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And when he said, why did you do it? She would cross her legs and smoke a cigarette and just sort of smile.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
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 This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. I'm really thrilled to have my buddy Skip hollands Worth on the show this week. He wrote a book called She Kills, and it's a collection of updated stories from Texas Monthly, focusing on fascinating and often shocking female murderers and some of these cases I've never heard of. Skip is one of the best
storytellers around, so let's talk about the book. First. Is this the first book that you've had out since The Midnight Assassin.
It is the first book I've had out since The Midnight Assassin. And it wasn't even my idea. It was an editor at Texas Monthly, Megan cry We had this deal in place with Arper Collins. Texas Monthly did there's a certain number of books. And she said to me, do you know how much you write about women? And I went, no, keep going thinking I was going to get in trouble in some way, and she says, why don't we do a book of your favorite women criminals who.
Came to mind for you? Because I did read the origin story of your fascination with women who kill with the what do you call them? Oilcatter. I don't know if you can get into that story, but that was you were in high school, and this story was coming out near where you were growing up, right.
Yeah. I grew up as white bred as they come, in a town called witch Soft Falls north of Dallas, and I was a cellist in the school orchestra. I volunteered at the state hospital. I was an eagle scoup. My dad was a pastor. I mean, you can't get any more boring. Than that, but there was this part of me that did sort of have a fascination with
the shadow side of life. And when I was about sixteen years old, after my junior year in high school, my dad brought in a copy of the witch Soft Falls Record News, the local newspaper, and the headline went millionaire olman and wife found in their mansion. And it was Bobby Burns, this lean, charismatic wildcatter who had been shot to death in his bed. There was a Dick Van doc Day, so he had a bed and his wife had a bed on the other side of the bedroom.
Then someone had shot her to death. She was wearing a gown from naming Marcus. I mean, they were ultra rich. They would fly in their own private plane to Dallas, which took about ten minutes on the plane, so that she could go shopping. You know. She was this charming ex model, and he was this gung ho wildcatter who was drilling big wells and so they were richest chocolate. They had this well, this huge mansion, eight thousand square feet in size. We all just were sort of fascinated
by him. And here it turned out that they had been murdered by we figured some rival. I will never forget being at my church youth group that night, Sunday night going the killer could still be in our neighborhood right now, he could still be checking any of us. And suddenly my imagination took this giant leap as I began to realize there was this whole other world I
knew nothing about. Well, that isn't the end of the story, because a few days after the shootings it turned out that the medical examiner had discovered that she, the wife, Abby, had shot Bobby and that she then in turn got climbed back into bed and shot herself. And no one to this day knows what happened, and it's haunted me ghost like all these years, last fifty years.
How is that possible that nobody had any kind of an inkling, you know, of their mental health struggles that she had, or nobody dug into this enough to be able to figure it out.
Oh, I think there are a lot of people who knew there was, you know, rumors that would go through about her private life, his private life. Maybe she shot him because he was going to take her, or he was going to go live with another woman. Maybe she shot herself because she didn't want to go to prison. You know, the names of people who could have had or could not have had affairs with either one of them just whipped through that town like a prairie fire.
Wow. How did the medical examiner come to this conclusion? You know, was it the powder burns on her or the trajectory or what was it?
Powder burns? Where the gun fell, how the gun was used was pretty standard stuff.
Yeah, And they probably checked her hands for residue and all of that stuff.
So I used to swim laps. I'd go to the country club to which I calls country club with my wealthier friends, and I would swim laps and slow down past the spot where the mothers would sit in their lawn chairs and gossip. And I would be doing this horrible version of the Australian crawl, hoping that I would be able to hear something true.
Crime reporter right there in high school.
Huh Yeah, hollins Worth reporting mission had begun.
In the book you said you could have started your own little detective agency back then. Was that like a serious Did you really think about that? You really were were going to keep files on this kind of a story.
Not at that moment. I didn't know. You know, I had read an Agatha Christie novel. I think I'd read some Sherlock Holms short stories. But I didn't even know anybody who had been arrested. Back then, none of my friends had gone to jail. I just didn't know that world at all. But it stuck with me as I went on with life.
Moving back to the main point of your book here, what do you think was so fascinating? Was it the wealth? Was it the mystery of this case, and I don't mean just for you, for everybody, or was it, you know, that the possibility that this woman did do this? And I also wonder if people believed that this really was a murder suicide. There's a lot of questions at once.
Uh, the fact that they had so much money, that they lived such an elegant live. They would go in these safaris in Africa, and Abby she was a better shot than her husband. So you know, people tried to tie it together as to what would have made her do this. She was not a violent person. She had not done anything remotely wrong. I mean, it was a brutal execution. And you know, this is what drives true crime because you're not really writing or interested in true crime.
By definition, it's the story of people, these people who cross this invisible line and do something no one expects.
And I think people now understand that women can be just as violent, you know as men, sometimes more violent. But I still think that is there's certainly like a sexism involved there, because there still is that disbelief going back, of course hundreds and hundreds of years, but really squarely landing on Lizzie Borden, wouldn't you think that's one of
the origins. That's one of the big cases where you just think, there's no way this woman didn't do it, some people might think, and then there's a jury of men who acquits her in something like forty five seconds. That's probably exaggerating, but I mean, don't you think that that's a prime example of people just saying that a woman could have never done this, at least a woman of a certain socioeconomic background.
Yeah, I mean, there are women who are hardwired to commit as much crime as men.
I'm wondering if you're going to say those are not the most interesting ones, interesting ones that don't seem are wired like that.
Those are not the most interesting ones. The interesting ones are the Abby Burns, the other women in my book who were like wallflowers who sort of stayed in the shed, you know, just had their own little, quiet lives that never did anything remotely rebellious. And something began bubbling to the top. And I don't know if it was, you know, in long held resentment and a long simmering jealousy, something that began to gnaw away at them and they let loose.
Now the Oxygen Network would say these women snapped and they should be on our show. That's not true. They didn't snap. Something was going on in them for them to finally lash out to get some kind of vengeance or justice or redemption. And those are the women that fascinated me. Like talking about quick verdicts. One of the stories in the book is about a woman named Candace Mussler who was the great socialite of Houston in the sixties, and in nineteen sixty four she was arrested with her
young nephew she persuaded him. According to the police and prosecutors, she persuaded her nephew, young Hansoon looked like Elvis, to stab her husband to death. Then she got accused of stabbing him, trying to stab the nephew to death who that she was having this big affair with. And she goes to court, and she had charmed so many people over the years. You know, this outcast girl from Georgia and Louisiana who comes to Houston and Mary's this extremely
rich financier. She doesn't show any violent tendencies until something happened in this day in nineteen sixty four, and she was acquitted quickly because the male jurors just could not fathom that a woman with big heels, high heels and this sweet southern smile could pull something like this off.
I wonder if you go back to all of these different layers of the way that women can be seen, women killers especially. I don't know if you would consider Abby Burns and Candice Muscler as the I don't think fem fatale is the right word, but there is that fascination with the dangerous woman. I assume that Muscler is in more of that category than you would think that Abby Burns is.
Oh yeah, Abby Burns was no fem fatale. Candace was a fem fatal I mean she married again, I think for his third time, and somebody supposedly threw that man off the roof of her Reverokes mansion. You know, it was phenomenal the attention she used to get. When her trial happened, the New York Times sent a reporter to cover it, back before the New York Times had reporters that did that kind of thing, and he described it as one of the most spectacular criminal trials in the
history of the United States. It's just unbelievable. And when you go and watch the testimony or read the transcripts of the testimony, it feels like you are being sucked back into time when Candace was pretty much as famous as Jackie Kennedy. People today don't even know who she is. But that was the crime of the You know, every year there's a crime of the century. That was it for a year or two?
Is she the woman who it was scandalous that she had dated or had an affair with a black musician. Was that her?
That's her? And I'm trying to remember the name of.
The musician, Chuck Berry.
Okay, I mean, think of this now. She gets acquitted in the trial of the century, as the reporters were calling it, and then, you know, the reporters down there. Have you ever heard of a woman reporter for the New York World named Theo Wilson. Yes, she was the first great female crime writer. She was the Brenda Star of America. And it's amazing that there haven't been more historical books written on this group. She'd befriended Judy Garland.
After her acquittal, she went to a Martin Luther King Southern Leadership convention and set next to him at private dinner she threw at her home. She had Chuck Berry play a concert at the backyard of her house. Is She covered the outdoor swim well with she glass so that people could walk on it, and she said, now, ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor to present to you Chuck Berry. He comes on to the stage and
she lays a kiss on him. That Dick de Garon, the famous Houston defense attorney, who was an up and comer at that time, said, shocked the city of Houston from you know, down to its soul. And she didn't care. She was just this free spirit who happened to have a need to kill men.
What was her motive for the husband? Is it money?
I assume it was money. But she had a lot of money if she just divorced. So I don't know. And that was If you read that story, you will think that I didn't answer that question. And some of these questions, just like Abby Burns, are not meant to.
Be answered, and you actually write quite a bit of it. I feel like about unanswered questions. You know, you had your podcast Tom Brown's Body, you wrote about, you know, the servant girl annihilator from Austin in the eighteen eighties unsolved case. So have you taken a look at why you like those kinds of cases where you just have, regardless if it's women or men as the killers, where you just have all of these unanswered questions floating around.
I just think it's more interesting when it's not a cut and drive case. And you know, when there's times you're not going to know the answer, like the that Smith forever on that book about the serial killer in Austin, and it was just hours days going through old no you know this, and going through old nineteenth century newspapers looking for one quote from a sheriff or a police officer that would give me on the right track, and I never got there. Now I found really interesting stuff.
But did I find the answer? No, which is what makes it, you know, the story even more interesting. It's like, you know, when the BTK killer was finally found by the next day, almost everyone was bored with that story. You know, it's always the uncalled that are the most interesting. That's why I enjoyed doing those.
In my other podcast, Buried Bones, I work with Paul Holes, who's a forensic investigator, and he most famously helped solve the Golden State killer case, which you know, this was a rapist, sadist killer who Paul had pursued for so long because he was in California as an investigator. They catch Joseph DiAngelo and then I asked him, I think just a few weeks ago, why where are we with
that case? Did he plead what happened? And he's like, I don't know, I don't really care at this point because he's caught, And so I wonder if you It sounds like you might have that same kind of attitude, right, I mean, you know, there's a good story to tell with a lot of these types of stories that have an actual ending, but the mysterious ones are the most interesting, especially if they are with women. What do you think
of the phenomena that happens. I mean, set aside the Richard Ramirez women fawning all over him and asking him to marry them and stuff, what about the men who fawn over the candae mosclers of the world, world who invite the dangerous woman in.
And there were men who flew into Houston just to get their shot at her. I mean there was a famous Houston society columnist named Maxine Messenger who essentially kept a running tab on who Candice was going out with. This is after her, you know, one husband disappeared, the second husband had been stebbed to death, the third husband had been thrown off the roof of their mansion. And
you just think people would run for their lives. No, men were wanting to, you know, have their shot at her so they could tell their buddies just how close they came.
So I also think when I think about female killers, I go to, well, I feel like it's sort of at the other end of the spectrum, Eileen Warnos, where you have a really dramatic movie Monster that won awards and was just such a compelling portrayal of this woman who had endured a lot of abuse before she you know, kills a series of men when she's a sex one and so you know, this is Eileen Warners has had things made about her, but she's sort of at the
opposite end of the spectrum, a different kind of dangerous woman. And we certainly do pay more attention to not women on the fringe like that, more of the unexpected gentleman. You could be sleeping right next to her and she'll kill you kind of women, don't you think. And that's a weird it's a weird dynamic to have with a true crime audience.
Yeah, And it's the women that are beguiling that draw men in. Candice after her acquittal, moves back to Houston, of all places, and people drive past the mansion and there are tour buses that drive past the mansion just so these people will pay ten bucks to get a look at her, and sometimes she would wave at them. So there was this mystery to who she was. She did not hesitate to go out in public and support public call and you know, she gave money to the
Boys Club, She gave money to the Houston Rodeo. She wore you know, cowgirl outfits every night to the rodeo, and she would just look at you when if a reporter, if he ever brought up the idea that maybe she was guilty of these killings, and you would think, well, here we go, she's gonna something's going to blow up, and she would charm the reporter. You know a lot of them came down. There are a lot of New
York reporters. The guy Jim Bishop who wrote all those the day Lincoln died, the day Kennedy, he was a big best selling author. He came down and covered her trial because he could not get enough of her.
Let's finish up with Candace, because I don't think we talked about how she died. She died at fifty six, fifty seven.
Maybe she'd had so many Perkidan like drugs that were in her system that she died in her sleep. Well did she die in her sleep? You know there's a conspiracy group at out there that will say that she was killed by somebody that didn't want his secret to come out, like the nephew or he became her nephew who she had the grand love affair with, became the Hugh Hefner of Houston and would go to a bar
called Tgi Friday's. Now, this is a man who everyone knew, stabbed the husband, the nephew, the young nephew, completely entranced by Candace. Women went after him in the same way that men went after Candace.
Okay, let's talk about Peggy Joe. Is it talus? Is that how you say her last name?
Peggy Joe Talis who did not commit a murder. But she's a story I was ho It's maybe my favorite story I've written about.
Comes to crime, I can tell, and the way you write it I can tell.
I mean, here was a woman who grew up driving, you know, when she was she dropped out of high school. She got a Fiat, He's fiat. She drove it to San Francisco one weekend just to see if she could meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the City Lights bookstore. She was a free spirit. I found that the woman who was her best friend, who said Peggy Joe just was a free spirit. She just wanted to do her own thing.
She didn't care about money or children. She just wanted to get in that Fiat and fly around town and stop at concerts. And they went to the Doobie Brothers concert in the seventies and the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger was writhing around, still wrinkle free. I think she began a relationship with a guy. She didn't have much of a job. She worked behind the counter at a Marriott.
She began a relationship with a guy who was a banker, and she decided one day to go visit him at his home where at his place of work, just outside of town, outside of Dallas, and she watched a woman getting his car and drive away, and she realized that was his wife. So there are these series of little disappointments that began to run through her life, which is not uncommon for middle class, middle class women who have
been abused, not necessarily abused, but just ignored. And she was began to live with her mom in a little two bedroom apartment in Garland, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, because her mom was getting sick and needed some help. And she began to see her life, according to the friend I talked to, drift away, and she got a job at a courier service driving envelopes around. This is
before the Federal Express days. She stopped going out, and then these bank robberies began to happen in two thousand and one, and I was a young reporter, new reporter then for Texas Monthly, and so I would cut these articles out, thinking there might be a story here. Because the story was about a man dressed as a cowboy, wearing this big ten gallon hat with a big belt buckle, cowboy boots, a beard. We c FAI said, well, they probably pasted that on with some sort of glue, but
no one ever thought, well, that's a woman. It was a man. And he began to hit all these small town banks, getting a thousand dollars here, two thousand dollars, and driving away, never showing his face. Always he had taken a license plate from a nearby apartment near the bank, and he would take his office screw a new one on. So the FBI, when they would look at tapes and see what car was driving away, they were getting diverted
and around the FBI headquarters he became known as Cowboy Bob. Well, Cowboy Bob finally made a mistake and did not take off the license plate of his own car, so they were able to trace him back to this apartment, and there sat Peggy Joe Talas with glue starting to come down, her face, and that had been keeping the beard on. And the head FBI agent in charge of the bank Robbery division then said to his other agents, gentlemen, we're no longer looking for Cowboy Bob. We found Cowboy Bob.
Bett was stunning that someone could pull off these bank robberies. Now, what she was good at was no job. Robberies, as the cops call them. You hand them a note, you know, and even that it's a pretty dangerous thing to do. It's it's not going after blowing up a vault. I mean, that's the most dramatic of heyst but this was still you had to be very careful not to run out of the bank, not to squeal away, to keep your head down, to make sure that you hadn't been given
some baked bills. And this robber, you know, never showed
a gun. And when they realized and caught him and realized there was a woman, they tried the FBI tried to get her to talk about how she learned to do this, because that surely couldn't be the first time that a woman could rob a bank like that, But maybe it was she found something, as her friend said, she found something joyful about doing something so daring, so frightening, and she got away with it, and she was able to use the money to pay off her mother's high medical costs.
What is the time span of this.
In nineteen ninety nine to two thousand and one, and here's what happened next. She got a three year sentence, which is unheard of if she robbed like ten or eleven banks. She got a three year sentence, went off to prison. Her niece came to see her. She came through the door, she smiled, she said, I'm sorry, I'll never do that again. She just seemed so casual. And a psychologist was brought in, this man who had interviewed all kinds of bank robbers, and he couldn't get a
thing out of her. He was, you know, in transpire because here was this woman who had pulled off these robberies. And when he said why did you do it? She would cross her legs and smoke a cigarette and just sort of smile. Well, she was let out after three years. She went back to live with her mother in an apartment in Garland.
Her mom was still alive, still alive.
Her mother eventually died from her from a bone cancer, and they had a funeral. Peggy shut everything down, gave away her plants. She was good at growing plants on the front porch. You know. She handed out and gave away her furniture. She bought an RV with purple curtains, used RB that weized as it went up a hill
for four thousand dollars. Now, you know, in another several years had passed when her mother died, she bought the RV and she started living in these little public drive up parks you can spend the night in at local lakes. Then one day she disappeared, and at the same time a story began to come out that a woman dressed as a man who was robbing banks and tyler this town in East Texas. Now, because all the old FBI agents who worked on the case had retired were moved
on to different positions, no one put it together. So she robbed a guaranteed bank, she robbed another one, and then she robbed the original guaranteed bank she robbed the first time, and ended it off to Mexico in her RV. She was quickly followed by the cops, by the FBI.
It was the strangest posse you could imagine. And she turned into a call to sac where neighbors got on their front porches and were filming everything that was happening with their video cam cam quarters that everybody had back then. And she stood out on her front she opened the door to her RV and I'll let you guess. I'll let you read what happened next. It's just two. It's not my writing that does justice to that scene. But what happened is so moving and heartbreaking and wonderful.
And you said that's your favorite story. Is it because of her?
Yes, it's not because she was necessarily a good criminal, so that played into it. It is how did she pull it off time after time? But here was a woman who was finally getting chance to bring back her youths again and to you know, be a free spirit. So many, not just women, but so many people as they begin to age, they don't have this kind of life to look forward to in retirement that they thought they might have. It's not going to be easy street for them. And she wanted to go out with one
last great hurrah. And you know, as her niece told me, that ends the story. She goes, uh. I wouldn't wanted to say good for you, Peggy, Joe, good for you.
One of my kids is into true crime, and she does not like stories about female killers at all, female criminals. She doesn't want to watch them. She wasn't interested in the Karen Reid story, any of these, you know, kind of more high profile stories. And I finally said, why, why don't you want to watch one where the woman as a perpetrator, because we are constantly you know, reading or watching stuff that's at words, you know, men killing women.
And she said, because I don't want to sympathize with the kill. And she said, I will no matter what, sympathize with the woman, whether she's a victim or the killer. And she said, I said, morally, that's a great idea. So I thought that was really interesting because we're not always skip as reporters or as you know, people who are interested in true crime. We're not always searching around for why Dennis Rader did what he did or Ted Bundy.
You know, we're not looking, But I feel like we're always looking for the reason women did stuff.
Well, there's not this backlash you would think at some point never happens.
Do you have another story in that book that stands out to you. You had one about a nurse I think of this character.
Her name was Vicky Don Jackson, that she lived in Nakona, which is a town of about twelve hundred people in North Texas. Now you know, you know all the big time serial killers that have come out of Texas, Henry.
Lee, Lucas, Kenneth All McDuff.
Bigdoff, they were vicious men. Right. Well, here was a woman who had twenty six nurses uniforms neatly pressed in her closet. She wanted to be Florence Nightingale. She took her job very seriously. She was very devoted to her patients. She cleaned them, brought them food, helped them to their
cars when they were being released from the hospital. Everybody, I mean no one had a bad word to say about nurse VICKI until one night in nineteen ninety she pulls out a syringe and fills it up with my vacarium chloride, which is a medicine that can stop respiratory breathing. And doctor choose it to get like if they need to intimate a patient to get the tube down the throat of a patient and then they can knock you know, get them out of the stop the medicine which is
coming through the IV, and they're fine again. But she was killing off patients. She killed off ten in the in the last couple of months of two thousand and seven or eight. I think then she killed off ten more, and she might have killed off five more. That's in a lot of members of the town. She worked the night shift. She would get in her closet put on and she told me this, you know, she was trying
to tell me that she was innocent. But I just did a series of interviews with her, thinking at some point she's going to explain why she did what she did. And she would always, you know, call me mister Hollinsworth. She would ask how I was doing, She asked about my health. She was in county jail, so the rules are a little different. If you're in the state prison, you know, you get like thirty minutes with an inmate
and that's it. They throw you out. But if you have a kind, kindly old sheriff, he'll let you sit in the interview room day and night until something breaks. So in December eleventh, two thousand, she would put on one of these starched nurses uniforms. She would wash her hair under the kitchen sink with Lady Clare that she would buy that she would get at Walmart discount. She would go buy the Dairy Queen, the one nice restaurant in town, and she would order the same meal two tacos, dinner, salad,
rice and beans, and I see sweet. And she would walk by people's tables and go, how are you, How are you mister Stevens, how are you, miss Johnson? I mean, it's a Florence nighting the countryfide Florence nightingale. And then she would go murder these patients, and the doctors were so bewildered they could not imagine this was crime. It was, you know, as a cold winter. Old people were dying, people were getting respiratory illnesses. This is just what happens
in a small town hospital. Until someone found a tube of my bacia and chloride in the trash looking for an answer. There were people that would go to the Dairy Queen and see her every night. There was one man who would drive his riding lawnmower, his seers riding lawnmower to the Dairy Queen. And I interviewed him and I said, did you have any idea? He said, I'd tell my wife every day after she got After Vicky Don got arrested, How could someone be so good during
the day do these kind of killings at night? Well, there was this uproar in town. Why was Vicky Don killing these people? And I joined the upper you know, I went up there and I would interview her as she waited for trial, kept trying to figure out what was going to break. I was using every skill I could come up with, which obviously wasn't much because I couldn't get her to confess to anything. But she would
say things occasionally. For instance, there was this one hundred year old lady named Missus Jennings who would slap and bite Vicky when she ever. She came up to take care of her at the hospital, and Vicky had known her, Vicky I learned since she was in high school. Since Vicky was in high school, she took care of her back then in a nursing home, and so here in the last days of her life, Missus Jennings life the
widow Jennings people called her. Vicky let loose and murdered her with a my vircarium and so by the time I got to the story, it was known that she had gotten after this woman, and I said, well, what did you think of her? Oh, mister Hollinsworth, I liked her so so much. She was so kind to people. Well, maybe not kind is the right word, and maybe she could have been a little kinder to everything I had
done for her. And then I began to realize what was going on, or what could have been going on, which was here was in her teenage years, she was ignored by all the other students. She was this wallflower. She would come to the dairy queen dressed in what she called western tops, you know, little tube tops, and no one would let her drive around with them in
their car. So when she saw them years later in the hospital with her taking care of them, here was her chance and getting back at all the years of being ignored were being made fun of. She even went after an ex husband. The ex husband was having an affair, was leaving Vicky, and so Vicky decided to when she had the shot. When the husband's father came in to the hospital, she popped him with myva carre and chloride.
So all these people were dying. A guy that invited asked one of Vicky's children out on a date, cussed her and tried to ruin a reputation when she said no. When the daughter said no, and Vicky never forgot it, and years later she went after him when he came into the hospital as a patient. There was a girl that went to the nightclub and she wore this black dress that zipped up and down. And I called her one day and I said, did you know Vicky Jackson?
And she begins to cry and she says, no, I'm sorry. I never knew her. I said, you graduated from high school with her. She just assumed that Vicky went after her because she was getting the attention with that black dress with the zipper, and VICKI had never gotten the same kind of attention. So you saw her beginning to spiral down, and it became obvious that she was spiraling. But I don't know it. Just you know, I'm sure
there are people that thought, well, good for her. We always know this kind of woman who had never who ignore.
But do you see how we're both searching? You search and I do too, particularly with female killers. You're looking for a reason, and I don't look for a reason for a lot of male killers. I just think, why would this woman have done this? What happened? And I end up doing stories on women. I've done several who simply have psychopathy and there's no rhyme or reason for why they did this. But it's interesting that we go to thinking about that, Okay, that's she was ignored and
now she's getting revenge. So I think that's interesting that we're just always and I probably always will just kind of say we've got to figure out what happened, and then it becomes something like my kid says, it's some kind of sympathetic thing where then you're almost rooting for the woman. I don't know, I find it, and I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with any of it. I just think it's interesting.
You know, well, she definitely didn't have a fan club, and you know, Nikono wasn't going to say Okay, we forgive you. I mean, it was never going to be anything like that. But I kept thinking, understand her, no matter how much psychopathy she had, I understand her.
So one of the you know, the killer nurses, quote unquote, the most famous one, did you look? And I don't know if this is mentioned in the book did you look at Jane Toppin'? Okay, So from the eighteen hundredth lady to probably the most famous nurse, they call him Angel of Mercy, which is quickly followed up with the line they showed no mercy for their patients. She was a private nurse, so she was able to get away with a lot more. But she targeted people, you know,
who had personal she had personal issues with. She targeted random patients. She you know, was moving from house to house. But her motive, besides I think the number one motive was you know, you would think, oh, it's the revenge, or it's the money or whatever. It was rejection, you know, but really it came down to she derived sexual gratification from watching somebody die from a poison that she administered. So imagine that late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, she's
doing this. More than one hundred people was the claim that she killed, and you know, just to think about that, and I mean there was proof because there were some patients who survived to observe she'd climb into bed with these people, and she still was not executed. She was committed to a mental health facility until she died, and I think she was in her eighties when she died. I mean even then, she's not hanged like somebody who would have robbed a bank one time would have been hanged a man.
Show you how significant a role these women had played in people's lives. One of the more unusual stories I wrote about was a prison band, and they came from the prison's women, the women's prenitentiary, the Gory Unit, and in the nineteen forties there was only one prison for women. It was called the Gory Farm Gory State Farm, and a woman there named Revel Childs decided she was going to start a band, just like the men had one. And she'd walk around the dormitory and say, we can
do one as good as the men. And they started a band, and they basically became the Dixie Chicks of their day. They were on WBAP radio every Wednesday night, played in a show called a prison show called Behind the Walls. Back then, prison's offen had big music programs. And then she was paroled. Others in the band were paroled and they disappeared. They never they could have had careers. They wanted to become famous so that the governor would like them, and they could get out of prison, so
they became famous in order to disappear. To this day, you know, I couldn't find I found one, one or two women. And this past week I wrote that story. I don't know how many years ago, but this past week the phone rang and it was the sister of another of one of the performers, who had no idea what had happened to her sister after she got out of prison, just disappeared. And you know, you think history history, need to remember the history never dies. There's no such
thing as a story fading into the past. The past has never passed.
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Sinner's All About the Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already. This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed by John Bradley, Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga, Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you know of a historical crime that could use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked,
email us at info at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors. For Wicked Words
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