The Broken Column

Sometimes the mysteries of the past are solved, and other times they are not. Either way, they remain very curious.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke'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 are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
Lawrence stepped outside of his Philadelphia apartment one afternoon to
find a box of seemingly discarded objects. This was not
uncommon in his neighborhood, where people often left old furniture
or boxes of books out for passers by to pick through.
Lawrence took a look inside a couple of knickknacks, including
a bronze statue lay on top of something massive and sparkly.

(00:59):
He dug through the box, unearthing an enormous crystal ball.
To Lawrence, it looked like a prop from a movie
or a Halloween costume, the sort of fortune teller or
witch might use. He made him move the box to
his garage, but he found that it was so heavy
that he had no choice but to drag it. Lawrence
had no use for the knickknacks, but he knew someone
who would love the crystal ball. His friend Kim Beckles,

(01:21):
cleaned Lawrence's house for him occasionally. Kim liked a joke
about being a witch and was all too happy when
he presented her with the crystal ball the next time
he saw her. Six months later, a man nicknamed Al
the trash Picker passed through Lawrence's neighborhood hunting for items
to pawn. Alan Lawrence weren't close friends, but he had
given Al a key to his garage and told him

(01:43):
to take anything that he wanted to sell. That day,
Al picked up the bronze statuette that Lawrence had found
next to the crystal ball. Al didn't have much use
for it either, but he knew that the old adage
was true. One man's trash is another man's treasure. Al
slipped the statue in with his other fines for the day,
and he made his way towards South Street garage and pawnshop.

(02:03):
The shop bought from Al regularly, and that day they
offered him thirty dollars for the statue and a wooden
table he'd picked up elsewhere. Twelve days later, on October
twenty fourth of nineteen ninety one, Penn Museum employee, Jess Canby,
took advantage of a free afternoon to do some shopping.
As a self described thrift store junkie, Jess loved to

(02:24):
pick through piles of discarded treasures. She entered the South
Street Garage and pawnshop that afternoon with no idea what
she was about to find. A bronze statue out behind
the counter caught Jess's eye. She asked the clerk if
she could inspect it more closely. In her hands, the
metal was cold and heavy. It depicted Osiris, the Egyptian

(02:44):
god of the afterlife. Jess examined the statue, first in
fascination and then in disbelief. Without a word of explanation,
she'd dropped the statue onto the counter and raced out
the door. Less than an hour later, she returned, this
time with two En Museum directors and the police. You see.
Three years earlier, on November tenth of nineteen eighty eight,

(03:07):
the Penn Museum staff had conducted their morning checks and
found the unthinkable. In a room called the Harrison Rotunda,
where priceless artifacts from Japan and China were displayed, three
objects were missing. A silver Japanese sculpture resembling a crashing wave,
a bronze statue of the Egyptian god Osiris, and a
fifty five pound crystal ball that had once belonged to

(03:29):
the Dowager Empress of China. Together, they were valued at
over half a million dollars. Museum officials alerted the police
and raced to check their security footage. They were horrified
to discover that security had been undergoing repairs to their
camera system and no footage of that night existed. Word
of the heist traveled quickly, and the Japanese wave sculpture

(03:52):
was recovered the same day. It had been dumped outside
of a building on the UPenn campus without fingerprints or
forensic evidence. Police and FBI searched for the crystal ball
and the statue, but without any leads, the case went cold,
that is until Jess can be spotted and recognized the
stolen artifact. At the pawn shot that day. Investigators questioned

(04:15):
the pawnshop owners, who led officials to al the trash picker,
who led them to Lawrence Stemmtz. When questioned by the
FBI and museum officials, Lawrence told them how he had
found the statue in a box with other objects, including
the crystal ball that he had given to Kim Beckle's
Kim happily returned the crystal ball to the museum, where
it was identified as the stolen artifact. Kim, Al and

(04:38):
Lawrence were all questioned extensively by the police and FBI,
but cleared of any suspicion in the robbery. Today, the
crystal ball is back in pride of place at the
Penn Museum Harrison Rotunda, along with the Osiris statue and
Japanese sculpture. The story of their time away from the
museum is not widely known, and the heist itself remains unsolved,

(04:58):
and as far as the year or so that the
crystal ball spent in Kim Beckle's possession, she told investigators
that she had used the priceless antique as a hat rack. Today,

(05:21):
the Nachez Trace Parkway is a two lane road winding
through the tranquil forests of Tennessee. It's a favorite for hikers, bicyclists,
and tourists looking for a scenic drive. But two hundred
years ago, long before the road was paved, the Natchez
Trace was more than just a place for a quiet getaway.
It was one of the main routes for traders and
explorers crossing the American frontier. On a cool autumn evening

(05:45):
in eighteen oh nine, a lone traveler stopped at one
of the few inns along the remote trail, a log
cabin called Grinder's Stand. The innkeeper's wife noticed right away
that the man was behaving strangely. He kept pacing back
and forth talking to a and she gave him the
key to the main cabin and started preparing his bed,
but he told her not to bother he preferred to

(06:07):
sleep on the floor. Late that night, around three o'clock
in the morning, the innkeeper's wife was startled by the
sound of gunshots from the main cabin. She woke up
the servants and hurried over for them to break open
the door. Inside, she saw her guest crawling on the
buffalo hide rug, bleeding from bullet wounds to his head
and chest. He begged them for a drink of water.

(06:29):
The servants poured him a glass and helped him sip,
but that was all they could do for him. There
were no doctors this far out in the wilderness. By sunrise,
he was dead. The man's servants were traveling a day
or two behind him, and they soon arrived at Grinder's
stand carried him along the trail. The man's friends all
assumed the death was a suicide. He had lifelong struggles

(06:50):
with depression, and he was dealing with money problems too.
He'd recently had to leave behind a job that he
absolutely loved for a desk job, and it was a
difficult adjust, even drinking heavily to get through the days.
He even tried unsuccessfully to take his own life just
a few weeks earlier. But there was something odd about
the situation. The man was a skilled gunman. He was

(07:12):
a former soldier and an expert hunter. How could he
have shot himself twice at point blank range and missed
badly enough that he survived for hours. Many people, though,
thought his death was actually a murder. It may have
been roving bandits searching the trail for someone to rob.
But another scandalous theory was that the innkeeper had caught
the man in bed with his wife, and some believe

(07:34):
that it was an assassination because this man wasn't just
any old lonesome traveler. He was one of the greatest
explorers in American history. Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and
Clark Expedition. There's a conspiracy theory that Lewis was killed
by James Wilkinson, an army general who served as governor
of the Louisiana Territory. Wilkinson was secretly a spy for

(07:57):
the Spanish, and he was also involved in some corrupt
land deals that Lewis had information about. The idea was
that Wilkinson had killed Lewis to protect his secrets, and
while there's no hard evidence to support this theory, it
has stuck around. Almost forty years after Lewis's death. In
eighteen forty eight, a Tennessee State commission opened his grave

(08:18):
and examined his body. Their final report found that even
though the death was officially ruled a suicide, it was
and I quote more probable that he died by the
hands of an assassin. The commissioners erected a monument over
Lewis's grave, a broken column symbolizing a life cut short.
It's still standing there along the Natchez Trace, near a

(08:39):
replica of the original Grinder's stand. In recent decades, some
of Lewis's descendants have tried to convince the National Park
Service to exhume his body again for more forensic testing,
but the request has been repeatedly denied. Unless they changed
their minds, the truth about what happened to Meriwether Lewis
might never be known. He might have been a trail

(08:59):
blo who navigated a continent, but in the end he
became lost in the fog of a personal mystery. 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

(09:22):
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, and
you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.