The Clue of the Blue Bottle

And down hidden, Oh, as he roll under the shelf a glass bottle blue as indigo. This place stores the facts that matter, and matters of fact. It's all that stands between reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. It lies in a time between now and then. Welcome to the Last Archive, A place I like to go to figure out how we know what we know, how we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes lately

as if we don't know anything at all. I'm the historian Jilla Bore stepped through the door to an unfinished grave. The body was found face down early in the morning of May fourth, nineteen nineteen, A rainy morning, a Sunday in springtime, a century ago, in a little park in the center of Barry Vermont, a quarry town known as the Granite City, Young Harold Jackson was out for a walk before breakfast when he came across the body and

rushed off to find a policeman. Boficer. There's a naked dead woman in a vaked lot near the Bustle Hotel. Dead woman, you say. The body lay pale, an animal against the dark, wet grass, a kill, like something hunted, a fox in a trap, prey like something caught, a fish on a hook, tied up like something about to be roasted, a bird on a spit. Her hands were tied behind her back. Her mouth was gagged, her neck

was garreted. She was naked, stripped of everything but her gray blue silk stockings, her laced leather shoes, her yellow kid gloves. Her clothes lay rumpled in a pile. Her eyeglasses were caught in her hair. The policeman hurried toward the body. A crowd began to gather. People on their way to church wearing their Sunday hats and bonnets, stopped and stared, as if they were a spur of the moment, mourners. How could do such a Why do all murder mysteries

start this way? Fiction, non fiction, true crime, pulp fiction, magazines, movies, podcasts, It doesn't matter where you come across them. A dead woman, a beautiful woman, a young woman killed viciously, found naked, exposed, dead and doubly silent, not just killed, but gagged, And we stare and stare and stare. This murder really happened. The recordings from the scene we reenacted ourselves, but everything here really happened. Who was she? Who killed her? Good questions?

I want to answer those questions. But I've also got bigger questions about the history of knowledge and evidence, questions important to ask in our muddle headed, fake news, post truth world. On this season of The Last Archive, I'm going to try to solve a crazy big who done it? Who killed truth? I love nothing more than an investigation, but you have to have a plan. The place to start looking for answers to really big questions is with

something small. If you want to understand biology, you start with a cell, or not even a cell, A chromosome or not even a chromosome, a nucleotide history works the same way to answer question and about the history of evidence. You don't start with philosophy. You start with a single mystery on a particular day, and not even that, but with one tiny clue, gray blue silk stocking, say, or a white linen handkerchief, just the kind of things you

can find in the last archive. The dead body that a crowd had gathered around in Barry, Vermont on a Sunday morning in nineteen nineteen. Everyone wanted to turn it, turn her into a set of facts, a body of evidence. They came by ones and twos. The chief of police, the deputy chief, the attorney general, two doctors, a reporter, and a photographer. The photograph was how I came across this case. I found it in an archive. I held it in my hands. It made my head hurt, It

broke my heart. It had been pasted into a leather bound album, pasted almost lovingly, an ancient photo album of murdered bodies, nearly all of them were women. But this photograph was somehow the worst, the saddest, the cruelest. I saw that photograph and I needed to know more, a lot more, silenced women bother me. They really bother me. I needed to know who she was and what happened to her. I wanted to hear her speak. There are

methods when you conduct a historical investigation steps. Here's what I like to do. I like to start with the easy stuff. Find out first what everyone knew about whatever it is you're interested in. Then think about all the stuff that was so obvious to people that they didn't even notice it at the time. They took it for granted and didn't quite see it anymore. Then find out

the stuff that only a few people knew. And then, finally, and this is the best part, and it only happens if you're doing your work right, find out the stuff that no one knew. Step one, How do you find out what everyone knew? And Berry, Vermont in nineteen nineteen the newspaper. So I went to the library and took up old issues of this town's main paper, the Buried Daily Times. One thing everyone knew. It had been a lot of death and barry in the last year the

pandemic influenza Spanish flu hit. It hit Berry very hard, partly because the man who worked in the quarry for years had very weak lungs. Schools had closed for months, and about the only public events being held were funerals. The misery had only just begun to end. The quarantine had only been lifted a few months before this body was found murdered more senseless death. Anyway, I dug up

the Barry paper. When I read a newspaper like that, I can pretty much hear the reporter talking to me in my head, and just the way reporters talk then, or at least the way I imagine it. I listen for what's weird, and here it's what's weird. Starting with this very first story, the reporter for the Very Daily Times crammed in the details, detail after detail after detail, Very Daily Times, Monday, May fifth, nineteen nineteen, woman was strangled and naked. Body left and garden off Main Street.

Between the fence and the body was a small patch of tall grass which did not appear to be trampled, but the dirt between the body and the hat, on a northerly line seemed to have been disturbed slightly, as if it might have been done by dragging some object. While the grass still further northerly and under a loose wire fence, was somewhat flattened it by the trampling of feet, or by the dragging of an object over or through

the fence. He was writing a style of true crime that's familiar now, so familiar that it sounds old fashioned. But back then it was new. It really only begun a few decades earlier. In the eighteen eighties. The public wanted details, and newspapers gave them every last clue, as if readers too might solve the murder. Coming within the perspective of the camera were the woman's clothing, partly under the body, perhaps lying some eight feet away and perhaps

not discernible in the picture. A pocketbook lying about eighteen feet on the opposite side of the body from the hat, and her gold watch, the ladder of which had in the meantime been picked up. The watch was still running. The watch was still running, and it was inscribed with three initials l PC. This, by the end of the day led the police to her name, Lucina Courser Broadwell. Her maiden name was Lucina Phillips Courser LPC twenty nine, one hundred and ten pounds, five ft three. Her husband,

Harry Broadwell, was a carpenter. They had three children, Doris eight, Hildred seven, and Wendell, who was only five. Finally, hours after the body was found, a horse hitched to a wagon carried her to an undertaker's. That afternoon, two doctors drove to the undertakers to conduct an autopsy. The word autopsy auto plus opsy means something you see with your own eyes, the evidence of your senses. This, too, was mostly new pathologists gathering evidence and conducting that autopsy in Fermont.

They were trying to get the dead body to speak. In a century on, that's what I'm doing. Historians are coroners too. A lot of things, a lot more things than murders. Used to be mysteries. A mystery for centuries meant what God knows and we do not but must believe, the mystery of the origins of life, the mystery of

what happens to you after you die. After a while, the mystery began yielding to the fact as the elemental unit of knowledge, as if knowledge is made up of facts, the way a body is made up of atoms, or electricity is made up of electrons. I took a while. This process was slow, but people eventually got fact mad. They believed they had discovered a universe of truth. You can see that even in how people understood the causes

of death centuries ago. Starting the late fifteen hundreds, during the Age of Mystery, authorities began writing up a special document for every death, something called a bill of mortality. On a bill of mortality, you could be said to have died of lots of different things. What all of them to me have a kind of poetry of breach, of blasted, of cramp, of each, of a lethargy of fight. I love that list. People do die of these things,

of fright, grief, and misery. The way we think now about death comes not from the ancient bills of mortality, from the Age of Mystery, but from the modern death certificate, from the age of facts. The pathologist who examined Lucine A. Broadwell's body in nineteen nineteen, he was looking for a cause of death, a fact. He found bruises on her hips and thighs, and he also found seamen. And then the medical examiner used all this evidence to fill out

a certificate of death. He had a list to choose from, taken from the International List of Causes of Death. You could die of all sort to things on that list, but unfortunately there's no poetry to it. Number one eighty two homicide by firearms. One three homicide by cutting or piercing instruments. In the age of mystery, if I'd been writing Lucina Broadwell's bill of mortality, I'd have written down two things she died of, oh being savaged and of terror.

But instead the medical examiner wrote something else on her death certificate. Number one hundred eighty four homicide by strangulation. Her throat had been crushed. But who killed Lucina Broadwell. Most people in Barry figured her husband, Harry, had done it. He'd been arrested before for beating her he wants cut her with a razor. But Harry had an alibi. He'd been out drinking, and he had some witnesses to at

least for part of the night. He'd been at a dance, and then he knocked on a friend's door late at night and gotten him to make him an egg sandwich. The chief suspect had an alibi, and the police had no other suspects. They were stumped, so they made a decision. What they needed was a detective, a private detective. This, after all was the golden age of detective fiction, the age of Hercule Pirot and Charley Chan and Lord Peter

Whimsy and Barry. Though they didn't have any private detectives, but they knew one, so they put in a call to Boston to the offices of James R. Wood Wood Detective Agency James R. Wood Junior speaking. This agency would correspondence in all parts of the world. Is prepared to undertake all legitimate detective business for co operations, companies or individuals. Male and female operatives furnished. James R. Wood was head

of the first detective agency in New England. It had been founded by his father in eighteen seventy, nine years before the fictional Sherlock Holmes solved his first mystery. Wood wore a thin mustache, owl's eye, spectacles and an impeccably knotted tie. He smoked a pipe. I mean, of course, he smoked a pipe. His specialty was rural murder. Like the Broadwell case. It was a complete mystery which had baffled the authorities. He took the sleeper train up from Boston,

smoking his pipe, pondering the evidence. Wood was thirty nine at the time and he was also his own Watson. He wrote chronicles of his cases James R. Wood's detective notebook. That's the gold mine. Most of the stuff you're going to hear from him, the stuff comes straight out of the pages of his notebook. The case I'm about to relate to you has been considered throughout New England as one of the strongest circumstantial cases ever tried. James R. Wood was not a modest man, but his account of

the case is pretty thorough. He got to town just before Lucie A. Broadwell was to be buried days after the murder. He went first to the Broadwell house and inspected the body. He interviewed Harry Broadwell, and then he wrote four words in his notebook satisfied the husband innocent? Okay, but why Harry would seem to have been the most likely suspect and even though he had an alibi, it was hardly air tight, especially since nobody knew exactly when

in the night his wife had been murdered. That was one of the first things that didn't quite make sense to me when I started reading about this case, that is, reading James Wood's account. After first seeing the photograph of Lucien A. Broadwell's dead body, but would like the Barry. Police just wasn't interested in Harry Broadwell, even though they

knew that he had beaten his wife. A century ago, men could hit their wives and even rape them without much of any consequence, so would dismiss the idea of Harry as a suspect. Instead, he started looking for a very particular kind of fact. He started looking for a clue. A clue used to mean a ball of yarn or thread. The word kept that meaning in English for hundreds of years, and then people started using the word clue to describe the yarn you'd use if you were stuck in a maze.

If you enter a maze, a really good idea is to unravel a ball of yarn to mark your way, since you can find your way back out. So clue started to mean a thing you would use to find your way out of a maze. And here's another reason we use the word clue this way. A lot of murder victims are women, and their clothes are often torn, so there were lots of clues at the scenes of crimes, actual not figurative threads trailing from torn items of women's clothing.

Wood wrote about the stuff in his notes on Lucine a Broadwell. Tied around her neck was her torn shirtwaist with the knots in the shirtwaist secured by a man's handkerchief with a sail as knot. After a while, clues started to mean anything you could find at the scene of a crime and follow to solve a mystery. But still the best clues tended to be bits of clothes. During the day, we had ascertained that the handkerchief belonged to Eddie Barrow. We identified it by the landry mark.

A man's handkerchief with a laundry mark on it. That is a pretty good clue. I'd led to a man named Eddie Barrow, a drifter. Wood's operatives tracked him down. Barrow had lent his handkerchief to someone else, he said, a fellow by the name of George Long, a lanky, wiry Canadian. But what did George Long have to do with Lucina Broadwell. Wood thought he knew mister Broadwell was suspicious that his wife was spotty. Sporty meant that you

slept around. They had been considerable family trouble and had told Broadwell that they had seen his wife coming out of the Pocket house at the lower end of Main Street on more than one occasion. Aha. Another big clue for James Wood. Missus Parker's house was sort of the town brothel. She'd hosts men who came to town to work in the quarries. She'd matched them up with sporty women from Barry, including Lucina Broadwell and a friend of

hers named Grace Grimes. Wood followed his trail of clues all the way to Grace Grimes's house, where she told him that Lucina had written her a letter on the

very day she died. In the first part of the letter, Missus Broadwell explained about having been down to Missus Parker's house several times, of having met a lodger there by the name of George, that George and she had been quite friendly, that George talked about buying an automobile, that George had asked her to go to California with him, That she, Missus Broadwell, had decided that George was full of hot air, that he was no good, and that

she was not going to see him again. That the second part of the written on Saturday, red I've received a call from Missus Parker, and she wants me to come down tonight and meet George again. Most everything our actors say in this podcast is taken from historical documents. We know they said this stuff, But this little bit of Lucia Broadwell, this is not that. This is what James Wood wrote down from what Grace Grimes told him that she remembered from a letter Lucia Broadwell had written

to her that Grimes had destroyed. I'm sick and tired of the whole bunch. However, I'll go down tonight and I'll tell Missus Parker what I think of her, and I'll ditch George as I know he is full of hot air and has no money, and as a bluff would believed he had found his man. George Long was a drifter in love, and Lucina Broadwell had lost patience with him. He'd been fun for a while, but she planned to break up with him because he was full of hot air and he was a bluff. A liar.

Put this new insight into the miss of Broadwell's murder. Wood headed back to Vermont. It all started with the laundry mark on that white handkerchief. Wood loved this clue. He loved it so much that he titled his account of the case The Clue of the White Handkerchief. Wood knew he was now near the end of the maze. On Sunday morning, May eleventh, he invited George Long to meet him at the hotel Barry, a big, elegant Victorian, and then he and the deputy sheriff kept Long at

that hotel, questioning him for four days. They submitted him to an ordeal, a very ancient sort of ordeal. In the age of mystery, no one could know could truly know the guilt of another person. Only God could know. The point of a trial was to find a way for God to reveal someone's guilt. These tests were called trials by ordeal. One kind was the ordeal of the corpse, where you'd be found guilty if the murdered corpse bled

when you touched it. The Pope banned trial by ordeal in the year twelve fifteen, But that year twelve fifteen something else happened. In Magna Carta, the King of England established the right to a trial by jury. So just hold on it and think about that for a minute. The end of trial by ordeal and the beginning of trial by jury took judgment out of the hands of God and placed it into the hands of men. But

still the age of mystery lingered. I've come across American cases from as late as eighteen ninety four where the suspects were subjected to the ordeal of the corpse, told to approach or murdered body to see if it would bleed again. And something very much like that happened in that hotel room in Berry, Vermont in nineteen nineteen, when Detective James R. Wood questioned his suspect, George Long, in that hotel room. Wood tried for hours at a time

to get Long to confess. Long admitted to knowing Lucina Broadwell and even having dinner with her on the night of her death in missus Parker's house. He admitted two that he'd had sex with her that night, but he insisted he hadn't killed her, and then, desperate for evidence, would had submitted Long to a series of what I think you can fairly call ordeals, those old tests of truth from the age of mystery. One day, Wood handed Long two pieces of rope, and he asked them to

tie them together. Long you've been lying to me. I want you to tell me the truth about it. Tie a square knot. A square knot is about the only knot I know how to tie. A square knot happened to be the type of knot the murderer had used to tie up Lucina Broadwell. Could it be a clue? Later, Wood took out the photographs of Lucina Broadwell's dead body and made Long look at them, subjecting him to a

kind of ordeal of the photograph. While Long looked at the photographs, Wood opened a box containing the clothes that had been found next to the body, and then carefully, one by one, he draped them over the railing at the foot of the brass bed in the hotel room. After Long finished looking at the photographs, he got out of his chair and stepped over to the bedrail to look at the clothes, and made as if we were about to pick them up. Suddenly, there in that hotel

turned interrogation room, Wood interrupted him. Look out, George, you get your hands all covered with blood. There isn't a goddamn bit of blood on these clothes. Wood figured he'd nailed him. Lucian A. Broadwell had been strangled. She hadn't bled. But if George Long hadn't been there, if he wasn't the murderer, how did he know there wouldn't be blood

on those clothes? Like I said, Wood question Long for days, the ordeal of the rope, the ordeal of the photograph, the ordeal of the clothes, And then at the end of those four days, the police charged George Long with first degree murder. This case was going to a trial by jury. It began on a Friday in autumn, the leaves falling to the ground, rustling in the wind, at

the Washington County Courthouse in Montpelier, Vermont. The courthouse was packed with spectators, and there were seven reporters there too, including four from big city papers in Boston. The story was front page news all over New England. Oiay oiay. George Long sat next to his lawyer, who planned a question Harry Broadwell's alibi and to point out that it was Broadwell, not Long, who had a motive to kill

Lucina Broadwell. The prosecution had a difficult case to make, after all, there were no witnesses to the crime, but the prosecution hoped to prove that Long had raped Lucina Broadwell and then strangled her. Quite why, it was harder to say. And when Long took the stand, he denied everything, including everything he'd told James Wood in that hotel room. You knew missus Broadwell, didn't you? No? I didn't you say you never spoke with missus Broadwell, No, sir. It

went on like this. Then ten days into the trial, the prosecution did something really interesting. Now called to the stand James Wood Junior. Long had just testified under oath that he'd never met Lucina Broadwell. Perfect. The prosecution must have thought, we've caught him lying, because when Wood had questioned him, Long had admitted not only that he knew Broadwell, but they did had dinner with her, even that he'd had sex with her on the night of the murder.

The prosecution could have asked Wood to tell the jury what Long had said, but it wanted something better, and wanted the court to admit as evidence the entire transcript of Wood's interrogation. To this scheme, Long's lawyer objected. He said that Wood and the deputy sheriff had essentially kept Long as their prisoner for four days and four long nights in the hotel. Berry not arresting him, just grilling him,

which of course was against the law. Well, all that time, from Sunday until the next Thursday, mister Long was kept in close confinement up there in that hotel by you or some other officers. Wasn't me, No, sir, what sir? No, sir, You were pumping him. You were some of your associates all the time, No, sir, weren't you? No, sir? Didn't you wake him up in the middle of the night, out of a sound sleep and pump him about this murder? I did not? Do you know who did? No? Sir.

Long's lawyers cross examination relied on a bigger point about evidence. There are rules. They're old, change all the time, but there are rules, and the prosecution had broken a bunch of them, mainly because of the circumstances under which Wood

had questioned Long. Another judge might have disallowed as evidence the transcript of James Wood's interrogation of George Long, but this judge allowed it, and so the entire transcript of Wood's interrogation was read to the jury so that the jury could imagine that they too were sitting in that room in the hotel. Berry watching Wood give Long the third degree. Long's lawyer, in his closing argument, pleaded with

the jury to ignore all of it. I say and submit you, gentlemen, that under the evidence there must be a doubt. But the prosecution said the case was open and shut. And the prosecutor and his closing argument was very good. He talked about the rope of evidence that tied this case together. And as he walked around the courtroom, he held in his hands a rope which he tied and untied, tied and untied, as if he had George

Long all roped up. The jury deliberated for less than a day, party fun on a charge of second degree murder. We find the defendant guilty as charged. All right. The judge sentenced Long to life in prison, and Barry Vermont declared, mystery solved facts one the day. But to me, either something was missing or else something had gone terribly wrong. Long might have done it, sure, but on what evidence, said the jury actually convicted him. I couldn't see it.

Somewhere along the line, I must have missed something, some stray fact, some clue. Here's what you do when your investigation reaches a dead end. You do it all over again. So I went back and I looked at that super creepy photograph again, the one where Luciena Dwell looks like a hunted animal, tied and about to be roasted on a spit. And then I looked at the newspaper stories again, and I read Wood's notes again. And then I noticed

something I hadn't noticed before. I noticed that when Wood first took the stand, the prosecution read a statement into the record, but in the newspaper the contents of that statement just got a passing mention. You'd think it would have been summarized in full by that very Daily Times reporter, poured over by. The reporter had been so eager to report every last fact gathered at the scene of the crime,

But nope, he had only this to say. Much of the statement has to do with facts that cannot appear in print. Why what facts were unprintable? Then I figured whatever the newspaper didn't print I might still survive in the original trial transcripts. Those would be stored far away, deep in Vermont's state archives. There should be more cows. Landscape would be well, it's not a visual media. We could just say there it cows. It's mostly cows here. That's my son. Since this is a show about truth,

I should just stay for the record. There were no cows in sight, so just ignore my son and ignore me and ignore to my producer Ben on the right, that's some arrowloom wild cows. Okay, cows, Look at brand. I don't get that one. The trial records were waiting for us in a low slung building on the side of Root two in Montpelier. I've got some of the boxes pulled. Few of them have changed their box numbers because we would reprocessed them, so I should be all

set free. You too. That's reference artivist Marisa Dobrick, and she'd pulled out a big box full of George Long's trial record, bound in giant books. The record runs to more than twelve hundred pages, so we can kind of get a whole piece of the puzzle this way, I see it is when you're doing a court case, you're looking at pieces of a puzzle. I drive past or murderacing every day? Do you really think of her? Just

about every day? The trial records had actually been misfiled, and it had been lost for a very long time until this amazing archivist Gregory Sandford, the man who'd hired Marissa, found them after I'd emailed him with a few questions. There's almost nothing as thrilling as finding something you've been looking for for a really long time. So you open that one box and all of a sudden there are two or three volumes and saying, wow, this is it.

Anybody should research at any point, because there's that moment of discovery that it's like, wow, you know this is cool, and it is cool, it's super cool. But it takes a long time to read through trial transcripts, and I noticed there was a lot in them that hadn't made it into the very daily times. Okay, first thing to report. There was so much hanky panky going on in this little granite city, especially at Missus Parker's house, that brothel

where George Long had met Lucina Broadwell. A great many of the hundred witnesses who marched to the stand during the trial were asked about the goings on at Missus Parker's house. That stuff was scandalous, but it wasn't entirely unprintable. Hundreds of pages into the trial transcript I finally found the part of the testimony that the very Daily Times could not print something that George Long had told James Wood about the Knight of Lucina Broadwell's death. Go ahead, yes,

go ahead. And we was in the room then a while and came out. Were you intimate with her there? Yeah? But before become an intimate did she get any money from you? No, sir? Did you remove a close her skirt, just skirt, just her skirt and a hat, yeah, and her hat and gloves and gloves. Now on that occasion when you were intimate with her, is that the occasion you told me about once you used some sort of preventative. She used a blue tablet. I have a bottle in

my room over there. Now I can't tell the name of the tablet, but there's a blue wash that comes in an oblong bottle or a three cornered bottle. Those blue tablets or the blue liquid in that oblong bottle that must have been a concoction made from a plant called blue koosh, a perennial with blueberries. Who's the sort of thing you'd take Before birth control was legal, it was advertised as aiding menstruation. This part of the interrogation

transcript was unprintable because legally, it was obscene. That is, it violated the terms of the eighteen seventy three Comstock Act, a federal law that prohibited the printing of any information relating to, among other things, the prevention of conception or for causing unlawful abortion. The newspapers could say that lucian A Broadwell's stomach had veal and bread in it when they opened her up. They could talk about the bruises on her thighs, but they couldn't mention her alleged use

of birth control that was illegal. Is that something you gava? Yes, I had them sitting there in the dresser, and I had them in my pocket that night. None of the evidence used to convict George Long had ever been very good, but in the end it hadn't really mattered. George Long had provided a married woman and mother of three with birth control in order to have sex with her without fear of pregnancy and discovery by her husband, and then

he lied about it. These on principal facts were reason enough for the jurors, a jury of twelve men, to convict. That evidence cinched the case. Not the clue of the white handkerchief, but the clue of the blue bottle up in on Pelio. In the state archives. Some people think Lucia broadwell spirit has never found dressed. Berry's got a feel into it. It's weighted with history, and I mean I think that sometimes you can feel that. That's Marisa

Dobrick again, reference archivist for the State of Vermont. All I can say honestly is I feel like she haunts it. I'm not sure I believe in ghosts myself, but I find her stories so haunting that every day I drive past it. I don't think any good answers were given. I think she's still there. I do. I don't think they found him that place. I mean, you can go there. You can go to the parking lot. Lucina Broadwell has

been dead and buried for a hundred years. I never really got her to speak, but I did want to guess, to pay my respects, I decided to go find that unfinished grave, the place where she'd been first found naked, bound and gag. So my producer Ben and my son Simon and I piled into my subaru and headed twenty minutes south on Vermont sixty two to barry to the scene of the crime. Like Maurica said, there's a parking

lot there. Now. We brought with us a stack of photographs, that terrible photograph of Luciena Broadwell's corpse and then all the other forensic photographs shots of the scene. It looks really different there now, So it took a lot of looking to find the exact spot. There's like the garden, then there's a road. Here's this street right here, and then there's a garden a little way as a road, and then this curb and then the fence again. So

that parking lot really is the former garden man. Yeah, we're pretty sure that we found the spot, and so we just stood there a moment of silence for her. Standing there, During that long moment of silence, my mind wandered. Jurors are known as finders of facts, but for a very long time women couldn't serve on juries. Only men then could decide what was true and what wasn't true. Who killed truth? Standing there on the spot where James R. Wood had once stood, I thought about his sister, maud

Wood Park. She hadn't joined the family business, the Wood Detective Agency instead. In nineteen nineteen, the year Lucia Broadwell was murdered, Maudwood Park, who was arguably the most influential woman in American politics, was leading the fight for women's suffrage as a congressional lobbyist in Washington, and she hadn't stopped after women finally got the right to vote with

the Nineteenth Amendment. After its ratification in nineteen twenty, women like Maudwood Park went on to fight for the right of women to serve on juries. That fight's date by state took a really long time. In Vermont, women didn't get to serve on juries to decide on matters of fact until nineteen forty three. That same year, Moudwoodpark started

collecting documents chronicling women's history. Like me, she couldn't stand the idea of silenced women, so she created her own archive, an archive of women's history, the Sleasanter Library on the History of Women in America. Lately, libraries like that archives have been busy digitizing their records. A few years back, the library that holds the records of the Wood Detective

Agency digitize them. They lived at James Wood's notebook and his leather bound photo album out of boxes and plays them gently in scanners, and then they uploaded them to the Internet. If today you do a Google search for Lucyna Broadwell, a photograph of her dead, bo pale and animal might float to the surface of the ocean of the Internet. That's how most of us find evidence these days, not by way of mysteries and ordeals, facts and clues,

juries and rules, but searches and data. Why does it seem lately as if it's hard to know anything at all because of the nature of this search Lucino Broadwell, like every other search result, she will have been ripped from her context and stripped bare of her history. She will be faceless and factless. True crime. Here in the Last Archive, we've got all kinds of records, shelved, stacked, filed, sprawling all over the floor, photographs, ledgers, facebook posts, fingerprints.

This season we'll be pawing through all this stuff to find out what happened to knowledge and truth and maybe even what to do about it. Stick around the doors always unlocked. The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and Bennette of Haafrey. Our editor is Julia Barton, and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrell is our Engineer, fact checking by Emy Gaines, original music by

Matthias Bosse and John Evans of Selwagen Symfinette. Many of our sound effects are from har Janette Junior and the star Ganette Foundation. Our full approoved players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becka A. Lewis, and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The last archive is brought to

you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater, to Emily Shulman at Harvard Law School, to Vicki Merrick Atlantic Public Media, and to Alex Allenson and the Bridge Sound in stage and at Pushkin. To Heather Fane, Maya Caney, Carl Migliori, Emily Roostick, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta Riley, Oliver Ruskin Kutz and Emily Spector. I'm Jill Lapoor