrible. Oh, and we're going to jump right into our first scene. Bridgette So yeah, yeah. Okay. So, yeah, it's it's all one document I sent you, so it's just the first page. And what I'll do is I'll read. There's not a lot of dialog in this, so I'm going to read like all the description e type stuff.

So you're going to be Gregg T Gregg and yeah, let's, let's do it. It'll be a it's a short scene. It's going to go pretty quick. All right. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. All right. So this is the Kelley family cabin during the day, and a man approaches the cabin on horseback. It's cold and the wind howls across the small valley. And the man, as t Greg holds his jacket tightly closed as he nears the Kelley home. There we go. I can talk. He heads off.

He hops off of his horse and looks around the property and it's quiet. No one is working. No sounds are coming from the barn. No cooking or talking, coming from inside the cabin. Hello, Mrs. Kelley. He gets no answer. Greg hitches his horse to a post near the barn and walks towards the cabin. He knocks on the door and it swings open with a loud creak. He peeks inside. But it's dark. Too dark. It's Mr. Greg, hoping to catch a warm meal. Nothing. Just the sounds of the wind.

And then Greg hit gets hit with a strong, terrible smell. Oh, Lord. He covers his face and stammers back away from the door. But Greg knows all too well what that smell must mean. Yeah. Don't. And so what's really interesting is I've been researching all these murder mysteries in serial killers of the 19th century. Death was so common back then, especially in the West. Like people are just surrounded by death. People in their family die all the time. Also, a lot of veterans of the Civil War.

And so every book I'm reading and like article, a little thing I read about all these different stories. Whenever there's the smell of death, people are just like, No, there's the smell of death. Just like. Another one. They just know it so well. So, yeah. So this city, Greg, I just knew immediately there's death. Like there's dead. There's a dead body somewhere. So what he does is he actually starts looking through the cabin and it's got to be dark and creepy and obviously smells bad.

He found a little door that opens that goes into like a cellar. He goes into the cellar and he. Never go down to the never, never. In the cellar. And he finds what he thinks are like three bodies so wisely, because there is no there's no CSI back then. People don't know the right way to behave around crime scenes, but wisely, he just immediately leaves. He doesn't touch anything. It is a try to, you know, save anything. He just goes and he gets authorities.

They rain. They round up like a search party. They go to the Kelly cabin and there's more bodies besides just the three in the basement, in the barn, they basically look wherever there's loose dirt and they stick sticks down in it to see if something's in there. And so, yeah, all around the barn and the property, they find what is estimated to be 11 total people and it could. Be more it's a lot. Yeah and and again I'm going to assume if they find 11 there's probably some more like.

There's no way they got them here. Yes. And so from what I've read, it's normally said that they could only identify one body. But I did find a few sources that say that I identified three. One of them is a guy named Jim Coven, who was a cattleman from Texas, J.T. Taylor, who was a salesman from Chicago, and then another businessman from Texas, a guy named Johnson. They did find a rusty ax, which may have had some, like, human flesh and blood on it. So they suspect that that was the usual.

Yeah, that's it's definitely a good guess for a murder weapon and word spread fast. And they. Said that. Yeah. So again, no, no Twitter or phones but still like it spreads fast. And so the town nearby, Oak Creek owner excuse me, in town Beaver, Oklahoma, word gets to the people that are searching for the Kelleys now that people in Beaver were like, Oh, the Kellys. Well, they just they just passed through here like two days ago.

So they they caught a whiff of the Kelly family as a matter speaking, and they had that direction. And they end up because it's the old West days, they get a posse together and the posse is going to go hunt down the Kellys. And sure enough, they they keep on up like they're able to track them. And they found evidence of them at Palo Duro Creek in Texas, which you can actually it's still there. Powder Creek, still the same name still around you can go visit and yeah, they gave trail chase.

They ended up finding the family out and out in the wild and they actually chased them for like two or 3 hours, like on a horses, carriages going after them. So you can imagine the hoots and hollers and guns shooting in the air and everything else. It probably is. Going to rain. Kate fell off her horse during the chase and actually, like broke her back. And they eventually catch up and they catch the son. Billy and the daughter kept. And William, the patriarch, skedaddled away, of course.

And they start interrogating Billy and Kit and essentially Kid is like, she's playing the nurse and she's I'm just the daughter. I didn't do it like I look, I have nothing to do with what my family does. Right. And her her brother then goes, What are you talking about? You were part of this, too. We all were part of killing everybody. Don't you go saying you didn't have anything to do with it? Oh, he crumbled under pressure. Yeah. And so it's sort of Texas and Western justice.

They just bring out some ropes and they hang them just like right then and there. They do not arrest them. They do not send them back. They the whole just kills them. And then they keep hightailing it after William. So they chase William for a while longer. They eventually catch him and they catch him by like I think holding guns and shooting at him. And finally he just kind of like raised his hands. I was like, okay, I'm not going to get away from all this.

And what they do with him when they they stop him is they essentially say, like, confess to your sins. We know you did it. You're your son. Your daughter talked about it. We know you killed all these people. And William was like, No, I'm not talking. So they hang him, but then they drop him before he passes out and they're like, Yeah. And then they're like, confess. Or We're going to we're really going to hang. Yeah.

And so he confesses and he says that it sure enough, the whole family was involved and he tells them where to find some like stolen money and valuables and tells them where all the bodies are. And that's how we got most of the information about how they would kill people is from this interrogation not the right word. This is in a legal culture. Yeah. And look, you can't trust everything someone says under that type of duress, but likely not.

But at the same time, what does he have to gain at that point? Right. Exactly. And they also have enough evidence from what other people have said and the bodies and the cabin that like he's probably telling the truth for the most part, right? Yeah. So, yeah. So he confesses and says that they killed nine men and two women. So 11 people total. I don't know if I believe that number. It may be more like I said, he was stripped of all his belongings and eventually just killed right then and there.

What people say in terms of how the Kelley family killed their their victims is that they would have somebody sit at the dining room table and they would be feeding him or her and they would put the person's chair in like a trap door to the basement, the cellar. And then at some point someone would give a signal, they would open the trap door, they would fall in and hope that like they'd break a bone or get hurt.

So they're stuck down there and then someone would go down and finish them off with an ax as as dramatic and like movie like as that is, they built this cabin super fast. I mean, this is just laying planks down and putting a roof over it, right? I don't think there's a trap door in the sense of like there's a mechanism with a button or a lever that like opens it. I think there was definitely, you know, a hole in the ground that you could lift up a little door and put people in.

So I don't think they like used the trap door quite the way they say. This is just my own theorizing. Yeah, I think yeah, I think they probably did more. What the Benders were supposedly did, which is sneak up behind the guest and just whack them on the head and then send them back to the basement. So that's just my own thinking about it was and the interesting thing about this Kelly story is, again, it gets overlooked because the benders get a lot of attention.

But what I found fascinating is this is ten years after the bloody benders that I mentioned. So a lot of people, because the benders escaped, assume that the Kelly family is the Bender family and changed their name. I do not. Oh, I know. It's really cool. It's fascinating. But the descriptions and the ages don't match. And I was going to ask about the ages for the the kids would be significantly different if it's ten years later as.

The kids I think were older than these two kids back ten years prior in terms of the Bender family. So I do not think this is also the Bender family. They the the two older benders couldn't really speak English very well. And these people definitely could. They were they were seemed like they were from America and yeah.

So it's I don't think that matches but I do think the Bender family gets so much national press and there's articles especially when they're they're moving to Kansas where people are still talking about it. And the newspapers are probably still writing articles like clickbait articles for the time that I think the Kelly family was like, Oh, that's a good idea. No one's going to catch us doing this. Like, let's, let's go for it. Let's look.

It's fascinating to think that that they're motivated potentially by that, but motivated in such presumably the the mom or the dad were the, you know, the ringleaders of the whole thing. Right. So how twisted must you be to be like, let's make this a family affair? Yeah. What's your kids? How to do this? Get our kids to do this. Let's do this. And I think, great.

And so, yeah, you got to think about the motivation of it is I do wonder if it was purely like an economical thing, like this is a way we're going to make money. Yeah, it's like we live in a really hard place to live. So let's this is the best way to make some money and get some things is to to steal it. But also that's so many people so quick. A lot of people that like this, I mean, really thrilled. It has to. Yeah. There has to be. And I think we have to resist the urge that this is what I do.

I look at things sometimes I'm like, that makes no sense. There's no logic behind it. Well, let's be honest. There's no logic behind this at all anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So saying, you know, why would they do that so quickly? You know, you know, you're going to get caught. Well, because they're not thinking the same way that we do, obviously. Yeah. Yeah, that is that's a really good point.

And that's why it's so important that there are criminal psychologists now or didn't exist, people that can study this because that's the best way to help help ourselves and help others is to actually understand and what goes into this. And you have to wonder if they came wherever they came from to that area, were they doing things like that. Before they came. Home? Said yes, before they came. We have no idea. But no, we don't.

There's no way to track it because they could have changed their name. They could have lied about where they were from. There's no way to really check back then. So dark. Yeah, it's super dark. It is very dark. And yet fascinating and fascinating.

So now we're going to we're going to turn it ourselves and go across the Atlantic Ocean to to England, because there's all you got to have if you're talking about 19th century, you know, serial killers, you got to have something in Victorian England because it is absolutely such a crazy, dark, interesting time and place. So I, I basically just picked one what they call Black Widow Killers because there were a lot of women in the 19th century that just poisoned everybody they could.

Bitches were fed up, man. Yeah, they were. And so I basically, like, closed my eyes and pointed a finger at a list. I was like, okay, I'll. I'll tell this one that there are so many. But back then, the reason I think poisoning was, I guess, prevalent in a lot of these cases is because you could get away with it. There weren't always autopsies. You could buy a lot of these poisons just off the counter and no one would think anything of it. So you had medicinal uses if you in a different way.

So exactly. You're down to your little, little general store and be like, oh, I'd like some arsenic, please. Exactly. Nice about it. Exactly. And also the the birth rate is just especially in Victorian England, it's just terrible. And, and even like I'm went on ancestry a number of years ago because I was like I want to find out about my past and all my relatives. They're all Southern farmers and almost every family in the 19th century that I'm related to, they all had like 12 kids.

And you look at it and it was really confusing at first because you'll see the same name pop up twice and you'll think, Oh, there's this is because census records are bad and birth records are bad. It's like, Oh no, it's because babies are dying and they just use the same name over again. I can't be bothered to think of a new man. I already got 12 kids. I don't want to think of another one. Exactly. Yeah. So there's a there's a lot of deaths.

And even when marriages would end because of death, people would remarry quickly because you needed to have somebody to help you survive. So people are like wives and husbands are dying all the time. So, again, kind of a perfect situation for somebody that that is a killer to kind of get away with it. So we're going to talk about Mary Ann Cotton. She is people that follow these kind of stories have probably heard her name because she is one of the famous names, Mary Ann Cotton. Oh, hello.

Her birthday was Robson and which is not as pleasant of a name. And apparently in a documentary I watched about her, the Robson family. She's from northeast England and the Robson family was actually a clan in Scotland for like 100 or 200 years before this, that were they were raiders. They were like basically raid people and steal things. So that is potentially her heritage because of that name, which is really. Kind of thugs. So she, as you can guess, living and she was born in 1832.

She did not have the best childhood. She grew up in a mining town. Her father was a miner. Her father died when she was, I think, ten in a mining accident. People didn't have money hard again. Hard, hard life. Hard life. She moves out when she's 16 years old and she actually tries to do something a little different with her life than just be a miner miner's wife. She tries to become a nurse and this is in the area of South Hetton or Heaton. I apologize for listeners in the UK.

I don't know how to say that name, but the family she worked for, she wasn't a nurse in like a hospital. She was a nurse for a family, like a well-to-do family that had 12 children. My God. Big old family. And a lot of people that study Marian Cotton story think that this is probably when she started to hate kids is working which I do not blame her at all I do not blame her at all.

She ended up getting married and kind of left that work and she allegedly got pregnant five times and none of her children lived. And some people, again, that have like studied their case, some people assume that there's, you know, mental illness and depression, which can happen after that. Yeah. And that that may have influenced her, her psyche as well. She ended up moving back to northeast England after all of this. And her husband, William, who did I write down his last name?

I did William Mowbray. Her husband became a minor. And I actually read two different things. He either became a miner or he became a fireman on a steam vessel. I would like to say, having read a lot of old record things before in my life. Yeah, it could both could be true because he could have been a miner for a time and also, you know, those kind of things and people just mistake one for the other.

And they had more children that she had a daughter named Isabella, born in 1858, but then she died when she was two. She had another daughter named Margaret Jane, who was born in 1861, a son named John Robert William born in 16 three. And Margaret, Jane and John both later died. Who know Margaret Jane lived. So I get very confused because there's a lot of kids in this story. A lot of kids, a lot of similar names, adults. And we're not even done yet. Oh, dear.

Are there more to come with all similar names and a lot of them die. But John does die and he dies from what they say is gastric fever. 1865 comes along and the William, her husband dies of what they call typhus fever. And you should say what they call that is a real saying, but they're not fever. Yeah, yeah. But they're not they're not really investigating it. They're just like, oh, this person died. How? He died? Oh, he had typhus. Okay. And he died of typhus. Fever.

Oh, sometimes it's also read as intestinal disorder. So again, it depends on what you read there. That's really interesting. Well, that's that's quite a thick intestinal disorder. Now, turns out William's life and the life of their children were insured by the Prudential Insurance Company, the Pru, as they called it, which, if anybody listen to my first two episodes of a study of strange William Herbert Wallace in those episodes worked for the Pru. So it's the same insurance company.

But decades before. So yeah, they were insured. William was insured for £35, which is half a year's wages at the time. So that is a good chunk of change. And this might have gave Mary some ideas. I'm just I'm just going to call that out so I don't need to go through all of her children in Oliver Husbands because this is going to be too long of an episode if I do. How many husbands were there? I think four. Okay. No, maybe three.

Her last husband, this is jumping ahead in the story, but her last husband and apparently she never got divorced from a previous husband who did live. He actually left her, thank goodness. No kidding. He found out that she was stealing money from him and they had already they had lost like two of their kids. But he left her so he didn't die. And I don't think she ever formally got divorced. So her husband after that may have technically legally not been a husband.

That's why it's kind of like three or four husbands somewhere around there. So, yeah, she she basically for a period of time, she only has one surviving child after many, many die. And she sends her daughter, Margaret Jane, no, sorry, her daughter Isabella to live with her mother, Margaret. Jane ended up ended up dying before that. Sorry. Again, you're going to get confused with all the kids for a period of time when her her daughter Isabella, is living with her mother.

She is free from children and a husband. But this doesn't last long. She moves on quickly and she marries a patient of hers because she doesn't nurse for a little while to to make ends meet. She meets a guy named George Ward in the hospital. He is sickly, which is already good for her, but not sickly enough that he should die very quickly. And yet he dies very quickly after getting married. Weird. How weird. And the doctors even notated that they were like, oh, he died.

But well, we weren't expecting that. We thought he would live a little bit longer. So then she starts working for a man named James Robinson. And this is the guy I mentioned that actually survived. She works for him for a while, but her mother gets sick, so she leaves his house, she goes, stays with her mother, but her mother then dies just like weeks after she moves in with her mother. Good lord. And then her daughter ends up dying.

Soon after she moves back in with the Robinsons, she ends up marrying Mr. Robinson, and he had actually lost a child before she started working for him. So a lot of people are like, oh, well, he he needs to get comfort from somebody. And the person working and living in his house at the time is Mary. So they end up striking it off. And again, you get married back then because you need the help. So it's like, Hey, you're a lady, I'm a man, you're here. Let's do this. Right, right, right.

Because they get married. Yeah, so they get married. They have a couple of kids. A fertile woman. Oh, yeah. And Mr. Robinson, he starts to notice as they're married that there's two things that kind of stand out to him. One is that Mary keeps pressuring him to ensure his family, their kids, and she talks about it a lot and he's like, Now, why would we do that? And she pressures and pressures and pressures. And he thinks that's kind of odd.

And then he starts noticing, like in his receipts and things, he starts noticing that numbers aren't quite lining up and he realizes she's been like skimming money and taking money. She's also been selling some valuables around the house, so he gets fed up with her and he takes their son, George, their only surviving child in time and leaves her and it, which is a very smart man, get get out of there. When you're breaking up, these ads run.

She moves on and she marries someone else, a guy named Frederick Cotton, which is where she gets the name Cotton from. He was brothers with a friend of hers, and they marry in 1870. And while they're married, she hooks it up with an old an old boyfriend of her is named Josephine. Yes. And so she's getting around and yeah, I don't need to go through all the details here again, this is a cliff notes of the day. Yeah. Essentially, she's killing everybody and she's using arsenic.

So you were dead on when you brought up arsenic earlier. And no one, again, a lot of people are dying back then. No one's doing our taxes. So people aren't really suspecting suspicious of her behavior. It's just kind of like that a lot. A lot. Like it's a lot. And then she ends upstream. She ends up hurting herself because she tries to take her son to a like workhouse and she tries to give him away to the workhouse and when she does it, she's like, You should take him.

Don't worry, he won't be here long. Because quoting this is a quote from her. His name was Charles, by the way. Charles would go like the rest of the cotton. And so the the guy at the workhouse thought that was really odd. So he actually told investigators about it. They don't really they can't really do anything at the time. But then, sure enough, Charles dies when he's back home, like very quickly. And this puts her like in the target, so to speak.

I guess it seems super extreme because right now we're looking at it in a chunk. But I guess when it's happening over years and over time and the situation, the environment, like you said, of people dying pretty regularly, it's easy to explain things away. Yes, yes, 100%. Yes. And so what was interesting at this time is her plan kind of backfired on her because she had been ensuring as many as many of her victims as she could. Right.

And because the police suddenly have a target on her and they're investigating her insurance payout for her son, Charles isn't going through because they're investigating it. So she ends up, long story short, gets arrested, goes on trial. But before she goes on trial, she gets pregnant again. Yeah. And this was a typical tactic at the time for women on trial, because it's a way to sway some some opinions about you from the jury and sympathy.

It also delays the trial because they wait until after you have birth. So she has to go through a whole pregnancy. She gives birth, then she's on trial. She's having to hold the baby and take care of the baby on trial and there are some people that were like, Oh, look, it's so sad that she's got a baby. But luckily not everybody kind of fell for it and she was convicted and was hung. It is assumed that she killed between 16 to 21 members of her family.

You're like, Oh my God. I don't even have 16 to 21 members of my family. Yeah, I don't either. I don't either. Oh, yeah. And it's a little interesting thing because I'm researching this as what's her name from. Sarah knows Elizabeth's. Home. Oh, yeah. Holmes is pregnant. While she was getting her sentence read. Just, you know, this week or last week, whenever that was very recently, she's pregnant again with her second baby.

And so part of me is like, oh, I wonder if I wonder if that's a bit of a tactic to, like, take it easy on her. Yeah, it's an interesting, interesting thing. I don't know much about the fairness story. I did watch that miniseries about her, but I haven't like got into that too much. Seeing it yet. But I'm definitely interested in it. Again, that's not, you know, murder and killing, but it's definitely as well. I just don't get it. Yes. So, lady, court in here.

16 to 21 members of her family, Holly Farm. Yeah. Wow, that's and that's. Go ahead. I mean, you would think like like I said, yes, it's obviously a perfect storm, but after a while, don't other people in the family start to look and be like, okay, you've got six people around, you have died. That seems extreme. How does it get that big? How does it get that big? And especially I don't know if she just you know, you can't Google search somebody.

So like when she's hooking up with these dudes or getting married. That's true. I don't I mean, there's got to be enough people around that know her and like, can, like, run into somebody down at the local coffee shop and be. Like, I think. You're getting married again, huh? Like, I don't know. It's it's definitely really interesting to to think about that. Yeah, it is. Really, really. Weird. So our last solved crime will do is talk to her doctor Thomas Neal Cream.

And this is one of the people for those that follow true crime and serial killers. You may have heard him because a lot of people suspect that he is Jack the Ripper. Okay. I do not. He was in prison in Illinois at the time of the Ripper killings. So it's it's a little far away. It's pretty far away. And also, serial killers have very distinctive modes. They have very specific ways that the emotional and psychological reasons they're killing are very specific to them.

So when someone's outside of that M.O., it really doesn't make sense. And he's very different this it Thomas Cream is also known as the Lambeth Poisoner is a nickname. Some people call him, and he's a Scottish Canadian doctor and he would use strychnine poisoning usually to to kill people. And it's said he killed up to ten people and three countries. I actually I don't personally think he killed that many, but lot of people put that on him.

He also had a very big mustache, which I know is the style of the time, but I just don't trust a doctor with a giant mustache. So what I want to be writing? Yeah. What are you hiding? So his family immigrated to Canada when he was a kid. They lived in Quebec. He goes to medical school at McGill University in Quebec. He there's a this story has nothing to do with the serial killing, so it only takes up time today. But I really loved it.

While he was at medical school, he had a skeleton in his room. He's a medical student. I'm not going to judgment for that. Back then, though, skeletons were real skeletons. They didn't use plastic stuff. He, his house or apartment building caught fire and burnt down. And for a while people thought he died in the fire because they found this like, burned up skeleton that was in his room, but that wasn't him. So anyway, I just thought that was interesting. And that's still weird. I'm sorry.

Yes, you're you're you're a student, but does everybody really have their own skeletons that they take home with them? That's a that's a good point. Yeah. So he he ends up he gets a girlfriend named Flora Elizabeth Brooks. And she's the daughter of a hotel keeper in town. And she becomes pregnant. And this is where Dr. Karim's future sort of clinical work comes. Begins, I should say, because he becomes an abortionist. So he he performs a procedure on his girlfriend.

Meanwhile, her girlfriend's father is super upset that her daughter got pregnant and forces Dr. Karim to marry her and he didn't want to get married. So as soon as they get hitched, Dr. Karim is like, am I got to go? I'm going to go study more medicine in London. So he high, high tells it out of town to get away from his wife. Oh, and yes. And so he's studying medicine in London. And then, you know, for a few years he comes back to Canada and he finally founded a clinic that performed abortions.

And so in May of 1879, this is considered his first victim. A woman named Kate Gardner is found dead outside the back of his clinic. A bottle of chloroform is found nearby the body. Police go to Dr. Crane and they're like, do you know this woman? And he's like, yes, she came to me for an abortion, but I didn't I did not provide an abortion, nor did I give her chemicals to kill herself with and and sort of puts it off.

But because he's being investigated and this is behind his clinic, people in town start to talk, the rumors start to swirl. It kind of hurts his reputation. So Dr. ends up in this becomes a common thing for him. He writes a forges a letter that is supposedly from Kate Gardner and it's a suicide note. And she claims this, like local businessman is the father of her, the child that she wants to have an abortion for. And and she's going to kill herself.

Meanwhile, all her friends, all her family, look at the letter and they're like, that's not her handwriting. That's not that's her signature. And so it's an interesting thing because Dr. Cream ends up using he didn't get away with it like the letter did not work. But yet he he actually uses letters again and again and again. We'll find out. But this still, while he's being investigated, it hurts his reputation enough that even though he wasn't arrested, he did flee town.

He moved to Chicago in his 1879. I forget if I ever gave any dates in this. So it's important. No, thank you. In 1880, he performed an abortion on Julia Faulkner. Sometime in some of the articles she's listed as Mary. And so I, I don't, I don't know if that's just some where there's a mix up. Her records are weird from back then which they are. Yeah. And he gets arrested because of her death but he gets acquitted because of lack of evidence. But he, he is people do investigate him right away.

That's what's interesting about him as a serial killer. What doesn't what led them to him that time? Yeah, I did not dove in deep enough to find out, but I do think it's probably because she had an abortion. People probably know where she went for the abortion, you know, like that kind of thing. And then there was a woman named Ellen Stack who died from essentially an overdose of a prescription. And cream is the one that provided her with that prescription. But he blamed the pharmacist.

He was like, no, no, it's not me. He's a pharmacist, messed up the chemicals and blah, blah, blah, of course. And so no charges are ever brought forward in that because there's just not enough evidence. Right. Just clearly it's just a shitty doctor at this point and everyone's. A shitty doctor and then goes little too far because he ends up killing a husband of a woman that he's having an affair with. Oh, and yeah. And you can read about this.

The Chicago Tribune articles they wrote about it, so you can actually read about this still. So, yeah, this in 1881, the gentleman name was Daniel Scott and Dr. Graham was having an affair with Julia Scott and he is arrested. He is sentenced and goes to prison. And this is during he's there for ten years. That's when the Ripper murders happened is while he's very, very well recorded in prison in Illinois.

So as soon as he gets out of prison, he moves back to London, kind of has to get away, reinvent himself. And he lives on Lambeth Palace Road in London. And he met a woman named Ellen Don Wurst, who was a prostitute. And she got poisoned and Dr. Thomas Cream, instead of just trying to somehow not be associated with these victims, he just starts blaming other people, kind of like he did with the pharmacist, kind of like he did with the Fords letter.

He blames a local businessman and says he's the killer. And then he wrote the coroner anonymously, who wrote a letter to the coroner claiming that he could tell the coroner who killed the girl for a reward. A fee? Yeah. And around this time as well, Dr. Karim was supposed to go on a date with a woman named Elizabeth Masters, and he never showed up on his date because he met a prostitute named Matilda Clover. And he went to Clover's home and then left.

And later that night, someone found Clover screaming. She's in a ton of pain in her house. And the person that found her calls for a doctor, a doctor comes and treats her. And being very much the 18 what is this, 1890 now around there, the doctor said, oh, she's been drinking too much, she's a prostitute, so she's going to diagnosis, drinking too much. And so that's that's why they claim that she dies that evening is because she drank too much.

Well, a few days later, doctor cream starts asking his landlady is like, Oh, did you hear about this Mrs. Clover that died the other night? What do you know about it? He starts talking to people and asking around. He accuses another doctor like the doctor that found her and helped her of killing her. And he writes writes a letter under the pseudonym Eliot Malone. To the doctor isn't not working well for you so far.

He's he's basically tried to blackmail the doctor and saying, like, I know you killed her. I can prove that you killed her because you poisoned her. But what's interesting about this is, remember, the doctor thought she died of drinking too much. Right? Didn't think she was poisoned. But here's a letter claiming he this person cannot prove she was poisoned. So it becomes very evident to the this doctor takes the letter to the police.

The police begin investigating because they're like, wait, if she was poisoned, then whoever wrote the letter killed her because they're the only person who know. Excellent detective work. Again, long story, CliffsNotes version, version of this short. They actually look at the body, they exhume it, they study it. She was poisoned from strychnine. And yeah, the authorities begin to realize that it could be this doctor cream fella and.

And and at that point, are they able I mean, he's so far from home, basically, are they able to connect him? Like he's got a history of doing something? He's got a history. And I think they are because there is a story.

I don't know how true this story is, but I think just by the nature of the story does make me think that in reality, they were able to connect that this guy has been in prison for murder and stuff like that, because there's there's this interesting story about a New York police officer who comes to London for holiday and Dr. Cream gives him a tour of all the poisoning killings going on and has tons of detail like over here on the left.

This is where the woman, like, gives her way too much detail. And so the police officer talks to local police officers and it's like, oh, this doctor cream guy, he's he's really cool. He knows all these details about these cases. And there's a local investigator name by the name of Tunbridge, who is the one leading the case, and he basically figured out it was cream right away. So he was just putting all the evidence together.

They didn't have enough to really get them for murder right away, but they did have him enough for blackmail because of the letter he wrote. So they arrest him for blackmail and they did this strategically thinking, okay, well, he's arrested for that. We'll have enough time to start putting together the pieces of the murder trial, and then we can get him for the murder. So it's kind of like arresting Mafia members for tax evasion.

It's like, let's just arrest him for tax because we know we can do that. Get him off the street. Yeah, they arrest him for blackmail. They're able to actually, during that time piece together enough information and enough evidence during with the murders to to then send him to trial for murder. And he's arrested. And that's the end of it. I think he was hung. I didn't write that down. But I do imagine because that's what they did back then with murderers.

So you think he was probably hung back then? Yeah. So there's a round five poisonings when I was counting it. That's like for sure him. But again with a lot of these people could be a lot more. Could be a lot more. But Dr. Karim, I don't think was the smartest guy. So he's going to be a doctor. So you assume he's an intelligent person, but then damn, really dumb. Yeah. Yeah, that's the lack of logic. We were talking about before. That's right. Yeah. Sign the proper way to behave.

It's crazy, you know. You you. You say that. And it makes me also realize I don't think the women were never robbed. They weren't. So I think the motivation behind his killings had to purely be for the killing. There's there's some kind of thing there, psycho. There's psycho.

And again, the M.O., if you know Jack the Ripper, because some people claim he's Jack the Ripper, the Ripper obviously had a great emotional distress related very specifically to women because he would butcher the sexual organs were like completely butchered, whereas this guy's just poisoning. There's such a drastic difference in the way that these people operated that, yeah, I am not I'm not one of the people that takes takes credence in the the Jack the Ripper doctor credo.

Plus like the most basic thing is the timeline doesn't add up. Yeah, he was obviously incarcerated when that was happening, so. Exactly. All right. So now we're going to some unsolved cases. Let's solve a murder. Let's solve them. You know, I wish I actually had a note at the beginning of my notes. I was like, maybe I'll say this because I do try to come up with like theories. In most of the cases I have, these are more like I don't even have theories on some of these cases.

I feel like it's so far removed with time I'm that it's like theories in terms of like, oh, it had to be this suspect. Like, I can't do that. I can have theories about some other aspects of it, but not today. Maybe some other ones. You'll come when there's one. I can. I can break open. You'll have to come back on. Oh, my. God. Please. That's really. Amazing. So we're going to start with the Austin AX murders, also sometimes called the servant girl Annihilator, sometimes the Midnight Assassin.

I know there's amazing names for some of these. They sound like Brit horror movie titles. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I have a girl, an Annihilator, which is even a little bit better than assassinated, I think, in terms of movie titles. So this one is relatively famous, I would imagine. I haven't looked it up yet.

I would imagine there's other podcast specifically about this case because it is really interesting and maybe some of these as well I might do deeper dives on to do bigger episodes in the future. So yeah the next murder is this took place in did I did I just think that I would remember the date because I do that sometimes don't write it down because I'll be like oh no when this happened, 1884, there I go, 1884 or into 85, because I think it started out on New Year's Day 85.

Yes, January 1st, 18. Even so, the Austin ax murderer claimed the lives of eight people, seven women and one man and injured at least eight other people. And most of these were servants. That's why it's the servant girl Annihilator, who lived in the home that they worked in. And this person would come in, attack them while they were in bed. Some of the victims he would drag outside and either sexually assault or beat or bludgeon and mutilate. And yes, they're just not not good things at all.

This is not a family friendly episode, by the way. I don't know if anybody's figured that out yet. So I I've read a little bit about this case in the past, and I used to think that this was only targeted African-American servants. Like, that's what I in my mind, that's what I always thought this case was. But actually, two of the victims were white, so it wasn't specific to race. It may still have been targeted at black people and maybe just accidentally found white victims.

But there could be a racial motivation in these murders as well. And I'm sure somebody is looking into that a lot more than I have. And Austin was not the city it is now. I know it's still not a huge city, but back then it was even much smaller at a population around this time of around 11,000 people, all of the streets were dirt at the time. Nothing had sort of been paved with rocks or stone or early, early street asphalt. I don't know what they used back then. Well.

It was still just still dirt. They were building that the state capitol building at the time. This is interesting to note. They had a state insane asylum that had 500 patients in it, which is a lot of patients. For a better percentage of them. Yeah. Yeah. But they would like people to, to be fair, because mental hospitals in that era are probably one of the most frightening places in the world. But they would put people in there for just like having a headache.

It's like, Oh, I've got to go to the asylum. Yeah, sure. Yeah. My wife won't have sex with me enough. So centered on the asylum. Yeah. So on January 1st, 1885, a servant named Molly Smith was found in the backyard. Her head was split into a and she also had stab wounds. Her boyfriend, who live with her, was also attacked. He survived, but he was attacked and badly injured. They were African-American. And the police, as you can imagine, African-Americans in Texas in 1885,

the police did not do a very thorough investigation. No. And what they would do at the time to investigate murders is they would bring in bloodhounds. The bloodhounds would try to get a scent. And then they just follow the bloodhounds and be like wherever the bloodhound goes, there's our killer. But the bloodhounds couldn't really pick up a scent. They couldn't do anything. So the police can do a lot. However, they were still able to arrest somebody.

They basically just said, Oh, Molly Smith's ex-boyfriend, he's black because it had to be it had to be a black person. And I'm saying that as a cop at the time, that's not me saying that. That's me and character. And they arrested him even though he could not have done it. So this is where our second scene comes in. Bridget Oh, this is a yeah, yeah. So this is just if you scroll down further on that page. Yeah. Got it. So you can why don't you read Grooms.

He's the the police and the city marshal lead investigator. And I'll read everybody else because there's a bunch of people on this thing, okay? I don't do accents, but I should try. I should try. Yeah. Go for it. All right. This is this takes place in the I did not write down his name. So when I wrote the scene, I just call him boyfriend. So this is Molly Smith, the recent victim of the murder. This is her ex-boyfriend's home. So Molly Smith's ex-boyfriend is eating lunch,

surrounded by family and friends in his home. When the police bust through the door, Grimsley The city marshal leads the charge. Officers push boyfriend to the ground and handcuff him. You're under arrest. What did I do? You murdered Molly Smith. Take them away, boys. A friend steps in front of the arresting officer. He couldn't have killed Molly. Sir, we read the paper. He was with us when she was killed. Blackley Story. Another friend steps forward. He was. We had a party.

The whole neighborhood was with him the entire night. A police officer even jumps into the conversation. It's true, boss. I was there. It was a good party. Does it matter if everybody was with him the whole night? Everyone says we were. Because we know he did it. I'll prove it. Mr. Ex-boyfriend? Yes. Did you know Miss Molly Smith? Yes, of course. There you have it. That's as good as a confession, in my opinion. So there you go. There's a very dorky scene that I wrote just earlier today that's.

Brutally like spot on, I'm. Sure. Yeah. So he and I look, it's a it's a dorky scene, but I'm not exaggerating. He had so many witnesses that he was at a New Year's party the whole evening. And if he had killed her, he would have had to leave the party. He would have been covered in blood and come back to the party. But he was a he was surrounded by people. I don't think he was probably ever alone before police even came to him. And yet they still really, really targeted him.

I don't think he was ever convicted of anything. Thank goodness I could be wrong with that. And nobody knows they did. I think they arrested him. At least they brought him in. And I didn't write down again Cliff Notes. I was just kind of moving quickly through it. But yeah, so if anybody wants to clarify that, right, in a study of stranger dot com, let me know what happened to the boyfriend and what his name was because I totally forgot to write it down. I'm so sorry about that.

So by March of that year. So do you know what, three or four months later there are more victims. The next two, some people claim to be probably from different attackers, but they do get lumped into it because it could be the same ax murder. It's Christine Martinson and Clara Strand. They were both severely wounded by similar attackers but not killed. They survived. And they this is where a lot of diverse accounts of what the killer looks like come into play because they describe him.

Basically, everybody describes a different some people call him a white man wearing black face. Some call him a black man wearing a scarf. Some call him a white dude with a cowboy hat. And like the descriptions of the killer are so varied, it just makes it even harder to kind of even come up with an idea of who who likely could even be assassins. Start with that. You can't start anywhere. It's just so hard.

The city, meanwhile, as you can tell from the earlier scene we did, they claim that African-Americans did it because, of course, good, honest white folk don't do anything bad ever. So it's a purely, you know, racist driven investigation when it starts. So on on May 6th, Eliza Shelley was the next victim and she was killed that she did not survive. Days later, Irene Cross was stabbed and bled to death. And where she worked and lived. And then in June, Clara Dick was attacked but survives.

This is one of those basically when they're survivors, a lot of people don't always lump them into the murder victims. They think it could have been someone else. But for the. Sake, it's a big concern to like how many people how many people. Are going. Arrest. Yeah sound stabbing and I think people yeah absolutely. There's another victim killed by an ax and then an ice pick was shoved into her ear as well. So there's there's definitely an overkill

aspect to this serial killer that's personal. Yes. And then a woman named Rebecca Rainey was later attacked with along with her daughter. I think they were sleeping in the same bed together when they were attacked. Rebecca survived, but her daughter did not make it, which is just devastating. And then there was a larger group were attacked in September, I think it was four people. Two of them did not make it. And then on Christmas.

So it's about a year that this has all been taking place on Christmas, Susan Hancock was attacked while sharing a bed with her daughter as well. That same night. Eula Phillips and her husband are attacked. Eula does not survive and because her husband survives, he gets arrested and he gets convicted just for her killing, not for all the others. The police are just able to manipulate their case into just his wife.

This is also that's an interesting thing because this is also these are the white victims, the Phillips. That was going to be my next question. Yeah. So there is a difference. There is a difference to this where maybe people thought he blamed it on the on this famous ax murder going around and he just attacked his wife. I don't have all the details on that, but he is convicted. It is later overturned, so he does not get it all pinned on him.

There are rumors in the African-American community at the time that the killer was a white man that had supernatural powers and could turn himself invisible. Okay, that many people are getting it. Yeah, but if I get it though, like if that many people are getting attacked and you're trying to create reasons for how it's happening and why this person's not getting caught, like I can easily see that happening. This city. A brutal bloody crime scene. I mean, attacking somebody with an ax.

You're not walking out of there without blood on you. You're just not. And to do that repeatedly, over and over again and nobody sees anything. Even with survivors. No, it could be like that. It's so bonkers. So by my count, I think it's ten victims being attacked with an ax out of 12 that were likely killed. So that's that's why it's the ax murderer of Austin is an ax was used for if not all of them. Most of them.

Most of them. Yeah. Now, during the attacks, this is the thing that actually creeps me out the most when you think about it. During the attacks, the the killer actually interacted with two young boys and they were fine. They were left without being attacked. One was eight, a guy named Douglas Brown, and he actually called the killer a big, fat African-American man as the way he described them. But again, there's people are describing this guy in so many different ways and the killer covered up.

The kid with a blanket was like covered him up with a blanket before the killings. The other child was Eula and James Phillips, two year old Thomas, and he was sleeping with his parents. When it happened. The killer came in and gave him an apple, kind of like distract them and occupy his time. Yeah, that that's so freaky. That that's so bizarre. And the fact that they're both boys. So he's clearly targeting women. Women. Yeah. And younger women to two of them were daughters, right?

Presumably they were young. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And then it just stopped. The attacks just stopped. Yes. So they stop. There is. There's a show on PBS called History Detectives. And this is, I don't know, ten years ago, something like that. Someone that was working for that show has a theory that it's a guy named Nathan Elgin, who was a 19th African-American cook in town.

And the reason the if it is him, the reason they the attacks stopped is because I think it was in January of the following year in 86, that he was actually caught attacking a woman with a knife. And the police were there. They chased him and there was a kerfuffle and they actually shot him and he died the next day. I don't know how true that is. I would like the reason this is still unsolved is because he can't 100% pinpointed on this guy.

Some of the local investigators just claim he's just he was just drunk and a bad guy. He wasn't. It's not, you know, a different M.O. again. Yeah. Somebody that's strategically targeting people as a serial killer and someone that's just a very aggressively violent person that loses his temper and whatever. Still a very bad guy, but it's just a different scenario. So that's why some people don't don't 100% say it's him. But it could have been and that may be a reason.

And they do kind of say that somebody that does this really only stops when they get caught or they die, right? Get shot or die. There are there are some people, though, that claim that there is this psychological thing that does happen with some serial killers where they just reach a point and it's like they that the gratification they're getting out of it changes so they no longer do it. So there are some killers in history. There are very specific examples of some that just stop.

They don't like slow down, they just stop. So it's I would say it's three things. I would say they get killed, they die, or the rare ones that just mentally something triggers in them that's a little different they stop. I guess that's kind of what happened with the Golden State killer, right? Yes. Yeah. Got to just stop just stopped and lived his life. Yeah.

And some people, depending on what your theory is on like the Zodiac Killer, because it's not someone that some people think it is, it could have also stop. Yeah, there's a number of examples out there of that. That's crazy. So Austin, the city of Austin was basically terrified even after the killing stopped for decades. And this is just a nerdy history thing that is so me but something I came across that I love is Austin bought these things called moon towers from the city of Detroit.

They're hundreds and hundreds of feet high. They're basically just big lights. That light a city pre, you know, street lights being everywhere. And I think some of them are still around Austin as like historic monument kind of things.

But they bought some moon towers from Detroit and they would turn them on and there's actually like local newspaper stuff from the time, even though this is ten years after the killings when they did it, but even still, ten years later, a lot of people would comment in the newspapers of women now feel comfortable to walk outside. So because there's light. There's light. That is fascinating. It is. It is. And as as per my guess, I'm going much longer than I expected today. So I apologize.

Don't apologize. This is so cool, so fascinating to me because I've honestly, of all the stuff that I have read and no, I have not heard of any of these. Oh, good, good. Oh, that's fine. That's what I love. I wish, you know, I yeah, some of these I will have to do longer episodes about one day just because they are they are so fascinating. You know, like Mary Cotton rings a bell, but yeah. Yeah. You know, not to the extent of all of that. Yeah, yeah. And hers.

I had to, I had to skip like most of my notes, as you could tell, because I was like, I should married other kids because I was like, we'll be here all day if I read that report. Yeah. So our next unsolved case is the Denver Strangler of 1894. And this is this is so sad to say, but and maybe have had only killed three people, which seems like, oh, this is basically like a good guy. After everybody we've talked about today. Getting really low body count, he's practically like, yeah. A saint.

So the Denver strangler, this took in this all happened pretty quick. This is a matter of like two, two and a half months. And Denver was a pretty big city for 1894. In the West, there was 100,000 people in it. And the the first victim was a woman named Lena TAPPER, who is a French, quote unquote, sex servant.

So, yeah, I would the way I kind of explain this to myself anyway is like a very high end escort, like more than just like a Jack the Ripper woman wandering the streets hoping she can pay for a room for the night. Is this is like a high end escort kind of stuff. She's not on Craigslist, as it were. Right? Right. And she's a mistress to a local guy named Richard Dimity, which I'm probably pronouncing that wrong. So people I know this case better let me know.

And she was found strangled to death in her bed, in her house, a 1911 Market Street in Denver. She was part of a group called the Macro or, I don't know French so level killer deal more. That was believable. Oh, goodness. Believable. And yeah. So she's she's a sex worker strangled in her bed. And this is around September 3rd. And I don't know much about the investigation, so I don't know. It's a sex worker. And historically, police don't put too much effort into those.

So but I can't say for certain. The next victim was Marie Conti. So she was a member of the same sort of sex group, high end sex workers. I could not find her address anywhere. But a newspaper had found from the time said that her house was in the same row of houses as the other victims. So think all the victims I know two of them at least are on the same street. So she might have also been on the same street or nearby, so all in the same area. And she lived with her boyfriend, Tony Sandor.

And Tony, the story goes that he fell asleep and he was when he awoke, he found in the bedroom that she was dead, strangled and a cord was found dug into her flesh around her neck. Yeah. And she was a lot of money was missing. Like apparently they only found like less than a dollar in her entire house. And she was well-off. She was a high end sex, which she had. She was doing well for herself.

So the fact that they didn't find money, they think theft is part of the the motivation to these murders. Police started just arresting people. They were like, hey, you, come here. You might be the person I get. So I think they arrested five men total, including the first victim's lover, Richard Dimity. Okay. And all men ended up getting released because there's not enough evidence. It definitely has the feeling of like, yeah, you. You're nearby. You're right. Something I'll stick.

Yeah, maybe they'll stay. The third and final victim is a Japanese woman named Kiku Yama. And again, she lived on the same street. I think she lived at 1925. There it is, 1925 Market Street, so very close to Lena TAPPER, the first victim. She had only lived in Denver for about a year. She moved to the U.S. to go to the world's fair in Chicago. The famous, famous World's Fair. Oh, yeah, that was. And yeah, she stuck in the States and then eventually moved to Denver that year.

And on November 13th she went to bed when her boyfriend Amy took a walk and Amy came home from the walk and found Kiku on bed with a towel around her neck. But she was still she was like gasping for breath so he didn't know what to do. So he runs outside. He grabs neighbors. He's trying to get somebody to help. A police officer is nearby, overhears them so he the police officer comes to they go inside. And by the time they're back inside, she's dead.

They noticed that everything had been rummaged through. Like drawers are open, doors are open, closets are open, everything's so again. There could be a motivation of theft involved with these killings. And Amy, the boyfriend, gets arrested. Of course, there's. No evidence, though, so I don't think any of that sticks.

Of course, the there are some kind of usual suspects, the people that write about this case, Richard, the boyfriend of the first victim, I don't know enough about this to really say whether or not, however, he felt that is the right person. I was going to say the right thing. Richard actually was prosecuted for the crimes. Oh, he was acquitted. There's not enough evidence there. But the strange thing about his case is he moved to Brazil immediately after he was acquitted. That's a red flag.

It's a red flag. But what I tried to look up and I could not find to listeners if anybody out there has the information, a study of change at gmail.com. I wanted to find out if he had already moved away while the other murders took place because they happen to. Be named in question. It may not have been because they happened kind of quickly together.

So he there may not have been enough time for the trial or whatever, but it still is something worth looking into in terms of like, was this after everybody died or not? There was also a guy named H. Mellor who was cut strangling a woman and was about to cut her similar to the previous case we talked about. Police didn't even pin all the murders on this guy because there's like now he's just a bad dude. Is he just a bad dude? I don't. It's like a different M.O.

Like he was drinking a lot, you know, just a violent, obnoxious dude that should be arrested for other things. But he kill other women, especially because he was about to cut her cutting was not involved. Not a part. Of his murders. So, yeah, that's that's just my thoughts. So to wrap up this evening, we're going to move on. This is actually a case I do want to do a bigger deep dove and a story on, but it's the Tims torso murders also called the Embankment murders.

Everything has multiple names on today's episode. Tim's torso murder. Yeah. And Tim's. This is the Thames River in London, so. T got it? Yes. Yeah. And what I have always loved about this case is it happens at the exact same time and in the same area of Jack as Jack the Ripper. So this is where Jack the Ripper makes a comeback. In our case, some people put the two things together like, Oh, there's dismembered women in one hand and cut up and mutilated women on the other.

They're the same killer. It's all in the same area. I don't believe that. Same as even in investigators at the time. You know, the props that they should get, they didn't even put the two together because they're so drastically different guys so near the same time, but they're very different. Well, it's easy to think why people would want to put them together. Oh, yeah.

As disturbing as it is to think about the fact that there's somebody out there butchering prostitutes and, whatnot, it's even more disturbing to think that's happening. And there's somebody else out there. There's somebody else doing it at the same time, in the same fucking place like that brutal man man got London. And in Victorian England there's a place and it was all smoky and terrible back then. Da sleazy and. Yeah, not, not, not a good place to live at the time.

At the time. I love London. It's kind of my favorite scene. But yeah. Yeah. So I don't want to go too much down the rabbit hole in this because I don't have all day. But yeah, the killings that are happening at the same time as Jack the Ripper, the there are four common that are like almost like Jack the Ripper has the canonical victims. This is similarly like four canonical victims of the Tim's torso murders. Only one body was ever identified.

Oh, so the Tim's torso killer, he dismembered his victims and dismembering. Because I'm a nerd. Nerd enough person that I was like, let me get my definitions straight. So actually. Exactly. Does that entail. So it's the act of cutting, ripping or tearing or pulling or otherwise disconnect limbs from a living or dead body. Okay. Yes. And there is a psychological difference with killers that dismember versus like the severe mutilation with Jack the Ripper.

So, again, just kind of different different imposed. Right. Also, none of the like sexual organs were cut up and stuff with the Tim's torso murders, which is basically what Jack the Ripper did like that. That was his that was his target. Yeah. So these cases are so strange and disturbing on their own that they all kind of have their own names, like each victim's killer. So there's the reign him mystery, the Whitehall mystery, the murder of Elizabeth Jackson in the Pynchon Street torso murder.

And they're all likely the same killer. Well, Whitehall was the area of Jack the Ripper. Yes. That was Whitechapel. But I think. It's. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. These all not far from Whitechapel in my under my, my very L.A. brain understanding of London. They're all in the same area. Right. So the first I think this is the first it's the random mystery. This is 1887, and the remains of a body were found in the Thames River and it was found by workers. So they were likely like factory workers.

They were all like along the river and they found the body. No cause of death could be determined because even though they found other body parts later on they found the torso. First they found other body parts over like the next month or two in the river. And they were all connected, like surgically. They were a surgeon, not surgically, but a surgeon was able to say like, Oh, these are all the same body. Yeah, they couldn't figure out what killed her.

I know she was dismembered, but like, she could have been killed before that. And that helps in investigating. But they couldn't tell because they're so cut up it was just hard and time had passed. It was really. There was no head. No head. That is correct. Yeah, no head. So then there is the Whitehall mystery in 1888 and I think this began in September where dismembered remains are found. This time it's three different locations in the city.

The famous part of this story is that I think it's the left leg that was found not in the river, but actually on a plot of land that was about to become Scotland Yard. So it was found a place they build. Scotland Yard. Yeah, that's how I actually found out about this. I think I heard that in a Jack the Ripper documentary. So pretty, pretty ironic that the famous police headquarters would be built right on top of where this leg was shot.

And then other parts of the body were found along the river through like September of that year. And these. Still early? No head? I don't think so. I didn't write that down, but a pretty sure no head. And again, these were able to be matched. It's like all one victim and Elizabeth Jackson is next. Obviously, they identified her because there's a name to the story. Yes. And this is on June 4th, 1889, the following year. And her torso was found in the Thames River.

More body parts are found along the river the next week. And this one's like in my understanding of the case cut, up and dismembered more than the other ones because they found like a liver, a leg, a part of a torso, like there's lots of parts they end up finding. And even though they couldn't find head, they were still able to ID her through other various methods and. Replaced her liver. Some would say, Yeah, I know that liver.

She this is the really terrible part of this story is she was pregnant and she was a homeless prostitute. So again, this is where a lot of the connections with like Jack the Ripper come. And saw. Next is the pension st torso murders. This is in September of 1889, the same year and a policeman actually found a torso under a railway arch at Pigeon Street in Whitechapel. The sinking, which makes perfect sense, is that whoever this was was killed somewhere else,

and then this part of her body was dumped in that spot. Mm. Genitals, not wounded, anything like that. Again, just to. Not connect it directly to the Ripper, because this is Whitechapel where this is found there. This one has a lot of rumors and speculations, a lot of like locals are like, I know who did it. It's funny. Like, everybody's, like, pointing fingers at people. None of them are confirmed or deceived.

Disproved, like they're all just local speculation where can read about a lot of those? There are two other victims that happened before 1872 ish. There's a dismembered woman found in London. Oh, also in 1884, another woman and then some modern writers connect it to a murder in Paris. That happened in like 1902 or 1903. I don't have enough to have an opinion one way or the other. Yeah, it does seem like a big jump, but that is the story of the torso. Tim's murder.

So happening at the same time as Jack the Ripper. Man, you may not know this, but I'm wondering something. You know, the dismembering ones always are intriguing because a lot of them, for example, the Black Dahlia, which was never solved per officially there is a surgical. Yes. Element to it. Right. It's like somebody that knows how to do that. Has a level of knowledge that your average murderer does. Yeah. Is that the case with these? That is the case with this one, specifically with this one.

And I buy that more, especially the third victim who was so cut up like, yeah, it doesn't seem like they're hacking and slash it. It seems methodical and like if I had this a weird thought to have very macabre, like if I had to dismember a body, I literally wouldn't know what to do. I'd be like, exactly. Things.

So I do think this one is very truly someone had to know either medical knowledge or it my brain jumps to like a butcher, but even then, like you're not dealing with human bodies all the time, so there is a difference. So in the tools. The tools see the Jack the Ripper case, people always talk about, like a lot of the investigators would say, it's got to be it.

Even one of the prominent theories of Jack the Ripper is that, doctor, I don't I've never even when I was a kid learning about Jack the Ripper, I was never like, Oh, yeah, it had to be a doctor because of all that. Because that just seemed that seems more slash and crazy. That's what I would say. Yeah. Again, that's just me. I'm not an investigator. I'm not a medical person, so I don't know. But like, yeah, I have never really. But I knew that with Jack the Ripper. I think it could be anybody.

But yet these I think someone someone had to have knowledge about how to dismember a body, I would think, you know. I mean that's intense. Very intense. So intense. So interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And so that is all our cases today. And I just want to, again, kind of reiterate what I said before we get into the unsolved ones is I didn't come in today being like I have theories on these.

It was more about these are these are just fascinating cases that I think get overlooked that I think should be looked at by not just fans of true crime, but even like criminologists that do like to go investigate historical murders and crimes because there may be enough there to actually start to pinpoint some of the suspects for the unsolved ones. You never know what can happen. So I do think they need more attention. Jack the Ripper gets all all the all the credit. Gets all the glory.

It gets all the glory. And I agree with you. Like looking looking at something like this last one. Okay. Yes, there's 100. No, Denver was 100,000 people. London was at the time. Oh, yeah, oh yeah, yeah. It's large. Oh yeah. But you have to be able to weed, weed some things down. Right. Like look at who are the who would have the knowledge, who was in the area.

Obviously this isn't something that we do, but it seems like somebody now whose mind thinks differently, who can track things differently, there's got to be a way to come up with some viable. And you never know nowadays with, you know, DNA and all of that stuff.

Some of these cases may and again I just did cliff note kind of stuff for these some I've I've investigated or researched more than others today but I haven't gone in deep enough to find out like are there still bits of clothing or potential murder weapons? I know some of the bloody bender one because that's the one I'm diving in for, for future episode. That one, they still have some of the potential murder weapons in museums.

So it's like, is there anything we can do to find DNA with any of these things? Is there old newspaper articles that connect something that the newspaper hasn't been found? So it has been digitized and it's on some, you know, back in a filing cabinet and a city record somewhere. Absolutely. A Lot of the Jack the Ripper stuff because it is such a popular case. A lot of the old letters and things are saved. So like, what about some of these others? But some stuff exists. There has to be.

Yeah, yeah, you would. But who's got the time and the resources? Right. And somebody has to really dedicate themselves to that. It's sort of Elon Musk buying Twitter. He should, it's my opinion, but he should just, you know, put a lot of that money of his stuff solving cold cases. Stew, I'd be way more interested. It would be. Think of all he could do so well on all the documentaries that would be made after all right. Yeah, I would watch every single one. Yeah. To Netflix and go back.

Yeah man. It would be it would be amazing. It's fascinating. Yeah, it is. It's very fascinating. And these are these also show the variety of the crazy sort of psychotic nature of humans. Like all of these have very different motivations. All of these have very different potential mental illnesses that either weren't diagnosed or can't be because it's been too much time. And and also investigators even investigators, I think, get influenced by, you know, politics and bureaucracy.

And we got to make sure the whole city is calm and they don't think someone's going to kill them. So they make decisions that aren't always in the best interest of actually solving the case case. And I do think back then, I think were harsher on investigators looking back into the past. Because they. Really didn't know what they were doing back then. Like you really did have to catch somebody red handed back in those days. Yeah. They didn't have tools.

No No, but it is it still is disappointing that some of these investigators weren't either more open minded or more aware of it just taking better care of crime scenes and stuff. Like they, you know, they weren't great at that. So anyway, I'm rambling on about the stuff, but. I think it's fascinating though, in comparing the way you did it with comparing the solved cases versus the unsolved cases.

I mean, even the solved cases, they just took people's word and they're like, Oh yeah, I did that a couple hours ago. The dead people. Great. We're going to hang you now. Yeah, yeah. The end closed the book. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. That would never happen today. No, and nor should it as much as I do think the Kelley's all probably should been, you know, sentenced and everything else terrible should have happened to them. It's like, yeah, mob mob justice is not a good thing.

And study them, find out why they did it. Yeah, I know why they did it. Let's make sure no one else. And heading west stops by some cabin where they can get murdered so easily because there's literally no law out whatsoever. But like, find out what's going on. Yeah, and it's interesting. The Bender episode. Yeah. Everybody listening, please.

If you want to hear that, it'll either be next week when hearing this episode or two weeks from now because it's the holidays and I've been sick and my whole family's been sick, so I'm just moving slow. So subscribe to make sure you get caught up on that. But the Bender one, I'm doing a massive deep dove on. I can't wait. And it's it's fascinating. And one of my favorite little tales I came across is and it relates to this with why I'm bringing it up now.

But when the benders they escaped and people are investigating the crime scene, their cabin, there was a neighbor that was kind of friends with the benders, kind of, I should say, even friendly, like not even like a good friend. But he was also German. The benders were German, so they hung him because he's and knew them and was like friendly with them. So they're like blaming him for all the murders and they didn't kill him. Luckily he did not die.

But it's just like that mob justice kind of stuff. It's like you can go down some bad, bad places. That it I. Like that that is an innocent man that you're just hanging because you're mad and he's also German. So yeah, it is. There's some terrible stuff that can happen. Oh, humans, aren't we? Great Britain is wacky, wacky, wacky humans. I will say that also of the reasons that I like to read about this stuff and study this stuff is it really makes me feel good about my own life. Yeah, yeah.

When I feel like I'm messed up, I'm like, Oh, no, I'm. Yeah, I'm fine. I'm so much better than some other people. Yeah. Yeah, it is really sad. Well, thank you for coming on this journey with me and to thank. You crazy. Serial killers. Yeah. And I'll. I'll keep you informed because you should come back for some other ones that I'm trying to, like, piece things together with. Like, I invite people on what I think they'll like something or have insight into a topic.

So I'll have to get you back for some some future, because I'm going in the right choice. Oh, thank you. But I am going into I did like scary things over Halloween just because of the nature of where my brain is at right now, which is not a dark place. I just went into research on Bender, so now I'm just thinking of serial killers. But It's like I feel like the next six or seven episodes are all going to be serial killers. So there's so many to go through.

There's so many different avenues that you can go right. You can like you, you can do the solve, the unsolved. You can do what's the guy, the iceman, the crazy person. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He is mind blowing to me. Oh, absolutely. I mean so many. Yeah. And even I want to do some because similar to like the 1800s, the 19th century murders today.

Part of that is, you every now and then you come across when there's a modern day serial killer that gets caught, there's going to be some article or blog or comment from somebody being like, this didn't happen in. The old days like this is, you know, they blame it on everything from not enough Jesus in your life to too much Jesus to like video games. Video games they blame all stuff. And it's like no serial killers have always been around. Human nature has not changed.

And there are terrible people from the past and they're terrible people today. We shouldn't just flag it with that. We need to study these people so we can understand this, and that is the best thing we can do. And that is one of the reasons why I like looking at 19th century century killers is like people think Jack the Ripper kind of started the whole thing. It's like, no, no, no. Yeah, no, he did it. They've always been around.

So I want to do some episodes about serial killers in sort of far off countries, either in like Asia or Russia, like like get out of the Western civilization world and do some because they're too they're everywhere. They're everywhere. And I think it's an interesting thing that you can study at some point the evolution of how people were able to get away with things in the early days. Oh, yeah. The seventies was ripe with serial killing. Right.

And how that's changed into now, how it's like more difficult because of being on the grid and you know, there's cameras everywhere you look and just science and technology has changed so much. Just the evolution of of how people can get away with evil things. It's so interesting. And on autobiography, my TV show, we did an episode about the murders because they had a bunch of a bunch of cars.

It was all the cars with with the Manson's. And again, I'm going on a tangent here, but one of the things, because I've always been fascinated with serial killers, I went and filmed and walking around like their ranch and like where they lived in the ranch. I went to Spahn Ranch and went all around it, filmed all around it. I even like went into the rock. There's a famous picture of the Manson family, like on this rock. And like, I have pictures and video of me under the rock.

And I got to say, as I'm of those people was like, Oh, this is so cool. Like, I like dark stuff. I'm going to have so much fun. Being there was unbelievably like, depressing like I did. Like, I definitely kind of want to do more of that. There's, there's an interesting part of me that's like, Oh, this is fascinating. But like, yeah, being there was not as quote unquote fun as I thought because I'm well. I think that's the empathetic part of like, yeah, fangirling out in front of

the cameras now. It's like, that is my honor that the fucked up illness that actually came from that place. Absolutely. Yeah. No crisis anyway. Yeah. So you got to count, you got to come back on its way. When I will. Ask me any time. I'll even do homework if you need. Oh yeah. Yeah. And thank you. Yeah, of course. Going to go like doom scroll some puppies and kitties or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was fascinating. And I did.

I took notes and nice looking into some of these a little bit more too. So thank you so much. Thank you, Bridget. Thanks, Michael. And that'll do it for today's show. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way. This is the week of Thanksgiving. I hope everybody is enjoying the holiday and I am very thankful for all of you, our listeners. This is still a brand new show and something they just started from from the pure joy and fun of wanting to share these kind of stories.

And I am I'm just so thankful and grateful for the feedback and the attention that I'm already getting. I cannot thank you enough. I can't confirm since I hung up with Bridget that our next episode is going to be two weeks from today. It will be a deep dove on the bloody benders, the bloody bloody benders, which I'm very excited about.

So to stay up to date to make sure you don't miss that episode make sure to subscribe, rate review or follow us on Instagram at is study of strange and as usual, if you have comments, ideas, things you want to share with me, reach out a study of strange at gmail.com. I would love to hear from you. And also I've mentioned in the last few episodes I am compiling personal stories, personal personal accounts from people that have witnessed or seen an unidentified flying object for a future episode.

So please reach out to me, send me an email, a study of strange at gmail.com. I would love to hear about it. I will leave it for that tonight. Make sure to check out our show notes, our website stage, strange dotcom patriot. And there's going to be some new content at the beginning of December on there and happy Thanksgiving and thank you and good night, everyone. I wanted to take a second to let you know about Audible.

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