Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all six episodes of Ghost Story, Add Free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. If you come out with a piece that says he was a murderer, then I will be sorry that we ever said we would contribute to it. But before we get into any of that, let's start at the beginning with the thing that set all of this in motion. When I was 16 back in the 90s, my family moved to an old Victorian house in London on a street called Queen's Road.
I slept in a bedroom tucked into the creaky top floor and weird things would happen up there. I'd wake up and objects would have moved across the room, specifically this one vase. When I go to bed, it'd be on the mantelpiece, and then in the morning I'd find it on the desk. I'd put it back and the next morning I'd find it somewhere else. Lights would flash on and off on their own, and I'd get this uncomfortable cold feeling whenever I was alone in the house.
It freaked me out at the time, but the truth is I didn't really think much of it. I was a teenager. I had other things on my mind. Every now and then I'd asked my sister if she was messing with me, but she always swore she wasn't. I grew up, left home, and became a journalist for Alder Zero. I cover things like French labour strikes in the war in Ukraine. I don't believe in ghosts.
So when my family moved out of the house on Queen's Road, I completely forgot about the weird stuff that happened in there. Until that is, a few years ago, a man reached out, an old neighbour of ours, with a story about that very room. I mean, it's quite a story. His name is Charles Penelites, and he knows everything about this neighbourhood. You could say he's a bit of a gossip, but you probably shouldn't. Slanderous gives completely the wrong impression.
Anyway, this is what he told me. Charles was walking around my old neighbourhood one day, going door to door, collecting donations for the local museum. I was there rattling a tin. And definitely not gossiping. Well, I mean, it was just Sonsa who's still there and Sonsa has moved out, and they've had a divorce and all that sort of business. Eventually, he gets to my old house and knocks on the door. A woman answers, she's the mother of the house.
After chatting for a bit, she invites him inside and she tells him a story unlike anything he's ever heard before. The story goes, the American swans up with a halo. And she goes, she tells him, one day, the woman is at home at my old house. She looks out of the window and she sees a man standing on the driveway. So the mother of the house opens the door. It's someone who used to live in the house, an American man who'd live there with his wife and two children.
The American says to her, I'm so sorry to bother you, but I just have to know. Do you still have that ghost in the top bedroom? Straight like that. What the American man proceeds to tell her? The things his family experienced on the top floor, it makes her go completely white. Because this isn't the first time she's heard of something going on up there. She just never believed it before.
The strike occurred since the daughter had always insisted there was a ghost in her bedroom, which would manifest itself on occasions and sit on her bed. The woman's daughter, starting when she was around 10, began complaining about a ghost visiting her room at night, specifically the ghost of a faceless woman. She said to me, oh yes, my daughter told me about some goings on, some sort of faceless woman who can't sit on my bed.
And she said, I always battered them away on the basis that we don't believe in that sort of thing. So I rang your father and he said, that was Tristan's room. So I imagined he phoned you and the cat was out of the bag. I promise you, and I hope you believe me, that I don't normally find myself having conversations like this, or even entertaining these sorts of ideas. But it's kind of weird, right?
You now have three completely unconnected families who have had some sort of strange inexperable experience and the top floor of that house. I think it's wonderful. It was definitely intriguing, but it probably wouldn't have been anything more than a story I'd tell my friends in the park. Except I couldn't stop thinking about this faceless woman. And that's because there's another coincidence, something I hadn't thought about in years.
So I guess Tristan and I just started going out and they invited my parents around to his house to come and say hi. I first learned about it where my wife Kate and I had just started dating about 20 years ago. My family still lived in the house on Queen's Road, the one with the supposed ghost and Kate was staying with us. And my granddad was in London, so they invited him over too. She was very close to her grandfather, so my folks asked if he'd join us.
So Granddad arrived. He's got nice, rosy cheeks, Granddad, like all the men in my family. He wore a beret every day to keep his bald head warm. And then my granddad walked into the house and before he said anything else, he said my mother was murdered in the house next door. And I don't think we had ever put two and two together between where Tristan lived and this big murder that happened in the family.
To be clear, I'd never heard about this murder before. In fact, Kate didn't know a lot about it either. Just that her great-grandmother had been killed decades before. She had no idea that it happened here. Neither of us had any clue at the time that my new girlfriend's family had any connection to this neighborhood, let alone the house next door. But the details of the murder make the coincidence even stranger. Because just next door to my house, the house supposedly haunted my faceless woman.
Kate's great-grandmother was killed by two gunshots to the face. From Wondering in Pineapple Street Studios, this is Ghost Story. I'm Tristan Redmond. Episode 1. The House Next Door. This Halloween season, don't let your habits haunt you. It's time to break free. With fume, you hold the power to change. No tricks, no gimmicks, no vapor, and no nicotine. Just delicious natural flavored air. You can bring with you everywhere. Fume is an award-winning device designed with you in mind.
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We've now come to the murder story. But before I tell it, I want to tell you a bit about my wife's family, the Dancies. Because the murder didn't happen in my family. It happened in theirs. And the Dancies are a pretty impressive bunch. I'm going to take you through a tiny family tree. I'll start with a ball guy in the beret or a beret to Americans. He's my wife's grandfather. He was the one who announced that his mother had been murdered in the house next door.
He was a well-known headmaster of elite private schools in England, including the one Kate Middleton went to. Then there's his son, my father-in-law, Jonathan Dancy, who's also bald and wears a beret. He's a pretty famous philosopher. What if lying is ethical in this situation? What if a certain actions aren't universally good or bad? Like Jonathan Dancy says. So much so that his name dropped in an episode of the good place.
Jonathan Dancy, are you talking about moral particularism? We never even covered that. And then there's his son, Hugh Dancy, my brother-in-law. First position, please. Roll the camera. That's him in the latest Downton Abbey movie. And action! Coming down the stairs. Not expecting to find him there waiting for you. Hugh is Hollywood famous. He's not bald and frankly he doesn't look great in a beret.
He's been in a bunch of movies and TV shows. Black or down, Hannibal. And my personal favourite obviously, Ella and Chanted. You have the first maiden I've met who hasn't swooned at the sight of me. And maybe I've done you some good. And then there's my wife Kate. We met at university. These days she works with the United Nations. Before that she was a diplomat. And as if she couldn't be more impressive, she literally used to save children for save the children.
Let's go straight to the expert on the UN, Kate Redmond. Kate, what can you tell us about the decision? So I work at UNESCO, which is one of the UN agencies it works on education. I'm not a Dancy, but I'm also pretty bald these days. And when I marry Kate, the Dancies gave me a beret of my own, so I could fit in. When you first meet the Dancies, they can be a bit intimidating. But they're also warm and funny.
And after 20 years of hanging around them, they've become my family too. But in all that time, I hardly ever heard anyone talk about the murder. It wasn't a secret, but aside from that lunch with Kate's grandfather, it just never really came up in conversation. Until I started asking questions about it. What story did your dad tell you when you were 18? That his mother had been murdered. Not until you were 18. This is my father-in-law. I call him Johnny. He's the good place philosopher.
He seems to be the only family member who was told about the murder on purpose. So he has the closest to the official version of it. He was driving me back from Oxford. I must have been an undergraduate there. And we were just going over the ridgeway. And he just started telling me this story. Perhaps he started off by saying something like, I was younger than you when my mother died. And your grandmother didn't die natural death. But I should tell you how it happened.
The woman who was killed was Johnny's grandmother. And my wife's great grandmother, named Naomi Dancy. The year was 1937. And Naomi was a pioneering doctor in London. She and her husband lived in the house on Queens Road, just next door to where I grew up. So my grandmother's brother was living in the house. Morris. He was sort of disturbed because he were endamaged in the war.
Naomi's brother, Morris, was struggling with shell shock after World War I. He come home with a piece of shrapnel in his brain, having lost an eye. I don't know where his detail originated from, but it would later be reported that Naomi had particularly beautiful eyes. And as Morris lost sight in his own, he developed a deep jealousy of them. Anyhow, one night, Naomi was in bed, gone to bed early. And Morris came into the room and shot her in both eyes.
And then he went into the upstairs room and cut his throat. That's a story, really. Yeah, that's a story. This is why when I learned about the faceless woman in my childhood bedroom, I thought about Naomi. I wanted to know more about her than what happened that night. Who was Naomi? Well, that is a very good question. I know nothing. I didn't even know her name until you started working on this. Did you know anything else about her? Nope. Except no one seems to know much about her.
I mean, as far as the family goes, there is nothing. Is it Naomi? Am I saying the name right? And in fact, as the story has been passed down through the generations, it has become less about Naomi and more about the man who survived to tell the tale. The critical narrative part was, Fether jumped off the stairs like to dodge a bullet or something like this. Because there was someone else in the house that night.
Naomi's husband, John Dansey, by wife's great grandfather, known in the family as Fether. The way I've always told it was that Fether not only switched off the lights, but also flung himself backwards down the stairs. The name Fether is a sort of play on the word father, father, Fether. Anyway, the story goes that the brother Morris tried to kill Fether that night too. But Fether dodged the bullet and narrowly escaped. It was an action story.
Great granddad had done like a really cool James Bond jumping over the banisters, shooting at the light, doing like one of those roles that Commandos do and then shot the guy. What do you think I'm doing? I'm doing the guns, like, and... Well, if you're guns, like that. All details of Naomi have fallen away. And what remains is admiration for Fether and his daring escape. Is that like, did that make him a hero? Yes! And this makes some sense.
Fether has sort of an outsized influence on the family. This day it was Fether who established an obsession with education that the Dancies retained to this day. Even outside of the family, his presence is larger than life. There's a BBC documentary about the guy. His portrait wants hung in the Royal Academy of Arts. He's the family patriarch. And one of the reasons we're calling him Fether here is that there are so many John Dancies in this family. There's one with his name in every generation.
Which brings us to the third story, the family drama. Because just two days after I heard from my old neighbour about the ghost in my teenage bedroom, my wife discovered something. Something that totally called into question this heroic image of Fether, and the family's story of the murder. Can you remember the story of how you ended up finding that article? Was it like a sort of Google wormhole you were basically in? I go down so many Google wormholes, yeah.
Kate's helping her dad with an obituary for her grandfather, the one that was headmaster at K Middleton School. She's poking around online to see what's out there, and she remembers him telling us about his mother's murder in the house next door. And I looked up something like, dancing, murder, Richmond, not expecting really to find anything. And I did, I came across this crazy article on the National Archives website. And I had no idea why it was there.
It was written by an archivist who happened to stumble upon the file from Naomi's murder. Apparently most murder files are kept in one building in London in the National Archives. And out of thousands of cases, this murder stood out to her. She found the police files so strange that she decided to write about it. She gives the broad strokes of the murder story, but then she raises some serious questions about what happened that night.
So I think it says, murder suicide or double murder question mark. It was mind blown for me because the article questioned who was the guilty party. And suggested that the potentially was my great granddad and not the brother. And that was the first I'd considered the idea, or even read any suggestion that the case was not sort of closed and clean and the right guilty party had been found. Kate forwards the article to her family to see if this could be true.
And none of them had heard anything like it before. It was hard to tell how seriously to take the article, but at the very least we now realize that there was a different version of the story floating round. And it was totally unlike the official dancey family story. I mean, the opposite of the question was, did they do it? They killed them both. Kate's family decides this blog post is no big deal. Nothing to take seriously, but is to just keep moving and let it be.
But I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I did some reporting, went back to the source, and got my hands on the original police file. Let's do it. Yeah, let's go. Because I'm no murder detective, I called one up to help me understand it. Three, anxious to hear what you make of all this, Tucky. Oh, I find the story fascinating. The hair's on the back of my neck when I read it. And once I started reading it, my little curiosity project took on much bigger proportions.
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On an autumn day in 2022, my producer colleague Annie Brown and I are standing outside a little cottage in a quaint village in Surrey, waiting to meet a retired senior police officer from Scotland Yard. We've got the police file in your back. Yeah. Good morning. Jackie Moulton spent nearly 30 years in the job and became one of the only female detective chief inspectors at a time when men dominated these jobs. There's a hit TV show in the UK that's based on her called Prime Suspect.
Helen Mirren plays Jackie. I was a career detective. That's whatever wanted to be. It was a detective. We dealt with murders, rapes, domestic violence, some of the hostage negotiators, fraud cases, the whole gambit of crime. After my wife Kate found that article raising questions about who might have actually killed Naomi. I wanted to have an expert walk us through the original police file to help us understand it. Okay, can you explain to me what you're looking at?
So in front of me, I have the fire and I think to the murder that was in the National Archives, it's the record of the crime and what happened. It's a story book really. The narrative of the criminal incident witnessed from different points of view. In this case, we have the most important statement from John Dansey. By the way, I should say that in my wife's family, there are a lot of people who are John Dansey. So what do we call him, Dr. Dansey?
We call him what he's called in the family, which is favour. I can't say that. I can't say that because there's no evidence. Sure. But if you don't mind, I'll call him favour. It's so confusing for people who listen to the story. If I'm not consistent from you, it's totally fine. We're going to spend much more time with Jackie and favour the statement later. But for now, I want to walk through the night of the murder from favour this
day. His account is the most detailed version of what happened that night, as told to the cops directly after the murder. So this is a statement of John Horace Dansey of aged 46, a medical practitioner, who says, I am a medical practitioner and at the moment semi-retire. My wife, Naomi Dansey, was assistant medical officer of health at Hammersmith where she has worked for 16 years. We have three children. The statement's rather long, so we'll just be reading parts of it right now.
In these first opening sentences, Fether is outlining the main characters in the story. We've got Fether himself, his wife Naomi Dansey, and her brother, Morris Tribe. Morris Tribe aged 44, an army officer, pensioned with severe head wounds and with loss of an eye, was my brother-in-raw. Remember, Morris Tribe came back from World War I with a piece of shrapnel lodged in his brain, having lost an eye. Fether tells us that Morris's mental health has been deteriorating.
He's been drinking more and more, and he's staying with the Danseys on Queen's Road so they can look after him. And now, let's pick up with the night of the murder. Fether's statement starts the clock at around midnight. Naomi Dansey had arrived home late from a lecture she was giving across town. Fether tells us what happens next. I sent my wife to bed and went and peeled an orange for her and told her to go to sleep, but she was tired, and I would write to the children and get it off tonight.
Then I went to my study on the first floor and started a type letter to the children. Just after midnight, with Naomi in bed, Fether settles into write to his three kids at boarding school, sending them updates from home. Morris is also still awake. I could hear Morris who was in the next room moving about. I left my door a little jar so that I could hear what he was doing. Fether is listening for Morris' movements, because he says he's already nervous about what Morris is capable of.
He explained earlier in the statement that Morris has recently been threatening Naomi, even specifically threatening to shoot her eyes out. About 1.10 am, I gaged the time because I rang the ambulance up 20 minutes afterwards. I heard him go to the laboratory and locked the door. Shortly afterwards, I heard shots. I thought it was three. I went to the door and saw Morris advancing towards me. I said, Morris, what have you done?
He was advancing towards me with the revolver in his hand pointed at my head. I tried to reason with him, but he kept coming towards me saying nothing. I pretended to lean against the door, and I realised he meant to shoot me. I switched the light out and dropped flat to the floor. He shot as I fell, and the bullet whizzed by my ear and went through the back window. I laid quite still and pretended that I was hit. He then went into the laboratory and closed the door behind him.
So, Fether is lying on the floor of the landing pretending to be injured. His wife Naomi is in their bedroom to his right, and his brother-in-law, Morris, has just disappeared into the laboratory of the landing. I went to the laboratory door and tried to force it. I found it was locked from inside, and I called on him to come out and give me the gun. He said, stand away from those panels, or I'll shoot you like a dog. I should warn you, the last section of his statement gets pretty graphic.
I then went into the bedroom. I saw my wife in bed. She had been shot through both eyes and blood was spurting from one of her eyes. Eventually, after a struggle, I forced the door at the laboratory with my shoulder. I found Morris in a somewhat sitting position with his head bent forward. A raise of fell from his hand as I pushed the door open. I felt for his pulse and found him postless. I left him and went into the bedroom to look at my wife.
After a lapse of a few minutes, I telephoned the ambulance and later the police. Signed John Dansey at 9.30am on the 23rd of November, 1937. The story of the murder was picked up by newspapers all over the world from Tennessee to Dublin, Wisconsin to Liverpool. There was something about it that seemed to grip people. Maybe because women doctors were so rare in the first place, or the gruesome specifics of the crime.
The headlines read, envied his sister's eyes so killed her, or brilliant woman doctor shot dead. But it was also Fathers' escape that fascinated readers. Nearly every article included a dramatic first-hand account of his standoff with Morris, and the gory cinematic details that Fathers shared with the press. But the statement is just the first document in the police report. And the more that you read, the more questions that you have to ask yourself.
And I would have done this investigation a lot differently. As Jackie and I make our way through the file, we get to a point in the story that the archivist noted in her blog post. At this point, some anonymous letters had started to come in. The final documents in the file are two anonymous letters, sent to the police by members of the public in the aftermath of the murder. They're barely legible, but both letters urge the cops to look into the husband.
Once says quote, believe me, I am not the only person over here who thinks he murdered his wife and brother-in-law himself. So if you get one of these letters, what are you thinking? Well, I want to have investigated it like it's been investigated in the first place, but if I received anonymous letters, that would give me a nagging doubt that I had missed something. And what the police do in this is just minimize it and ignore it. I mean, it can all be true. That's face it. It can all be true.
But these are the unanswered questions. Okay, at this point here's where I am. There's a ghost in my teenage bedroom, a faceless woman. Somehow, I've married a woman whose ancestors just happened to live in the house next door, and one of them had a eyes shot out. And now it seems like there's a suspect in her family that no one has ever looked into. And let me throw in one more wrench.
That bedroom, the woman with the faceless woman in the moving vase, it's where my wife and I first got together. It was actually in this house in Richmond. That was when we sort of might have realized that there was something maybe more than just being flatmates. Remember, Kate and I met at university, and the first few years we were really just friends, even though we shared an apartment, nothing ever happened between us.
But then the summer before our final year, Kate came to visit me at my parents house on Queens Road. The interest in bedroom show his parents will be delighted to hear that that's when we actually got together concretely. I'm too British to say it any other way. The night that we got together concretely was a big turning point for us. We went from being friends to dating to married five years later.
Maybe it was random, maybe it was fate. But could it have been some sort of paranormal intervention? Listen, I don't actually believe Kate's great grandmother was there in the room with us that night manipulating us for our purposes. I'm not totally nuts. But has the thought crossed my mind since I started this project? Yes. Yes it has. I think you're going to come across as like the wacko ghost believer. In the family? Yeah. I hope not.
I realized that at best, at best, opening up a 90-year-old murder case involving your family, Katie. I'm wondering if there's any link between the murder and the ghost in my teenage bedroom is totally ridiculous. And it was, it's a very bad idea as a son-in-law to be doing this. I mean, it is totally wacko. But is it a terrible idea? In many ways, yes. But here are the questions I need to answer, right? Did your great-grandfather get away with murder?
Is your great-grandmother the faceless woman haunting my teenage bedroom? And while we're at it, did we end up married? Because this ghost wants me to solve a murder that everyone's been getting wrong for a century. And it sounds like so far fetched, but it's like you've kind of opened many doors and you've kind of got to work out where they're going to go. Don't you don't have to be diplomatic. Do I have your blessing to pursue this story? Oh yeah, you do. You do have my blessing.
And then at the same time, I sort of have this sort of strange gut reaction that's like, I wonder if this has done the right way. Shit! This season on Ghost Story. Everything has possibilities, doesn't it, in murder. My dad would never have killed my mom in love to her. There's a legal term for phrases like that. This is all bullshit. What is the actual evidence? I feel deeply disturbed by that experience.
We're going to be more traumatized by this podcast than we were about in the murder. I'll tell you that. You are deconstructing an age old story that a family has told itself. You're not going to get to the truth. There is going to be blowback. If you like Ghost Story, you can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining Wundery Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music.
Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wundery.com slash survey. Ghost Story is a production of Wundery and Pineapple Street Studios. It's hosted by me, Tristan Redmond. Our lead producer is Annie Brown and senior producers are Chloe Prasinos and Jess Hackel. Our producers are Zalandra Ellen and Emerald O'Brien and our associate producer is Natalie Peart. Our editor is Joe Lovell with fact checking by Maximo Anderson.
The theme song and music by Darrell Griffith supplied by APM Music. There's mixing an original music by Hannah Sprown. Pineapple's head of sound and engineering is Raj Makija, with assistant engineers Sharon Bodales and Jade Brooks. The senior audio engineer for Ghost Story is Davy Sumner and the senior producer of development for the show is Jess Hackel. The artwork is by Brian Klugge. Legal services for Pineapple Street by Rachel Strom and Sam Kate Gumpert from Davis Wright, Tremaine.
David Hearst from 5RB and Crystal Tupier at Odyssey. The senior producer for Wundery is Michelle Martin, with producers Brian Taylor White and Grant Rutter. The managing producer for Wundery is Rachel Sibley and the coordinating producer is Sarah Mathis. Our executive producers at Pineapple Street are Maddie Sprunkaiser, Max Linsky and Jenna Weissberman. Our executive producers for Wundery are Morgan Jones, Rich Knight, Marshall Luhi and Jessica Radburn.
Special thanks to Jonah Hull, Ed and Chloe Caesar, Alison Vermulin, Jonathan Oates, Eleanor Johnson Ward, Barney Lee, and Chris, Jan, Sophie and Justine Redmond. This episode contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government license, version 3.0. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed.
It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt and multi-million dollar fraud. High-on-lindsay Graham, the host of Wundery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business leaders who risked at all the critical moments that define their journey and the ideas that transform the way we live our lives.
In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life. Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation. And Robert's determination to succeed turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead. Follow business movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wundery app.