Hello and welcome.
It's my favorite murder.
That's Georgia Hardstar. That's Karen kil Gariff, and today we're going to beautiful Italy.
I've been practicing my horrible Italian on Karen since I'm going Oh.
Yes, she's pulling out the chef's case Italian corner the chefs, did you preparado? Yes? I made coffee for you. Gratzi, You're gonna do great.
Thank you.
Right now, I'm flashing back to pictures of very patient waiters waiting for me to do that, and then being like, Madame, I was speak English with you. I was like, thanks so much, thank you.
I just they just want to see you sweat a little bit. Yes, put some effort into it.
Please have some respect for the country you're in.
Yes. And also we're supposed to say we may say, O, where are you from? You say I'm from the Republic of California instead of the US.
You're like, I'm cool. That's right.
Speaking of I feel like obligated that we have to talk about this real quick.
Do I move this off?
Yeah? This is getting serious. Okay. We have a lot of listeners that live in LA and that are over eighteen and I think we need to make sure we tell them that they have to vote for mayor. Oh, and they cannot vote for Spencer Pratt. And I know that they you're eighteen, You're like, I don't give a shit, it doesn't bother me. You have to vote, so you cancel out the people that are stupid that are voting for him, because we know our listeners aren't stupid.
You're not going to vote for him, that's right, but they might not go vote that day. True, That's a great point to me. Yeah, I also think I will say I believe in the children who are so much smarter and more active than we ever had to be. Yes, the privilege of a political from the nineties I think about and shiver with how disgusting it is. Yeah, and how much I'd never helped or did anything. And I think these kids today know what's what. Also, speaking of which,
I'm a real believer in Nitya Rahman. She's also running. You know, she's amazing because they do everything they can to keep her down. They do everything they can.
Yeah, I mean that's a debate all on its own. Yeah, vote for someone.
You believe in.
It's not going to be him.
We've played around with democracy too much and we are now actively doing damage and harmed people every single day with non action.
Yeah, for sure, that's I felt like we had to say that just.
Because and now and we're back because this is the crazy world we've had to live in where we simultaneously deal with the fall of democracy and then hey, Georgia's excited to go on vacation to the wonderful world of Italy.
I feel like there might have been a glitch in the matrix and it's freaking me out a little bit right the second Yeah, well, before we walked in this room, maybe this room is a time machine who the fuck knows, or time capsule or something. But the hot Dog phone box is upside down and it's freaking me out.
You know what it is? The other podcasts that shoot in here, they take our stuff down and put other stuff.
Someone's fucking with us. Who did that bridge?
You specifically Paula were on that. That's really funny. Wait, was this like an easter egg that he put in to say? Hey?
No, I don't think paul did, but it just happened on It doesn't clean up after himself.
Ill, I was in here, not that long ago.
Someone turned the hot dog phone upside down and blew my mind.
Seriously, there's three people crying in the control room right now because it's the intensity, which you know.
I love it.
I love it. I went to the desert this past weekend for a last minute birthday trip hot springs, yes, because I didn't plan anything. And then I was like, well, I don't I'm not just going to sit here, and I might as well go and sit in some yes, thinner magnesium watery. Man, I'm a believer. You look glowy.
Oh thank you? Well, I really Also, I think I've gone over the I went over the Stress waterfall, and for a while I was churning down in those the white water at the bottom of the Stress waterfall.
See you in a barrel, just like an old tiny barrel.
Right, I was down there, water straight down on my head for a while. I popped straight back up and I landed in a hot spring out by the desert. Also, it was one hundred and like three or four. At one point we just sat by a pool like I was a person that gets tan and just like laid around by the pool for like hours, so nice. It was great. I like less self help books and more like just go just go sit in the sun, or just go bake and.
Yeah, get the dopamine, yes, somehow actively Yeah, but like good for you dopamine, not like alcohol.
Yes, exactly, do something that immediately have an effect on your nervous system, which that really does. I didn't realize.
Yeah, I love that place.
I'm a real desert lizard.
Should get into it? Or do you want to hear about jump roping? Nope, let's get into it.
But it's jump roping.
I just started a new personal challenge. If you want to join me, jump the rope five minutes a day. Yes, though it's great, I'm going to turn it into content because nothing can happen without turning into content.
Or you can learn to double dutch eventually. Are you going to build up to a skill.
I'm going to learn to jump rope first because it's harder than I remember.
But do you feel like you might be able to get skip rope? Yeah? That bang the idea?
Right then then I'm a jump rope influencer.
Yes, then you can go to New York City where I watch tiktoks of people jumping into those double dutches that pop up in a square as a kid, you could, Yeah, I think I could do it a little bit.
I can know I could do it.
Now.
That's how cocky I am and how much I don't know how old I am. I bet I could get into it.
I'll immediately break your hip the second you do like, Oh god, that's really good. I'm totally down for that. Do you have to check in and stuff?
Sure? Yes, we don't do it.
Well, we'll never talk about it again. I mean that is our way, truly. But it's fun to dry things. Yes, you know. I have a mini trampoline that I jump on all the time.
I do too. I'd never jump on it, it's so hard.
What about this, I'm going to get on my mini trampling. You do your jump rope, yes, and we'll do parallel jumping therapies and then report back.
Yes, okay, my favorite jumping apparatus.
This is not an integration of any kind. I'm not being paid by Big Jump Blue at all. It's not what's happened I am.
She didn't get that, did you see, Katie even Buskirk right before we started recording. No, she's our incredible integration person. AD sales ad sales manager. She texts us and said, I was looking through where your listeners are across the world, and then she wrote with a fucking gift Vatican City.
That's not true, it's true inside the Vatican.
Yes, we have listeners in Vatican City.
Okay, then may just for one second.
We are trying it all the way back to Italy.
Please get it back up, for get it it?
Okay?
What uh? Hello? Every every citizen of Vatican City that's listening to us right now, you're putting it over the Maybe please go into your archives that you don't let the public into, so we can see the dragon eggs and the ghosts that are caught in a draggedy an. All we want to see.
It all has to be a listener who just does the archives. Gotta be just like a custodian.
A custodian, a file folder. Ten to tour.
We'll give you some merch.
You can have any sweatshirt you want if you tell us the secrets of the Vatican and let us look inside. Yeah, either soon. I have watched the secrets of the Vatican. Yeah, and they don't tie you in good secrets like it's like Mary Magdalene is actually the one.
No, nobody knows the good secrets, but the people who hate them.
Yeah, I know that.
It's if you're going to talk about fucking time travel, cities and places, that's obviously.
That's the number one port right. They do a lot of old crazy shit there. We did go on. We went on a tour of the Vatican because Paige Hurwitz, our friend an Ep, made us go there, a person who was born and raised very Jewish. Yeah, She's like, we have to go to the Vatican. And it was me Janet and Adrian were like, we don't want to.
It made us go. Yes. It was incredible, except for I did get in trouble for filming inside the Assistine Chapel and I was doing it for my dad, where I was like he's going to lose his mind, and the man like put my hand down and he was like, be respectful of other people's religions, and I was like, I think we're the number one of the classic Catholics in this religion. Like my grandparents paid for this fucking thing. They gave you all kinds of money they didn't have.
Yeah, well, Vatican City, here we go.
What here's the thing you're flipping through Netflix, You're like, oh, look there's a true crime podcast. Let me click on here and see what they're doing. Are they talking about this? What is this? Why is this?
This is so dominant? Why those two women? I can't stand women.
Listen to their voice. I think their opinions matter. They can't even speak a telling you even to go into the kitchen and be tradwives. And really, meanwhile, meanwhile, we're not going to we refuse. Meanwhile, that's not in the plans.
Okay, real quick, let's do some case updates.
I mean, if we are true crime podcasts, let's talk about because big things have actually been happening in the true crime space that's true we're in. And the craziest one is that the convictions in the Murdoch murders have been overturned. Alec Murdoch convicted for the murders of his
wife Maggie and his son Paul. That guilty verdict has been tossed by the South Carolina Supreme Court, citing shocking jury interference by a woman named Becky Hill, a court clerk who managed jurors during his twenty twenty three trial. What'd she do? They say, she improperly influenced the jury, among other things, by advising them not to trust the defense's evidence. Can't do that, Well, that's egregious, I mean
absolutely not. The South Carolina Supreme Court seems to agree with this, saying in its recent decision, Hill had quote placed her fingers on the scales of justice. But we should say Becky Hill has denied influencing the jury, although she did. What would you do? She pled guilty to misusing public funds and using your job for personal gain and specifically to promote her book about the trial. Oh so it's a wash. That's no good. Yeah, because here's
the thing. I think they get her on this crime. Yeah, justifiably so. And then it's like and perfect because now we undo the whole sweater right, totally unbelievable.
Wow, Okay, I have a quick update on you know, the case that it's nearest to my heart, which is the Yoworkshop murders. Yeah, I covered in episode seventy Live at the Moon Tower. And so they have finally found the actual killer based on DNA it's clearly this person. So the City of Austin is expected to pay thirty five million in restitution to the four teenage boys who
were arrested and convicted of this. So Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn, and the family of Maurice Pearce who died in twenty ten. So thirty five million. Yeah, it's taken a long time, but they're at least getting some justice.
Yeah yeah, is it justice or just like, at least they're getting some relief from the difficulties that being convicted for this crime is probably created in their lives.
And you can if you watch the documentary that was on HBO. I think they're in it and they're clearly struggling still.
So yeah, oh that all case.
All right, God, well we have podcast network.
It's time to be positive. Okay. So this week on Ghosted, Ross is joined by the scrumptiously spooky drag sensation Pineapple Honeydew. Oh my god, are you familiar with pineapples work?
No, I'm not enough.
I can't wait to watch. They get into apple atch and superstitions, dreams and Pineapple's own uncanny manifestations.
And then on I Said No Gifts, bridger Or avoids a full blown argument when writer comedian Chloe Radcliffe arrives with a gift. Then the two discussed Craigslist killers, bed bug immunity, and dating delicate men.
It's like a conversation just for us. Then over on this podcast Will Kill You Aaron and Aaron dive into his toe plasmosis, which is among the most widespread fungal infections in North America.
What is it about me and them that makes me so excited about that?
Because you know you're now going to listen to that episode and now you'll be an expert on the widespread fungal infections in North America.
Love Fungus.
They also discuss baths bird's tuberculosis and the surprising history behind this disease is discovery. Wow.
Yeah, that's gonna be good. Finally, on Hollywood Land, Jake and Zeth tell the story of the legendary Steve McQueen from Beers with Elvis to Charles Manson's hit List. This story never takes its foot off the gas.
That's our graceland, Hollywood Land vibe over there, and just for everybody to know, in the merch corner, we have looked around this terrible world of ours and decided to officially restock that this is terrible. Keep going mug. You asked for it. There.
It is blue on blue and it's on both sides now, which I really love.
Yeah, I love that color combination. It's very nineteen eighty one, totally. I love it. That's a good mug.
Yes.
Also, don't forget my Ontario mug from touring in like twenty eighteen. I probably got it at a Starbucks's. Yeah, it's Starbucks for sure, or it was given to us. If you gave this to us and you're seeing this right now, please write in and tell us what it
was like. Okay, all right, you're first. I'm first today. Wait, it's December eighteen sixteen, so a while ago, a baby girl named Elizabeth is born in Massachusetts in a comfortable household by two parents who can afford to educate their children. Her two brothers are sent to all boys schools, while Elizabeth will eventually be trained with other young girls to someday become school teachers. She is a curious, driven, and
exceptionally bright young girl. These are all qualities that would be celebrated if they were displayed by her brothers, but we're talking about eighteen sixteen. An intellectually gifted girl invites scrutiny and criticism and screams of kill the wit Elizabeth
will learn the hardest way she can. Society prefers their ladies to be nice and to be quiet, and when they're not, when they dare to use their brains to question authority or their husbands, that intelligence will be used against them and they will be deemed too dangerous for their own well being. And that usually back then meant
being institutionalized. When Elizabeth is forcibly committed to a psychiatric institution, she witnesses and experiences genuine harm, but it also radicalizes her and she will begin to keep a diary, writing down everything she sees. And when she finally gets to tell her story, she will not be nice or quiet about it. She will change the world. Wow, this is the story of Elizabeth Parsons.
Where Packard Elizabeth Parsons.
Where Packard Packer. She has three last names like a modern day lady. Maren. Read the book The Woman They Could Not Silence by author Kate Moore who wrote The Radium Girls. Oh wow. Yeah, and that's the main source that was used today. Any other source is listed in our show notes, but it's mostly the work of Kate Moore.
So Elizabeth Parsons Ware grows up very religious. Her father, Samuel Ware, is a minister with Calvinist leanings, so pretty bleak lens of Christianity that says all humans are inherently sinful, and salvation isn't determined by you making good choices or being a good person. It's just kind of randomly what God decides based on like I like you, you'll be saved, you won't. Sucks pretty fear inducing at all times, so you kind of can't do anything right. You're always apologizing.
We've all better there. So the Wares run a very god fearing, theologically strict household, and yet they're very progressive about their daughter's educations. For a girl of her era, Elizabeth's education is an unusually rigorous one, and it also probably helps that they live near Amherst College, which kind of provides this intellectual backdrop, so that influence is the
way she sees the world. Of course, by the time eighteen thirty five rolls around, nineteen year old Elizabeth is working as a teacher until her career is interrupted by what doctors will refer to the doctors of the time will refer to as brain fever. Her symptoms include headaches, chills, fever, and confusion. Today, she would likely be diagnosed with a viral or a bacterial brain infection like encephalitis or meningitis. Wow,
those are fully treatable with modern medicine. But it's eighteen thirty five, So doctors theorize that Elizabeth's job as a teacher has overstimulated her female brain. Hysterical, She's hysterical. She's just fucking lost it, which is manifested in these physical symptoms that she has now. Cut to my sister Laura, going, it does drive you insane, Like that's all I can think about. Where it's like, it's true, they were right,
but she's wrong. So oh that felt great. I've never really, I've never really taken that to the public station.
She's never going to hear it.
You're wrong, Laura, Yeah, she doesn't. She's not a fan of this.
Yeah, Laura, you guys are wrong.
You guys have always been wrong, right, Okay. So when Elizabeth's father hears about this diagnosis, he requests that his daughter be admitted to the local asylum, believing that the root of her illness is that she's quote used too much mental effort end quote in her line of work, too too much mental effort. The hot springs really hard?
Should do this from a hot spring?
Ooh, we absolutely should. There's two ducks that just hang out the whole time with you, and they're not scared of you because they're filled with lithium.
I want ducks to be my friends. Now, that's my new like yeah, bird obsession.
It's guygirl duck couple.
And they're like cool with everyone.
They don't care. They're just so relaxed and filled with magnesium and all the minerals you need for your nervous system to be Okay, I sold this to me completely. Okay, great, we'll get your little gift certifically. So this, of course, will be entirely against her will, obviously, and according to Elizabeth, she will later write a needless and unkind decision. She will spend six weeks in this asylum, subjected to all kinds of archaic treatments, including at one point blood letting.
Oh so it's not any kind of like hospital that we would know today.
Right, they didn't have lobotomies yet, right.
I don't think so. I would love to Everything in me wants to say no. Of course not, but I don't.
I want to ask if they had electric shock therapy, but I don't even know if they had electricity.
I don't, so I shouldn't. I think it was like the fresh new thing around town, electricity, But I don't know either. What we know is that she does not write about this first time she's hospitalized in any way, but it's a nineteenth century mental asylum. Her physical symptoms do start to improve, though, so she's finally discharged because, of course, she is treated and basically her brain infection
goes away. But by the point that she gets out, she firmly believes that her recovery is incidental and that her treatment by these asylum doctors has actually only made her worse mentally and emotionally. So a couple of years pass after that, and then in eighteen thirty nine, when she's twenty two, she gets set up with a friend of her father's named Redie.
For this.
Oh sorry, we have a picture of Elizabeth. Here's her og.
She does not look happy. That's a dour face.
All she wanted to do was be mean to children and hit them with a stick while she taught them Latin.
She's like someone unzip my dress. It's so tight.
Please, I'm just upset about it. The idea that you would get a physical infection or a virus, and suddenly it's like, sorry, crazy, go to the insane asylum.
Your father or your husband says you're crazy.
So that's all that's needed. That's it.
Okay.
So she gets set up with a friend of her father's named Theophilus Packard. Can we take a look at theophilis whoa, Yeah, this is when he's young. No, this is after he sees the ghost.
He looks like Planet of the Apes where they like put a suit on the apes.
And also I think it's the chin strap beard. This is the final argument against the chin strap beard. I know guys do it because they're like there was more left. Yeah, there used to be a lot. Now we're down to this one. And the answer is firm. Norah, Please don't.
Trying to see if you'd be hot without it. But I don't think well.
Also, he's taken the chin strap beard to a totally upsetting level where it's under his chin but grown out, so it looks like he's wearing a children's lion costume.
You think it smells like is that so they can eat soup better?
Maybe it's so that he can worship the Lord better. Because he is like her father, a Calvinist minister, and fourteen years older than her. He's thirty seven. He is not particularly romantic. I know that's going to shock you. He's not all about that relationship. And in fact, later Elizabeth will write that during their courtship he quote did not seem to love me much. Yeah, who sounds about right.
She does go on to say that she marries him in part to make her father happy, but they are not a match, so author Kate Moore writes, quote, their characters were as opposite as it was possible to get. Where Elizabeth was vibrant, sociable and curious, Theophilus was gloomy and, in his own words, dull. He said he was dull.
Yeah, always trust the guy when I tell you what they are.
He's like, Look, don't get fooled by my way back chin strap beard.
I know I seem whimsical because of this fucking.
This was just an accident. Yeah, what if he couldn't grote beard hair on his chin? It started back there. Okay, So for years Elizabeth endures a marriage that she will later describe as quote love strangling the worst. She spends that relationship constantly tempering your own thoughts and feelings to keep peace in the household. She has a lot of children, and she moves at the whim of her husband's ministry career. He is always the focus of everyone's life, because how could it not be.
He turns heads when he walks in the door.
He looks like he invented, like grape juice or something. He looks like something from the old, like try to clean, like a disgusting prune on it.
Ye, He's like, it works, it makes you buytolity, it affects your clean And always talking about a spleen like he won't shut up.
That a spleen. He's like, listen, I'm dull, but your spleen will be clean.
Clean is the heart of every malady.
Of every chin beard. In eighteen forty eight, the first women's rights convention ever held in the US, which was the Seneca Falls Convention, takes place to New York and activists like Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Lucretia Mott are like the central players of this event. It's a watershed moment in the broader movement for women's rights in the United States.
Elizabeth is now in her early thirties. She doesn't get to go to this, but she hears about it, and she hears the messages of women's empowerment that come out of it. It resonates with her. She is a decade into this miserable, dull, loveless marriage, and she begins to test the social limits of her role, not only as a mother, but as a preacher's wife. So she takes on this is the ultimate like get out of jail free. She starts doing missionary work, so she gets out of
the household. She's like, it's for the Lord by, It's what we're all supposed to be doing. And she gets to be out in the real world. And once she gets out into the real world, she starts examining her own faith. And this is the time where spiritualism is very, very popular in the United States, which is the belief the living can communicate with the dead, and being raised in the Calvinism end of Christianity, she's drawn to theologies
that are more empathetic and mystical and humanistic. She even attends a seance where she claims that she spoke with her late mother. Wow. So listen to episode three sixty three landed in Marshmallows if you want to hear about Harry Houdini's fight against spiritualism.
That was a good one because.
He didn't like it. So for most other women at that time, that kind of dalliance into spiritualism was what was happening. It probably would have been fine. But because Elizabeth's husband is a rigid nineteenth century Calvinist minister, her spiritual journey puts a huge strain on their marriage. But she doesn't want to hide her beliefs anymore. Basically, she's just trapped and she's like, whatever, I'm going to do
what I want. So in their ultra religious social circle, which is probably just all the people at her husband's church, they're just watching as the minister's wife dabbles in the heretical like the saance.
It can't, it can't, it's not allowed.
And so at home, this I guess hobby is challenging Theophilis's values on everything from how to raise their six children to major issues of the day like slavery. Elizabeth identifies as an abolitionist, although a very flawed white eighteen hundreds one got it very self serving, but overall, especially like trying to put it on the table with her husband, who is ten times worse in every direction than her,
he doesn't like it. She is an avid supporter of John Brown, the man who led the anti slavery raid at Harper's Ferry in eighteen fifty nine and was executed for it. She's a believer in this movement and her husband is mortified. He, of course, unsurprisingly finds his wife's politics increasingly embarrassing. She becomes so disillusioned that she actually leaves her husband's church because she's like, how could you say you're of God and be doing this to people?
I mean, that's such a fuck you. Yeah, my wife leaving preacher's wife.
You saw the Whitney used To movie, you know what it's like. So leaving the churches, she is just piling up the humiliations for him, their marriages and shambles. But of course, divorces off the table. He would never do it morally, and she is deathly afraid that she'll lose custody of her children. Then her husband of twenty one years does the unthinkable dies. No, No, it's close though,
but not bad for him. It's eighteen sixty They're living in Jacksonville, Illinois, and one night, in the middle of the night, Elizabeth is taken from her home by two strange men and brought to the Illinois State Asylum and Hospital.
Wow, he's just like, here's the problem. Let me get rid of it.
Yeah, you're so embarrassing by contradicting me that you must be insane, and so you have to be committed. And it's right there in Jacksonville. Elizabeth has no idea what's going on. She remembers being in the reception room hours later, begging to be released, and then she sees her husband through a window and realizes, like he's there to confirm this is happening and make sure it happens. Chilling. She will later write in her journal that he looked at
her with quote one last look of satisfied delight. Never had I seen his face more radiant with joy. Damn, He's like, she's gone, Can you imagine that face? Can we see the face again? Never had I seen the face really so radiant with joy.
That's why it doesn't look like a joyful person.
It's not.
He looks a little stunned.
It would actually probably be very upsetting to see him.
That guy radiant, just seeing that face through a window and I think, like that's a ghost or whatever.
But to see him happy, he's like heat, he's finally gone. I can get back to my books and ledges and God and of course God. So Theophilis commits his forty four year old wife to an asylum, telling the doctors there that she is quote slightly insane. His proof is we all, I mean, we'd all be in there, this whole building of people would be in there, thank God together. His proof is her leaving his Calvinist church and disavowing his worldview, and Illinois state law at the time says
no problem passed her. All husbands have the right to institutionalize their wives without any medical proof that they are mentally ill in any way. Yeah, and it was just so recently, I know. So as we know, Elizabeth has been through this before. It's what her father did to her when she's a teenager, and of course that works
against her and reaffirms her diagnosis. The well respected forty three year old superintendent of this hospital is a man named doctor Andrew MacFarlane, and he does seem to agree with Theophilis's assessment that Elizabeth's actions over the last few years suggest that she is quote slightly insane.
Slightly insane is so cute, It's like, can you that would be great?
Now? I mean, she's not raving in the streets, we understand, but she certainly isn't down at church nodding along with her husband's beard. Elizabeth will write that she has been quote placed there by her husband for thinking end quote. But her insistence that she's saying, of course only since seems to affirm to doctor McFarland that she's not the old trick screaming I'm insane Yeah never works. Yeah, I'm saying, I'm saying and then you say it five hundred more times.
So she's committed with no clear discharge date, and so she begins to write, and from her very thorough diaries, she describes her time in there, yearning not only for her freedom but for her children. She is in agony. Her friends on the outside are advocating for her release, but they are powerless, of course, because of the laws of the time, so they can argue all they want.
Elizabeth is certainly not alone in her experience, though she documents the leagues of other women that she meets in the asylum and who've also been unfairly institutionalized by the men in their lives. She also records details on patients who are genuinely unwell and how the staff are clearly unequipped to treat them and are often abusive. It is a miserable place. It's overcrowded, resources are stretched thin, there's high staff turnover. Some words are filthy. There are puddles
of human waste left on the unclean floor. Every room seems to have been stripped of the smallest possible comfort. Patients only get to sit on hardwood benches, and the bedding is as scratching, itchy and terrible as it could possibly be. And so Elizabeth writes all this down. She takes it all down, and she writes about all of it in detail. But the darkest testimony involves the extreme abuse that she experiences and that she witnesses other patients
being subjected to at the hands of asylum employees. So you've got to figure probably a lot of these employees were totally unqualified on trains, They're just thrown in there, like make sure they're quiet, or makes sure they eat or go to bed. From there, the exploitation of that power. Women are injured as they're violently stuffed into strait jackets.
They're beaten for being unruly, they're choked. Sometimes Elizabeth tries to intervene, but she writes that once, while trying to help a patient that's being man handled by a much larger attendant, he turns and grabs Elizabeth and drags her through the hallways back to her room by her arm and locks her in so she can't interfere anymore. She writes about a patient being starved as punishment, and when she sneaks that woman some food and aid finds out and pulls a knife on her and holds it over
her head. Holy shit, so it's just it's Mayhem in there. She also writes about an assistant choking a young patient and one of his fingernails is so sharp it slashes the young patient's throat. When the attendant backs off, Elizabeth dresses the patient's wound with a piece of her own clothing, and she keeps that bandage, and she writes that the scrap is quote red with the blood of this innocent girl, as proof of this kind of abuse in the Jacksonville
Insane Asylum. Oh my god, she terrifying. Yeah, and she's just kind of like, I'm just going to put it down. She writes extensively about the arrival of bath tubs too. Oh no, And we talked about this a little bit with Nelly Blyig.
So.
At first, they're introduced as a more hygienic and dignifying alternative to the sponge baths that were usually given to patients, but Elizabeth describes them as quickly becoming instruments of torture, used to punish girls and women for things as small
as quote silly behavior and laughing from her bed. Elizabeth writes that she can hear the patients begging for mercy as attendants throw them into the tubs, sometimes with quote their hands and feet tied and if they resisted, a straight jacket was placed upon them end quote like just sadistic people. This is not therapy in any way, And this is no and fa sadism. It's sadism because they're held underwater repeatedly for long stretches of time, and sometimes
the water's freezing or it's scalding. Haunts and the only way that Elizabeth knows that the patient survives this basically torture slash treatment is when they come back up out of the water screaming. Fuck. So she is in this situation and in this hospital for months, and of course it's deteriorating both her mental and her physical health because it's a living hell. As an act of resistance, she does her best to keep her mind sharp, so she
commits to a routine of regular exercise and prayer. This is you and me in jumping rope. This is how we're going to.
Do it, keeping sane in this fucked up world.
As we jump rope or on a mini trampoline. We're going to be.
Like, Lord, Lord, Lord, sharpen our brain.
Let's sharpen this shit up and get it together. She writes in her journal, quote I am becoming so extremely sensitive to wrong and abuse that I cannot or shall not witness it without interference, even if you put me into fetters for it. End quote. Wow. She is trapped in this asylum for three years total, Oh my god, until she's finally released in eighteen sixty three due to sustaining pressure from her older children, who are now are
either in their late teens or early twenties. So they just basically have been calling and pressuring doctor McFarlane and the other asylum officials like armaphones. No, sorry, they've been calling. They've been they have been putting pressure. Sorry doctor no, no, no, that's the good catch. They have been putting pressure on doctor McFarlane and on the other asylum officials basically saying, our mother is not crazy and you know it, and
get her out of there. But also the asylum officials and the workers are getting sick of dealing with Elizabeth and her interference because she really is fighting back. Essentially, they officially declare her incurably insane, but then release her so it's not a celebration because she is still married to Theophilis, and so when she gets home, according to her journals, he locks her in the nursery of their
homes the whole time. Are you thinking about the whole little just now, just now, full credit, then thank you, full credit. And apparently nurseries were way smaller in houses back there.
They were like in the fucking attic, like the attic room.
With the it's carry potter ship. He's he's locking her in the smallest place he possibly can't. She manages to sneak a letter out of the nursery window to a friend, outlining exactly how she's been confined against her will.
So she's just locked in there, yeah, and she had okay.
Yeah, just like whatever if it's I mean, imagine, it's just like, you want to give me some soup? Sounds good? Could we please do that? Like whatever? This guy fucking beardo, I don't want to see it. Don't bring it back outlining exactly how she's been confined against her will under the false pretense that she's insane. That friend and delivers the letter to a local judge, and finally, for some reason and somehow it works. For the first time, the
Awfulis's behavior is seen as legally problematic. While a husband can easily have his wife committed to an asylum, it's not as defensible to lock that same wife up in a little room in your house.
There are boundaries, people, we're here, let's just run around.
There's a rocking chair on the front porch. It's so nicely you keep all that abuse to the asylum, okay. So in January of eighteen sixty four, Elizabeth goes to trial to establish her mental state once and for all. She's now forty eight years old.
She's like, can I go to sleep?
She is like, but probably in the perfect like menopausal state to be like, let's do this thing.
She's also like an old late I mean.
No, no, say it. I mean, because forty eight in today's money, she's one hundred and seventeen. Various physicians and family members, friends and acquaintance go on record in the courtroom to state that she is a sane human being, and after five days of testimony but only seven minutes of deliberating, the jury deems Elizabeth Packard to be sane. And you know it is an all male jury. I
mean it would have to be. I believe Neckbeard's being like, I don't want to give this woman her freedom, but I've asked With that, Theophilis immediately skips down and takes their three youngest children with him. Elizabeth is left with nothing but the clothes on her back. Luckily, she does have her older children and her friends to lean on, but of course she is forever changed by the years of mistreatment. So she channels her anger into advocacy work,
and she starts by advocating for herself. She takes her husband to court in both Illinois and Massachusetts, where he's currently living, and she sues him for damages. Damn, I mean in the mid eighteen hundreds in the is electricity real? Yet it's that long ago. A few years after that, in her early fifties, she finally wins custody of her youngest children, and then she sets out on a campaign for the rights of both married women and patients in
psychiatric institutions. Wow. Her most powerful tool is her writing. Her diaries capture the horrors of the asylum so vividly that when she publishes several books based on them, the public laps it up. She becomes increasingly famous. She travels all through the United States sharing her story, and she
eventually secures real changes in the law. She's said to have inspired the passage of over thirty different laws in various states, ones that better protect women's personal assets when they get married, and an Illinois law that guarantees a trial for anyone unwillingly being committed, which could have prevented
Elizabeth's own institutionalization if it had existed years earlier. So now it's eighteen sixty seven, and Elizabeth's efforts also result in the state investigation of doctor Andrew McFarland and the Illinois State Asylum in Hospital, which stretches on for seven months. In the end, investigators recommend he be removed from his post, but for unknown reasons, this doesn't happen, and he holds the job for three more years, at which point he
willingly leaves to open his own private asylum. In eighteen ninety seven, when she is eighty years old, Elizabeth Parsons ware Packard dies suddenly of a strangulated hernia. She is buried in Chicago. After decades spent writing books and giving in passion lectures on the horrors of the asylum and the women who were sent there and who suffered there. Her legacy as a courageous woman who stood up and
spoke out has endured. As for doctor McFarland, despite the reputational damage caused by Elizabeth's advocacy work, not to mention the investigation into the asylum under his leadership. When a new state run psychiatric center opens in Springfield, Illinois in nineteen sixty eight, it's named in his honor, cool the mcfarlande Mental Health Center. But when author Kate Moore's book The Woman They Could Not Silence is published in twenty
twenty one. It brings renewed attention to Elizabeth Parson Where's story, and in twenty twenty three, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker announces that center will be renamed the Elizabeth Parsons were Packard Mental Health Center.
That is amazing.
Yeah, and it just happened. And it's because of author Kate Moore and her work. And of course Elizabeth Parsons were Packard's work where she was just blindly in the dark, going this is wrong. I need to change this.
Somebody, dude such a strong like they could have named it something generic to just taking his name off of it. But instead of naming it after this evil doctor, they named it after a woman who fought him. Yeah, fought his evil. That's amazing.
And also it's like, was he evil? I feel like the naming thing is like their way of saying, but he did such great work, which always happens, but he didn't according to the people he was doing the work on. And that's the key is that anybody can claim that, or their constituents can claim it, or their boys down at the Elks Lodge. But how about the people that were there and sitting in their own fucking piles of
feces being tortured. Okay, So of this decision, author Kate Moore has said, quote, I think she would be personally grateful that she and her work have been recognized when for so much of her life she was denigrated and dumbed down. But I also think she would say the work is not done. End quote. And that's the story of mental health advocate Elizabeth Parsons wear packard.
Wow, I didn't as slightly what is it slightly insane?
Slightly insane?
I didn't know that about her at all.
Amazing And also it's a mental health awareness month, that's right, So that's what the whole vibe is about. Yes, good job, thank you. And here's Kate moore book. She's an amazing author.
Oh yeah, the.
One they could not silence. Very cool, so cool, good job, that was great, thank you. That was harrowing the idea that there are this many women who had to go either undercover or just were committed to insane asylums and then had to do the work on the other end once they were released totally and I mean you can't just send me here because you don't like that I'm talking.
I mean it says something about like, you know, because she knew how to write. All the women who were not given an education, who couldn't write about their experiences or send a note through a window to their friend to tell them what was going on with them, that's.
Right, you know, they could only raise their voices, which then immediately qualified them as being slightly.
Insane, which is why they didn't want to educate women.
Then we would fucking that's why. That's why our school systems are in the state that they are, because if nobody knows anything, then weren't going to be good with it. Okay, great job, thank you. I mean if you insist, I guess.
I mean I don't have to.
I mean I could walk out right now.
How do they get so disgusting? And how do you keep them clean?
You never can. You're always wiping your glasses on your shirt, the thing they tell you not to do. Oh really, m hm, unless you're the kind of person that can keep a little silky thing. Now, I can't do it.
Nobody can do that.
That's a lie, is it started? Line?
Okay? Conspiracy? I couldn't think of the word conspiracy.
Oh my god, my brain. The brands are going to cross the board, myself, the people I'm observing, this is what's happening to all of us. Okay, but let's go back, okay.
To February of twenty twenty. Remember that the world is starting to look with increasing concern at coronavirus outbreaks in China and Italy. But today we are in Argentina. Specifically, we are in the Andes Mountains on South America's highest peak, the Aconcagua.
Okay, I've heard of it. No? Is it a by match you peachu?
No?
Okay?
The fact that this is I don't know.
I don't know.
Why am I saying yes? Right? The fact that this is the highest mountain in South America makes it one of the seven Summits, which are the highest peaks on each continent. So this makes it part of a popular climbing challenge for mountaineers who want to conquer.
All of them.
Could you imagine being like that?
Do they not know about TV or naps? It's I mean, I get it, it's nice to be outside and stuff. I don't know how that.
Dry it would be cool for something aside podcasting.
I feel I feel like those are people who have learned something in this world about not the immediate gratification of like stuff like this. I just never learned that. Yeah. Same, It's just mean I can't hike all the time if no one's giving me attention, right or alcohol?
Okay, So Everest is the highest of these seven summits. It's also the most expensive and logistically worrisome, which is because of its popularity, altitude, and weather concerns. But it's debatable as to whether it's the hardest to actually climb. And so also, I did the deaths on Everest in episode one seventy four, and you covered Junko taba e in episode five twenty six. Should anyone want to feel cold.
More learn about a legendary lady mountaineer, right, or your thing? Or just a bunch of terrible deaths skeletons?
Yeah, yeah, okay. So it's the middle of summer in the southern part of the Hemisphere twenty twenty, so February. It's the peak of the Andes climbing season, and two porters are on the mountain not too far from the summit on its hardest climbing route. It's called the Polish Glacier laying down ropes for a climbing expedition, and Akankagua has multipots to the summit. Some don't require much technical equipment or skill at all. You can just kind of
have a nice walk up to them. But you do have to be in really good shape to get to the top, which is twenty two thousand feet, because the risk of getting severe altitude sickness is very high, and so some climbers use oxygen. Some are purists and don't. But this route that we're taking, the Polish Glacier route, is where the porters are, you know, getting everything ready for the mountaineers. And this part is extremely difficult. It
requires significant mountaineering experience. And it's named the Polish Glacier because the first group to open up the route in the nineteen thirties had been from Poland.
Okay, not that interesting.
Yeah, It used to be that groups of mountaineers set up their own camps, lay their own minds. But now there's a whole industry around mountaineering and these porters are doing just that.
Can you imagine that's your job, though, it'd be pretty red like some people are planning, like this is my lifetime trip to climb this mountain, and other people are like, ugh, gotta go to work and climb this mountain again. They do it constantly.
These idiots just keep coming.
Okay.
Another thing that's changed is that the Polish Glacier is receding because of the global climate change.
Fake.
I'm just kidding. What's the word conspiracy?
Conspiracy? No, it's not.
This means that every so often, and I remember seeing this, like in my news feed, the glacier spits out an item that had once been encased on ice.
My favorite.
On this particular day, the porters stumble upon a nicomat camera. Oh it's an old school camera and it's got an old school label maker name on it. So a name and address with an old school label maker. Wow, right, Yes, the name says Janet Johnson and there's her address as well. The porters can see that twenty four photos have been taken with this old camera.
They shrug it off.
They take it down to the mountain to their campsite when they're done for the day, and they show it to a guide named Ulissees corve Lan. And when Uluss sees the name Janet Johnson. Then he goes white and he tells the porters that Janet Johnson, along with another climber named John Cooper, died on the mountain almost fifty years earlier under very mysterious circumstances. Her camera had just been uncovered.
The ice receding is unveiling evidence. That's right.
This is the story of the Aconcagua Mountain mystery. The main source for this is a twenty twenty three New York Times article.
It's very good, robust.
Yeah, no, it's not urty.
It's good.
It's called Ghosts on the Glacier by John Branch with videos by Emily Ryan.
It's a really great read.
And then I also went to a website by this writer slash mountaineer named Mark Horrell h.
O R R E L. Mark.
It's one of the greats. The rest of the sources can be found in our show notes.
Great.
So it's nineteen seventy two and a fifty two year old Portland based lawyer named Carmine Defoe.
Yeah, that's a good name.
Old done starts putting together a group that will tackle Aconcagua together, and they want to do the Polish Glacier route, the hardest one.
If they succeed, they will be the fifth ever group to do.
So. Hey, hey, let's climb. CARMEI is a member of a climbing.
Club which Karmie. Is that his nickname Carmi? Yeah? Did I say Carmine? Yeah, well I've meant Karme. It's really Carmine.
That's it could be, And it's just it's such a cutie nickname for like Carmar Carmie.
So he's been a member of a climbing club that's a thing called Mazumas.
It's been around.
Since the eighteen nineties. It's still around today, so don't talk shit, you can join it. Most of the climbers he recruits are also members of Mazumas. The group includes a psychiatrist named Jim Petrowski, a doctor named Bill Eubank, a dairy farmer named Arnold McMillan. Wow, just like people who were in the climbing mountains. It's like pigs, all kinds.
Joe girl named Maureen.
No, a police officer named Bill Zeller, and the youngest, a twenty five year old Brigham Young University student named John Shelton who was hot and He also spoke the best Spanish in his group because of his mission trip. Okay, hm, the hot was me. What's it called editorial life?
Thank you? Welcome?
And NASA engineer named John Cooper, who had worked on several recent Apollo missions.
I mean every type of person, that's right, except for women.
Well, oh, we're gonna get to her.
Okay.
Carmie hires a local guide named Miguel Alfonso, and then close to when the group is going to leave, he announces one new member of the party, a school librarian with a PhD in education from Denver named Janet Johnson.
Okay, right.
While most people in the group are in the same general orbit, although none of them have ever climbed together, Janet has never met anyone else in the group. But Carmie's Denver friends say she's a highly experienced climber, so she can come along letter in.
Yeah, oh, lady climber.
What's she doing?
I'm not gonna wait around all day?
What's she doing on the mountaintop?
Stop it? This is serious. No, it's not okay.
Because the climbing party includes a NASA engineer and a woman and a woman, there's considerable public interest in the expedition, and it attracts some media attention because like it's kind of a new exciting thing, this mountain climbing.
Yeah.
Women in the sixties, you know, everest the whole, like climbing things.
Like the trend. It's really becoming entrent.
And everyone loves NASA people so and women of course they love women, so love women. They get us a lot of media attention, especially directed at John Nasa, John and Janet so John Nasa, John, I'm gonna call him. That is thirty five at the time of the expedition. He had grown up in Kansas and had always loved the outdoors. After graduating from Oklahoma University, he becomes a pilot for the Coastguard.
He's an avid climber.
He's just like all the things that you want if you want an outdoorsy type. Yeah, you know, like when you are swiping whichever way and you're like, do I want to hike on my first date or no, he's the hike on the first daid guy.
He's the hike five miles on our first day. That's right.
He summitted Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya and po Poka Tepey Toll.
Yes, where my vacation home is.
That's right, And they all have elevations between seventeen thousand and nineteen thousand feet. And at NASA, John had worked on the Apollo eleven mission to the Moon and every mission since up until the last one, which was Apollo seventeen.
That's right. You knew that.
Shortly before his expedition to Uconcagua. While at NASA he had met a secretary named Sandy Myers and they had gotten married in nineteen sixty eight and they had a son named Randy in nineteen sixty nine. And we're back and it's a fan offal of NASA, John Cooper CIVU play.
Okay, yeah, regolutely right. Absolutely, you would love to have a beer with that guy. Totally fun cheers.
Although all of John's backstory becomes known to public around the time with the climb, most of what people know about Janet at the time she's a lady. She's a lady, yes, which is unusual for a climber at this time. Janet's thirty six at the time of the expedition and had been born in Minneapolis and adopted by Victor and May Johnson. That Johnson's are very religious and very strict, and Janet is an obedient daughter. She's a voracious reader, extremely studious,
loves to learn. When she's ten, she says to her parents she wants a sister, and so they adopt a five year old named Judy. I know, Judy, says her sister, quote liked to study. That was her favorite thing to do. Straight a's. She would settle for nothing less same when Janet goes away to college.
This sucks.
When Janet goes a way to college and this is so little sister. Oh no, Judy finds a box of love notes between her sister and another woman. This Janet and love notes between Janet and another woman. Judy found those in her room. Oh okay, she went away to college. It's unclear exactly how j and its parents find out, although little sister it's clear.
Yeah, yeah, I mean you allegedly, but you said that, you go this sucks and then you're like she found it where I'm like.
Why that sucks?
Oh yeah, sorry, Alviany, that doesn't suck.
Judy fucking became a rat. Yes, you know, got it. I'm sure she regretted it the rest of her life. They find out about it. Her parents are really strict religious parents, and they send Janet to a hospital to cure her.
Yeah, it's seme today.
This of course does not work, and Janet moves to Denver as soon as she can to put distance between herself and her parents.
That's the story my mom used to tell as being a nurse and a psychatric hospital and like the you know, the late sixties seventies where people are just taking their the kids that smoke pot, the kids that rebel, the kids that were different in some way, and just like, well, you have to go to a psyche.
To the scariest place on earth. So it's in Denver. She becomes her own woman, and she gets her masters and then a PhD in education and starts working as a school librarian. And then really just it's the thing to do between climbing mountains whenever she can. She's just obsessed with it. She's among the first twenty women to climb all of Colorado's fourteen ers they're called the summits that are higher than fourteen thousand feet, as well as notable mountains all around the world.
Wow. Yeah.
In addition to local interest in John and Janet, the group also attracts attention because of their plan to climb the notoriously difficult Polish Glacier again. They would be the fifth team to do it if they accomplished it. Spoiler, they don't. A journalist from the local paper in Mendoza, Argentina named Raphael Moran goes to interview the climbing team when they arrive in Argentina. So he goes to the hotel.
He's like, Mistick gets just you know, a little fluck piece on everyone, but right away he gets some bad vibes. When he interviews everyone together, he feels that the group is not cohesive. They don't seem to know each other well enough for what they're about to embark on, because you have to trust each other, especially if you're roped together, and believe that the other person knows what they're doing
and has your best interest and helps out. They also don't seem to quite understand just how difficult the Polish Glacier route is. They're kind of being jovial about it. He tells the photographer to make sure he gets single shots of everyone in the party because he's convinced they won't all make it back down the mountain and he'll want a photo for the newspaper when that happens. WHOA, yeah, oh, let's see a photo of Janet. So that's Janet got it.
There's no sunscreen back then, but sunscreen didn't exist.
No sunscreen. Everyone's wearing the same flannel.
That's right, no sunscreen. Skin cancer still exists.
Those cool sunglasses for sure, though, Oh yeah for sure.
So wow, that's yeah, she's got it all going. The group stays together at a hotel in Mendos, Argentina, before setting off. John Cooper, the NASA engineer, keeps a diary, and from it it seems like he and the other men in the group don't quite understand like what category to put Janet in. She just is kind of an enigma to them.
He says.
She doesn't seem feminine at all. He writes, quote, Janet sure is weird. She went swimming in her bra, blouse and panties today and the.
Poll was full of people.
End quote. So it's just like whamon climbing mountains.
Also, she just jumped into the pool because she didn't have a suit.
She didn't give a fuck, like she was definitely like a I don't give a fuck, lady, yeah, Yeah, I'm going to live life how I want.
To live with And so these guys had kind of never been around anybody like that before exactly.
So the team sets out for base camp, a twenty five mile extremely rigorous hike on its own. Like you get to the first place and you're like, we have to go more.
Who's making the food?
Right? So base camp is at thirteen thousand, five hundred feet, which is around one thousand feet less than any of the highest peaks in the Rocky Mountains. Altitude sickness begins to be a factor at around eight thousand feet and they're at thirteen five hundred and by the time they reached the base camp U Banks, the group's doctor is already not feeling well oh and has.
To stay there.
So I looked up what altitude sickness feels like, because I don't fucking know, and I'll tell you and you'll understand this as well as I do. So altitude sickness generally feels like a severe hangover. Ooh, those fucking hangovers where you're lying there just wishing for consciousness.
Yeah, you can get out of your own body just for two hours.
Like sweaty and suppressed, and oh it'spicious, so bad. It's characterized by a throbbing headache, nausea, dizziness, fatigue, and shortness of breath.
So it sucks.
You're not hiking anymore when you get it. At base camp, the group connects with a local twenty five year old climber named Roberto Bustos, whom they have hired to look after their base camp setup. So I think he might be the cook or they just are eating like dry weird Yeah, what is it?
Handfuls of walnuts? It would drive me insane. Yeah.
Roberto also specifically remembers that the vibe seemed off to him as well. They didn't seem like a team, but rather a group of individuals. He says, quote, there was no group attitude. I was thinking, Oh, I am on my own. Everyone has to take care of himself. In my opinion, they weren't ready for such a strange and big mountain as a Concagua.
Yeah. That's a terrible way to start, right, Yeah, And.
I think a lot of people underestimate this mountain, and the people who are from there know that.
Do you think the infighting would be worse if it's strangers who aren't gelling, or if it's people who know each other really well, because that also has a thing of like you could start as a great group, but something happens and then yeah, either way, then it's more personal totally. But you think that that you make sure you like each other though, if you're going to do it, you're right. Trust is the two people.
Might not like each other when everyone else, Yeah, who knows? Email us? Are you a mountaineer? Let us know what's it called altitude sickness?
It's ultimate thread on the trail. Let us know what it's like to be a mountaineer. Do you hate Everyonekay? The whole time you're thinking of string cheese, right, because that's all I can think of? Or like you have to like line your pockets with gummy bears, some.
Crackers that are sandwich with peanut butter. They're so fucking good.
Think up pulling that out of your socks and no one else can see.
These days, it's expensive to be a mountaineer, and that's partly because nowadays porters set up camps, they lay lines so that groups can mostly travel directly from base camp to base camp up the mountain. But in the seventies that wasn't really how it went. This group would be doing all of that work themselves. So their route up
the mountain will include three separate camps. So they have to climb up to Camp one, haul all the gear up there and set up camp, then go back to base camp, then go back to Camp one with the rest of the gear camp there, and then do the same thing two more times for base camp two and three. So bring everything up, stay, bring everything up.
So it's exer size and frustration. Yeah, while you're mountaineering. Yeah, yeah, I saw that tree already. You're like, your attitude just gets worse and worse.
Right, The conditions are varying with the potential for storms to blow in, and the climb includes long periods of navigating through spiky ice formations called penny ten days, right, Penny ten.
Days, Penny ten days. Have you ever heard of them? Yeah?
Literally penitents petitentes because they look like people praying in church. They're basically still agmites.
There's still lag mites coming up from the ground exactly.
They're these huge spikes of ice, huge fields of them, just coming up from the ground like upside down giant icicles. I'm gonna show you a photo. Oh great, because I didn't understand those. Oh, so you have to navigate around those. It's just a pain in the ass.
Essentially, you can't just like worry about putting one foot in front of the other. No, it looks like.
An old movie, like a Dune or you know, labyrinth kind of thing.
Or a doctor no situation exactly.
So there's a bunch of those as well. So those are a big pain in the ass. They're hard to climb around. It's grueling and already feels like people are starting to grumble about each other.
NASA.
John writes in his diary that he does not think Janet is contributing enough. He writes, quote, she's a real loaner and appears to be for only one thing, to get herself to the summit at the expense of everyone, or on everyone's back, meaning they're carrying more than she is or something, and she's not really yeah, helping out.
That's the first thing I thought of that she would be accused of, because as a woman she can't maybe technically carry as much, or if there is that kind of bitterness where they're like, we didn't want her here anyway, totally. That is what you would say.
Several in the group come down with acute altitude sickness right off the bat and stay at Camp one or go back to base camp. This includes Karmi right off the bat, the leader.
The author of the whole plan.
He's out, the doctor U Banks is out, and Shelton, the hot interpreter out gone. The rest of the group make it to Camp three. They do the fucking thing at the base of the Polish Glacier about eighteen thousand feet up and the last camp before the stretch to the summit. So one last camp, okay. As they get ready to start climbing, Petrowsky the psychiatrist, can't get on. I just hate this word. Can't get on his crampons. I hate it.
I can't every time I see it.
Are you gonna spit that out?
Why did I take that sip? That's they are spiking.
Shoe attachments to get into the ice that absorb.
Your foot blood every month, not crampons. I just can't a borrow crampon.
Oh my god, you a krampon. I forgot to bring mond.
I'm sliding into the penitents. So he's like.
Having trouble putting them on, which is weird, and it's clear to everyone else that it's because he's disoriented, and they think that he's suffering from severe, possibly deadly altitude sickness, because at that point your brain is like not working fine.
Alone, it is my Tampa.
The local guide, Alfonso, takes him back down the mountain to base camp. So now there are only four climbers left in the entire group. Zeller, the police officer, McMillan, the good old dairy farmer, and John Nasa John and our Janet. None of them have ever climbed a mountain this high before, and none of them knew each other before the trip.
Here's the other thing that I just would like to and maybe I'm totally wrong in doing this, but the idea that someone was like, she's just doing it for herself, It's like, so how many that are left are doing it for everybody else?
Do you want to hold hands at the top of the mountain?
Now? Literally going to be like me first? I mean, isn't that kind of what mountaineering is about? Like you go together, but it's a one man sport. It ends a woman one woman, Okay, sure?
According to the accounts, of Zeller and McMillan, the psychiatrist and the police officer who are left and spoiler alert, they're the only two survivors at the group. Before the group had set out believing they would reach the summit that day, but had moved very slowly, picking their way
across the glacier with ice axe and crampons. They realized they will have to camp for the night, and they didn't bring their tents, so they have to like beave a whack into the fucking ice and try to like spend the night in there.
We'll make themselves like a little igloo.
It sucks, And so the next morning NASA John Cooper says he's too fucking cold. He's like, I'm out sense. He's like, I'm going to go back to base camp. And they let him go alone, which is something I guess we're not supposed to do, which is like maybe part of the thing of them not knowing each other. Yeah, they don't stick together.
Yeah, you know.
So those three climbers keep going up for the summit. The last stretches an icy, snowy Ridge, and Zella and McMillan say they walk ahead of Janet, making.
A path for her.
Let's see that photo, remember that one. Okay, it's just someone hiking with the rope tight around them, leading back to whoever's taking the picture behind them.
Yep, right, they're at the top, big old mountain. They made it to the top. No they didn't.
Ok that's technically not the top.
Oh it's on the side. That's the top. Okay, right, I don't know.
What do I know.
More than me?
So they make her a path and at some point, as the sun is starting to go down, they turn around and realize Janet's not behind them anymore. According to their account, they find her one hundred feet off the trail, lying in the snow, and she says, quote, my name is jan Johnson. Don't make me suffer, Just let me lay here and die end quote. The men say that Zeller ropes himself to Janet, and eventually both of the men try to get Janet back down the mountain, and
they say her hands are swollen and black. They have to anchor her from three different directions to keep her standing up. They get to the snow cave where they had been in between the final Ridge and Camp three, where they had spent the night, where Cooper had left to go back down the mountain, remember, and there's a flare gun there and so they shoot it, but nothing happens at the lower altitude at this point because it came down. They say, Janet seems in better shape, so
they send McMillan down the mountain to help. So it's just Zeller, the police officer, and Janet at this point, who's clearly not doing well. Yeah, on his way down, McMillan loses his ice axe and falls, sliding one thousand feet down. He has a black eye when he tells this story and says that's how he got it. Then he says he saw members of the Argentine Army and
dead news and a dead soldier. But it's only when he finally reaches camp through that he realized he had hallucinated all of that, because that's what happens when you have altitude sickness. He will later learn that he really did see a body, but it wasn't a dead soldier hallucination. It was actually John Cooper's body NASA. John Cooper's no
thirty five year old NASA engineer. So meanwhile Janet and Zeller are following McMillan down the glacier, and they also take a big fall, which doesn't result in major injuries, but their faces get cut up and their glasses get broken. In the fall, Janet and Zeller become untethered from each other because remember they had tied her up in three places to help walk, and it's only when Zeller climbs back up to Janet that he sees John Cooper's body. He says, quote, I checked him, and he was dead
and appeared to be frozen. I didn't see any cuts on his exposed skin and no tears in the clothing, so I assume that he didn't die as a result of a fall, but exhaustion and hypothermia end quote. So just kind of sat down on where he was at, and yeah, died. Zeller says at this point that Janet seems in decent shapes since they've been coming down a bit, but wants to rest a bit longer, so he leaves her and says he'll go back ahead of her, back down to camp three, which again, you're not supposed to
leave anyone alone, especially someone who's clearly suffering. He reaches camp and he finds McMillan there, and the two fall asleep and Janet never joins them. The men say in the morning when they woke up, there's no sign of Janet. So they decided to go back down the mountain, saying that Zeller was too disoriented from altitude sickness to try again and to keep going or to help get anyone
down the mountain. So essentially, just two people of this whole mountaineering team make it close to the top and come down, and out of the four, only two come down alive.
Okay.
The case is widely reported on, and John and Janet's families are, of course devastated. In some newspaper articles, Janet's name is misspelled as Jeanette. Janet's mother saves clippings of every single article and carefully crosses out every Jeanette replaces it with her daughter's correct name. I know some articles quote Janet saying having said let me die here, which they said that she said, and in all of those articles, her mother blacks out the entire quotation. She's like, my
daughter would never do that. They don't believe that at all. A judge and police investigator in Mendoza open a case labeled as an investigation into possible manslaughter, but despite this. After brief questioning, everyone on the mountaineering team is allowed to leave the country and go home. Once back in Oregon, Carmi gathers as surviving members at the party for a meeting with the club leadership and they write an official chronology of events, which is a story everyone tells their
hometown newspapers and any following investigators. So they put a story together in secret, and everyone sticks to that narrative.
Oh so they don't that meeting and that plan is a secret plan. They're not like, let's get together and put this on the official record.
No, yeah, they're like, having been interviewed back in Argentina and having very different narratives and conflicting stories, they meet up and they get their story straight, especially which is suspicious.
Yes, it is.
So.
The account says that John and Janet had been desperate to reach the summit and had likely died of pulmonary edemas from lack of oxygen at altitude, and because their bodies aren't able to be autopsied, they're still on the mountain. That's the general consensus.
That is so.
That was nineteen seventy two, and in the summer of nineteen seventy three, John's body is found. That expedition is led by Alphonse, our local guide, who is haunted by this entire ordeal. At the foot of the Polish Glacier, they find ripped tents and sleeping bags, and about one hundred and fifty feet above on the glacier they find John's body and there's photos of it. John is found missing a crampon and without an ice axe. He's on a gentle slope and reports say his face is frozen in a.
Look of terror.
But like that to me is like everyone is when they die.
Yes, it's the same thing as when it freaks people out and people think it's demonic when people's like eyes are missing when their bodies are discovered, and it's like soft tissues is what goes first. Yes, but it looks like the devil has been here.
Right, So that says nothing to me. But it's just it's.
Noted death, it's dead bodies. Yeah.
So here's the weirdest part of all to me. His abdomen has a cylindrical hole which is bloody and goes so deep it almost like hits his spine, though this isn't seen until his body thaws. At a lower altitude because they bring him down. A National Geographic reporter named Lauren McIntyre, who goes with this group, comes to the conclusion that quote, there is no mystery at all. He
fell on his ice axe and he injured himself. But remember his ice as isn't with him when they find him, but he could have fallen on it left it behind. Then he says he was in so much discomfort and pain when he was nearly a base camp that he finally got off the steep part of the glacier, got down on the flat. He had evidently stopped, sat down and removed his gloves and was probably trying to examine himself in his wound when he fell on anous and froze to death. So he fell on his ice pick.
As that consensus, he tells us to the press in a statement, and it seems like a lot of people take him for his word, even though he's just a reporter and not a forensic investigator. Alfonso the Guy feels incredibly uneasy about all of this because he specifically remembers the two other climbers saying they had seen John's body in a seated position, not laying down. With his head in his hands. But of course they had been hallucinating.
You can't.
You have to remember the whole time that these two who survived were probably suffering from out some sort of altigide sickness as well. Janet's body is not found until February nineteen seventy five. Ernesto Cumballero and his son Alberto, who's seventeen, are with another climber named Guillermo Vieio when they have to scrap their summit attempt and decide to climb down via the Polish glacier in a field of
penny ten days and covered by some snow. So it's a field of those and it's covered by some snow. They find Janet's body.
Ooh.
Her face is blackened from two years of exposure, but it's also severely injured with exposed bone, and there is blood visible on her face and jacket. And like John, she's missing one crampon and her ice axe. Her hands are bare. She's tangled up in ropes, and this is super ran. A rock is found sitting on top of her body, and there are no rocks around. She's in
this ice field field exactly. So she's found on a shallow slope far from anywhere she could have possibly fallen a long distance with Zeller, So that narrative that that's how he lost her and she could have died isn't true. So Alberta is a teenager and doesn't really know it to make up at all. But the other two men will say that they are sure Janet was murdered. Of course they are just as an expert as a National
geographic reporter who swears the opposite. But it doesn't look like it squares up with the official narrative of the expedition.
It's just such a weird thing for a porter to come out and just be like, I'm almost positive that this is what happened, where it's like, sorry, aren't you a reporter? Right?
Yeah?
I would you.
Supposed to speculate?
Yeah, yeah, totally.
A medical student who was present for the autopsies of both John and Janet says that John had a skull fracture and that hole in his abdomen which looked to him like it could have been made by an ice crew, maybe your ice pick as well. The injuries to Janet's face and damage to her boot looked like she had been hit hard several times, so it looked like she had plant forestroma to her face.
Yeah.
The medical student who is now a neurosurgeon, is also convinced that they were killed and that their deaths were not accidental. He says that this was the consensus and that the medical examiner believed the same, and they're all dead now, so he's kind of one of the last people who can verify that. Janet is buried at the small cemetery at the base of the Aconcagua, which she had told her family she wanted before the expedition if
she perished on the mountain. No one from her family is able to attend, but someone leaves flowers with the note detu madre or from your mother on her grave. That's so sad, and the only item her sister receives it is Janet's ring with a brown stone from her finger, and Judy still has it today. Unfortunately, any chance of for their investigation, so here's maybe there would have been
a big investigation and the answers would have happened. However, it's nineteen seventy six in Argentina and there is a there's a violent military coup that overthrows a democratically elected president Parone and establishes a military dictatorship that brutally just consumes Argentina for years. I hate to gloss over that because it's so important, And.
Just go watch the musical A Vida. You'll learn at least one woman's perspective exactly.
So moving on just like that, but you know, there's no chance of further investigation. Essentially, the last surviving thember of the party, John Shelton, the mor No the Mormon missionary missionary BYU student, was in hospice care at the time of this New York Times article by John Branch and Emily Ryan, and they go see him in his hospice bed. He insists that there is no foul play. He calls that idea hogwash, and he dies a month before the article is published. But he firmly doesn't believe.
And but you know that's the narrative.
That's the narrative that he he was at the secret meeting to establish.
Right, yeah, and he wasn't there.
He was, Oh yeah, he wasn't wasn't so, but you know that's based on everyone.
That's his opinion, right, those around the uconcago community have more mixed feelings. Even though the medical examiner felt certain foul play had been involved, they might not adequately understand the damage a fault in the mountain terrain could actually inflict. So that makes complete sense. But still, looking back at the conditions at the time on the glacier, the amount of soft snow would have made a very long fall
improbable or maybe impossible. So when Janet's camera is found, the film is sent to a special archival photo development company in Canada called Film Rescue.
Because they're like, what's on here?
Yeah, and if just anyone tries to develop it, it's going to get fucked up. So they are able to get all the photos off of it, so the camera film and another role of film they found are able to be processed. And the pictures show the party mostly smiling in those early stages of the journey, hauling gear and setting up camp. The photos are beautiful and well composed, and actually, can you show one of them, really beautiful photos. This is on the mountain for fucking fifty years.
Wow, just sitting up there. Yeah.
Also, Zella and McMillan said, when she turned around and saw that she was gone, he said, well, we weren't tied together, so she could have just left. But that one photo that she took, they're tied together. So is that her last clue? They are tied together? Whoever took this photo? And we're not totally positive which one of them that is they are roped together? Yes?
So so why lie? Right? What's the lie about? Exactly?
So?
John Branch writes in the New York Times article, quote, if she was oxygen deprived or delirious, she still knew how to focus the lens, compose the frame, and hold the camera study to take clear photographs. That is where the film ends. That is where the legend begins. The film does not solve the mystery. It adds to it. It tells you what Johnson saw in her final hours, but not how she felt, not how she died. Not every discovery leads to revelation. Some just make you want
to know more. End quote. And that is the story of the Aconcagua Mountain mystery. And you can punch me in the face.
Just why, God damn.
Just one time you can punch me in the pit.
You really set that up like we were gonna get sorry, But.
Okay, let's speculate care speculation allegedly. Allegedly, this is just a true crime podcast theory. We're not doctors, that's right. Did one of them go?
Although we could have been it's been ten years, we could have gotten a PhD.
Why don't we have our fucking honorary degrees from Sacramento and La City College?
Yause they know we're fool of shit, so speaking up.
So maybe one of them actually kind of had lost it on the mountain and was hallucinating something and killed them.
Yeah, she was not sexually assaulted as well.
I don't think that a sane, normal person would be able or have the energy to attack someone like that with being at that elevation. But if you were hallucinating, if you were, if you had delirious.
Yeah, if you didn't like a person to the degree where they kind of invaded your space, right, and then it's not just anybody, it's this lady that's I'm going to get there for myself, is their perception for some reason.
But or she was pushing to keep going and they didn't want to. But I don't think that there was that level of linear thinking at.
That height because they had such bad Yeah, like.
On the way down, he saw, you know, he was hallucinated. So what happened up there? Did he hallucinate?
There?
He was at war and these were soldiers, and you.
Know, but I guess if that were the case, then when they all got together to put a story together, why wouldn't they be able to say, hey, listen, these are the myriad stories we have because these are the crazy things we experienced.
Because mountaineering would change forever after that. Like I see them, these mountaineers, these guys, guys banding together and being like, let's not you know, we're going to get a bunch of press over this. We just wanted like this to kind of be hidden so we can go on doing what we're doing, and we don't want to ruin these guys. Like the memories of these people and the lives of the living ones. This is speculation. I'm not saying this
is true or right. Their entire families because they had altitude sickness and did and some crazy thing yeah that they weren't aware of, they don't remember and you know, in their minds aren't responsible for. So I'm not saying I think that's true.
But it sounds like you think that's possible. Like as opposed to the usual where it's like they killed her or whatever. It's like you're like, something weird happened, for sure, But what they're protecting probably isn't just a pure killer, right,
it's more of an accident situational. Yeah, I know, doesn't it seem like though, that's a little bit more of an argument of not mountaineering, because it's like you'll get oh, you'll get up there, no, yeah, and you'll be hallucinating dead soldiers all around you because you're not supposed to go up that.
High, right, because our bodies and brains were not meant for that elevation. Yeah, I mean I got sick in Denver because it was too fucking high.
How high we were on stage in Salt Lake City the first time we played there, we had to take oxygen in the va It's crazy, right, And that was like I'm guessing right now, three thousand feet above sea level, like probably not even close to this, it's serious.
Yeah, but a camera being found in the fucking ice.
Also, it does sound a little fake the I'm saying she said my name is Janet. That whole story, yeah, seems fake, Yeah, and oversimplified, Like if you fell and were laying there dying. Yeah, wouldn't you just be like cat help leave me or get help?
I mean, I think leave me makes sense if you're a true mountaineer.
I don't know.
Tell us what mountaineering is like at my favorite murder at gmount And Wow, I don't know.
What other mysteries will be uncovered over the years as the snow melts. Those crampons dos those crampons come rolling along? Ice pick? DNA tests them.
I mean he had a hole in.
His Yeah, he got ice picked somehow. Yea, yeah, did he.
Fall on it?
That's possible. Oh man, Well that was a great story. I mean that was very compelling.
I've been excited to tell you about it. Despite the ending, I apologize.
I love seventies photographs. Yeah, I love the idea that at the very end, it's like except for that they were tied together. Right, that's wild?
Yeah? Yeah, Well, jump rope, jump on a trampoline. Keep it positive, don't go on a mountain, don't go hiking up on a mountain.
Don't be a hero. Don't be a hero. Speak up. Your voice is wanted and needed, Yes, definitely, And of course, stay sexy and don't get murdered.
Goodbye, Elvis. Do you want a cookie?
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Our senior producer is Molly Smith and our associate producer is Tessa Hughes.
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This episode was mixed by Leona Squalacci.
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