Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's here two. Jerry's here too, and I'm here too. That's me Josh, And this is Stuff you Should.
Know, the We're All Three Feeling Weird edition.
Yeah, yeah, and that's strange. So yeah, I said that I was just feeling kind of off today and you said me too, and Jerry said me three.
Yeah, what does that mean?
I don't know, but I mean that is very That's remarkable to me that all three of us, I mean, we all have three different personalities. Ye, we don't like you know, we don't live together, despite what most people think.
Yeah, not anymore.
No, So I don't know what it is. Maybe something's in retrograde and something's house or something like that.
That whole thing. Yeah, stuff you should Know is in retrograde, whatever that means.
So, yeah, we'll do our best with this. I'll do my best not to break out in tears.
No, I think would be okay. And big thanks to Julia for helping us put together this episode on one of the quacks of all quacks. I feel like we have covered quite a few quacks over the years.
Yeah, this one know isn't as bad as that one guy that we did though, But she's up there for sure. I mean I think she still has her supporters, Like you can still buy her books online. Yeah, but most people who are familiar with their case are like, she was a serial killer, right, she just had a strange, strange method of murder.
Yeah, of bleeding people of their money.
Yeah, yeah, for sure and their life force.
Yeah.
As Toby Hooper might put it, that's right. So, yeah, we're talking about a woman named Linda Burfield Perry Hazard. There's at least two hyphens in there. Yeah, And she was born in the nineteenth century, but was doing most of her work in the late nineteenth early twentieth century.
And she was a person who was vehemently opposed, like from what I could tell, like very seriously, like this was her personal philosophy against what would be called modern medicine today, but at the time was you know, just starting out as we'll see.
Yeah, for sure, she was a self described fasting specialist. She had no medical degree. She did have wealthy patients and I was about to say patrons, but I guess they were patients and she said she was the only fasting specialist in the world. You know, this was sort of the time of the sanitarium sanatorium world, where you could go off and practice some very questionable methods of healing people.
Yeah, like the Kellogg brothers in Battle Creek.
Yeah, exactly, because you know that we had not in the United States yet set up sort of rules around the medical world at this point.
No, but it's coming. It's like right around that time, and in part because of so much quackery that was going on the same time. A lot of this stuff is what you would call alternative medicine today or just sensible stuff. Like the Kellogg brothers had a bunch of weird stuff, and their whole jam was fairly weird, But if you boiled everything down to what they were saying, a lot of it was like diet and exercise, which is just great advice today as far as health is concerned.
The problem is is like some people took this to terrible extremes. Other people were peddling just like outright fake and dangerous medicines, Like yeah, there were the outliers were so bad that they were ruining it for everybody who actually had some legitimate stuff that they were doing, and Linda Hazard was an outlier. Although again I think she was a true believer in herself and her cure.
Yeah, for sure. But you know, to be clear, she was not serving up bowls of granula. She was killing people like I think fifteen patients starved to death under her watch. Yes, and she would eventually go to trial for the murder of one.
Yeah, it was a sensation in nineteen.
Twelve, a real sensation.
Let's talk about Linda Burfield Perry Hazard, who we're just going to call Linda Hazard from here on out. But she was born Linda Burfield in Minnesota in eighteen sixty seven, as most people in eighteen sixty seven were born what really rurally, and a lot of them in Minnesota. I think something like ninety eight percent of births in eighteen sixty seven took pres Minnesota.
That's incredible.
She actually had an experience, she said, she wrote again a bunch of books, eleven by my count. Oh well, and so she said, according to herself, that she had been she had run into modern medicine as a child, and this doctor had given her some pills blue mass pills that are essentially mercury pills, and they were like fairly regularly used at the time, but they did not sit very well with her.
No, it made her really sick, like this again, this is the day when they would, you know, a doctor would say like, here, take this thing, because it'll cure basically anything you have. And that's always the red flag, even if it's not pure snake oil, the sort of cure all thing. And it made it really sick, very memorably, so like digestively for the most part. But after that she was like, I'm done with doctors and I'm going to eventually be my own doctor and be a doctor
to other people. She married a guy named Edwin Perry in eighteen eighty six, had a couple of kids, got divorced, and apparently I don't know if that led to her divorce when she just sort of went center of left as far as her care goes. Do you think that was it.
It's possible that was the impression. I have too, but I'm not sure. There's so much just random stuff that people say about her that may or may not be true. There's a lot of surmising.
I think it said center of left too, by the way, Yeah.
The thing is, Chuck, is everyone knew what you meant, so that counts as communication. You know, don't be such a prescriptionist.
That's right left of center. But she married Perry, got divorced, and then fell into the care of doctor Edward Dewey, who was a a faster. He preached fasting. He basically said that, you know, every disease that we have comes from habitual eating and excess. Basically like you're out eating what your stomach and your gastric juices can handle.
Yeah, that's the sum total of Linda Hazard's whole thing. I mean, she had a three prong approach, which was intense fasting ama anema an I've read that that her enemas lasted for hours sometimes.
I think that was also the title of your second LP, right, it.
Was my cover songs of William Shatner's cover r that's right, Yeah, that's actually appropriate title for that. Or lobotomy lobotomy lobotomy. Yeah. And then the other one was powerful massage that I think calling a massage is fairly genous. Yes, she would pound on her patients and apparently shall eliminate, eliminate because again she's trying to get undigested food and poop that's left over out of the body. And by fasting, you're not introducing more food, You're letting the body rest while
getting rid of the food that's been undigested. That's the source of all of your diseases.
Yeah, like you drank the colon clints before your first colonoscopy kind of empty.
Yes, yeah, Oh, she would have loved that stuff.
Yeah, probably, so. She did take a few nursing classes. You know, we have to mention that I'm not trying to legitimize he or anything, but she did take a few osteopathic nursing classes. She opened a fasting therapy practice in Minneapolis. There this is when she went by doctor Linda Burfield Perry, even though she was divorced from Edwin Perry. And yeah, she said, like, come on in, I'll beat on you. I will. I will not let you eat anything,
like really not at all. As we'll see, let's hold on to that little factoid like how little these people are eating. But she would find love again in nineteen oh three, or find something in the way of a swindler named Samuel Hazzard, who was a He would go to jail for bigamy because he was already married and I guess did not get divorced and also married Linda Burfield, and so he went to jail for a couple of years. Yeah, and then got out of jail and they're like, all right,
we're good to go. Let's go to Seattle.
Yeah, And that's where her practice really started. The two of them together like really kind of established this.
Well.
They call it Wilderness Heights, and it was supposed to be like a sanitarium or retreat where you went and got this fasting cure. And it's just like you said, you have to be wary of cures that cure everything, and that was very much the case with her. She apparently was saying like, once you go through the fasting cure and you get all this crowd out, you're set like everything from you can go have a kid and have no pain during childbirth. You're not going to get
toothaches anymore. If you're an alcoholic, you won't be an alcoholic anymore. If you're depressed, no more depression, Like it's a cure all from her stance, that's how she basically advertised it. I guess.
Yeah, So she's the main player here, Samuel. Her husband is a little bit in the background, but he'll pop up here and there when it comes to the financials. And then our other couple of players are Claire and Dora Williamson. They were English. They were daughters of an English military person, Evelyn Dorothy. Her name was Dora. She
went by Dora Williamson. She was born in India in eighteen seventy three, and then her sister Enid Lily and Claire Williamson was born in London in eighteen seventy seven. And they were basically from teenagers on. Had no parents. I think their father died after Claire was born and
then their mom died about sixteen years later. So they were, you know, they were orphaned teens who were really really rich and really really tight, very close with one another, and seemed to be like adventurous, not in a hurry to get married, which is what you would think for the time period to get married right away. They kind of like to travel the world and go on adventures and not follow the prescribed method.
Yeah, they were independent women of the nineties, eighteen nineties, that's right. So they also though they weren't entirely orphan, I mean as far as like biological parents, maybe you're concerned, But they had a governess who took care of them as well, and I think kind of was part of their life long before their mother died. But I have the impression that she was like an additional mom or an additional grandmother or something to them, Right, So.
I think that's how the richies do it, Yeah for sure.
So just keep that in mind that these women are slightly outside of the norm. They have no problem with being slightly outside of the norm. And they are very interesting and interested people, are very curious, and one of the things that they are focused on is natural health. Like they're just super into that kind of thing. And by the time they cross paths with Linda Hazzard, they've done like all sorts of stuff, like any kind of
cure you can think of. They've traveled to some sanitarium or some notorium, they've traveled to some health clinic, and they've just done this whole thing. It's like basically what they were interested.
In, Yeah, for sure. And you know, they did some kind of brave things at the time. For the time period they were like, I don't want to wear corsets anymore. They're super uncomfortable, and don't I think they're probably bad for us. Sure, so they didn't wear corsets anymore. They gave up meat. Eating meat was or being vegetarian, I guess at the very least was a pretty weird thing back then. So they were definitely following their own path. And then in nineteen ten they were in their thirties.
At this point they were in the beautiful Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia.
You sounded like you're an announcer for the Price's right.
It looks really nice. I mean it's still around from what I can tell, at least the pictures of modern.
Yeah, it's a fairmunt now, Oh, of course it is.
And I didn't mean that snarkily, like there are some very nice Fearmonts.
Sure you said that because they're a huge sponsor stuff. Should know they're not, are they?
I don't think it's like, why am I not getting any free juice there? So at the time it was like the nicest hotel in North America. And they saw an ad in the local paper from doctor Hazard and I guess we can call her a doctor but mentally easing scare quotes, and they wrote her a letter and said, Hey, we're two sisters. We'd like to visit Wilderness Heights and we're coming to Seattle.
Nice. I think that's a great place to leave off for an.
Ad break, coming to Seattle. What could be better?
Not much? Man, all right, we'll be right back. So before we get back to Claire and Dora and Linda Hazard, we should probably make like a little side note here that, like, although Linda Hazard's stuff was bizarre like this, the extremes she took it to, like, alternative medicine was still very much a thing. We did that whole episode on the Flexner Report which basically said from now on in the United States and Europe, it's just like medical science. That's it.
Anything outside of that is cuckoo quackery and should be persecuted and run out of town on a rail essentially. And that so this was the time when you could still be an alternative medicine practitioner. You could still be an out and out quack. Yeah, And there was no law against that yet. And this was definitely the like the gray area that Linda Hazard fell in.
Yeah, And I think her case, and especially the case with these two sisters in particular. Like, it wasn't the leading reason, but it was definitely evidence as they move forward with stuff like the Flexner report of like changes is needed. Their fasting had been around for a long long time. Obviously, people fasted in the Bible, people fasted in ancient Greece. I think Hippocrates and Pythagoras both were
into fasting, So that was not a new thing. Fasting is still a thing, and detoxes and cleanses, and you know, we've done our fair share of podcasting on that kind of stuff, So none of this is new or old.
No, we did one on courses too. I just remembered, that's right. Yeah. One of the other things that is definitely old about this is that whole idea of undigested food being the source of all disease. That's ir vedic in nature too. Ancient Asian Indian medic goal practice basically says if you have underjust of food or build up a poop or whatever in your system, all disease emanates from that. So even doctor Edward Dewey was not exactly like groundbreaking with that idea.
Yeah, and people are like it all comes from the poop and They're like, have you smelled the stuff? There's no way that's good.
It's gee ross.
What if poop not you know, I guess we're going there. I'm going there. Okay, what if poop didn't smell like that at all? And I'm not saying, oh, what if it smelled like, you know, something great? Like what if it just literally had no odor and that was it? Like would the world be really a better place? H I say, yes, Yeah.
I guess sure. I guess I don't smell enough poop in any given day that it really ruins the world for me.
Well, I mean you have your outhouse.
Sure, but I see yourself. Yeah.
I was just curious at like on the like the divorce rate, like what all would change air airports? Airports happens?
Okay, yes, airports. That's a really good point right there.
Yeah that's the worst.
Yeah, it really is really bad. Like that's a good reason not to fly before like ten am.
Like it's one thing to be married to somebody, but you don't want to smell the poop of twelve strangers.
No, no you don't. That's why no one should poop in public bathrooms. They shouldn't even have toilets in there, all urinals all the time.
Yeah, they should have urals, urinals and signs that say hold it.
Right, just hold it, have a poop, go to jail.
All right. So sorry to get to go off on a tangent there about poop. I was just kind of I've never done that particular thought experiment.
Okay, Well I liked it all right.
So she had her her big, big book. I mean, she had eleven of them, but I feel like the one, as far as this goes, this most relevant is the one from nineteen oh eight. It's called Fasting for the Cure of Disease, ease, and that's where she laid out, you know, the program which is just those three things really, you know, fast to get beaten on and get those as Josh says, m enema. And the first person to die from this treatment. She wrote the book after six
years after this, which is pretty disturbing. But in nineteen oh two at her Minneapolis practice, there was a woman who was partially paralyzed, and very sadly, she died on day thirty seven of a forty day fast and Linda Hazzard, as the doctor said, cause of death paralysis.
Yeah, that would be a recurring theme, as we'll see, right, because she also she was declaring the cause of death for her patients as a physician, even though she wasn't really a physician. And I guess still even at this time, under circumstances like this, the local coroner would still take a look at any dead body. Saw the body of this woman, Gertrude Jon and was like, I don't know that this was paralysis that did this, because she's pretty emaciated.
Let's perform an autopsy and see what happens. Looked inside of poor Gertrude Young and said, yep, she died of starvation, just as I suspected.
That's right. And as we'll see later, Linda Hazard didn't think that was a viable way of dying. She's basically like, you can't starve some of the death. It's not possible, right, So she's wrong about that. But she did not have a medical license, so she could not be like brought up on charges or anything. It's she was telling this woman to fast, and the woman was fasting. She didn't have her, you know, locked up and chained to a
bed or anything like that. She was just following the advice of the wrong.
Person exactly, and yeah, Linda Hazard could just like shrug and be like, you know, what are you gonna do? Yeah, this was like years after when she and her husband Samuel moved to Seattle and started their practice together. So that's not why she moved. This was just the first body in her long body count essentially.
Yeah, I mean bodies. You know, people started dying at her practice in Washington as well. And there in Washington at the time, you could be grandfathered in as far as what kind of alternative medicine you were practicing, so she was kind of all good there. In nineteen oh seven is when she started treating patients in Washington, and you know, right away, again this wasn't like the weirdest stuff at the time, so she had some of the
elite of Washington, like state legislators coming there. It was it wasn't like that weird lady in the woods that's killing people. It was you know, it was sort of of the fashion of the day in some ways.
Yeah. Also, there was a real deference to her from the local population, which were typically Swedish immigrants who were not necessarily formally educated. They didn't have a lot of money. So this was like she made a lot of money, we should say, multiple times throughout her career, so she was wealthy. She had a lot of land. She was a doctor, so she said, she was much more highly educated than anyone else in the area that they knew. So she was popular and people just kind of respected
her in this area too. So in addition to these wealthy and kind of elite you know, alternative medicine file patrons and customers, just the local people who had nothing to do with this still thought fairly highly of her too.
Yeah, for sure, even though people were dying. I think by the time the Williamson's sisters arrived in nineteen eleven, seven patients had died under her care, six from starvation what looked to be starvation. And what was also learned was,
like you said, she performed all the autopsies herself. And it was also revealed that the estates of these people were left to the sanatorium, So she was also taking their money, even though it was, you know, from the outside, under the guise of like they believed in her so much they wanted her practice to continue.
Yes, exactly, and this is where it really becomes murdery.
You know, yeah, like the super nefarious.
Something else that was gross that I found was so the Wilderness Heights was like a few like a handful of primitive cabins and then her cottage, and her cottage still stood until like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen.
Oh wow.
Yeah, and you could go into her cottage and it was still there was still furnishings in it and including her bathtub, and the bathtub of her cottage is where she was performing her autopsies.
Uh.
So that to me kind of like really gets across like this is not like a super polished outfit, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And I think that's important to keep in mind too. She basically built some rough fused cabins in the woods in Washington and called this like her sanitarium.
Yeah. And this is by the way in Alala Woods, Washington.
Yes, so close to Walla Walla, so close.
So Claire and Dora get there in February of nineteen eleven and she was like, hey, we're not going to stay here in Wilderness Heights. I'm not sure why she did this. I have a feeling that she knew that she had some big fish on the line. So she took them to Seattle instead, and she basically lied to them and said that the Alala Woods Retreat wasn't completed yet,
even though I think it clearly was. And so they they put them up in some apartments in downtown Seattle, started their fasting treatment and the vigorous massage, and they were eating two cups of vegetable broth sounds like basically canned tomato juice a day.
I also saw I think Dora later said that they were made from asparagus tips, spinach, and lettuce. A broth made from that, yeah, veggie broth. Yeah, so not anything that you could possibly even remotely get full off of yet, like you said, I think a cup twice a day, Yeah, that's just yeah, So you're going to lose weight very quickly. And this was like forty plus days of fasting. That hazard was prescribing to her patients, right, And so I think both of the Williamson sisters made it to fifty
days before they were transferred to Wilderness Heights. They didn't walk, they were on stretchers. That's how they got to Wilderness Heights from their apartments in downtown Seattle.
Yeah, and I mean from what I can tell. They weren't screaming on the way like get me help. Like it feels like they were either all in still on this or just so out of it at this point they didn't know any better, you know.
Yes, or they were asking for help, but they were asking for it, like Stevie from Malcolm in the Middle, where they were like, get help.
It was pretty good, Stevie.
Thanks.
Did you watch the reboot of that?
No reboot. I can't give me one reboot that was as good as the original or even close.
Yeah. I can't bring any reboots to mine at all, so I don't know. But you're you're pretty much right, like even the great Kids in the Hall, Like it was just okay, right. I kind of want to watch the Malcolm in the Middle one though, Oh oh, you haven't seen it either, No, but I heard it was pretty good.
Actually all right, But is Frankie Munis has his voice changed?
No, it's exactly the same. And so it was what's his face?
What was his name, Stevie, Stevie, Yeah.
Yeah, I couldn't remember. I just remember Cranston was so great.
Yeah, and his daughter's great too. We've said it before. We'll say it again on the Pit. Doctor mel Is Brian Cranston's daughter, and she does it great to him.
Yeah, I think we said that live on stage. I don't think the listening public knows that you are now on the pit.
Yeah, but apparently it just stopped, like they just stopped putting out episodes. But that last episode does not end in any way that anyone would ever end the season of TV. Oh you think, Yeah, Like, Noah Wiley didn't leave yet. I don't even think as Buddy fully agreed to getting the treatment he's supposed to get. What's going on with Ali? Sheemi? Like the last thing we saw is she just kind of had a meltdown in her car. There's just all the stuff's up in the air.
But oh, I think that was the purpose. I think it just was cliffhanger after cliffhanger.
Okay, yes, I can get cliffhangers. But it's almost like it just petered out rather than cut it, like they just cut all right, disagree? All right, Well, I was surprised that that was how they ended it.
We just spoiled some stuff, by the way.
Oh yeah, we should probably Well, we.
Didn't say anything huge. No Wiley didn't leave, big deal. Okay, all right, does he ever leave?
I don't know.
That's what I just need to go, like, he's never he never leaves, he comes over, he overstays, is welcome. Everyone's like, when's this guy gonna get on SMO and drive out of Here's true? All right, I feel like we're really off the rails now. We should take a break and come back. Yes, yeah, all right, we'll be right back all right where we left you. So, Noah Wiley had not left yet the pit. No, I'm sorry. We left the sisters in pretty bad condition. It was
about fifty days into their treatment. They were obviously in really, really bad shape, having traveled by stretcher to Alaala Woods and Claire died seventeen days after they got to the compound. There in the forest. She and this is like very triggering and super upsetting, so I'm issuing a warning here.
But she weighed less than fifty pounds when she passed, and Hazard's own autopsy once again determined she died of a liver disease that came from a childhood medical treatment that caused her organs to shrink, and when her the governess showed up, Margaret Conway, you know, finally arrived. She told her that and she was like, I basically raised these kids and she didn't have any childhood medical treatment that caused her organs to shrink.
Yeah, and we should just say that Margaret Conway, her governess, who we talked about earlier, she got a cable from one of them. I can't remember if it was Dora or Claire.
Probably Dora, I think it was Dora.
Yeah, it just basically saying like, please come, here's the ship you want to take, here's where we are. Just get here. And Margaret Conway just dropped everything. And within a month she had traveled from Australia to Seattle. That's how long it took.
Yeah, but I mean she was welcomed. I mean Samuel met her in Seattle and said, all right, let's get on the train. We're going to show you this operation. Like it's pretty sad what's happening, but like we have a top notch practice here. And they brought her to the mortuary to see Claire and she was like, that's not Claire, whoever this body is. And I get the impression that it wasn't like she so emaciated. I didn't recognize her like I think they tried to pull the fast one on her.
Yeah, there was rumors, I guess that the local mortuary was in cahoots with the Hazards and that they would switch out bodies that weren't amazing heated who had nothing to do with Wilderness Heights. Yeah, the emaciated bodies of their victims so that family wouldn't be like, I think you starved my mom to death. Right, So Margaret Conway was not in any way, shape or form put off by Samuel Hazzard's charm or Linda Hazard's authority, like she
realized like that they had killed Claire. One of the dead giveaways was that Linda Hazard was wearing one of Claire's robes and her favorite hat when she received Margaret Conway at the at the Wilderness Heights at their cottage, and that I think immediately rubbed Margaret Conway the wrong way. And she was like, I give me Dora. I'm taking Dora home and Linda and Samuel said not so fast.
Yeah, while Dora was in the same shape, she weighed about fifty pounds, was barely alive at this point, and so yeah, she asked for and the hazards are like, actually where the executor of her estate. She is under our legal guardianship forever, and my husband Samuel has power of attorney over all of her in the family's financial matters. And not only that is you've got a medical bill you need to pay. You owe us two grand.
It's about seventy k today.
Yeah.
Margaret Conway is like, well, I don't have seventy grand. I have no idea how to overturn a legal guardianship. But it just so happened that Claire and Dora's uncle, John Herbert, was just up in Portland, not very far away, even back in nineteen eleven, nineteen ten, down in Portland. Yeah, oh yeah, you're sorry. Go to be right, No, one hundred percent, it is I have which show we did backwards?
Usually we do Seattle first and then Portland. Right, yeah, okay, So anyway, John Herbert was down in Portland, and Margaret Conway got in touch with him as I need your help, like these Claire's been killed and Dora was in big trouble, She's about to die, and these two hucksters have like all sorts of legal mumbo jumbo going on. And John Herbert got involved. He's like, I'm a man and this is the Edwardian era. So everybody listened to me, and that's when things started moving.
Yeah, for sure, Samuel Hazard did produce a document. It was a typewritten statement that he said, Claire, you know, dictated this to us on her deathbed, but she didn't sign it because she was too weak to sign it.
Because of the whole you know, liver issue. I said to my relatives and friends, I'm writing the statement to say that Dora and I entered on this course of treatment only after thorough investigation, that we have continued it voluntarily, and that if death occurs, I believe that it is inevitable that it would have come in any circumstances, which is like, I mean, it sounds like a child wrote that to get out of being in trouble, you.
Know, right exactly. So, I mean, just that last line about if she dies it was inevitable anyway, just so smacks of Linda Hazard's philosophy that you can't starve to death. Yeah, it was just very clearly fake. So John Herbert gets involved. Thanks to Margaret Conway, they find get this. The vice counsel of the British embassy in Tacoma. Let all that sink in for a second. They get them involved, and
they get the guardianship overturned. Herbert gets the two thousand dollars unpaid bill negotiated down to one thousand dollars and essentially pays a ransom for Door to be released. And in the meantime, once he has Dora back, he starts looking into some of these other patients and finds like Dora and Claire were far from the only victims who were essentially had been exploited financially while they were out of their minds from starvation.
Yeah, for sure. So it's, you know, just like the movie scene is starting to sort of add up in his head, and he brings this evidence into the authorities there in the county and they investigate obviously, and Linda Hazard was arrested for murder for I think murder in the first degree of Claire Williamson and for obvious financial fraud. And it was a you know, you said earlier, it
was sensational. It was a big deal, international press. You know, first they had to find out where the Olala Woods was and then they came there and started covering this case, and she was known as the Starvation Doctor. I think they started calling her place Starvation Heights instead.
Of what was it, Wilderness Heights.
Yeah, Wilderness Heights, Yes, it's pretty good one. And they you know, there's a lot of speculation flying around, like you know that she had this hold over people, that was rumors that she may have been hypnotizing them to
keep them under her hold. But like you mentioned earlier, there still are and certainly back then had people their former patients or wealthy benefactors or other naturopaths that were like, hey, you know, she's a woman practicing outside the box medicine and that's why she's being prosecuted.
Yes, we should say that it actually took a lot of leaning on the Kitsap County prosecutor where Wilderness Heights was located, to actually prosecute this crime, because again, she had a lot of local support and there were a lot of people who are like, she's being persecuted by these Brits who are like total out of towners, and they're being supported by vocal people from the American Medical Association who want only doctors to practice their way and
basically this woman's being persecuted that as a witch essentially, so she did have a lot of supporters, but she had a lot of detractors too. It seems like, on balance, at least as far as the press is concerned, she was generally viewed as a murderer and a grifter. I guess, a grifting murderer, terrible combination.
Yeah. I think the first thing she said was this, the first guy that came at me was an ambassador stationed in Tacoma, Tacoma. Everyone does that sound remotely believable?
Right? It does sound kind of made up.
So January fifteenth, nineteen twelve, the trial starts. They lay out their evidence basically, which was all pretty obvious, like she's trying to fleece these people of money when they have no control over their own senses. And I think I had about one hundred people testify for the prosecution. There were lots of doctors, you know, being paraded up
there as expert witnesses. And Dora even took the stand and talked about this scene basically near the end where she was bedside and Claire is trying to whisper Stevie style something to Dora like her sister as she's passing essentially, and every time she tried to speak miss Hazard or missus Hazzard as as she called him, she kept talking and I couldn't hear. Like she would lean in and she'd say Dory, and she would interrupt and say how did you spell that name again, and like she would
not let her. I mean, this is one of the most upsetting parts. Like she wouldn't even let her sister perhaps even say goodbye. Who knows what she was trying to say.
Yeah, and apparently also, I guess doctor Hazard cut in and was like, I'm going to give Claire one of my famous massagists and pressed down so hard that Claire lost consciousness. And shortly after that, Dora was told that Claire had died. And so, yeah, those probably would have been her last words to her that Linda Hazzard basically interrupted on purpose.
Yeah, I think she actually died, Dora. I found out she died the next morning, so she didn't get that chance. Later either, the defensive course comes in and said that you know it wasn't the treatment. She didn't die of starvation. That's when Linda Hazard very famously says, you know, it's not possible to starve someone to death. And you know, Trot's out her book in the middle of court and says here, read this, and this is the quote from
the book. Death in the fast never results from deprivation of food, but is the inevitable consequence of vitality sapped to the last degree by organic imperfection. Right. I mean, that's quackery, if like nineteenth century quackery, if I've ever heard it, you know for sure.
But I mean it is technically true, like you die from your organs failing, but your organs get their vitality from the food that you're not getting. So it's kind of like potato potato essentially. Yes, it is. It's a pretty glib workaround, I guess. But she stood by that. She was like, now, you can't die from starvation. That's why she said. And Claire died from liver disease. That's why her first patient, Gertrude Young, a first patient to die,
she died from paralysis. It's whatever was wrong with you ahead of time, that's what killed you, not starvation. I don't know if Linda Hazard truly believed that there's actually some evidence at the very end that we'll see, but that's just so dumb that and I have the impression that Linda Hazard was not a dumb person at all. I just can't believe that she believed that.
I feel like, given the financial piece, I feel like she knew what she was doing. Okay, that's just my take on it.
Right. So again, there were some supporters who are like, hey, you know, like she's being persecuted, and the jury said, you know what, we're going to split the middle here. We're going to find her guilty on a charge of manslaughter not murder, so everybody can be unhappy.
Yeah, basically, she was sentenced to two to twenty hard labor at Walla Walla Penitentiaria.
Yeah.
And that wasn't it though, because she appealed the case and appealed it and appealed it all the way up to the United States or was it the state Supreme Court?
No, the US Supreme Court.
From what I am seen, the US Supreme Court took about eighteen months to get there, and you know, she had supporter sending in letters the whole time saying to release her. The state of Washington did revoke her license to practice medicine, but she did continue to practice two more deaths happened after Claire Williamson, and then she finally goes to prison, eventually at Wallawalla.
Yeah, so while she's appealing and is out and about on bail, two more people die. She kills two more people. That's just crazy. She finally gets to Walla Walla, like you said, and that two to twenty years. It's what's known as an indeterminate sentence, like you have to serve at least a minimum, but you're not going to serve beyond twenty right. So she was in there for I think less than two years before she was paroled. She
very famously knitted ponchos for the other inmates. And when she did get out, I think within six months she had been pardoned by the governor of Washington.
Yeah, and you know, it's kind of hard to get super accurate information for this old time stuff, but I did see in the Washington archives there was a stipulation that she had to leave the country if they were going to let her out. So, regardless of whether or not that's true, she did leave the country. We'll get to that in a second. Dora also left the country. She went back to England and settled down in Gloucester and you know, lived sounds like a pretty great full
life after that. She got married in nineteen fourteen to Reverend Wyndham Allen Chaplin and lived to be seventy one years old. Died in nineteen forty five. So she fully recovered from her quote unquote treatment, right, and Linda Hazard went to New Zealand to Hawker Wares.
Yeah, and was very well received there during the trial. One of her vocal supporters was the Sydney Morning Herald, I think, or at least some columnists in there. And she made a ton of money again when she showed up in New Zealand, Like people just flocked to her for her treatment. And I think she long said like, hey, yeah, fifteen people died in my care from the fasting, but you know I've had hundreds of other patients, So is that really that bad? And people are like, yeah, it
is kind of bad. But also, you know, most doctors who lose patients don't also fleece them of their estate. Like that's really what took it. Like, murder is bad, murder for profit is really bad.
Yeah, I agree, we're going to rank murder.
Sure, let's just face it. Murder for profit is really bad.
I agree. I think the piece that you were talking about, the one additional little piece of information that maybe she did believe fully believe this stuff, yeh, is that she herself died from her own treatment June twenty fourth, nineteen thirty eight, self administering of fasting cure. So you know, I don't think it was pure hocum in her mind. I think she probably did believe it to a certain degree, but I think she took it to extremes to fleece people for sure.
Yeah, that's Linda Hazard.
Yeah. There's a book that a lots came from from nineteen ninety seven. It's called Starvation Heights by a local named Greg Olsen. So shout out to Greg Olsen in that book.
If you can't find it at a sec or a third g, I guess to the end of Greg Olsen's name and it should.
Come up that was it, g R e Gg.
Yeah, probably won't come up on a search that's just g R. E g in Starvation Heights nineteen ninety seven, but if you add that extra ge, it will definitely come up.
Yeah, And if you just google greg Olsen, you'll probably come up with the Atlanta Braves Catcher from the nineteen nineties or.
Early about him. Yeah, he was a catcher. Huh yeah, Okay, you got anything else about Greg Olsen, whether you're talking about the author or the catcher.
I know he was not a belly scratcher.
You belly itcher.
I think scratcher a picture, not a belly atcher. Catcher, not a belly scratcher.
Oh okay, I've never heard that second part. He just blew my mind. Buddy. Well, since we started talking about braves pictures and childhood rhymes, I think it's time for listener mail.
That's right. This is from Daniel. Hey, guys, love the episode of Maple Syrup and all your episodes. You want to let you know something similar In Australia, there's a tree called the side agum or the eucalytus gunny nice, and it produces a similar sweet sap. Guys. I couldn't find any evidence of it being eaten as is, but the local Paalawa people of Tasmania let it naturally ferment to turn it into a cider like drink called Why Elena.
Of course, the tree is now incredibly rare, mostly confined to one valley in Tasmania due to all the usual good things I sent sarcasm there. As a white Australian, I would love for you to do an episode on bush Tucker. So much knowledge was lost due to colonization and genocide, but there's still so much amazing information out there. And that is from Daniel.
Nice. Daniel, thank you have not heard of cidergum tree no or bushtucker no. So those are really great ideas and thanks a lot for that. I cannot wait till we get back to Australia so we can try that cider bush Tucker?
Is it food apparently?
Oh? I think bush tucker is like knowledge. That was the impression I have.
Well I just look it up and it's called it's a food, So.
You know, thanks for that. He just gave me the rope, didn't you.
Well, I mean I tried to tell you those food.
Well, I hadn't realized that you looked anything up. I thought we always discussed before we look things up.
Oh sorry, click any click type type.
Here you go now. I know. If you want to be like Daniel and send us a great email, we would love that. You can send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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