Thomas Morris: The Dublin Railway Murder

crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. This week on Wicked Words, we're traveling to eighteen fifty six, Ireland for a locked door mystery. A cashier for a Dublin railway station is found dead, savagely beaten. Nothing appears to be stolen. Can an experienced detective crack this case. Author Thomas Morris tells us the story in his new book The Dublin Railway Murder.

The sensational true story of a Victorian murder mystery. Tell me how you came to write this book. Where did you discover this story?

three years research. And what I found was that when I looked through medical journals for material I was using for the heart surgery book, there were these strange little stories, case studies, case histories of patients who got into strange difficulties or been treated in unusual ways. And I collected a lot of this material and it formed the basis

of my second book. So for quite a long period, I was constantly looking into old medical journals between about the dates of about sort of seventeen fifty nineteen hundred, that sort of era, mainly the nineteenth century, and a lot of this stuff I would just sort of squirrel away for future use, and sometimes I thought it might

turn into a slightly bigger project. And one of the stories I came across and didn't actually return to for a good two years was a single page report in an English medical journal about a court case that was then going on in Ireland. It was a court report which was only included in a medical journal because there

were some medical evidence that was submitted. It wasn't actually very interesting as medical evidence goes, but when I read the page, I thought, actually, this sounded quite an interesting story. And the bit of it in particular that I was interested in was the fact that this court report was

a murder trial. It was the murder of a clerk in an Irish railway station in Dublin in eighteen fifty six, and that day's evidence had discussed the ways in which the murderer might have got in and out of the room, whether the victim was killed, And just reading that one paragraph about this discussion of how the murderer might have got in and out of the room reminded me of a Golden age detective story, one of those nineteen thirties

Agatha Christie's stories. One of her Great Contemporaries. I didn't really think very much more of it until a couple of years later when I found that the whole trial had been transcribed, And when I read that, I found that actually it was not just as good as I had thought it might be, but actually quite a lot better. It was a really fantastic murder mystery with a genuine mystery at its heart, also elements of the sort of

locked room mystery going on. In particular, the one feature I'd kind of single out as the reason I was interested in writing about it as a non fiction book was that it had all those elements that make detective fiction of the early twentieth century so enjoyable, which is to say, a distinctive setting, a cast of characters which includes a relatively limited number of suspects that you can choose between, and then a distinctive detective at the heart

of it all, even with a distinctive name, Augustus Guy. So when I went back to it and read the transcript of this trial, I thought, this has to be a book.

After the trial, there's this very extraordinary you could call it a coder. There's like this strange afterlife of the stories not done and dusted, and that involves at this point this extraordinary character phrenologist, as you say, as somebody who studied the shapes of people's skulls and based an entire theory on the shape of skulls. He wanted to prove that you could distinguish between a murge and a

non murderer based on the shape of somebody's skull. He is a very extraordinary character who comes in and then we have this rather unexpected I mean to me, it's it's almost the it's the part of the story that makes this such a distinctive tale that this phrenologist, a man based in Liverpool called called Frederick Bridges, comes in and then studies the skull or the person who has turned out to be the chief suspect for the murder.

I'll say, there's no way anybody is going to believe that this is the only piece of evidence needed to convict someone. Into people believe them. And that's what was sort of happening, you know, in this case and in this time period before phrenology was discredited, was you could have somebody feel you know, the skull of someone and declare whether they had a criminal mind or not, like you had said. Also, you know, sort of like an eighteen fifty six minority report.

in London, the Metropolitan Police. The Metro Police was found in the eighteen twenties and their detectives came along about ten years after that. Dublin institute its detective force a little later, but it was modeled explicitly on the London force when Dublin gained its first detective force. So you have the structure of the police and the way they operate is superficially very similar to the way that a

police investigation might even take place today. The ranks of the officers are the same, the way they go about it is sort of superficially similar, but at the same time their investigation techniques are so primitive.

children to support, and they had very little money. They ended up living in I would say some poverty, although in quite a grand house in the southern suburbs of Dublin. George Little ended up as the bread winner for the entire household, for his mother, for his grandmother who lived with them, and a widowed sister, and for one of his siblings, a sister who lived with him. So there are four people living in this house. He's the only person earning a wage. And he was working as the

chief cashier in the station. One evening in November eighteen fifty six, he told his sister that he was going to be working a little late. There was a lot of work to do, and his job consisted essentially of taking all the cash that was taken on the entire railway line from Dublin to the West coast of Ireland.

And when all the money came, all the money from the entire length of the line, every ticket office came to Dublin and it was his job to count it up, account it and then send all the returns into the accounting department of the railway company. And on this Thursday evening there was a lot of money to be counted.

He had to stay late to his family surprise. He didn't return home that night, and his sister went into the station the following morning to find out what had happened to him, and nobody had realized that he had not left his office that night, and they found his office locked and shut, and when they broke down the door,

there was this scene of absolute carnage within. He had been bludgeoned to death with some heavy object, but his throat had also been cut, so it was a fairly terrifying scene, a huge pool of blood, and then this really very disfigured body lying underneath his desk. I think it's worth saying this in Dublin, which strangely had not experienced any murder in probably over a decade.

eighteen forty two. That's fourteen years without a single documented homicide, which I think is just an extraordinary statistic.

And the reason for that is twofold one is that the money that came through his office wasn't just every fare that was paid on the entire railway line. It was also the Canal Company, which was also owned by the railway company. Before the railways came along, the main route of communication and of carrying large heavy loads from the west coast of Ireland to Dublin was the canal network. Every penny that was spent on the canals all the

railway ended up in George Little's office. But also that particular week there had been a big fair at a place called Mullinger, which is in the midlands of Ireland. It was the main place where horses were traded at that point in Ireland and even breeders and owners used to come from England to buy and sell their horses at Mullinger. So there was a huge amount of extra footfall on the railways. Even animals, by the way, went on this railway, so cows and horses would also have

been loaded as freight. So there was a huge amount of traffic going up and down the railway line that week, and as a result, he had this huge sum of money on his desk in front of him at the moment that he was killed.

So by the time the police actually a summoned to investigate the scene, literally dozens of people have been even people just wanting to go into the room to have a look and see what it was like, what was going on. People were taking souvenirs from the room even before the police had had the chance to examine it. So they didn't have a pristine scene by any means. But objects they found there really probably immediately they could see that there was no murder weapon on the scene.

They found a small pen knife which had evidently been used as a sort of office work, maybe for sort of cutting the strings on bundles of papers, that sort of thing. There was nothing sharp enough to have caused a wound that's described by one of the doctors who examined the body as having almost entirely severed his neck. The cuts of this blade had gone so deep that he had almost exposed the spine from the front of

the neck. It was a really very extreme injury, and similarly the skull had been very badly fractured in several places, so it was of heavy object. There was absolutely nothing suitable in the room for causing such severe injuries. There was brief discussion at the inquest, which took place forty eight hours later in the same building. There was brief discussion of whether a poke which had been found next to the fire might have been involved, but it was

a sort of slim, slender, cast iron object. There was absolutely no way it could have caused those injuries. So pretty quickly the police understood that they were also looking for murder weapons as well as the murderer himself.

with his family. There are a couple of other families that lived there full time. There were always people in residence, and George Little's office was on the first floor of this building. There was a maid who came and went, who would make the fire and then clean the rooms after everybody had left, And there was more than one way in and out of his room, the door which was lockable, and then there are a couple of windows, one of which overlooked the great roof that went over

the train shed itself. And when his body was found, the door was locked. Initially it was thought that it had been locked from the inside. That turned out not to have been the case in fact. And then there was also the window, And actually both of these routes remained plausible entry and exit routes for the mergerer for

months afterwards. In fact, what was probably the cases they established quite quickly was that the mergerer had probably gone in through the door and exited through the window, and there was a route that they established. It was possible to get out of the window and then walk along the roof and then down a ladder into one of the restaurants one of the laboratories on the station platform. So there was a sort of multiplicity of options that possibilities that were open.

the circumstances. There were reasons for thinking that it had to be somebody who knew the station premises well, because the station house itself was locked up after one of the late trains had left in the early evening, and at that point it was possible for a member of the public to walk into the station house and find his office, but you would have to know a quite complicated route, which involved going downstairs to the basement and then up a backset of stairs in order to get

to the office. At the same time, there was also the possibility that it had been a crime of opportunity, because the building was fundamentally open to anybody any member of the public during the day, and there were numerous hiding places where somebody could have hidden. The investigation, which lasted weeks and then stretched out into months, lasted so long partly because there were so many different possibilities, both of the nature of the crime but also who had committed it.

one of the reasons that it absolutely gripped Dublin. When this was first announced in the papers within forty eight hours of his death, nobody could remember something quite as appallingly violent as this, and in fact it led the police to think at first that there might have been some sort of motive like revenge involved, But when they looked into his family background, they found that actually he

was an extremely quiet and reserved man. He was a member of a Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren, was absolutely pacifist, did not believe in holding grudges. He was honest to a fault. He had few close friends, but he was universally well liked. There was no grounds for thinking that this could have been a sort of personal motive, so that left the idea that it was either robbery or

just a random attack. And at first it seemed that nothing had been taken, because when they found his body they discovered that his table his desk was piled high with gold coins and banknotes hundreds and hundreds of pounds, an absolute fortune to any normal Dubliner. So they thought, well, this can't possibly have been robbery, and it was only after the accounting department downstairs had gone through every pile of money on his desk and compared the sums that

they counted up with what was in his books. That a very substantial sum of money turned out to be missing, and at that point they realized that the motive almost certainly was financial.

through the window. And in fact, he didn't even have a lock on the door. And this isn't a city that had really extraordinary poverty. Just within a few miles of the front door of this station, it had received thousands of I mean refugees is not too strong a word. From the Great Famine of the previous decade, many many Irish people had starved, others had emigrated, and many more had left the countryside in search of food and accommodation

in Dublin. So there was a huge poverty problem. And the idea that these hundreds of pounds would not be a target for criminals is breathtaking. So yes, I agree, But even that was heightened security arrangements. But so much more would have been done to protect him in those circumstances.

no idea. Similarly, when a murder weapon was found, which turned out to be a fitter's hammer, which is an enormously heavy hammer, which was carried in a locomotive by the driver and was used elsewhere in the station for a variety of maintenance and building tasks. There was a substance found on the head of this hammer which might or might not have been human hair. Again, they attempt to find out whether it is human hair. They think it looks like it, but they absolutely can't prove it

in court, So there is no fingerprinting. The examination of the crime scene is rudimentary and takes place far too late. Anyway, the only evidence that you might say has a sort of monoicum of modernity to it is that provided by the doctors, you know these days it would be done

by a pathologist. But his body was examined by three doctors, and in fact, when the murder weapon is found, the hammer is discovered at the bottom of a canal, they actually exhume his body to see if the head of the hammer fits into the wounds on his skull, which is a slightly horrifying idea now that you dig up a body just to do that and in fact provide evidence which is probably not all that conclusive. But that was the only of course they had.

And then the same thing with the weapon. I suppose maybe there's a clue within the weapon, like it's a specific kind of hammer, that only one person at the railway station would have owned. But other than that, what good does it do to do these different things? Do you think?

circumstantial evidence. And a detail like that about there being some hair on the hammer may prove absolutely nothing, but it's being seen by the prosecutors and the investigators as a potential link in a very long chain of circumstantial evidence, something which on its own means nothing, but when combined with a lot of other apparently trivial findings, might actually add up to something which to a jury looks like a convincing line of argument.

working together, and you present work. We have all this evidence, and he doesn't know how not valuable some of this might be. Maybe he's more willing to turn on the other person, I suppose. I know that's not particularly the case in this story, but I was thinking that, like, boy, you gather enough stuff, even though it might not seem like it's going to lead anywhere, at least it looks to the public like you're moving forward.

him was none other than his wife. That was a fact of great significance in English and Irish law in the eighteen fifties, because at that point in legal history, it was not possible for a wife to offer evidence

against her own husband. There's this peculiarity that at that point a wife was still seen as the literally the possession of a husband and part of him, which meant that one person was essentially giving evidence against himself, which is a sort of obvious logical absurdity, and it leads this situation where somebody can come forward and say, my husband has confessed this crime. I know what he did. I can show you how he did it. I can show you where he hid the money, I can show

you what he did with the murder weapon. But none of that evidence, which would otherwise be damning, is admissible in a court of law because a wife is simply prohibited from giving that evidence to a judge. Now, that is the reason that in this case the police were absolutely compelled to put together the most convincing, circumstantial case that they could.

in that building. They interviewed pretty much every employee who worked there and just word saying something about the scale of this as well. By the way they had there were workshops where carriages and engines were built. There were maintenance offices, there were the ticket offices. There were the housekeepers, the station masters, there were stationed police officers who were there.

It was an extraordinarily large operation. Sixty people worked in the station house alone, and as part of their search, they drained the canal, which at that point it ended in a basin right outside the station. So they drained the canal and this army of workmen sifted through the stinking mud at the bottom of the canal, and that's where they found first the hammer and then subsequently not one, but two raisers.

point becomes the police's favored suspect. He is interviewed about how they keep the hammers in the store, and it's behind a counter where he has to sign out the hammers to whoever wants to use one, so that that is seen as the obvious source of them of the murder weapon.

in his job as manager of the stores. He was probably acquiring things to the stores that maybe he sold on for his own profit, and he was a trusted member of the company, so this probably wasn't being noticed by the management. In addition to that, there were a couple of little incidents where he gave what were subsequently shown to be untruthful answers to the police when they

came to investigate him. I think it's worth saying this that one of the reasons I know all this is that, amazingly the police files for this case, which is, you know, more than one hundred and seventy years old, now, the police files have survived, and so I have seen notes where police officers discussed the behavior of their suspects in private. And there is even in the case of Bernard Gunning, the record of surveillance that was placed on him for

a period of many months. I find this slightly jaw dropping. Now. The paper trail shows that he was being followed by plainclothes officers under conditions of secrecy for at least three or four months in early eighteen fifty seven, and there are documents where these officers write what he's doing in his spare time late at night, going to hotels, meeting unnamed women and going with them to another house in

the city. So they were absolutely convinced that Gunning was guilty, but they didn't have any evidence to prove it, and that's what they resorted to, these plainclothes officers tailing him around town, reporting on his doings to senior officers.

a woman walked into Well. She knocked on the door of the chief prosecutor for that part of Ireland and said that she knew who had committed the murder and it was her husband. And later that same day she led police to three separate sites on the estate where they found caches of money, and she also showed them where her husband had destroyed evidence, including the clothes he'd been wearing, and provided other essentially proof, or so she claimed,

of his guilt. And that's where the sort of second phase kicks in, where they arrest their man and they prepare evidence to put him on trial. But as I said earlier, they were hamstrung by the fact that they simply couldn't use any of the absolutely brilliant evidence they'd just been handed by his wife. Now they were able to use the evidence of his children, and they interviewed all the children, although the youngest was so young that

his answers really weren't of any value. But they ended up putting two of these children on the stand in the subsequent trial. The oldest child remained loyal to his father and was therefore of no use to them and was not required to give evidence. But this very interesting family dynamic then emerges, which is that the father and the oldest son remain allies. The father being on trial, the other children which is two daughters and a younger son, and the wife essentially never speak to him again.

able to give evidence against her own husband. But it was only in that very specific offense of assault against the spouse. In fact, that provision was not changed in English law until I think eighteen ninety seven, so it persisted for really quite a long time.

But even though she was possibly quite seriously ill, he refused to get any medical attention for her at all. She also suspected him of trying to poison her, and she was very clearly unhappy that she had been forced

to cover up his crime. She and her eldest son had seen him returning in her account covered in blood and carrying a bucket full of money, and when he saw that she had seen this, he forced her to promise that she would now tell a soul, and also forced her to help him conceal the money and burn the clothes he'd been wearing. Following his arrest, she wanted never to have anything to do with him, and in fact she ends up in a safe house under an assumed name because she is never going to be safe

from him again. But he was actually quite keen to resume the marriage as if nothing had.

have gained from his wife. They had the evidence of his eldest daughter, but it became apparent during cross examination that she had been probably quite severely coached, and also was not really old enough to understand the nature of the questions or to remember accurately what had happened on one night nine months previously. And it's I think quite a gripping court scene because her evidence is absolutely brutally

taken apart by the defense barrister. It's quite clear that the nature of the contradictions that turn up in the prosecution evidence in court make it absolutely impossible for a jury in its right mind to convict the man who was standing accused of the crime. On the other hand, it seems quite clear to me that the man who was accused of the crime did it. He never gets quite to the point of confessing to it, but reading between the lines, there are moments when he more or

less acknowledges what he's done. And one of the things that I quite enjoyed about the story is that there's this amazing period of about two weeks after he's acquitted, and he's actually roaming free in Dublin, a free man. But half of Dublin, or even two thirds of Dublin thinks he's definitely the guilty man. And yet he decides to go on stage in a Dublin theater and do a one man show about why it couldn't possibly have been him that killed George Little at the Broadstone railway station.

He was absolutely shameless and had no sense of there's no delicacy there or any sense that the dead man's family might be impossibly offended by his behavior. So he turns into a sort of horribly compelling character, and one who certainly lacks self awareness. Even if he were not guilty, he certainly behaved in the most appalling way.

two shows. He did one matinee and one evening show, and the first one things became a bit rarey on the streets. But during a second show, there was a full blown riot on the streets outside, people throwing rocks and breaking windows, and inside the theater he was booed off the stage. So it was a catastrophe for him personally. And that was the moment at which it became apparent that he could no longer stay in Dublin, and that's the moment he decides to leave Ireland and find a way of emigrating.

a very detailed wooden model of the station building. It would be a wonderful thing to have now, and this enormous it was several feet long. This model was displayed in the middle of the courtroom and then the barristers, the lawyers would point to bits of it to explain what was going on in the examinations they were doing.

And after the trial, James Spollin, the man who stood trial and being a quitted of a crime, manages to take possession of this wooden model and takes it with him to Liverpool where he ends up and puts it

on display. So not only is he doing a stage show in a theater, he's also doing his exhibition where he puts this magnificent wooden model of Broadstone railway station in an exhibition hall in Liverpool, and he stands next to it giving a sort of lecture explaining all the bits of the station and where he was and where George Little was when he was killed, and how it couldn't possibly have been him that killed him.

where they went to. I suspect strongly it was New York, but Liverpool is a place where Irish immigrants typically embark, and so he's needing to find a way of raising the fair and he is introduced to Frederick Bridges. Now, Frederick Bridges was a phrenologist, It's worth saying I think that he was. Even in the eighteen fifties, he was seen as a bit of an odd ball in the haydo of phrenology was between about the seventeen nineties and

the eighteen twenties. By the eighteen fifties, most scientists really did think it was nonsense, but Bridges really stuck to his guns, and he had this whole private theory which involved a single angle that he measured involving the relationship between a person's jawline and their ear and within a particular range of angle. He said, essentially, psychopaths as we would understand them today, and dangerous murderer types, their measurements

would be very characteristic, so you could tell them. And he had spent years traveling around the country to executions, public executions, and he would seek permission from the prison governor of the prisons where these executions were taking place, and he would take a plaster cast of the head of the recently executed man, and then he would take these plaster casts home and conduct his measurements. And he claimed to approved beyond all doubts that all these murderers

had a very significant cranial features in common. And from this he built up an entire theory relating to violent men in the crimes they committed and the shapes of their heads. And the reason he was interested in spollen was although he had tested his theory repeatedly on dead men who were proved to be murdered. He wanted to

show that his theory also had predictive power. So he wanted to show that by measuring an accused murderer's head, he could personally prove whether they had committed the crime, which you can see how if this actually had any truth to it would be an extremely valuable thing that you would be able to tell people in advance whether they were dangerous or not, and therefore remove them from society if they showed a threat.

in return for a check. Essentially, it takes quite a while, but Spallin is a actually convinced, and the deal they strike is that in return for making a plaster cast of Spolin's head and taking a photograph of him, Bridges will pay his fare to emigrate, and fortunately for us, he also writes a little pamphlet about this encounter, from which we understand that he spent several weeks essentially charming him,

befriending him. There's a first meeting in a ced pub in Liverpool, and then he ends up inviting him to meet his wife, and Spoonin and his son go for dinner there several times, and eventually he is allowed to make the plaster cast and take the photographs, which sadly we don't have the original photographs, but there is a drawing made from the photographs which gives us a good likeness of Sponin, and then, having achieved that, he pays

for him to emigrate. And we don't know because the condition of this one of the conditions of this deal was that he was not to divulge ever where he went. But we do know the date he left, or rather the weekend, and from that it is possible to at least rule out many of the many of the options, and from what I've seen of I mean, you can tell these days. The records are so complete you can find out exactly what ships left Liverpool on a single weekend in eighteen fifty seven, or in fact it was

January eighteen fifty eight by the time he embarked. So I'm reasonably confident that I know that he did go to New York. As I say, it's all shrouded rather in mystery that the final days of his life in Liverpool.

know sadly that he didn't receive any response. But you can only imagine the reaction of somebody in the Home Office in London receiving this letter saying I've measured a man's skull and I can tell you he's definitely a murderer.

so interesting. So at least doctor Bridges homed in on one little section and that's it. But what do you think is the significance of that part kind of act three of your story with phrenology? Because James Sprawlin's in the wind, we have no idea, we think he's in New York. Do you feel like this really could have led to something, you know, because Bridges was really pushing this idea.

to some degree a fantasist. He claims, for instance, that at the age of nine, he swam the English Channel. There's a brief essay about his own biography which sort of prefaces his encounter with Spollin, and it's completely absurd the number of things he claims to have taught himself. He says he was I think one of twenty children or something. He says he swam the channel. He has a whole load of completely unlikely adventures, and then is returned to his parents by a kindly merchant who terms

him a genius. So there's a lot of self aggrandizement

going on there. At the same time, although he was obviously regarded with a lot of sort of pity and amusement by some of his contemporaries, he had the ear of some of the most senior people in government, The Prime Minister Palmerston, who had previously been in office and at this point in the eighteen fifties was out of office again but would later go on to be Prime Minister again, was very interested in phrenology and gave Bridges an audience at which Bridges was permitted to feel his

skull and examine him, but also present his ideas about the utility of phrenology for detecting criminals, and as a result of that he was given a direct grant of fifty pounds, which at the time was quite a considerable sum of money in order to develop his work.

allowed to give evidence. And then you know, we might have had a massive contribution which would have been terrible to investigations based on an antiquated and then a joke junk science in phrenology, So sort of like like there's several things that are rooted and inaccuracies that really pop up in this story of yours.

history of medicine, is actually quite worthwhile. You can't really blame doctors of the eighteenth century for relying on on leeches and arsenic and drugs that we now know to be harmful rather than helpful, in that they were rooted in centuries of tradition and what they thought was good scholarship. And the same is true for criminal investigation. Really they could only rely on the techniques they knew, and of course they used the laws that seemed to be just

to them. But you know, we have twenty twenty hindsight, we can see how ludicrous some of these ideas and laws look today, but living in their world and their cultural familiar not so much.

it was like, this is what my test says. It is the truth. There is no other explanation when you're at the nascent era of discovering all of these tools. And so when that was for me the dangerous part of learning about phrenology, where that is to say, Thomas Morris, look at the angle between his ear and you know, his mouth, there's along his jawline. Definitively, this is somebody

who is going to kill someone. And I still think those kinds of statements are dangerous to sit on a stand as an expert and say there is no other explanation, when oftentimes there is you can exclude, but sometimes you can't include.

a crime. Nobody turned up. It was embarrassing. He had his luggage full of copies of his book to sell and nobody wanted one. And I think after his first speaking engagement, the rest of his trip was canceled, so he was sort of he was a man out of time.

that's still must weigh on you. You're doing this story with all of these interesting things, but ultimately the main person at the center of the story doesn't get any justice.

their families. And the best that is done for him is that the railway company decides to instigate a collection basically a charitable collection, to raise enough money to ensure that his mother, who is an elderly woman, has enough to live on for the rest of her life. And so this appeal goes out and actually they raise only something like two thirds of the targeted amount. I think they were trying to raise one hundred pounds, wh should be enough to fund an annuity which would give her

an annual income for the rest of her life. And they get only two thirds of the way to that target. And a lot of care is taken through official channels to make sure that James Spollin's wife, the woman who's accused him, is all right, and that she has funds to live with her children, and that she's given anonymity in a new place to live. And there is absolutely no record at all in the papers that I've seen that anybody from government even once thought of George Little's family.

There's no record of a letter, of a visit or anything of that nature. It seems that as soon as George Little died, the official world just forgot them.

by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff, and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod.