Part One: The Naturopathic Doctor Who Bombed a Plane

Robert tells Brandie Posey the thrilling tale of Dr. Robert Spears, a man who was not a doctor but was a trailblazing Naturopath. And when I say "trailblazing", I mean he committed terrorism on a plane.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about the very worst people in all of history, and
we've got we've got a fun one for you this week. Folks.
I know it's been a rough year. There's been a
lot of pedophiles. I'm not just talking about the US government.
I'm talking about on the podcast, we've been covering a

(00:23):
lot of pedophiles, in part because there's a lot of
pedophiles in the US government, to be fair. But this week,
thank god, we're handling just an honest, simple grifter, you know,
one of the one of the good decent con men
who makes this podcast in this nation possible, And to
talk with me about just a just a corn fed,

(00:46):
good old fashioned, down home con artist, Brandy Posey. Brandy,
you're a comedian and you run your own comedy record label,
and you've got an album, milk Job that's out right now,
right now.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Right now, right now.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Baby.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Hell yeah, welcome to the show. You how you do
and how you've been since last we talked.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
I've been good also keeping up on the pedophile news
and probably keeping up with the pedophiles, Yeah, grinding as
much as you, I.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
Imagine, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's Uh, it's frustrating to be
aware of the world these days. I don't recommend it. Instead,
why don't you, Why don't we all just sink into
a story of days gone by? Uh and talk about
a con man from like a family of con men.
That this this will be a nice one, everybody. I hope,

(01:37):
I hope you all enjoy it.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Is this about a beagle boy. It feels like you're
about to tell me the story of the beagle Boys.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
The beagle Boys. Who the hell are the beagle boys
from ducktails? Oh no, no, no, no, this is much
this is much worse.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Okay, great, great.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
So we're talking about a guy named Robert Spears, who
was one of the first natura paths. He was a
very influential figure in like the first wave. You have
two big waves of naturopathy as like a discipline, one
that kind of goes up from the start of the
century until polio vaccines become a thing and people are

(02:19):
like alternative medicine, Why would we ever not want modern
vaccinations and the like? And then you've got one that
kind of crops it more recently in the seventies. So
there's like a split between the two, and we'll be
talking about both this This con man who spoilers winds
up committing some pretty serious plane crimes at the end

(02:39):
of his life. This ends in a fun slash mass
murdery place, but before you get to the mass murder,
there's a lot of cons so this should just be
a fun episode for everybody we're talking about. Have you
ever heard of Robert Spears? Is that name Robel?

Speaker 2 (02:53):
No, Old Bobby has not crossed my path. I can't wait.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
Well, we're going to talk about him, but before we
talk about it, and we've got a little mini bTB
episode because I want to talk about the birth of
naturopathy as like a field of endeavor, of work of
quote unquote medicine. And you really got to keep the
quote unquotes there when you're talking about this period of time.
For sure. The guy who most gets often gets credit

(03:18):
for starting naturopathic medicine as a discipline was a German
born American with an amazing name like the The guy
most often described as the founder of naturopathy was doctor
Benedict lust Ooh. He wasn't really a doctor, and to
be fair, he didn't claim to be a medical doctor,

(03:39):
but doctor lust is just really funny, Like I had,
I prefer that I'll give him the stolen valor if
I get to say doctor lust a bunch.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Does this whole thing start with boner pills? Is that
where we start?

Speaker 1 (03:51):
That's not genuinely doesn't No. I mean, I'm sure he
sold some weird boner medicine. Don't get me wrong. He
was selling like quack medical treatments in the Earth nineteen hundreds.
He must have been. But I also think he was
a legitimate believer. That's something this first couple generations of
guys who become like the naturopathic like movement, the first
natural head the Crusaders are like true believers. They're not

(04:13):
guys sellen snake well. I mean, they're selling snake wil
a lot of the time, but they truly seem to
believe in it. Generally, well, I.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
Guess, like at the same time, like, what is actual
medicine doing. It's right, we're passed how much is but
we're like, yeah, we got the nails for skulls.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
As we'll talk about. They are still doing some skull nailing.
One of the problems with modern medicine at this period
of time is we've just now by the time you're
starting in like the early nineteen hundreds, you're really starting
to get the first wave of mass produced, high quality
pharmaceutical drugs. Unfortunately, you don't have like the basis of
knowledge about like when those are good and when those

(04:50):
like wind up being worse for everybody in a lot
of cases, so you have a shitload of people being
over prescribed, like, oh, your four year old's coffin, here's
some heroin. H'll that'll that, I'll get it right back
to baseline, give it a four year old heroin. So
in this if you're someone who's saying I'm against I

(05:10):
think doctors use too many drugs. I want like a
non drug solution. In the nineteen hundreds, a lot of
times you'll be doing better by going with like a
quack doctor, just because they're only feeding you homeopathic medicine
as opposed to straight heroin and cocaine, which has some
negative health consequences. So it is more blurry when you're

(05:30):
talking about the difference between alternative medicine whatever that kind
of shit, and like the AMA, like, there's not as
much of a gap between them as there will come
to be in the modern era. That makes sense. So
doctor Benedict Lust again not a doctor, was born in
Middlebach Boden in Germany in eighteen seventy two, so he's

(05:52):
like a year younger than Germany itself as a young
man or child. It's a little unclear in my sources.
Lust gets sick. He contracts tuberculosis, and at the time,
by eighteen seventy two, it's not as much of a
death sentence as it had been like a generation before,
But a lot of people are still dying from tuberculosis.
So if you get diagnosed with it, you know there's

(06:13):
a pretty good chance you're not coming through the other side.
But Lust takes a treatment that's become in vogue at
the time. It is known as the water cure. This
was largely the invention of a priest named Sebastian Knipe,
but Knipe had discovered a book that some even older
guy had written on curing disease via cold water plunges.
You even see this today in a lot like the

(06:35):
podcast Right Health Influencers Everybody Back, Yeah RFK loves the
cold plunge. People have been doing this for way more
than one hundred years, like one hundred and fIF almost
two hundred years, there have been guys advocating for cold
plunges basically as a treatment for different illnesses. Now, in
Knipe's time, which is again the mid eighteen hundreds, tuberculosis

(06:55):
was even more so a death sentence. And so he
had gotten sick before for Lust gets sick. The guy
who treats him also gets tuberculosis as a young man,
and he like finds this book and writes, quote, I
clung to it like a drowning man. Uh. He later wrote,
it became in a short time the staff supporting the invalid.
Today it is the lifeboat that was sent to me

(07:16):
by a merciful providence in the nick of time, in
the hour of extreme peril. And so Nipe gets given
what he thinks is a death sentence, this tuberculosis diagnosis,
and he gets better, and he gets better while taking
the water cure. Now does he just does he recover
because of that? Or does he just recover while he's
doing that? Does that? You know? Nipe obviously credits his

(07:37):
recovery to the water cure, because he makes his whole
life about that. From here on out the rest of
his days, he's like a practitioner of this thing and
is this is it?

Speaker 3 (07:47):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (07:47):
I was just gonna and just fy to the listeners
if you want to look in this guy, his name.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
Is spelled k n E i PP. So yeah, just
a nip nipe, Yeah, yeah, gotcha, gotcha. Now is the
water cure just drinking water a thing? No, it's like
a okay, oh plunged.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
It's again like guys are doing today right where you
get in like this bucket of ice water and you
plunge yourself in for whatever period of time. From an
article in the Journal of Integral Medicine by Susanna Saranco quote.
Building from this little book, Knipe eventually modified the cold
water baths to what became his signature treatment. The shower
baths are gushes which he administered with a simple garden
watering can. By pouring water on the subject, a quicker

(08:28):
reaction is brought on than by bathing. Pouring was Father
Knip's special method. The object of all cold water applications
is to cause a stimulation in the circulation of the blood,
and they must last only long enough for this reaction
to take place. Knighte paid close attention to the primary
and secondary reactions caused by cold water on warm skin.
And part of why this is so popular is that
ice bathing or what he's doing, which is like pouring

(08:50):
cold water on you, because he says it causes the
reaction faster, it has a physiological effect, it does measurable
things to your body. Right. That said, it is never
neither ice bathing nor any other kind of cold water
exposure has been shown to treat or cure tuberculosis. There's
no documentation of this working. However, there's a couple of

(09:11):
things going on, because both Nipe and lust will credit
getting better from TB to this cold plunge type thing basically,
and first off, in the eighteen hundreds, a lot of
people are misdiagnosed when they're diagnosed with TB. A lot
of deaths that are just credited to tuberculosis were something else,
and doctors were worse at diagnosing stuff back then, right.

(09:31):
And Secondly, without treatment, a decent number of people survive tuberculosis.
I'm not saying don't get your tuberculosis treated, but I
did find a twenty twenty three article in the Journal
of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease which notes that about forty
percent of TB patients in twenty twenty one weren't diagnosed
or treated, and that ten year survival trait rates without

(09:53):
any kind of medical treatment are about forty percent, right,
which is less. People who don't seek medical care are
a lot less likely to survive tuberculosis. Please, if you
get tb seek treatment. But it's not crazy that two
dudes might have gotten sick and just gotten over it
more or less intact, because that happens sometimes, right, It's
just you know, the human body be doing shit. People

(10:16):
don't respond the same way to every disease.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Yeah, we're a powerful little machine that wants to live.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, times your body just pulls through.

Speaker 4 (10:25):
People did cool stuff.

Speaker 5 (10:25):
Listeners are very familiar with Front of the Pod tuberculosis because.

Speaker 4 (10:31):
Almost every episode it comes in and either kills our
villain or kills our hero.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Was like before modern medicine, and we're we're going right
back to that period of time. Don't you worry, you
give you give RFK another year or two.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yeah, rather not. I'm excited for the white handkerchiefs that
people cough a little bit of blooded into now to
be made out a plastic I'll be.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
Gone are the days of the cotton hanky.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
No, it got to be plastic for my baby. So
cold water immersion does, because this is something people are
advocating today. It does, again have observable and measurable physiological effects.
Some studies have suggested can help treat chronic immune inflammation
and have a beneficial impact on stress. However, Number one,
there's negative health consequences. It can raise your heart rate

(11:20):
to a degree that can cause cardiac events in people.
There are like health nuts who have died doing cold
plunges because it shocks their heart. Also, per an article
in the International Journal of Circumpolar Health, quote, many of
the health benefits claimed from regular cold water exposure may
not be causal and may instead be explained by other factors.
In other words, most of the studies that suggested a

(11:41):
benefit are flawed in some way. I'm not saying there's
no but there are maybe some benefits, and especially because
of the way it affects your heart and circulation, people
with certain conditions might benefit from cold water plunges. But
the science today is far from certain on this, and
it's surely not curing tuberculosis. But they have a lot

(12:02):
less data back then, so it is more forgivable. I
don't think Knipe is a con man. I think he
truly believes this saved his life and he's doing his
best to help other people, right. And I think the
same is going to be true of the future doctor
not a doctor Lust, because he falls in love with
this stuff. When he goes to Knipe's clinic, which is
basically a spa. Knipe's doing these cold water exposure things.
He's also going to be herbal medicine. There's a lot

(12:23):
of teas involved, and doctor Lust falls in love with this.
This is his first hit of what we today called
alternative medicine. This is the very first gaspings of that,
and Lust is immediately like, oh, this is my whole
life right here, baby, I'm going to make this everything
to me well.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
And it also makes sense because at that time it
was like that or Chimney Sweep, Right, So what.

Speaker 1 (12:43):
Else are you going to do with your time? I mean,
Jesus Christ, television really going yet exactly.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
If I'm just sitting in a nicey place that has
some nice teas and things like that, it's like, I'm
gonna maybe feel better than when I'm doing a twenty
hour shift in the factory.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
Now me, I would live at the pharmacy. I would
be buying that heroin cough ser up every day of
the week. Oh man, if only, if only so. Lust
moves to the United States near the end of the
eighteen hundreds, and by that period of time before we're
really into the nineteen hundreds, even the US, particularly New
York has become kind of this globally recognized mecca for

(13:22):
nonsense medicine. Like we Americans were on the ground floor
of selling bullshit to people and claiming it Kir's disease
from ninety six to nineteen oh one. Lust because as
soon as he moves there and he starts training and
a couple of different like quasi medical fields, one of
which so he trains as an osteopath. An osteopathy and

(13:45):
osteopathy is a difficult case to talk about. We're not
going to be giving it enough attention today. If you
run into someone who is an osteopath, they're probably a
real doctor. Yeah right, probably. It is large argely a
real type of medicine today. But it was founded decades
ago by an untrained amateur who felt that all disease

(14:08):
was caused by misplaced or deranged bones quote from Quackwatch
Quackwatch Rits quote and most diseases were curable by manipulation
of derange displaced bones, nerves, muscles, removing all obstructions, thereby
setting the machinery of life moving. His autobiography, The Founder
of Osteopathy, states that he caused a bald headed man
to grow hair three inches long in one week, and

(14:30):
that he could shake a child and stop scarlet fever, croup, diphtheria,
and cure whooping cough in three days by a ring
of its neck. He was antagonistic towards the drug practices
of his day and regarded surgery as a last resort.
Rejected as a cultist by organized medicine, he founded the
first osteopathic medical school in Kirksviille, Missouri, in eighteen ninety two.

(14:51):
This will not be the last time Missouri shows up
in these episodes.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
That's something extremely true.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
Wow, baby, whoop and cough. Let me wring their neck.
That'll fix them.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
Absolutely. The James Bond of doctors.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
It's crazy how many people who call themselves doctors still
think like, Oh, your kid's coughing too much. I gotta
basically break their spine. You gotta let me get my
hands around that fucking neck and just really throttle it
like a son of a bitch. Like That's still a
lot of guys who say that they're doctors today. They
paralyzed kids all the time.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
I abuse the child until they say they're okay.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah, so now that said, as wild as that last
paragraph was, from this point, osteopathy develops after this and
to again what is today a largely real field of medicine.
There are still some quacks who call themselves osteopaths, but
over time, the good osteopaths who cared about evidence based
care one out over the bad ones. I think that's

(15:49):
how the articles they've read make it seem. I'm not
a doctor except for in New Jersey, right, But doctor
Lust is studying osteopathy when it is still firmly in
its question era. He also studies chiropractic medicine and takes
classes on that. And if you remember our episodes on
the history of chiropracty, it was founded by a guy
who learned the secrets of spinal manipulation from a ghost.

(16:11):
That is where chiropractic medicine comes from.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
Oh wow, Yeah, amazing stuff.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
Happening in the early late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds.
So yeah, Lust gets into chiropracty osteopathy, and he starts
exploring botanical medicines, you know what people would call like
plant based medicines, and it gets interested in the emerging
field of what comes known as physical culture. Bernar McFadden,
who've done episodes on, is a major factor in this.

(16:39):
He and Luster kind of contemporaries, and they're writing about
health and about a lot of shit. RFK is in.
It's like how can you stay looking buff longer? If
you're a dude? You know, like, how can you how
can you get big biceps? Like what kind of chemicals
will make it easier for me to keep muscle on?
And I feel like.

Speaker 2 (16:55):
You're trying to convince me that RFK Junior might actually
be a time traveler from this area. That's the only
way he actually makes sense.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
Right. Ideology is firmly rooted in the early first twenty
years of the twentieth century. Now, Lust is one of
those guys who binges on fringe medical treatments. He's not discriminating.
He likes it all. He's taken sun baths, you know,
the modern equivalent would be modern equivalent would be those
guys who like expose their assholes to direct sunlights for
health reasons. He's exploring electro therapy. He's like shocking himself

(17:25):
to make himself feel better. He's he's and crucially what
kind of makes Lust a trailblazer is he's putting all
of these different quack treatments together, and he's mixing them
with like cold water therapy and herbalism, and he's looking
at it all as one connected field, not a bunch
of separate things. Right, And that's a new idea. Previously,

(17:46):
most of these old timy medical grifters aren't seeing themselves
as part of like a large movement that includes a
bunch of different kinds of treatment. They're like, no, the
secret is electro therapy. The secret is what a therapy.
The secret is they've got their thing and that's the
thing that they're trying to sell. And Lust is like, no, No,
this works a lot better if everybody's connected and we're

(18:07):
all part of like a united front pushing all these
fringe treatments that the real doctors don't want you to
have access to. Right.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
He's unionizing the quacks.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
He's kind of unionizing the quacks. Yeah, that's basically doctor
Lust's story. Uh. In nineteen oh one, doctor Lust starts
collaborating with a group of fellow travelers to set out
the underlying theory behind their new discipline, which doesn't have
a name yet, but they're they're firmly in opposition to
what they call the druggists. Right today, the term that
like these folks uses olopaths to refer to like real doctors,

(18:40):
what we call real doctors, but they're calling them basically druggists, right.
And the critique they're making, which is to a degree
valid in the time, is that real doctors just want
to dope you the fuck up, and a lot of
real doctors are just doping you the fuck up. That's
not an unfair critique of the day. That doesn't make
what they're selling work any better, but it is sometimes
less harm. Sometimes, if your doctors prescribing you like fucking arsenic,

(19:04):
and you're fake doctors prescribing you fucking homeopathic arsenic, which
is just water, you're better off with homeopathic arsenic, you know.
So the central tenet that doctor Lust and his colleagues
land on is this the body can repair itself, and
that rather than treating sickness, physicians should seek to restore

(19:24):
balance to the body so that it can cure its
own illnesses right and it can avoid getting sick, because
if the body stays in balance, then it won't get ill.
The website Indie health fact has a good summary of
what a Lust eventually comes to believe and push to
make the center of naturopathy as a discipline. Doctor Lust
was opposed to the processing of foods because such manufacture

(19:46):
tends to destroy their true nutritional values. He was opposed
to the administrations of all drugs and narcotics because they
are unnatural elements which the human body is not capable
of assimilating. He's opposed to the regimentation of the American
people under medically controlled ex elements because such legislation will
wipe out other methods of treatment and bring an estimable
damage to the health of every man, woman, and child affected.

(20:06):
He's opposed to any legislation which, in practice would prevent
a family from attending to its own ills, or the
choosing by such family of any type of treatment it
might desire, because such legislation restricts personal liberty intends to
take from the American people the right to use the beneficial,
homespun efficient remedies which have been handed down from generation
to generation. He is, it's just RFK, it's just OURSK, right,

(20:28):
it's I always think you should be able to tell
people that anything they believe is medicine isn't medicine. That's
a crime. That's the only crime. Not selling nonsense is medicine. Now,
the name naturopathy is actually coined by a married physician Coupital.
The doctors John and Sophie Shiel, who are kind of
colleagues and contemporaries of doctor Lust. They come up with

(20:49):
the name in nineteen oh two, and Lust buys it
from them. He purchases the naming rights because as soon
as he hears naturopathy, he's like, I can't beat that.
That's the best marketing name for this thing that we're doing.
Really and it is a good name.

Speaker 4 (21:01):
I don't know why, but like nineteen oh two seems.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
Really early for buying naming rights. Yeah, Like no, this
man is committed. He's convinced, and honestly it works like
he is a visionary when it comes to this shit.
So lest opens a school for nature paths, and he
opens what's probably the first health food store in the world.
I think, I think it's in New York. But yeah,
he opens like a health food store in like nineteen

(21:26):
o dot right, like in the fucking start of the century.
So that stuff goes back quite a while.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
God, I don't even want to think about how bad
this guy's degoterant was.

Speaker 1 (21:40):
Just a solid crystal. Yeah, it's a literal, it's literally emeralds.
He's just rubbing it in there. It doesn't do anything.
As naturopathy evolves, it becomes clear that its practitioners all
share one curious trait, a distrust or even a hatred
of medical drugs in an often heedless embrace of every
conceivable non drug theray be often two absurd ends. Now again,

(22:02):
and the way less frames this is like people have
a right to use the homespun treatments that their ancestors
have been using for generations. That's not what's primarily being
marketed by the natura paths. They're into a lot of expensive,
insane quack treatments. Take areopathy. Areopathy is a treatment that
starts with the premise that, and this is true, heat
can reduce pain. Right, We've all probably experienced this in

(22:25):
some way. It's a pretty common thing to like, you know,
deal with like inflammation, joint pain and all that sort
of stuff. People have known this basically forever. It's the
if you've ever heard of like an old timey treatment,
the mustard plaster, where they'll put like this plaster of
mustard on your naked chest. It's because that like burns
and the heat offers like a relief from some kind

(22:45):
of like chest cold symptoms and stuff. And I think
it I've never had it performed on me, but I'm
sure it does, like feel like it helps at least.
Areopathy takes this concept up to eleven and incorporates what
was literally called. The name of the device used for
aeriopathy is a human bake oven as a treatment. They're
literally putting people into actual ovens and at like oven temperatures.

(23:09):
I need to show you Sophy's gonna put on screen
if you're watching this. A nineteen twelve ad published in
the Calgary Herald, and I'll read the ad to you.
It's got a picture in the center of what looks
like a fucking iron lung, but it's an oven that
everything with the person's head goes inside, and it says
rheumatism positively cured by the human bake oven. Can you
take five hundred.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
Degrees Fahrenheite drive five hundred?

Speaker 1 (23:32):
Shit, that's crazy. You shouldn't take five hundred. No, absolutely not.

Speaker 5 (23:36):
I was like, okay, okay, okay, five hundred.

Speaker 2 (23:41):
You're turning your face off.

Speaker 1 (23:44):
That's well in excess of what I've read most of
these treatments where it usually people seem to be slow
cooked from anywhere from like two hundred and eighty degrees Fahirnheit,
which seems to have been like the most common. Two
hundred and eighty three hundred degrees is like a normal temperature,
and most for most people doing this, the high temperature
is up to like four hundred degrees. But obviously is
that ad show. Some people are going way further than that,

(24:04):
And it's not always the whole body ovens. Some smaller
contraptions were used to get a single part of the body,
like this easy leg bake oven. So if he's gonna
show you which just I mean, it almost looks like
one of those cuffs you put your arm in and
it's on a but I can see how you just
kind of jam your leg in there and it just
like bakes the shit out of it.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah, I turned my knee into a brownie. Let's go.

Speaker 4 (24:26):
What a choice.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
This must have hurt and killed people. I haven't run
into stories of that you shouldn't be baked, like, there
definitely are people getting burns because again, you shouldn't be baked.
Every reason I think we'll tell you that now is that,
like five hundred degrees is too much for any part
of your body.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
You cook meat. I don't even know that my oven
actually goes up to five hundred degrees. You probably shouldn't
be cooking meat at five hundred degrees. That's your baby's
cough out of there, like four hundred. No, seriously, that's crazy.
I like a hot sauna. I like a sauna. That
is a whole different ballgame from this. This is crazy.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
That's another fucking level of batshit. Now. Natural paths were
also known to advocate astral healing and zodiac therapy, which
is basically someone giving someone tea based on their horoscope.
And there were a bunch of weirder treatments that quack
Watch collected for an article on this, like quote blood
washing with herbs, auto therapy, which is quote treatment with

(25:27):
potions made from the patient's infected tissues or excretions, and
autohemic therapy, which involves a solution made by modifying and
potentizing a few drops of the patient's blood.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
Great, wow, manestly, but shout out to him for being
able to sell somebody's shit back to themselves.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
Oh that is absolutely all your own blood, selling your
own blood back, man, You made that, bro, That's crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
Now, to be totally fair to doctor Lust and his colleagues,
it's like one hundred and twenty something years ago. Again,
real doctors aren't always a lot better than the quacks
and the natural paths. You know, they have some points
in this era. But what's happening is you're going to
start not long after this period seeing the development of
like real medical science, like thing that people. Medicine from

(26:19):
nineteen hundred to like nineteen sixty probably gets better faster
than it has at like any other point in history.
Like you'd be hard pressed. I mean maybe the like
sixty years after that, but even then, I don't think
we had jumps quite as big as that leap from
in nineteen hundred, A lot of people are still basically
living the same with with similar medical access to what

(26:39):
they would have had in like the sixteen hundreds, right,
And a lot of parts of the world, there's not
massive differences from how shit would have been in like
the Enlightenment era in terms of the average person's access
to good medicine to by nineteen fifty to sixty, even
people out in the sticks have a much better access
to real quality medicine and to doctors who actually know
something meaningful about how disease spreads, and you have the

(27:02):
ability to actually prevent a lot of these diseases for
the first time. And that's going to be disastrous for
this first wave of naturopaths. Right, is that, especially from
like forty to sixty, it becomes really impossible to deny
that like, okay, well, the people who use the naturopaths
are still getting sick and dying from all of like
the weird plagues going around, and the people who are
getting vaccinated don't are living well.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
It's also funny we've got World War two happening during
this time too, right, And the idea of being like, ah,
here's like a tea for your leg that got blown
off is not medic hopefully.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Okay, what about this decondation is is that good? It's
it's been reduced by a thousand gallons of water? Oh no, dead,
you bled out? You bled ride out? How that was
a femoral hits? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (27:46):
Yeah, did either of you see that Skidesenel did in
the last month or so? That was like making that
was like a combination of making fun of the Maha movement,
but also like the pit it's literally this, No, it's
literally this modern times.

Speaker 4 (28:02):
You would love it. You would love it. It's great.
Also Harry styles, isn't it hell? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (28:07):
Great? Good and gild for Harry's styles. So you know,
And it's also important to note that one of the
key differences, one of the reasons that like osteopathy becomes
more of a real becomes a real discipline, and the
reason that medicine, you know, in nineteen hundred and nineteen twenty,
maybe a lot of doctors aren't really much better than
the naturopaths. That changes too, in part because the real doctors,

(28:28):
even if they start from position of believing a lot
of bullshit, are doing what you ought to do, which
is you document. Okay, we prescribed this treatment to this
many people, and oh, actually it turns out that after
a year or two, there was no difference between them
and the people who didn't get a treatment, or but
between them and the people who got this other treatment
that's cheaper, or you know, whatever you prune away, you

(28:48):
find out, oh, some stuff we can see isn't working,
so we're not going to do that anymore. And some
stuff the consequences of giving people these medicines, even if
they work immediately, is worse than you know, giving them
this alternative. So we're going to do that, and the
field gets better, and we get a lot better at
medicine over time. Naturopathy's problem, and the reason why it
doesn't really go down this same road, is that it

(29:11):
was fundamentally created and always run primarily by a bunch
of weird little guys and girls who each had their
own specific kind of alternative or quack therapy, like water
therapy or blood washing. And they were primarily getting into
the naturopathy not because they saw themselves as sie. They're
mostly not like lust. They don't see themselves as scientists

(29:32):
who are part of a movement. They've got a thing
to sell, and if that's the attitude you approach your
discipline from. That's not conducive to good science.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
Okay, you're coming out of scientific method versus.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
The vibe, versus and versus. I'm already. If this doesn't
treat this disease, I'm out a shitload of money. Like
I'm ruined like this. I have to be able to
sell this even if ice realize it doesn't work after
a while, because I'm pot committed to the shit. Speaking
of pot committed, you know who's pot committed to this podcast?

(30:07):
Our sponsors, Oh, very nice, huzzah. Yeah, they can't get
away from us now. And we're back. We're back, and
we're talking about naturopaths. So the AMA guys and doctor
Lustee have a lot of teeth and they do not

(30:28):
take kindly to a bunch of weird ass hippie types
taking patients and claiming to treat disease. The AMA declares
war on doctor lust and they managed to score some
real hits. Per an article in the Journal of Applied
Natural Medicine, Lust was arrested fourteen times and find what's
five hundred dollars because a dirty woman sleuth of the
medical Trust. The American medical association with an unspeakable name

(30:48):
took an electric light bath in his institution. Now that's
from a naturopathic publication, quoting a naturopath. I wanted to
know more about this story, this dirty woman and sleuth
of the medical Trust, the medical Trust, because trust busting
is popular in this era, right, this is the Teddy
Roosevelt era when some of this is going or when

(31:08):
a lot of these people's like political awakening is so,
you know, that's why they're they're framing it that way.
But I looked into this, and it turns out that
in nineteen twenty one, doctor Lust was arrested for committing
criminal libel against Francis Benzerki or Benzekr. That's the unspeakably
named woman who worked as a detective for the AMA.
Lust wrote that she was a disgrace to American womanhood

(31:31):
and to the free soil of America on which she treads.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
I want to hear her story, man.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Right here, it sounds like he's got some medical issues
with women. Wow, Well, because she's they've got her trying
to bust trying to prove that Lust and his followers
are representing themselves as doctors, right, are illegally claiming to
be treating diseases in a way that exceeds what they're
what they're free to do, right, obviously, freedom of speech
and shit, you have some room. We have a lot

(31:58):
more room today even to sell like quack treatments. But
you can't say certain things on your fake medicine.

Speaker 5 (32:05):
A disgrace to American womanhood, into the free soil of
America on which she treads hot loving. Yeah, great tattoo,
great t shirt.

Speaker 1 (32:14):
As every woman I've ever loved.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah, I want to see a film noir movie about
this woman, just like in her office smoking a cigarette
and just like somebody comes in with a bag of
their own blood and was like, I need help, detective,
let's go.

Speaker 1 (32:32):
Yeah. So these guys are all getting arrested a shipload
for practicing medicine without a license, which is actually why
doctor Lust biased the rights to the word naturopathy so
his people will have something else they can call themselves
that's decidedly not a doctor and thus much more defensible.
And that's that actually works really well.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
Do they have a seal? The way that like doctors
have a seal is just a shaka in the middle.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
It's got a logo. Yeah, they've got a logo, they've
got they've got paperwork that they're issuing because he's out
licenses for naturopathic doctors, right, And once they start branding
themselves that way, judges tend to agree even when they're
still sentencing him. He was told by one judge there's
no evidence that you practiced medicine or held yourself out
as a physician, but we find you just the same.

(33:16):
And the natural passal point is like, look at the
injustice of the system. And I see this as a
judge being like, yeah, man, you technically figured out how
not to say the words that would have definitely been illegal,
but you were for sure representing yourself as a doctor
and selling medicine. And I'm just going to find you
anyway because I know you're guilty, because you are because
you were doctor lust. By the way, no matter how

(33:37):
much Phlack the Ama threw his way, naturopathy kept struggling forwards.
From the twenties to the thirties, roughly half of US
state's passed laws that allowed naturopaths and other drugless healers
to practice per quack watch. However, as modern medicine developed,
many of these laws were repealed, and all but a
few male order schools ceased operations. The Doctor of Naturopathy
in d degree was still available at several chiropractic collegests,

(33:58):
but by nineteen fifty seven and the last of these
colleges stopped issuing it. The National College of Naturopathic Medicine
was founded in nineteen fifty six in Portland, Oregon, but
until the mid nineteen seventies had very few students. From
nineteen sixty through nineteen sixty eight, the average enrollment was
eight and the total number of graduates was sixteen. So
again there's a gap of like a generation from between
the first and second wave of nature paths. It makes

(34:21):
by the way, Portland, Oregon, where naturopathy, like its second
wave started the seeds of its rebirth, just had an
outbreak of measles traced to a safeway. And it's not
because people can't afford vaccines. That's not. If you look
at where the fucking viral outbreaks of cured diseases occur

(34:41):
in Portland, it tends to be more affluent neighborhoods who
are choosing not to take vaccinations.

Speaker 5 (34:48):
Yeah, you can always kind of an organ to come
up if it's like a weird medical thing, some obscure,
very tiny.

Speaker 1 (34:54):
Cold bullshit medicine stuff. Weird. Hey, yep, ancient.

Speaker 4 (34:58):
White supremacy, modern white supremacy.

Speaker 1 (35:01):
I love my adopt at home.

Speaker 4 (35:03):
Organs like hey, hey, how you doing?

Speaker 2 (35:06):
Hey, Hi, we're keeping it weird, man, Hey.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
You're crazy, aren't you? Welcome to Portland? But our weather rocks.
It is nice, great weather, so we hate fun.

Speaker 5 (35:18):
Yeah, the weather today is so good, you guys.

Speaker 3 (35:21):
It is.

Speaker 1 (35:22):
It's like sixty frees and sunny.

Speaker 4 (35:24):
It's great.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
Fire season this year is going to be a nightmare though.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:30):
Anyway, that's an important point. Just if you're talking about
naturopathy today, there are some differences because there's like a
break of a generation in between two fields. I think
a lot of the same problems are still present, an
issue of you know, at least with this first wave,
the very first natural paths like doctor Lust I think,
really believed in what they were doing. A big part
of the problem is a huge amount of like the

(35:52):
second wave are just people who realize, oh, this movement
has like connects me to a huge base of people
I can sell nonsense to. And that's what they and
that's definitely a lot of the founders too. It's it's
maybe I'm wrong about Lust being in this genuinely, Like
I honestly can't tell with him, but it seems like
he's somebody who like really does think this all works,

(36:15):
and that's not going to be the case with our
actual subject of this week, Robert spears. Yeah, who again
is the guy we're talking about this week?

Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah, or at the very least like less believed it
at the very for some period of time. It clearly
he clearly was a believer, and who knows what happened later,
But you know, I mean, you're not going to go
through all of this trouble necessarily if you don't have
true belief behind that for some point.

Speaker 1 (36:38):
Right, Yeah, Right, that's that's ten tends to be how
I think about it too. And yeah, so Robert Vernon spears,
the guy we're actually talking about was born on June
twenty sixth, eighteen ninety four, in Cassville, Missouri. See I said,
we get back to Bizarira, and we sure as hell did.
It's actually going to show up a few more times
in these episodes. He is not, however, born under the

(36:59):
name Robert vere and in spears. This is one of
our classic con man stories where this guy has like
thirty or so serious names, by which I mean a
name that he had, like he had took real efforts
to falsify as his own. He's got documents for these names.
He's got dozens of them. This guy goes through so
many fucking names. He was probably born Clyde Stringer or

(37:22):
Clyde Porter, but even that I have to put it
probably on because Clyde slash. Robert's mother is a woman
we just know of as Matilda, and she writes her
kid his name. She gives him a different name on
different government documents because she's also a conwoman. And so
from the beginning she's like setting her son up for success,

(37:42):
being like, I'm gonna make sure nobody ever knows what
your name is. Boy, Like this this will really benefit
you down the line. There's not a clean paper trail
for your life that's not gonna.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
Be SEO for one hundred and fifty years.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
Yeah, trust me, being able to become a new person
by skip counties is going to be much more of
a beneficial than name recognition in the life you're going
to lead my son.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
Well and fine, I will say, if this kid was
born a Clyde, I have a little bit of respect
from amount of.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
Borne Clydee Clyde to the bone.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love to hear. I'm excited to
hear about a Clyde who identifies as a Robert. This
is great.

Speaker 1 (38:21):
Yeah, well it comes to later. Alan Logan, author of
the Spears biography self styled just, notes that Matilda, his mom,
was quote a woman who also used many names and
changed her own identity as circumstances dictated. She claimed her
child was the son of a farmer named George Stringer
from northeast Oklahoma, which is where George was born and

(38:42):
where he was raised for the first three years of
his life. They got married when he was three after
moving to Missouri, so they raised him for the first
few years of his life in Oklahoma. Then they move
up to Missouri, and his mom uses the surname Smith
on her marriage certificate to George, but she had been
using the name Jenkin most of the time prior to that,
so even her husband knows. She's given two different options

(39:04):
as to her maiden name, and her headstone would give
yet another last name This was a slippery woman, and
she would pass those traits on to her son. Her
marriage to George did not last long. After a year,
she was caught having an affair with some other dude,
and so she takes Clyde in the night and abandons George,
who files for divorce. This is also going to leave

(39:26):
a mark on Clyde. He's going to not have the
best record of sticking around from marriages, as we'll talk about,
and he kind of inherits that from his mom.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
Yeah, Mailla, this woman as like the Moriarty. She's amazing,
the medical detective lady. I would really like to see crossed.

Speaker 1 (39:47):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. These two characters were born for
each other. So after leaving her husband behind, Matilda would
tell her son that George had quote died of pneumonia.
But Alan Logan writes, it is not entirely clear who
she was telling Clyde had died of pneumonia, because we
don't actually know who Clyde thought his father was, right, like,

(40:09):
we just have some old paperwork, So it's it's not
entirely clear who Clyde's dad was or who she told
him it was. Matilda moved through men at a rapid pace, right.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
So hell yeah, Matilda, I mean, don't you know you
got a little kids, So I got questions.

Speaker 3 (40:25):
But also for Clyde, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, she's living
in life's living it up.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
A lot of men are having the male version of
this life, which is much more common. So you have
to stand a woman who's willing to like break free
from tradition and and really like really just be like
a very masculine kind of scumbag. And honestly I appreciate that.
You know, it's nice to see.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
The glass gutter is just as important as the glass, right,
I think.

Speaker 1 (40:50):
The glass gutter it matters just as much as the
glass ceiling. Women have the right to be scumbags too, Matilda,
we salute you. You know who else is this scumbag? Nope, hmm,
that's not good.

Speaker 4 (41:05):
I like the roof over my head.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Sure. Well, anyway, here's ads.

Speaker 3 (41:12):
Okay, and we're back, and we're talking about whether or
not our advertisers or scumbags.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
Sophie says no. I say, I don't know who is right,
probably Sophie. Legally, I think I have to say that.
So in eighteen ninety nine, Matilda, who was just going
through this carousel of men in cities with her young son.
In eighteen ninety nine, she marries an elderly farmer who
is pretty cool. Not a great mom, doesn't do a

(41:48):
good job raising this kid, but pretty cool to read.

Speaker 4 (41:50):
A bootten and I appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
She marries a Civil War veteran with lifelong injuries and
a drinking problem to match. And he's got like a
kid that she winds up, well, she winds up having
a kid. I don't think it's his. I think she
cheats on him, and she has a kid with somebody else,
and he gets pissed, so he bounces in nineteen oh two,
and now she's a single mother of two. As a result,

(42:17):
Clyde experiences deep poverty for basically his entire childhood. His
mom is only able to keep them fed and sheltered
by moving constantly from town to town and conning strangers
to stay alive. I want to read a quote from
the book self Styled. As they moved from place to place,
he saw Matilda retelling their story and remaking her identity.
She used different names when it suited her. Clyde may
have absorbed more from his mother than she realized, including

(42:39):
the seeds of his own restless wanderlust and the ease
of taking on aliases. This is just he was like
made in a lab to be a con man. Basically.
Matilda eventually marries again and the families settles in Prior, Oklahoma,
merging the families of two single parents who now had
six kids between them. This marriage doesn't work out either,
and when things get bad enough that Clyde doesn't want

(43:00):
to be there anymore, he realizes, kind of by his adolescence,
I can just leave, like there's a train station in town.
And he figures out when he's like twelve or thirteen,
I just bounce on a train and go away for
a couple of days or a couple of weeks, like
if I don't want to be around here, and I
can just visit new places and then I can come
back whenever i'm ready, they'll take me back. And he
loves the freedom of the road, and he starts in

(43:22):
order to fund these trips. He doesn't want to work,
so he starts committing petty crimes. Well, he's away to
pay his way. You know, I know a lot of
friends who have gone through versions of this period in
their life.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
Oh yeah, we've all got a couple of crusts in
our past.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, this behavior ultimately gets him
in trouble when he's like a teenager and he gets
sent away to a reformatory school for some time. However
long he's at this reform school, by age sixteen, he
is out because he gets in trouble for passing bad
checks and then using the ill gotten money to buy
nice clothes and stay in hotels. And he's like paying

(43:59):
in check for hotel stays and for clothes for more
than their worth so he can get cash back. Basically,
that's a big part of the scam. It's a lot
easier to do this stuff, although he still gets caught
every single time, right right, That said, this is a
time in which the authorities are a lot likelier to
look the other way at formal charges if people can
work things out themselves. Basically, if you get caught, a

(44:22):
cop is likely to just kind of like drop things
as long as you're both white people. Right. If like
two white dudes will to agree, okay, he made it right,
we don't need to go any further. Usually they'll just
be like fine with it, right, that's a lot more
common in this era.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
So he's like a rapter testing the fence too. So
he's just like, Okay, where can I what is the
move here?

Speaker 1 (44:42):
Yet? What can I get away with? And part of
what he learns is he's really charming. Clyde is deeply charismatic,
and so people are kind of like often willing to
forgive him because as soon as he gets caught every
time he'll say, oh, yep, I did it, this is
what I did, and he'll like apologize and as a result,
I think that in his youth kind of keeps him
from catching serious charges until he turns eighteen. So Clyde.

(45:07):
One of the things about Clyde is he fucking loves trains.
Very relatable, right. Unfortunately, he loves trains because of the
crime potential inherent in those trains. And he's been observing
employees at the local railroad company MKT cash checks and
he also one of his friends I think works for
MKT and his dad, his friend's dad had worked there
for a while and so he like talks to that guy,

(45:30):
applies him for information about how the checking check writing
process works for MKT employees at the MKT bank, and
then he forges the name of his friend in a
check payable to himself. And I'm gonna quote from Alan
Logan's book here. His real audacity was in taking that
forged check to his friend's father, the MKT Railroad agent,
who cashed it for him. The check was only for

(45:51):
nine dollars two hundred and thirty three dollars to day,
but the thrill of it was priceless. The MKT Railroad
was enraged by the outrageous stunt. They deployed Special Agent
pour Him to give chase as Spears made his first
known headlines described as the gilded youth clydestringer from Prior, Oklahoma.
When they finally caught up with him in June nineteen thirteen,
the newspapers reported how Special Agent Porum had traced him

(46:11):
from Kansas City to Oklahoma City and across the state
east and west. He was finally found at Murdoch, Kansas,
hunting for work in a harvest field. First off, that's
a long way to chase a guy for nine dollars.
He really says a lot about how little there was
to do back then, Like you are going to the
ends of the earth for nine bucks. It's the principle,
I'm sure is what that guy would say.

Speaker 4 (46:34):
It's giving comic book the gilded.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
Yeth, Yeah, the gilded youth. Yeah, that's he does have
a comic booky style nickname.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
Very catch Me if you Can of him too at Hells.
Yeah yeah, yeah, I'm picturing Leo Dio like this is
like a Leo Dio type.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
Yeah guy, yeah, yeah yeah. Although again, Frank Abagnail, the
real guy behind Catch Me If you Can, was an
absolute fraud like that. The stuff in the movie didn't happen.
It was mostly just creeping on ladies.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
Oh, you know, movies the biggest con of all.

Speaker 1 (47:02):
So that's right, that's right. It's the final level of gods.
So Clyde does more than a year behind bars. He
sentenced to prison, and he's not released until August thirty first,
nineteen fourteen. And as soon as he's free, he establishes
a pattern of behavior that's going to be with him
for the next half century. He'd kind of consider going straight,
maybe briefly toy with the idea, and then he would

(47:22):
immediately commit a series of daring frauds and assorted small
towns of cities across Oklahoma and the Middle States, and
he's just going to like commit a bunch of fraud
and then fucking get arrested periodically in a pattern. This
becomes like the normal tempo of life for him for
the next several years. Right is, He'll commit a bunch
of petty fraud, mostly passing bad checks and stealing merchandise

(47:44):
from like different retailers he worked with over the years.
Then he'll get caught and he'll get in some trouble.
He'll either talk his way out or he'll do a
little time, and then he's back on the road.

Speaker 2 (47:53):
I imagine he also has like a bunch of babies
and baby mamas all over the country during this tabe.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
Well, he has some. He does have a couple of
kids that he abandons, like I think like three over
the course of the story. He also has a lot
of wives that he abandons, as we'll talk about. So
within three years, by nineteen seventeen, he's a wanted man again.
So when he moved to Collingsworth, Oklahoma, he changed his
last name from Stringer to Porter and figured that'll be

(48:20):
good enough. Nobody's got a guess that Clyde Stringer's Clyde Porter.
That's not kind of, that's impossible for people to suss out.
And then he passes another series of bad checks and
he has to steal a car to flee town. Clyde
drove the car to a train station and left it
parked outside with a note being like, here's who this
car belongs to. I'm sorry I had to take it.

(48:41):
You know, this is where you should return it to,
you know. So the cops ultimately raid Clyde's home and
they find a bunch of stolen property and a huge
number of forged checks. These were of such high quality
that businesses started posting copies of Clyde's bad checks to
warn their employees about what to look for when trying
to spot bad checks. Right that like, these are the
archetypal bad checks, so you should familiarize yourself with them. Clyde.

(49:07):
He goes on the run for a few more months,
but as is always the case, he can't avoid the
temptation to visit his family and friends, and he gets
caught in Toledo operating under yet another fake name, and
he's visiting a sister, and that fake name is Charles Howard.
He shows up in court dressed per the Tulsa Daily
World to the nines in a dark suit, white turned
down collar, and multi colored silk tie. It was his

(49:29):
second attempt to win a reputation in the bad check line.
So they're always kind of he's handsome and he's well dressed,
and the newspapers always write about that, and it starts
to there's this big it's going to be even bigger
in the thirties. That's like gentleman bandit archtype that's huge
in American pop culture. And because Clyde is handsome and
he's mostly robbing banks and he's not doing it violently,

(49:52):
a lot of people kind of like him. Like the
news is interested in any Clyde crime story because he's
this really likable criminal figure people want to hear about.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
But when does Bonnie and Clyde happen, Because that's a
different Clyde that rob banks.

Speaker 1 (50:07):
That's going to be in the thirties, totally different later,
and this Clyde's going by Robert by then. I got
to get out of the Clyde business by the time
there's that other Clyde.

Speaker 2 (50:16):
Yeah, exactly, it's just like a hack.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
I think there's a strategy here. I think he knew
he was going to get caught when he stole that
car to get away, And I think the note he
leaves is part of his his image campaign. Basically that like,
if I leave a note, they're telling him how to
return it to its owner. That'll go better for me
when I ultimately wind up in front of a judge,
and it does work for him. He winds up in
front of a judge. In his biography of Clyde, Logan

(50:41):
notes Alan Logan notes that most of Clyde's victims in
this period didn't press charges, and many who did still
described him as basically a good guy. Like they were like, well,
I think he's a really good guy. He just fucked
up here, and I'm still pressing charges. In keeping with tradition.
These recent charges are ultimately dropped, which Low claims was
due to a technicality. I'm not sure if that's accurate.

(51:04):
Vanishing Act, which is another book about Robert Spears slash Clyde,
the author of that, Jerry Jamison, suggests something different. Quote
the judge let Charles Howard off easy, citing the thoughtful
note he had left in the stolen car. This time, however,
he suggested the young man join other American patriots fighting
in Europe during the Great War. So basically Clyde gets off,

(51:24):
but on the condition that he joined the army and
go fight in World War One. Right, That's kind of
what happens here is this judge is like, you're a
good young man. What if you just go into the
trenches for a little while. How does that sound to you.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
Let's say, see how your stationary gets you out of
this one, buddy.

Speaker 1 (51:40):
Yeah, yeah, I think he's trying to be nice. Not
traditionally a nice thing to do make someone go to
World War One. But Clyde does join. He signs up,
he joins the army, and he uses a fake name
to join the army. And this name he picks, I
think because he's like, this gives me a chance to
establish the name I'm going to be known by for
the rest of my life. So when he's joining the army,

(52:01):
he goes by the name Robert Vernon Spears, which is
absolutely a fake name, but that's most of his life.
He's gonna keep going by Robert Vernon Spears as soon
as he signed up. Just a few days before he
reported for duty, Spears befriended another recruit c s Gilbert,
and the two went partying before handing their lives over
to the army. True deform, Spears told his new friend, Hey,
this is crazy, but I'm like broke right now. Is

(52:24):
there any chance you could like front me some money
so we can like party. I'll totally get you back.
And Gilbert's like, of course, man, we're gonna be fighting
in the trenches together. I got like two grand in
my Pocket'll take care of us. And the two spend
like two days partying and drinking and going to strip clubs,
and at the end of it, when they're like sleeping
in their hotel at night, Robert Spears steals his friend's

(52:44):
cash and runs like fuck, just as far as he
can get before the cops catch him, which they do immediately.
Spears confesses and he hands over the money, but Gilbert
refuses to press charges, and in fact, he begs the
cops to release his friend, saying, I guess like the guy,
and besides, I'll be serving in the trenches with him.
It's like if he got went to prison, you wouldn't.

(53:05):
But Gilbert seems to be a very nice dude.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
Yeah, poor Gilbert, you need you need a codea meeting that.

Speaker 1 (53:13):
You deserve a better friend. Man, this guy is not
your friend. There's like a local news story at the
time with the title land Freeze the one who robbed
him Very cute, very fucking nineteen seventeen. I don't know
much about what Spears actually did with his time in
World War One because he mostly lies about it later.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:31):
Right, we get very little detailed about what his actual
service is. It looks like he probably spent the last
year of the war as an aviator sergeant in the
three hundred and fourteenth Aero Squadron, which was attached to
the precursor of the British RAF. There's no evidence that
he was a fighter pilot, but he pretends to have
been a fighter pilot as soon as he gets back.
If you're going to be a con man, what better

(53:54):
job than fighter pilot? Right, lie and say you fought
in the trenches like a schlub. You want to be
a pilot, baby, that's the sexy job.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
Man. Uh huh. They got the aviators, ain't nobody else
got the sunglasses?

Speaker 1 (54:08):
Yeah, it's a mark of how fucking bullshit our era is.

Speaker 4 (54:11):
That.

Speaker 1 (54:11):
Like, even if you get trapped in one of like
these cool like one of our modern twenty first century wars,
like the cool new technology is so lame to be
the guy working with Like if if in nineteen seventeen
you're like, yeah, I'm a fighter pilot in Europe, that's
like cool as hell. In like twenty twenty six, if
you're like, yeah, I'm a drone pilot, Like, get away
from me, bro, that's gross.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
Like you play video games and killed.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
I want you to be in the same room as me.
That's sick. Yeah, like not even cool enough to be
a fighter. It's it's it's it's a bummer. I guess
there's that Kuwaiti fighter pilot you took out two of
our fifteen's on accident. That guy is sitting pretty is
the only guy with an air to air kill in
a long time. We do not do much of that anymore.

(54:56):
Um yeah anyway, Yeah, So by this point in time, spears,
he goes over. He probably has pretty pedestrian service, and
he comes back lying that he'd served as a first
lieutenant and he'd survived all these harrowing duels in the
skies above western Europe until he was finally shot down
and wounded. He returns to Saint Louis after the war,
and he starts telling the story to any woman who

(55:17):
will listen, right like that stuff. Of course, he had a.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Fate cane for a while and stuff.

Speaker 1 (55:23):
Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely, he got a doctor house. That ship.
It works great, almost as good as an eyepatch.

Speaker 5 (55:30):
I can't only imagine this man's like dating profile.

Speaker 1 (55:36):
Oh it's a nice Oh my god, not a word
of it true, he's.

Speaker 4 (55:41):
Got it, got his fake credit score on there.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
Job not real.

Speaker 5 (55:46):
Oh my gosh, he's got some like photoshop photos of him.

Speaker 4 (55:51):
Oh it's incredible.

Speaker 1 (55:52):
It's the best.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
Trust no man, Wow, yeah, number one, Chad.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
So he ultimately wins the attention and the hand in
marriage of a woman named Aura Clayton.

Speaker 4 (56:03):
Run girl.

Speaker 1 (56:03):
This is the start of what's going to be. No,
don't worry, Sophie, she's not gonna need to. This is
going to be the start of a regular con act
for Spears, which is he would entrance a young woman,
he would ask for her hand in marriage, they would
get married, and then in the night he would steal
everything in her house that wasn't nailed down and run
like fuck for a new town and start a whole new.

Speaker 4 (56:23):
Life, gas bitch.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
He does that so many times, like I don't know
how many times in total, but it's like more than
you have fingers on at least one hand. It might
be like two or three hands worth of fake marriages.
He does it a lot.

Speaker 4 (56:42):
And he's just moving from the city to sit or state.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
How far is down to town. He's not always even
leaving the county, Sophie, it was a different time. If
you were up the road, you can live a whole
new life. Prototypical it is, so it's fucked up, it's
pretty funny. So days after marrying and abandoning Aura, he
asks Dorothy Hayes for her hand in marriage, and then

(57:07):
he abandons her it takes all of her shit and
drives out west. He just keeps doing this. He spends
the early twenties conning a series of victims, several of
whom become his wives. Start He does this in like Seattle,
he moves down to Portland, Oregon, and then like through California, Nevada, Idaho,
and ultimately winds up in Denver, Colorado. Like he is

(57:29):
just leaving. He's leaving a trail of heartbroken women who
are also broke because he took all their money wherever
he goes.

Speaker 4 (57:38):
And then he's the tender swindler.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
He's the tender swindler, but things he kind of gets
a reverse thrown at him. When he in Denver, he
meets maybe his only real match, which is a young
lady named Laura Myers, and she seems perfect for him.
She's beautiful, she's got a rich family that he can
fleece for all their works. So they get hitched and

(58:01):
they book an expensive vacation and Spears is like heading
up stairs to get their luggage from the hotel that
they've been staying in for the last couple of weeks,
and Laura flips the script on him and by the
time he comes downstairs with their luggage, she's stolen all
of his money and run for the hills. This is
an hour after they get married, like playing motherfucker. Laura
got your number.

Speaker 3 (58:21):
O.

Speaker 4 (58:23):
Shit and bound Laura Myers feminist icon.

Speaker 1 (58:27):
Yeah, Laura Meyer's feminist dike guy Laura Myers.

Speaker 2 (58:31):
Wow. And that's that's the moment he actually fell in love.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
Yeah, yeah, that's the moment the first time. Yeah, it
is beautiful. You love to see you know, the story
in that way, Well it middles that way. We haven't
even gotten to him becoming a fucking naturopath yet. There's
a lot more left of the Robert Spears story, but
not today because we're at about an hour. So yeah,

(58:55):
I think, Brandy, you want to go out with any
plugs here?

Speaker 2 (58:58):
Yeah, I have a new album. It's called Milk Job.
I'm a stand up comedian. It's out on my record
label that I started called burn This Record that is
trying to bring more equity into the comedy space for
DIY comedians all over the United States and world. A
big thing that you could do to help our label
out is if you went to YouTube dot com slash

(59:20):
burn This Records and followed our labels so I can
monetize video. That would be a huge, huge, huge help.
I would really appreciate it. My album is going to
be a special that comes out in April, so you'll
be able to see it there as well too. And
then I'm on Vans Warptour all summer long doing comedy.
So yeah, come say hi, awesome.

Speaker 1 (59:37):
Excellent, all right, everybody. Well, that's going to be all
of it for all of us, for it today at
behind the Bastards a podcast that you just listen to.
Why not listen to another one? Why not on all
of your different devices. Just constantly have episodes of this
show playing on random loops. You don't even have to

(59:58):
listen to it. Just always be playing our episodes. You know,
break into your friends' houses, do that with their electronics too,
you know, that's the It's a fun way to do
us as solid that we'll have no consequences for anybody.
Breaking and entering is fine if you do it for
a good cause. That's the art. Official Behind the Bastards
stand no, it is not goodbye. Okay, well we're done.

(01:00:19):
Sophie and I disagree on this bye.

Speaker 4 (01:00:24):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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episodes but Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix,
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You don't miss an episode. For clips in our older

(01:00:46):
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