Mary’s Got a Gun

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
History is everywhere in the ground, in our landscape, even
in our skin. That was the lesson Adrian target hoped
to impart to his newest class project. The forty two
year old teacher had been looking for a way to
immerse his students in the history of the local area.
He'd spent his entire life in the sleepy county of
Somerset in England, and had long ago given himself over

(00:59):
to its rustic charms. But his student's eyes glazed over
whenever he told them that their home was the birthplace
of cheddar cheese, or that it laid claim to Great
Britain's oldest road. As much as these facts fascinated him,
engaging younger minds required something a bit more personal, and
that's when the perfect opportunity fell into his lap. In

(01:20):
the spring of nineteen ninety seven, mister Target learned that
a documentary film crew was in the area, dredging up
a century old mystery for a new television show. It
was a story that he knew well ninety four years before.
The skeleton of a young man had been discovered in
nearby Cheddar Gorge. Damage to the skull suggested a violent death,
but due to the advanced state of decay, it was

(01:42):
difficult to discern much more. The man's name was still unknown.
Around Summrset, people called him cheddar Man, after the area
where he'd been found. The mystery of his death remained unsolved,
but the documentary filmmakers hoped to change that. Using new techniques,
they manage to extract DNA samples from the skeleton's molar.

(02:03):
Then they posted ads around the local area asking for
volunteers to send their own samples in for comparison. It
was a long shot, but the filmmakers thought Cheddarman might
still have relatives living in the area. Finding those relatives
could transform the case and offer new insights into the
dead man's history. For mister Target, that was the perfect

(02:24):
way to get his class involved in a local legend.
He showed them how to gather DNA samples by scraping
flakes of skin from their cheeks, and then mailed the
samples to the filmmakers. It didn't take long to get
a reply. The results were surprising. Cheddarman was not related
to any of mister Target's students, but he was a
close genetic match for mister Target himself. The pair shared

(02:48):
a common ancestor through their maternal line, and this meant
that mister Target was likely a direct descendant of Cheddarman's
mother or grandmother. As you can imagine, for a middle
aged teacher, this was a startling discovery. He had known
Cheddarman's story all his life, but he never guessed that
he had such a close connection to the skeleton, and

(03:08):
more discoveries soon followed. Modern analysis of the skeleton showed
that Cheddarman had died in his twenties and that the
damage to the skull was probably caused by disease, not
blunt trauma. In other words, he wasn't murdered after all,
And years later, DNA analysis allowed experts to reconstruct what
Cheddarman even looked like. They produced a lifelike three D

(03:29):
printed bust, complete with hair and silicone skin in twenty eighteen,
mister Target encountered that bust for the first time while
visiting a local newspaper agency doing a story on Cheddarman.
It was his first time coming face to face with
his dead relative, an unnerving experience, to say the least.
Despite their connection, the pair didn't look all that similar.

(03:52):
The retired history teacher, now in his sixties, was white
with rugged, classically British features. Cheddarman had dark skin, apache beard,
and pale blue eyes, the only visible feature that they shared.
And yet mister Target couldn't help but feel a powerful connection.
He'd been given the extraordinarily rare opportunity to look into

(04:13):
the eyes of a distant ancestor. Because while Cheddarmans skeleton
was discovered in nineteen oh three, the remains were much
older than that. The man had lived and died around
eight thousand BCE. To this day, his remains are the
oldest complete modern human skeleton ever found in Britain, which
means that mister Target's family had lived in the area

(04:36):
for far longer than anyone could have guessed. And when
the teacher looked Cheddarman in the eyes, he wasn't just
meeting a relative for the first time. He was staring
into the face of history. It was another busy day

(05:03):
at Macy's department store in New York City. The depression
had put a damper on the usual crowds that flocked
to the Herald Square stalwart, but by the mid nineteen thirties,
the people had begun to come back, and so had
the pickpockets. As the shoppers crowded the perfumed apartment, a
young woman started screaming. A man had snatched her purse,

(05:23):
and she was shouting for somebody, anybody, to stop him.
The thief tried to disappear into the crowd, but a
firm hand grabbed him by the shoulder. He whirled around
to find a middle aged woman in a summary dress
and large, broad brimmed hat. She looked, for all intents
and purposes, like a middle class housewife out on a
shopping trip. Or at least she would have if it

(05:45):
weren't for the revolver in her hand pointed straight at
his heart. Instead of finding an easy payday, the thief
had run a foul of dead shop Mary, the Scourge
of the NYPD. Mary's life might read like a hard
boiled detective novel, but it hadn't started that way. Born
Mary Shanley in eighteen ninety six in Ireland, Mary and

(06:06):
her family immigrated to New York City in the early
days of the twentieth century. Mary was a loud, opinionated,
and fearless woman, meaning that she struggled to fit into
New York society. She finally found her place at the
age of thirty five when she became one of the
few women to join the New York Police Department. In
nineteen thirty one. Mary started out on the pickpocket squad.

(06:29):
Each morning, she dressed in playing clothes of a middle
class shopper and wandered the streets, monitoring the crowds in
department stores, theaters, and train stations. She kept an eye
out for suspicious characters looking to steal purses or shoplift.
Other days, Mary might go undercover to doctor's offices or
private chapels. She was looking out for criminals taking advantage

(06:51):
of women, like crooked doctors or people who issued fake
marriage licenses. One of her foremost duties, though, was taking
down fortune tellers, whose trade was illegal at the time.
Fortune tellers were thought to swindle women out of their money,
and while some might have tried at least to appear legitimate.
Others were crooked as a three dollar bill. In one instance,

(07:12):
Mary had her fortune read by a mystic named Princess
Juniata Flynn. Mid reading, Mary reached over and grabbed the
woman's elaborate head wrap. She untied it to reveal a
whole telephone handset bound to the woman's ear, through which
her assistant was feeding her information about her clients. While
Mary was already making a name for herself as a

(07:33):
crack woman detective, it wasn't until nineteen thirty four that
she gained her famous moniker. That year, female officers were
issued revolvers for the first time, and Mary quickly gained
a reputation for using hers. In the late nineteen thirties,
Mary was chasing a criminal on foot down fifty third Street.
Sensing she was going to lose him, she raised her

(07:54):
pistol into the air and fired a warning shot, bringing
him to a screeching halt. This in incident marked the
first time an NYPD policewoman used a gun during an arrest.
This soon became Mary's mo for particularly dangerous criminals. In
multiple cases, Mary would be facing an attacker or chasing
down a purse snatcher and fire her pistol into the air.

(08:16):
The sound was enough to make them stop, and although
she was often much smaller than her male criminal targets,
her bulldogged determination made her a force to be reckoned with.
For the next twenty years, until nineteen fifty seven, Mary
stocked the streets of New York, using her unassuming appearance
to stop crooks. She often brought her young goddaughter along

(08:37):
as a decoy, making her appear like a mother out
for the afternoon, and in nineteen thirty nine she received
the rank of first grade detective, the fourth woman in
history to ever achieve it. She was personally congratulated by
Mayor LaGuardia himself. Looking back, it really did seem like
Mary lived for the chase. She never married, preferring the

(08:58):
company of cops and crows to a spouse. She absolutely
loved the way that she lived her life. In one interview,
she quipped, it's exciting. I would die if I had
to go back to working in an office. It sounds
like Mary was living her best life right on target.

(09:19):
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities, subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,

(09:42):
and you can learn all about it over at the
Worldolore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.