January 24, 2025 • 62 mins
During the turn of the 19th century, a man named Ambrose Small ran Ontario's theatre scene. A known womanizer, gambler and all-around jerk, Ambrose made a ton of enemies with his business dealings. As the rise of motion pictures posed an existential threat to his industry, Ambrose cashed out, sold his business -- and disappeared. More than a century after the fact, people are still asking: What happened?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. Twenty twenty five. As
the humans reckon a calendar Tonight, folks, we're exploring a mystery,
one that may be unfamiliar to many of us here
(00:49):
in these still somewhat United States, but doubtlessly ringing a
bell or our Canadian conspiracy realist. Oh my gosh, had
you guys heard of this one before we pitched it internally?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Yeah? I was Roman somewhere around the Gulf of America. Gosh,
years ago.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Is that like the Gulf of Tonkin.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
In that it's made up?
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:12):
I got it.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, yeah, no, I remember. We somebody wrote us about
this years ago, and I think it's something that's been
flying under our radar, just as it had for years
before that.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Yeah, it's a twisted tale of intrigue, big business, bad deals,
a disappearance that remains unsolved today, and full disclosure, folks,
it's about a very pillish, uncool guy. The question is
what happened to Ambrose Small. And thank you to our
(01:45):
Canadian conspiracy realist up north and abroad who had written
to us about this before. But we talked often about
strange disappearances. It was much easier for someone to disappear
back in the day, with or without their consent. But
some of these cases, amid all the innumerable disappearances throughout history,
(02:08):
some of them still resonate and haunt people today. This
is a question that has been that has been thoroughly analyzed,
and as we'll see, no one as of yet has
proven what happened. No one has cracked the case. So
we're hoping that tonight, with your help, maybe we can
(02:31):
get a little closer to an answer.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, only one hundred and four years ago. We're gonna
find these answers.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
Right after a quick word from my sponsor.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
You are the facts, all right, Ambrose Joseph Small eighteen
eighty six. That's when he's born. No one knows what's
going to happen to him? It's he's born in Bradford
in modern day on Ontario. Side note, didn't know this one,
you guys. Ontario used to just be called Canada West.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
Oh wow, that's so funny. Man in the town I
grew up, Augusta, right across the bridge in South Carolina,
it's just called North Augusta, which I always found very
dismissive to South Carolina.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah. It also calls to mind things like West Virginia
and things like North and South Dakota. There could have
been other names.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
I like to refer to them collectively as the Dakotas.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
I call them the Carolinas if I don't know where
the town is, and I'm in a conversation, and I
know it's somewhere over there.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
So by eighteen seventy six, the Small family had moved
to modern day Toronto, and by eighteen eighty Small's father
became the manager of a hotel called the Grand Hotel.
It must have been a fine place.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
You know, burst of humility, a little bit of a
street level knowledge. Here the hotel is next to a
place called the Grand and Opera House, equally humble name.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
There you go with the other.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Well, and it's actually very very cool, guys, because this
is a place where culture moved from the US into
uh into Canada, in parts of Canada where there really
was that thing that we talk about all the time,
the great export of the United States culture, and it's
moving north because as plays and other it's mostly plays
(04:26):
like stage plays.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Musicals maybe as well touring circuit stuff, some Vaudeville stuff.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
Yeah, it was more of Vaudeville air in the golden
age of Broadway musicals. Yeah, mostly plays in Vaudeville's and
probably maybe some variety.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Shows all run out of New York to your point, Matt,
So now it's eighteen eighty four, Ambrose Small is still
a teen and he starts working at the bar of
this grand hotel. And while he's working at the bar,
he runs into, of course, a lot of locals. One
of those locals is a guy named Oliver B. Epperd
(05:00):
who is the manager of the nearby Grand Opera House,
and Oliver B. Shepherd, for one reason or another, really
digs and bro Small as a team.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
So eventually he migrated just around the way to the
Grand Opera House, where he became an usher you know,
one of those folks that kindly shows you to your seat,
and quickly he kind of worked his way up the
ranks at the Grand Opera House and became the treasurer.
That's kind of a success story right there. That's a
pretty high position. He was generally thought of as a
(05:31):
pretty solid worker. Small was also from early on someone
who really made no secret about their ambitions. He was
always looking for a little bit of a side hustle.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Yeah, always in search of some extra cheddar. The kind
of guy who likes money so much that he gets
upset when other people have it. If we're going to
editorialize and profile a bit, we know that at this
point he was already participating in bookie activities, illegal book
making operations. A guy I love taking bets on horse races,
(06:06):
you know, business in the front, bookie.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
In the back, betting on the ponies.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Yes, yeah, let those ponies run. Got to you got to.
But he experienced tragedy as well as mother passed away
in eighteen eighty seven, and then in eighteen eighty nine,
you know, he had a falling out with Shepherd and
he left. Perhaps this was due to small sometimes prickly
(06:33):
personality perhaps it was due to his constant pursuit of power.
Like you'll see biographers who speculate that Small stab Shepherd
the man who had helped him in the back metaphorically,
not literally, one way or the other. Small ends up
going to work at the Toronto Opera House. So same
(06:54):
kind of thing, different brand name.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, I went from Grand to Toronto because of whatever
was going on with this Shepherd character.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
And he gets promoted there as well, at the Toronto
Opera House. And during this time this will be important later.
His father, Small's father, a guy named Daniel, marries Josephine Corman.
Josephine Corman comes from money. She's an heiress. She's the
daughter of a wealthy beer baron named Ignacious, which is
(07:24):
such a wealthy guy named.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
And shout out to the Canadian Encyclopedia. How often do
we get to shout out those guys, that's for sure. Yeah,
I just have some of the most I don't know
the best collected information about this case.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
I would say they're one of the I would say
they're one of the best least biased sources online. So
you can read a lot of print books about this
investigating the mystery and about the life of Ambrose Small.
But often, and we say this with great respect, often
(07:58):
the authors are drawing toward their own conclusion what they
think happened, and the Canadian Encyclopedia newspapers at the time
they're taking wild swings, especially the newspapers in the era
of cutthroat muckraking press.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
So Small kind of fought his way to the forefront
of the super competitive theater business there in Ontario, and
he eventually found a partnership with Detroit theater mogul Clark J. Whitney,
who was a major player in the Ontario theater circuit.
So when Whitney died in nineteen oh two, Small bought
up tons of theaters and communities across Ontario and least
(08:39):
others to kind of create a network of theaters. And
they all depended on him by his own design for
booking these shows, because he was the sole controller of
the kind of pathway that you mentioned, Matt, from New
York to Canada, the New York kind of theater syndicates.
I guess you could call them.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Well, and you may yourself. How does the manager at
the Toronto Opera House have enough scratch to buy all
of these properties, right, these are established businesses that cost
lots and lots of money, and he is doing that
because we mentioned he's a bookie. But you can only
imagine that there's other stuff going on in the background too,
where he's able to get enough capital to buy major establishments.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Excellent setup. Yeah. In nineteen o two, he marries the
younger sister of his stepmother, So technically he marries his
step aunt. And her name is Teresa Corman, And just
like Josephine Corman, this is the heiress of that beer
baron Ignacious.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Isn't sheilin younger step daughter or something?
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, so still technically step aunt. So yeah,
that's what I'm saying. Like it's his stepmother's younger sister,
so technically, right, wouldn't that be his step aunt? Yeah,
So they're combined financial assets. Ambrose Small's growing control of
the theater community there and maybe maybe he bet on
(10:10):
the right ponies. Combined with Teresa Corman's inheritance or her
assets from her family, they make the couple super wealthy.
But money is not always going to equate to happiness,
not every time. They're very different people, like she is
a polyglot, she is super into world travel. She's a philanthropist,
(10:32):
she volunteers everywhere.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
And Small, on the other hand, is a philanderer.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
And a gambler, like you said, a womanizer. He even
I don't know, he's a real pill. Which is interesting
about this case. He had a semi secret chamber built
in the Grand Opera House and it was for his
tryst with chorus girls. This is the kind of guy
that we're talking about in our early days of Hollywood episode.
(11:01):
This guy would literally have young women who wanted to
work with him and he would invite them to that
secret room for an interview.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
Casting couch types stuff.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Cool. It's interesting because his wife was such a you know,
lover of culture and you know, the finer things in life,
and like you said, very well traveled, and he seemed
to be very much a part of culture and importing
it to Canada. And it would seem like, I mean,
I didn't know the guy, but that he was more
concerned about the financial side of it than he was
you know, the beauty of the arts.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, it is weird. According to some of the sources,
we found that secret room there in the Opera House
for the tryst chamber or whatever we want to call it.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
It is.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
It isn't found at least according to some sources until
the investigation begins that we're going to explain to you
or we're going to talk about. But others it's like rumors, right,
that are just circulating around the office basically, and the
various offices of all of these opera houses and places
of performance. But the guy is definitely viewed. It would
(12:09):
seem ken according to some of the information that comes
out during the era of yellow journalism, that this guy
is a bit of a scoundrel.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Yeah again, a pill. It is an open secret, right,
It's something that his wife seems to be very much
aware of. Now. The small family, Teresa and Ambrosewiming, they
live in opulence. They have a very nice est state,
but they sleep in separate rooms and they appear to
only grow further apart as small pursues, you know, this gambling,
(12:42):
this philandering and success as an entertainment mogul. Eventually he
runs what we could rightly call an empire of thirty
four theaters half or outside of Ontario. So he's expanding.
Any star performer who wants to wants to stroll the
boards at his stage. No matter how popular they are.
(13:06):
This control of the market means they have to in
some way deal with Ambrose small and Small has a reputation,
he does it. He's not just ruthless and unscrupulous, which
happens a lot with moguls. He seems to take sadistic
joy in screwing people over. We got to talk about
the business contract thing.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
Yeah, I mean it's funny you mentioned the whole Golden
Age of Hollywood episode that we did in terms of
the casting couch. But his iron fisted grasp over this
market and also perhaps sadistic bent also has a lot
in common with the studio system of those days that
we talk about in the episode. So everyone thought the
Small wasn't just a scoundrel, as you mentioned, Ben, they
also knew that he took great pleasure and pride in
(13:49):
putting one over on just about anybody. He planted business
contracts with little kind of hidden clauses that he called jokers,
that essentially were ways of kind of hiding in plain
sight things that would benefit him and not benefit the
person signing the contract. He was also suspected of using
(14:11):
his influence to actually fix some of these horse races, yeah,
which was totally possible, just to be clear.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
And also yeah, people called him at chiseler, which was
a big insult at the time. They called him at cheapskate.
They they did not like him. It reminds me of
that movie. It is an interesting comparison. It reminds me
of that film based on the real life event I
want to see. It was a small town somewhere in
Texas where there was a known bully who eventually got
(14:41):
killed and everybody knew who killed him but refused to
go to the police.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
Yep, movie is called Bully.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Oh it's a bully, ok. Larry Clark.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
Yeah, it's a gnarly film, not for the faint of heart.
It's it's pretty mean spirited.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Stumbled it to the answer. Yeah, this guy was unpopular.
A lot of people hated him. There's something mentioned. I
believe this isn't the Canadian encyclopedia. It's repeated in several
different places about a quote from a journalist in Toronto
at the time named Hector charles Worth. Hector Charlesworth knows
small personally, and in nineteen twenty eight, after the events
(15:18):
that we're about to really explore, here the stuff they
don't want, you know. Hector comes out with a book
called More Candid Chronicles and he says, if I heard once,
I heard a score of times the ominous words. Somebody
will get to Amby someday.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
They called him Amby as a nickname for Ambrose. I
don't know if he liked the nickname Amby. Even his
longtime assistants did not care for him. Guy named John
Dody Jack to his friends, worked for this guy for years,
and he also seemed to hate the dude, which will
be important later.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So let's talk about movie theaters. These are performance arts theaters,
many of the ones that Small has taken over and
is now running, and he has such control over them.
As we stated before, it's about the players, the actual
human beings that are going to get on stage. I
assume also it's the players who are going to be
underneath the stage, maybe the musicians. Right, He probably is
(16:16):
exerting control over everybody that is going to take part
in any kind of performance in these venues. And we're
talking thirty four or more of them as well, all
across Toronto in different parts of Canada. In eighteen ninety six,
the First movie theater shows up in Toronto. Now that
is a while ago, right, If if we're following through
(16:37):
the timeline here, which we're in, I guess we're in
what the nineteen teens at this point something like that.
Around this time, the concept of movie theaters is a
threat to his business and his way of life, and
it's kind of been looming in the background. But it's
(16:57):
been this technology that has been advancing pretty quickly and
growing a lot, especially to the south. Right in the
United States, movie theaters are becoming the thing, and as
they are now proliferating across Canada. Small things. Maybe there's
something else I need to do here, Maybe there's a
pivot I can make to either cash out or change
(17:22):
my wealth, change the way I make my wealth.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
Yeah. Yeah. To be clear, we don't have a sense
that this guy was necessarily a creative participant in the
entertainment industry. Like he was not writing his own plays, right,
he was not doing a Kevin Costner thing where he
directs and stars and stuff. He is about the money.
So whatever can accelerate his personal wealth is what he
(17:48):
will look into. The rise of motion pictures sends live
theater into decline, and so it comes to pass. In
nineteen nineteen, Small decides to exit the business. He's going
to sell out. You know, this is like if you
run AMC and you decide to sell AMC. And so
he says, I'm going to sell my theater Empire to
(18:12):
a competing force, trans Canada Theaters Limited over in Montreal.
And he says, I got to get the right price, though,
I got to get my big So he sells. In
nineteen nineteen, he strikes a deal to sell off his
entire business for one point the US equivalent of one
point seven million dollars one million dollars up front, the
(18:34):
other seven hundred thousand in installments over time. If we
want to pull a ridiculous history card and do a
little inflation calculator, that is thirty million, eight hundred and
twenty four thousand, nine hundred and thirty dollars and sixty
four cents in twenty twenty four money.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
Oof, my goodness, that is a lot of cash. Then
on the first of December nineteen nineteen, at the law
offices of Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt in the Dominion Bank
building on King Street, Small, Theresa and their attorney E. W. M.
Flock met Trans Canada Theaters representative William Shaughnessy. It's a
(19:14):
great theater man name to sign over those theaters. They
got a check for a million dollars. The check was
deposited at that bank Dominion the next morning, perhaps by
Small but also possibly by Teresa. Then on December twod
he vanished.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
So what happened? We'll dive into it after a word
from our sponsor, here's river did's increase to this day?
No one knows, at least by which we mean, no
one has an official solution to the case. Again, as
(19:55):
I stated earlier, there are a lot of opinions right.
There are things that initial investigators were convinced would solve
the case. There are things that later authors and researchers
are convinced they have discovered. We want to be fair
to all of them. But you'll see what we mean
when we delve into the theories. So maybe maybe we
(20:15):
step it back forensically into the day of the disappearance
December second, nineteen nineteen. Now no one is one hundred
percent sure of the exact timeline here, and honestly that's
typical for cases of this nature. We know that after
making this sale after getting the initial million dollars just
(20:35):
crazy money. Ambrose small, however distant he and his spouse
may have been. He made some purchases, ostensibly for her,
some kind of celebratory gifts. He bought her jewelry, a
fur coat, a Cadillac that's pretty nuts. And then he
had lunch with the guy who mentioned earlier in Noel Flock,
and with his wife Teresa, and he walked Esa to
(20:59):
a nearby orphan because she regularly volunteered at this orphanage.
And then he went back to his office with his
buddy Flock. They were having a meeting and they planned
to get out around five point thirty, at which point
they would maybe go and meet up for dinner. Flock
(21:19):
had a train to catch to London. Side note for
US Yankees in the crowd, that's London, Ontario. If anybody's wondering, WHOA,
that's amazing a train from Canada to London. We thought
so too, but it's not. So we know then that
Flock is gone. He's off to London, Ontario, and his
(21:42):
train leaves at six pm, so he leaves at five
point thirty, which makes him the last person that we
can confirm on record saw Ambrose small. After that, the
trail runs cold, or the trail is actually cold, but
no one knows about it for two weeks. His own
(22:03):
family does not report him missing until two weeks have passed.
It's not till December sixteenth, And I got to ask you, guys,
what's the implication there? Does his wife think he's just
off with a mistress. Maybe do a lot of associates
just say, hey, he made it, you know, he got
the golden goose. He's kicking back as a newly minted millionaire.
(22:25):
Or did the people who not like him, were they
just happy not to hear from him.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
It's one of two things. Either his wife was aware
that he does this kind of thing, especially when he's
got a windfall, goes and spends some of it and
spends his time with other women, if not his mistress,
because he did have one longtime mistress that his wife
was aware of, unfortunately, because she had found some letters
(22:50):
and some other things from that specific person. But she
knew he spent his time with other women, and she
knew that he liked to gamble and he liked to
be away, So maybe she just thought he was out
of town doing his thing, and she was either embarrassed
about that or has just gotten so used to that
that that's just what she deals with, right right.
Speaker 4 (23:08):
I think she was even aware of his casting couch situation. Yes,
whether it was completely against her will or whether they
had some sort of understanding or whatever, I think is
maybe not fully clear. But she was aware of his
patterns and didn't report him missing to the police because
just figured he was out catting around.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Or or she specifically didn't talk about him and his
disappearance for two weeks because stuff had to get done, okay.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
Which is yeah, like as always saying earlier, there are
a lot of places there, there are a lot of
possibilities that might not involve her as a culprit, right,
we have to remember this, Ley's been through a pretty
tough marriage. I do think it's worth noting that when
investigators do ask her when the family goes public on
sixteenth of December nineteen nineteen, investigators do ask Teresa Small
(24:05):
about this, and she says she had not reported his
disappearance because she wanted to avoid a scandal. She had
this specific statement that is in the papers of the time.
It's quoted in every source pretty much. She says, I
believe my Ambi is in the hands of a designing
woman somewhere and will come back. And this just a
(24:26):
side note for us here in the US. This finally
explains to me the double meaning, the double entendre of
that sitcom from back in the day designing women, because
they were a crew of interior designers or.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
But they were also you know, the amorous Yes, but
that's just as I was saying earlier, I think this
is potentially a statement you would say if you're trying
to cover your tracks because maybe you did something wrong.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
I'm just saying, and we're taking people at their word,
that's all. That's all I was saying.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, And I'm just saying that these are different possibilities,
man like, like there's no proof, there's no smoking gun.
Maybe she was waiting for a two week time window.
But the disappearance does go public. And when it goes public,
what does what does Teresa Small do? She offers a reward.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
Yes, five hundred dollars I believe, which at the time
would have been no small reward. I guess we better
inflation calculator that too. While we're at it.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
Oh, yes, sir, that is going to five hundred dollars
US equivalency in nineteen nineteen, Well would be nine thousand,
sixty six dollars and sixteen cents in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
Well, she should have gone for an even five oh
four to make it an even ten grand and twenty
twenty four numbers. You know what was she thinking? No,
but this was a big deal. This was the kind
of money that would get things done. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Yeah, And this is not for returning him, right, this
is information on his whereabouts. In addition to the five
hundred dollars reward. I believe she has missing persons flyers
distributed across Canada and across the United States. And the
investigators welcome this. They need the help. Honestly, they're flummoxed.
Everything they're looking at for this guy, at least again,
(26:17):
as you were saying, according to what the investigators say,
according to their word, is a dead end. He has
im packed any suitcases, by which they mean none of
the suitcases he previously possessed are missing. It doesn't seem
like he pulled that million dollars out of the bank.
There's no track record or no trail, I should say
(26:38):
of him using a check to pay for a train
ticket or to get a hotel somewhere. They go to
the usual spots he hangs out at, including we can
only imagine some of his gambling connections. He's not there.
No one there is speaking to the police. And I guess,
to be fair, the police burst into a gambling hall
(27:02):
or a den of iniquity, people aren't going to say, oh, yeah, yeah,
that guy was here. They're just not going to talk
to the authorities in general.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Well, especially if it's the big spender of that establishment. Right,
if it's one of the bosses that hangs out of
that establishment, you're never going to speak a word about
that person and what they're doing.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
It's just bad business.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Yeah, you got to reward your loyal customers, right, they do.
To that note about the longtime mistress, we know of,
authorities reach out to Clara Smith. Clara Smith is living
in Minneapolis in nineteen nineteen, and she says, look, I
don't know what happened to Aby. I'm over here in Minneapolis,
(27:46):
and they could prove that she was there, so maybe
did they surveil her, right, maybe he was hiding out
or something like that. That's a valid question at this point, Well.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
This dude is a serious public figure in this scene
at this point, correct. I mean he is a player,
so he's known, and this would not have gone unnoticed.
This was a pretty big news item.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, yeah, the big thing to notice here in this story.
Nothing is missing besides the man. It's not as though
the money was taken out, right. He wasn't walking around
with a million dollars. He wasn't even walking around with
a couple hundred thousand dollars. He was just gone.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Vanish, as if into thin air. Look, this is to
the point you were making. This is such a public figure.
This is kind of like Harvey Weinstein going missing. Even
though his I'm going to say it, doubtlessly he coerced
some women, right, even though that may not be front
of mind for the public sphere or the press at
(28:53):
the time. It's unescapable or inescapable reality. All sorts of
rumors pop up. Eventually, Teresa Small increases the reward for
information to fifty thousand dollars if found alive. Fifteen thousand
just for the body of Ambrose Small. The story goes global.
This guy's the Elvis Presley of his time, or the
(29:15):
Bigfoot if you like. There are all sorts of people
claiming that they have seen him. People were claiming they
were using their psychic powers or pseudo scientific powers to
be the last hope to find this guy, and none
of these things worked. Do we want to talk about
Arthur Conan Doyle.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
He shows up in this Oh yes, mister Sherlock Holmes himself.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Yeah, that's just a side note. You can read more
about it. But he's reporters in again this muckraking era
of newspapers. They reach out to other celebrities. This becomes
a celebrity story and they say, hey, will you help
the Canadian police find Ambrose small.
Speaker 4 (29:56):
Right, And that included a Viennese criminologist by the name
of mac Similian A. Langsner. He had a method that
I'm with pat or trademarked or whatever, but that's a
pretty cool name. It's called the thought wave system that
he believed could help locate this person. It sounds like
a bit of quackery to me. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
The thought wave system, whatever the efficacy may be, did
not work in this regard. And, as often happens in
a case of this magnitude, multiple people from across Canada
and the US and later the world started claiming to
have seen Small And some of these were claims made
in good faith for sure, some were made for attention,
(30:38):
all were apparently incorrect. There were also people claiming that
they were in fact Ambro Small. They were coming forward.
It maybe was I don't know, maybe it was all
the money on the line. What do you guys think
had to be I mean.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
Like I said that five hundred bucks and you know
it was enough to get stuff done. What I'm saying
is like this would have been a massive motivator, all
of these top people showing up trying to get on
the publicity wagon. It just seems like if something was
going to be found, that there was something out there
at clue of any kind, that it would have turned up. Well.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Yeah, and once it became fifty thousand dollars going on,
that's like lobbery.
Speaker 4 (31:12):
And that five hundred turning into fifty thousand, five hundred
already being a mega respectable reward. You would think that
if there was something out there to be found, with
all of these top people coming in to jump on
the publicity wagon, it was going to be found.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Yeah, there were so many false claims, including people who
said I am Ambrose small, very like I am Spartacus.
They eventually the Attorney General keeps a folder for all
these reports they don't take seriously, and they called it
letters from cranks, Comma, et cetera. This search is initially, yes,
(31:45):
aided by newspapers, but I think we can make a
strong argument it's only partially aided by newspapers. In this
mad rush to grab headlines to grab attention, just like
a precedent of social media today, there were a lot
of unscrupulous public They were super happy to print any
and all outrageous claims because if you got the right headline,
(32:06):
you sold the paper and they bought that instead of
you know, your competitor's news outfit. So newspaper readers also
got Can we talk about the cryptogram? I'm still so
confused about this. How would we pronounce this? Would it
be one p eb eighty six.
Speaker 4 (32:21):
And sounds like an aim handle?
Speaker 2 (32:24):
You got no idea?
Speaker 3 (32:26):
This is I can't remember if this mentioned in every source,
but in the Toronto Star if you if you look
at their reporting of this, apparently there was this cryptogram
that was released to newspaper readers and people were invited
to analyze it, and so a bunch of people tried
to crack the cipher and the going public opinion was
(32:50):
that this meant Ambrose Small was alive, but he was
trapped in a limehouse kill there a place called Brampton Junction,
and he was suffocating as you read this paper to.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
The cryptogram was just something that was sent by some
kind of crank that I was just trying to get
some attention.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
There's a book that I'm hoping to read by Katie Dobbs,
who wrote for the Toronto Star. It will hopefully have
more about the cryptogram, but we're honestly going to have
to dig into that.
Speaker 4 (33:22):
One.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Book's called The Missing Millionaire, The True Story of Ambrose Small.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
Yeah, and in full disclosure. I don't think any of
us have read that in full yet.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Okay, not yet.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
So this cryptogram spelled spelled like it sounds, it leads
nowhere and this is where we get to. I don't
know if we want to talk about some of the
weird alleged sightings. One that stands out is the work
of a private detective named John J. Brothy And pardon
my cat there, everybody say hey to doctor.
Speaker 4 (33:54):
Vankmin Hey, doctor V. Looking good.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
So this guy brought He says, Look, I found Small
and I found him doing poorly as they would say
at the time. This is nineteen twenty one. He says,
this guy, the real Ambrose Small, was a victim of
a hit and run in Des Moines, Iowa. And he
was dropped off by the person who had hit him.
(34:19):
So someone hit this guy in the road and then
they dropped him off and left. And this PI says
Small or the guy he believes as small as a
gunshot wound in his neck. He's got a crazy concussion
and both his legs have been amputated.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Yeah, like, what could that have been from? Was he
in war? Did he hop a train incorrectly?
Speaker 4 (34:46):
Yes, I've never heard that put quite like that, Matt,
I love it.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
And apparently this guy is non responsive, at least nonverbal
for three weeks, so the better part of a month.
And when he finds speaks up, he says, I am
John Dowdy. I came here from Obaha. That is all
I remember. Oh yeah, we remember though the name John
(35:12):
Dowdy or Jack to his friends, the longtime assistant slash
secretary of Ambrose.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
Small oh, James, right, yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
James, that's correct. Sorry, I just called him Jack because
we're friends.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
Of course, so we should hold onto this. Put a
pin in this fact for a little later, and we'll
see as well why this couldn't possibly have been the truth.
So moving forward in the timeline, the private investigator claimed
he showed this this man very unfortunate case, a photograph
of Ambrose Small, and the man allegedly replied, yes, that
(35:47):
is me.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Okay, we'll switch of the story.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
There's like a Memento man type situation, you know.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Yeah, sorry, I'm editorializing when I'm pointing that out. The
guy does get taken into custody in Des Moines, we
know that for sure, but we also know from that
point the trail falls cold. All we can assume is
that this very troubled individual was not in fact the
missing theater Agne. Because there's no other real reporting about them,
(36:15):
and despite all of this kerfuffle, this bruhaha, no one
can find the actual Ambrose Small. None of the people
claiming to be Ambrose Small turned out to be Ambrose Prime. Further,
no one can find a solid lead or a clue
that goes anywhere. And because there are no solid leads
because there are no solid clues. There are these wild rumors, theories, speculation,
(36:39):
these people. As I mentioned, I think I keep mentioning
it too much, but I just can't imagine. I have
a difficult time imagining deciding to go to the media
or to police and saying that you are the missing person.
It reminds me a little bit of those unscrupulos as
(37:00):
crazy scams where people would say they were a missing
kid would be gone for years. You know. Also, maybe
there's mental instability involved, and maybe some people just begin
to believe that they are, in fact Ambrose Small. That's
the magnitude of this case.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
Well, Ambrose is still missing, but the question remains, was
there foul play? We'll return after a word from our
sponsor and explore that very thought.
Speaker 4 (37:32):
And we're back. So why don't we start by jumping
into some theories and a handful of suspects. Theory number
one we've alluded to quite a few times already, and
certainly seems credible that Small ran off with one of
his many lady friends paramoors. Unfortunately, each lead in that
(37:53):
particular genre turned out to not hold water. If he
did leave with one of his ladies was someone completely
unknown or unsuspected to police. In addition to Small's friends,
quote unquote, his circle of associates, let's call them.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Yeah, I'm calling circle of associates because I'm not sure
if they would consider each other friends, you know what
I mean, based on the infamy of his business dealings.
The second theory is murder by employee, the guy we've
mentioned before, James Jack Doty, who I'm mistakenly called John
(38:30):
a second ago, but we introduced him at the top.
He was their primary suspect. He's the first person they
look at because Dottie has worked with Small for years,
and Dottie is often complaining to his friends, because he
does have friends. He's complaining about his salary. He says,
my salary is let me put it in an extremely
diplomatic way. He tells people his salary is insufficient. And
(38:53):
he makes something like I want to say, forty bucks
a week, forty three something like that.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Well, yeah, and he does a lot of work, a
guy who makes a lot of money, and he likely
watches his boss do all kinds of unscrupulous things, knowing
that he's making money in other ways. And he still
gets paid that much.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Yeah, and he's feeling like a dog's body, which is
just a fancy word for pretty much a servant or
a man of all needs, you know, like a valet,
a secretary. He's a fixer, and he feels unappreciated, and
you know, everybody feels unappreciated at some point. But this
went on for years for this guy. And initially the police,
(39:33):
well they can't get Jack's opinion because Jack disappears pretty
much right after Ambrose is gone.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Uh oh, that seems suspicious.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Yeah, not the best thing to do. Really.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Well, Well, he just went on vacation, just like Ambrose.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
Right, sure, why not? And when he went on vacation,
he took a lot more money than Ambrose appeared to take,
because Dowdy made off with the equivalent of one hundred
thousand to one hundred and five thousand US dollars worth
of victory bonds from the Ambrose small safety deposit over
at Dominion Bank, which you mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Nor is this World War One victory bonds?
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Stealing victory bonds? That feels I mean, I guess it
was a different time, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Now, Hold on, guys, correct me if I'm wrong here.
Those victory bonds. Let's say Daughtry. It's such a weird
doug h t Y Dotty.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Don't you keep saying Dotty or dough Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Sorry, there's another person in the story like Doughty or
it's very close and my brain keeps like smashing them together.
But this guy takes these victory bonds, right, Those bonds
have to mature before you can cash them out, right,
or maybe you can cash them out. They're just not
worth what they would be.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
They haven't matured.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, so I guess you would just hold on to
them and is a long game.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Or maybe he thought it was different from just taking cash.
Or maybe he opened the safety deposit box because he
did have access to it and just took what he found.
That might be a maybe more opportunistic. But this is
our second disappearance, and in the wake of the second disappearance,
investigators learn more troubling stuff about Jack. According to what
(41:26):
are loosely called informants, Jack had multiple times spoken of
what it would be like if he kidnapped or murdered
Ambrose small Now where they just mad at each other
after a business dealing. Was he, you know, rubbed raw
about something and said I wish I could just you know,
strangle this guy or something, or did he have an
(41:47):
actual plan? Either way, it doesn't look great. He's a
person of interest. You have to talk to him, definitely.
He's a guy you need to reach out and touch exactly,
and anyone could get touched, right. We know that's for
sure in this case. Because the law does catch up
to Jack. He's not in London, Ontario, he's not in Toronto.
(42:09):
He is arrested in Oregon on charges of theft and
conspiracy to kidnap Small, but not on murder, just to you.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Know, hang on to him for a while, as he
had said earlier, which again, don't say that stuff out loud, please.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
The kidnapping charges were eventually dropped because of lack of evidence,
and he wasn't able to be charged with the murder
because no one had confirmed Small's death in the first place.
He was still simply missing.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
Yeah, and he went away for six years. I want
to say he was extradited to Canada. Again, a crime solved.
That's a good thing, the theft of the bonds. But
this does not solve the disappearance. And police become convinced
over the course of their investigation that Jack could not
have done this. The Jack is not the prime mover
(43:03):
of Ambrose Small's disappearance, which leads us to the third theory.
Sometimes it's the one's closest to you who betray you. Right.
What if his family did it? What about his wife? Right?
And they're what seems to be, by many accounts, an
unhappy marriage. Ambrose Small has sisters, Gertrude and Florence. They
(43:27):
are the initial proponents who say, we think our sister
in law pay to have our brother killed.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
It's kind of whoa whoa, I.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
Mean awkward Thanksgiving labor for sure.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah, well, that's one of the primary things in any investigation.
Who benefits from this person no longer being here or
from this person being dead? Right? The primary beneficiary in
this situation would be the spouse because all of that
money just got deposited into their accounts, right, A million
(44:05):
dollar check got deposited and then he goes missing immediately afterwards.
That's it's just suspicious. And if this person, this other
person Jack high tailed it with a bunch of money
as well that was also his, that's weird. It does
make you wonder if it wasn't some kind of maybe
a combo meal.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
Right, Yeah, because Jack doubtlessly knew Teresa. Right, Yeah, that's
inescapable and it's proven. Yeah, Gertrude and Florence are convinced that,
or they are convinced enough. They clearly seem to believe
this enough that they pony up some of their own
funds and they hire a private detective named Patrick Sullivan.
(44:49):
Patrick Sullivan is solid at his detective work, we could argue,
but he's even better at getting press. He loves pr
a good headline. He does not find any trace of
Ambrose Small that we know of. But along the way,
he's talking to every reporter that he can put get
(45:10):
on the horn, you know, everybody he can button a
hole into talking about this, and he's publishing in these tabloids,
in these what we call yellow journalist rags, where he's
accusing multiple people. Sometimes he's saying, well, it might be
the Catholic church who Adam kidnapped because they hate theater
(45:32):
or whatever, or the reason the police can't find this
guy is because the police killed him and they're pretending
to look for him and now they're covering it up.
So this is the kind of stuff you see in
you know, a lot of talk shows or different even
podcasts today, that kind of speculation. None of it led anywhere, Oh.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Yeah, but the way he talked about it, he ended
up in a bunch of lawsuits himself, a bunch of libel,
obscenities stuff that he trouble for it, because again, that
type of writing in papers was so common, but the
law was catching up on. This is what happens when
you say clearly false things in newspapers about public folks
or the Catholic church.
Speaker 3 (46:14):
Right right, which was a big deal then and still
is a big deal today. And it's similar to the
earlier investigation of the assistant. The police eventually say, all right,
Teresa's small didn't have it in her character right to
murder her husband herself, but we are still concerned she
(46:34):
may have hired some unseemly gents to do the.
Speaker 4 (46:37):
Deed, which certainly seems in line with her station, you know,
I mean, being a moneyed and cultured person certainly wouldn't
be the one to wield the knife herself. And probably,
you know, even if she didn't know unscrupulous characters directly,
there's a guy for that, you know, there's people around.
If you're powerful and have enough money to spend, you
(46:58):
can find someone who will help you, the right people
to do the job.
Speaker 3 (47:02):
You'll know someone who knows someone. Yes, yeah, and there.
This is a serious thing. There's a valid line of questioning. Still,
after investigation, law enforcement says, we don't think it's her.
She is never convicted of any crime related to the
disappearance of Ambrose Small, which leads us to our fourth theory,
(47:27):
back to the racetrack.
Speaker 4 (47:28):
That's right, what if Small, who was famously a philandering
pill and a degenerate gambler, And finally, you know made
enemies are the wrong people. Let's not forget that newspaper
writer quote was saying, one day someone's gonna get amby,
whether it be a business partner, someone he had wronged financially.
More likely, though, once you get into the unseemly world
(47:48):
of professional betting and bookmaking, that's when people will actually
come for you, and maybe you know, decap you to start,
give you a little bit of time, but then if
you don't pay its curtains.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
I've seen peaky blinders world, just like.
Speaker 3 (48:03):
Wearing the hat. Now we're big fans.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Exactly, but The whole point is like that it could
be anybody in that world, because we already stated at
the top there he was using his wealth and influence
in that world to fix racing. So if somebody, the
wrong person loses enough money, uh, in one of those scenarios,
you could have a real problem on your hands. And
if you make enemies of the wrong folks in that
(48:28):
realm uh. We've mentioned before how expensive it is to
keep horses and to train horses to race like that
and to you know, be in that world. It is expensive.
Speaker 4 (48:38):
Not to mention the fact that he was capable of
fixing these races, which I don't even fully then you
mentioned is doable. I guess it would have to do
with injuring a horse or something, or having a jockey
that was, you know, on your payroll who perhaps you
know hold back is that the idea.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
Get that horse through the jockey.
Speaker 4 (48:55):
That makes it a little more sense. But what if
he fixed the wrong race and you know it, it
deprived somebody of some serious money, Even if it wasn't
him owing money, you know that that could have happened
as well.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Or what if you just what if you just betrayed
somebody else in the entertainment business, and I'm also very powerful.
These things could happen. The reason we include this speculation
with no hard proof is because it is possible. It's
it's very possible. We know that similar situations have occurred
(49:28):
in the past. So could he have could he have
just pushed the envelope too far and gone off the
deep end, like literally murdered and tossed away in a
ravine somewhere for gambling debts, Or could someone have thought,
you know, this guy screwed me over so much, I'm
not going to let him have a happy ending with
(49:48):
his one point seven million dollars, right, And you know then,
as now, law enforcement does often have a very difficult
time investigating the real powerful people. And the really powerful
people aren't the ones cavorting on stage, right, The really
powerful people are the ones who owned the stage. Or
(50:09):
what's that old Chris Rock quote about rich versus wealthy,
Like the star athlete and your favorite sports team is rich,
but the guy who signs his checks is wealthy. So
the idea then would be that maybe law enforcement got stonewalls.
You know, maybe there was some kind of some kind
(50:31):
of cover up, some kind of conspiracy from the wrong
person in the world of gambling or organized crime, or
even the world of entertainment. But there's the fifth theory,
which may be a little happier, maybe a little Shawshank
redemption esque. What a small squirreled away another nest egg
of money that no one knew about, and he skipped down,
(50:53):
you know what I mean, It was easier to skip
town back then. We just shave your mustache or whatever.
Speaker 4 (50:58):
I wanted a fresh star. He was gonna live a
new life where he wasn't a total jerk. Doubtful.
Speaker 3 (51:03):
Maybe people can turn over a new leaf. I mean
that one's possible, but I don't know if it fits
what we know about his psychological profile. It's a guy
who loves money, right, loves money. What would compel you
to willingly leave a million dollars and the chance of
another seven hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Behind unless he had more money, like black market money
squirreled away somewhere else. I mean, that's really the only reason, right,
And maybe he would feel okay about leaving his wife
that large sum of money that's going to continue. There's
another well, at the time, the equivalent of seven hundred
thousand dollars that would be doled out to her over
(51:45):
the course of however, many years right to that deal.
So my wife is all set. Now I've got all
this other money that's way more actually, and I'm going
to go do my thing. I can imagine that. Yeah, ye.
Speaker 3 (51:57):
Possibly. The think is none of these theories have been
conclusively proven even now in twenty Oh my gosh, you guys,
I did it. I put twenty twenty four instead of
twenty twenty five.
Speaker 4 (52:09):
Yeah, it's okay, it happens.
Speaker 3 (52:11):
Has that happened to you guys? Yet?
Speaker 4 (52:13):
Oh? Yeah, for sure, there wasn't. The Supreme Court in all,
the Supreme Court of Ontario at least.
Speaker 3 (52:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nineteen twenty three, time passes, they say, okay,
for legal purposes, we're gonna have to say it. We're
going to call it he is dead, which means that
we will enact his will as it stands on record,
and the will leaves most of his estate to his wife,
(52:39):
Teresa Small. Fast forward to nineteen thirty five. Again, never
convicted of anything, she passes away.
Speaker 4 (52:46):
After the estate was rated for all those back taxes
that were owed. Most of the remaining funds went to
various Catholic charities. The Toronto Police, however, officially closed the
small case in nineteen sixty, almost half a century after
the initial disappearance.
Speaker 3 (53:05):
Yeah, that's an important point to note, right, because as
student listeners, we'll all hear that weird discrepancy. Nineteen twenty
three declared dead, nineteen sixty, case closed. That's a long
time window.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
Isn't it weird to have the case closed and still
not have an answer. That's a little weird. Yeah, case
is still open.
Speaker 4 (53:26):
I didn't think you're supposed to close cases unless you
found out you've done it.
Speaker 3 (53:30):
You just call them cold, right, But they closed it,
and as a result, people have still been speculating about
this over time. In fact, there have been calls for reinvestigations,
new investigations. I mean, we know there was a second
investigation in nineteen thirty six that also went nowhere. That
was part of the impetus to declare the case closed
(53:51):
in nineteen sixty. You can see countless again magazine articles,
some great books. Even there was a play in twenty
twenty two that I don't think any of us have seen,
but I'm very curious to see what it what it entails.
Or what conclusions it draws. There is one thing though,
There's one piece we have to mention, right, it's the
(54:13):
letter from Reuter's not the news organization from Ruder.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
Yeah, maybe it is Reuter. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (54:20):
I like saying Reuter. Just yeah, yeah, it makes a joke,
it makes sense.
Speaker 2 (54:24):
But it also looks like it looks like, yeah, this
is weird. This is a letter that allegedly came through
that had had some information in it. It was allegedly
pinned by the wife, right by Teresa, allegedly, and it
(54:45):
was basically a deathbed confession.
Speaker 4 (54:49):
Yeah. I'll read a little bit of it if I could.
Poor Ambrose was killed on December second, nineteen nineteen. And
I know that part of his body, the trunk, was
buried in the Rosedale Ravine dump and other parts of
the body were burned in the Grand Opera House furnace.
This is very specific.
Speaker 2 (55:08):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (55:10):
It continues, You will be surprised, my dear Florence.
Speaker 2 (55:13):
And Gertrude, that the sisters, right.
Speaker 3 (55:16):
The sisters of Ambrose Small. You will be surprised, my
dear Florence and Gertrude, to learn that I am more
responsible for your brother's death, God forgive me, Reuter Comma
the news agency. No, that last part, that last Comma
part is not true, but the but I thought it
was worth the joke. So this comes out after Teresa's
small passes away, and this is coming from Ambrose's small sister, Florence,
(55:41):
the person at least the way they identify in the letter,
the way it's signed is just again Reuter.
Speaker 2 (55:49):
Yeah, it's very weird. And in the the concept here
is that after Teresa is dead, this letter would prove
that Teresa had something to do with the death of
a Ambrose, or at least was involved in some way,
so that the sisters now should be fully in control
or be the beneficiaries of other monies that were out there.
(56:10):
Even though most of the money in the fortune there,
as we said before, was given away to Catholic charities
and was tied up in legal stuff. The thought was
that the sisters came up with this idea and forged
a letter they would say that kind of thing. That's
the speculation, the speculation about it, guys. I want to
go back to the combo meal. What if, please, what
(56:33):
if the secretary who is there suffering through every day
with Ambrose right as he states, you know, I can't
believe I'm having to do all this stuff for so
little money. For this guy's doing all this crap. I
don't like him at all, but I need this job.
I got to do this check Dowdy. Then you got
the wife who is living at the house. Oh my gosh,
I can't believe I'm living with this guy. I know
(56:54):
we have this business partnership, you know, marriage thing going on,
but I know all the stuff he's doing and the
way he treats me and all this other stuff. Don't
you think those two wouldluded some kind of trauma bond
that we mentioned before in other episodes. Don't you think
maybe there's something in there where the two of them
conspire to, uh, you know, take the money basically after
(57:16):
that huge windfall.
Speaker 4 (57:17):
I don't know, Matt, I think that's a pretty pretty
solid alternative theory.
Speaker 2 (57:20):
Well, when what what is the secretary doing when he's
in his Heidi hole that he made, you know, for
his trysts or whatever. Maybe he's at the house with
Teresa just and again that's all complete utter bs speculation
on my part, but I can just imagine the two
of them being closer than soult.
Speaker 3 (57:42):
Yeah, I'll play these reindeer games further. What if like,
what if you say, Okay, for a big enough payoff,
I'll sacrifice six years of my life in the pen.
You know people have cracked that deal before.
Speaker 4 (57:53):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (57:53):
Well, and he was just trying to get away to
the US. He was in Oregon.
Speaker 3 (57:57):
But like, I don't know, Yeah, I'm saying, but that
that could explain to the speculation. That could explain why
he didn't squeal because he thought he would be made
whole toward the end of Uh, toward the end of
the conspiracy. Uh. These these are great questions. And yes, folks,
we know law enforcement at the time was asking these
(58:18):
questions as well. But whatever they found, they did not
go forward with it, right, They did not release an
official conclusion. And that leads us to ask the question
we asked at the beginning, what happened to Ambrose Small?
There are tons of people who, for one reason or another,
are certain they've cracked the case. But despite all the
investigations over over decades, decades, decades, no one has universally
(58:43):
agreed on anything.
Speaker 4 (58:45):
Well, do we do we feel like this deathbed confession
is sincere or Is this just another bit of a
kind of smoke.
Speaker 3 (58:53):
That's a great question, and it's it's tough. You know,
at some point it's almost like a rorshack because they
didn't have the same forensic methods available. Now, you know,
like if this came out this we're twenty or post
two thousand case, people will be checking DNA, right, that's
(59:14):
the reality of it. It reminds me of our earlier conversation
we had about DNA found on the belongings of a
victim of Jack the Ripper. Right now we ask about
chain of custody. Was this kept sacra saying that might interfere?
We know that nothing yet has led us closer to
figuring out the truth, unless that is, you have a lead,
(59:36):
fellow conspiracy realist. If so, what a coincidence, because we
have an email address and a telephone number and ways
to contact us online.
Speaker 4 (59:45):
That's right. You can find us at the handle conspiracy
Stuff where it exists all over the internet. On Facebook,
we have a Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy.
On YouTube, we have video content color for your perusing enjoyment.
And on x FKA, Twitter, on Instagram and TikTok. For
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wish to contact us as individual human beings, you may
(01:00:05):
do so. I am on Instagram at how now Noel
Brown and Bolin How about yourself? Ah?
Speaker 3 (01:00:11):
Yes they do call me ben bullin here A big
thanks to Hidulgo for reaching out. Maybe it was a
U tree. Maybe these were willow bows if you want
to find If you want to find or interact with
me online, any questions, comments, love a limerick or a
picture of corvids at ben Bulan where people use ats, Instagram,
(01:00:31):
you can find me the air. You can also check
out the website Bembolin dot com. Matt, Matt, what's kicking?
What's ticking? What's talking?
Speaker 4 (01:00:38):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
Just want to point out guys. For Monster the Zodiac Killer,
we interviewed this author and historian Peter Vronsky about the
Zodiac case. He is from Canada and specifically has written
a book titled The Disappearance of Ambrose Small case closed.
Huhh And I just didn't even think about that until
(01:01:00):
I stumbled upon his book in research for this episode.
So shout out to Peter Vronsky and check out his socials.
That's vr o n Sky. Yeah. Hey, we also have
a phone number. If you want to call us, our
number is one eight three three st d WYTK. It
is a voicemail system. When you call in, you've got
(01:01:22):
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We are the entities who read every piece of correspondence
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Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. Twenty twenty five. As
the humans reckon a calendar Tonight, folks, we're exploring a mystery,
one that may be unfamiliar to many of us here
(00:49):
in these still somewhat United States, but doubtlessly ringing a
bell or our Canadian conspiracy realist. Oh my gosh, had
you guys heard of this one before we pitched it internally?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Yeah? I was Roman somewhere around the Gulf of America. Gosh,
years ago.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Is that like the Gulf of Tonkin.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
In that it's made up?
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:12):
I got it.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, yeah, no, I remember. We somebody wrote us about
this years ago, and I think it's something that's been
flying under our radar, just as it had for years
before that.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Yeah, it's a twisted tale of intrigue, big business, bad deals,
a disappearance that remains unsolved today, and full disclosure, folks,
it's about a very pillish, uncool guy. The question is
what happened to Ambrose Small. And thank you to our
(01:45):
Canadian conspiracy realist up north and abroad who had written
to us about this before. But we talked often about
strange disappearances. It was much easier for someone to disappear
back in the day, with or without their consent. But
some of these cases, amid all the innumerable disappearances throughout history,
(02:08):
some of them still resonate and haunt people today. This
is a question that has been that has been thoroughly analyzed,
and as we'll see, no one as of yet has
proven what happened. No one has cracked the case. So
we're hoping that tonight, with your help, maybe we can
(02:31):
get a little closer to an answer.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, only one hundred and four years ago. We're gonna
find these answers.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
Right after a quick word from my sponsor.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
You are the facts, all right, Ambrose Joseph Small eighteen
eighty six. That's when he's born. No one knows what's
going to happen to him? It's he's born in Bradford
in modern day on Ontario. Side note, didn't know this one,
you guys. Ontario used to just be called Canada West.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
Oh wow, that's so funny. Man in the town I
grew up, Augusta, right across the bridge in South Carolina,
it's just called North Augusta, which I always found very
dismissive to South Carolina.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah. It also calls to mind things like West Virginia
and things like North and South Dakota. There could have
been other names.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
I like to refer to them collectively as the Dakotas.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
I call them the Carolinas if I don't know where
the town is, and I'm in a conversation, and I
know it's somewhere over there.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
So by eighteen seventy six, the Small family had moved
to modern day Toronto, and by eighteen eighty Small's father
became the manager of a hotel called the Grand Hotel.
It must have been a fine place.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
You know, burst of humility, a little bit of a
street level knowledge. Here the hotel is next to a
place called the Grand and Opera House, equally humble name.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
There you go with the other.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Well, and it's actually very very cool, guys, because this
is a place where culture moved from the US into
uh into Canada, in parts of Canada where there really
was that thing that we talk about all the time,
the great export of the United States culture, and it's
moving north because as plays and other it's mostly plays
(04:26):
like stage plays.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Musicals maybe as well touring circuit stuff, some Vaudeville stuff.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
Yeah, it was more of Vaudeville air in the golden
age of Broadway musicals. Yeah, mostly plays in Vaudeville's and
probably maybe some variety.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Shows all run out of New York to your point, Matt,
So now it's eighteen eighty four, Ambrose Small is still
a teen and he starts working at the bar of
this grand hotel. And while he's working at the bar,
he runs into, of course, a lot of locals. One
of those locals is a guy named Oliver B. Epperd
(05:00):
who is the manager of the nearby Grand Opera House,
and Oliver B. Shepherd, for one reason or another, really
digs and bro Small as a team.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
So eventually he migrated just around the way to the
Grand Opera House, where he became an usher you know,
one of those folks that kindly shows you to your seat,
and quickly he kind of worked his way up the
ranks at the Grand Opera House and became the treasurer.
That's kind of a success story right there. That's a
pretty high position. He was generally thought of as a
(05:31):
pretty solid worker. Small was also from early on someone
who really made no secret about their ambitions. He was
always looking for a little bit of a side hustle.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Yeah, always in search of some extra cheddar. The kind
of guy who likes money so much that he gets
upset when other people have it. If we're going to
editorialize and profile a bit, we know that at this
point he was already participating in bookie activities, illegal book
making operations. A guy I love taking bets on horse races,
(06:06):
you know, business in the front, bookie.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
In the back, betting on the ponies.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Yes, yeah, let those ponies run. Got to you got to.
But he experienced tragedy as well as mother passed away
in eighteen eighty seven, and then in eighteen eighty nine,
you know, he had a falling out with Shepherd and
he left. Perhaps this was due to small sometimes prickly
(06:33):
personality perhaps it was due to his constant pursuit of power.
Like you'll see biographers who speculate that Small stab Shepherd
the man who had helped him in the back metaphorically,
not literally, one way or the other. Small ends up
going to work at the Toronto Opera House. So same
(06:54):
kind of thing, different brand name.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, I went from Grand to Toronto because of whatever
was going on with this Shepherd character.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
And he gets promoted there as well, at the Toronto
Opera House. And during this time this will be important later.
His father, Small's father, a guy named Daniel, marries Josephine Corman.
Josephine Corman comes from money. She's an heiress. She's the
daughter of a wealthy beer baron named Ignacious, which is
(07:24):
such a wealthy guy named.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
And shout out to the Canadian Encyclopedia. How often do
we get to shout out those guys, that's for sure. Yeah,
I just have some of the most I don't know
the best collected information about this case.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
I would say they're one of the I would say
they're one of the best least biased sources online. So
you can read a lot of print books about this
investigating the mystery and about the life of Ambrose Small.
But often, and we say this with great respect, often
(07:58):
the authors are drawing toward their own conclusion what they
think happened, and the Canadian Encyclopedia newspapers at the time
they're taking wild swings, especially the newspapers in the era
of cutthroat muckraking press.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
So Small kind of fought his way to the forefront
of the super competitive theater business there in Ontario, and
he eventually found a partnership with Detroit theater mogul Clark J. Whitney,
who was a major player in the Ontario theater circuit.
So when Whitney died in nineteen oh two, Small bought
up tons of theaters and communities across Ontario and least
(08:39):
others to kind of create a network of theaters. And
they all depended on him by his own design for
booking these shows, because he was the sole controller of
the kind of pathway that you mentioned, Matt, from New
York to Canada, the New York kind of theater syndicates.
I guess you could call them.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Well, and you may yourself. How does the manager at
the Toronto Opera House have enough scratch to buy all
of these properties, right, these are established businesses that cost
lots and lots of money, and he is doing that
because we mentioned he's a bookie. But you can only
imagine that there's other stuff going on in the background too,
where he's able to get enough capital to buy major establishments.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Excellent setup. Yeah. In nineteen o two, he marries the
younger sister of his stepmother, So technically he marries his
step aunt. And her name is Teresa Corman, And just
like Josephine Corman, this is the heiress of that beer
baron Ignacious.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Isn't sheilin younger step daughter or something?
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, so still technically step aunt. So yeah,
that's what I'm saying. Like it's his stepmother's younger sister,
so technically, right, wouldn't that be his step aunt? Yeah,
So they're combined financial assets. Ambrose Small's growing control of
the theater community there and maybe maybe he bet on
(10:10):
the right ponies. Combined with Teresa Corman's inheritance or her
assets from her family, they make the couple super wealthy.
But money is not always going to equate to happiness,
not every time. They're very different people, like she is
a polyglot, she is super into world travel. She's a philanthropist,
(10:32):
she volunteers everywhere.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
And Small, on the other hand, is a philanderer.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
And a gambler, like you said, a womanizer. He even
I don't know, he's a real pill. Which is interesting
about this case. He had a semi secret chamber built
in the Grand Opera House and it was for his
tryst with chorus girls. This is the kind of guy
that we're talking about in our early days of Hollywood episode.
(11:01):
This guy would literally have young women who wanted to
work with him and he would invite them to that
secret room for an interview.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
Casting couch types stuff.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Cool. It's interesting because his wife was such a you know,
lover of culture and you know, the finer things in life,
and like you said, very well traveled, and he seemed
to be very much a part of culture and importing
it to Canada. And it would seem like, I mean,
I didn't know the guy, but that he was more
concerned about the financial side of it than he was
you know, the beauty of the arts.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, it is weird. According to some of the sources,
we found that secret room there in the Opera House
for the tryst chamber or whatever we want to call it.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
It is.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
It isn't found at least according to some sources until
the investigation begins that we're going to explain to you
or we're going to talk about. But others it's like rumors, right,
that are just circulating around the office basically, and the
various offices of all of these opera houses and places
of performance. But the guy is definitely viewed. It would
(12:09):
seem ken according to some of the information that comes
out during the era of yellow journalism, that this guy
is a bit of a scoundrel.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Yeah again, a pill. It is an open secret, right,
It's something that his wife seems to be very much
aware of. Now. The small family, Teresa and Ambrosewiming, they
live in opulence. They have a very nice est state,
but they sleep in separate rooms and they appear to
only grow further apart as small pursues, you know, this gambling,
(12:42):
this philandering and success as an entertainment mogul. Eventually he
runs what we could rightly call an empire of thirty
four theaters half or outside of Ontario. So he's expanding.
Any star performer who wants to wants to stroll the
boards at his stage. No matter how popular they are.
(13:06):
This control of the market means they have to in
some way deal with Ambrose small and Small has a reputation,
he does it. He's not just ruthless and unscrupulous, which
happens a lot with moguls. He seems to take sadistic
joy in screwing people over. We got to talk about
the business contract thing.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
Yeah, I mean it's funny you mentioned the whole Golden
Age of Hollywood episode that we did in terms of
the casting couch. But his iron fisted grasp over this
market and also perhaps sadistic bent also has a lot
in common with the studio system of those days that
we talk about in the episode. So everyone thought the
Small wasn't just a scoundrel, as you mentioned, Ben, they
also knew that he took great pleasure and pride in
(13:49):
putting one over on just about anybody. He planted business
contracts with little kind of hidden clauses that he called jokers,
that essentially were ways of kind of hiding in plain
sight things that would benefit him and not benefit the
person signing the contract. He was also suspected of using
(14:11):
his influence to actually fix some of these horse races, yeah,
which was totally possible, just to be clear.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
And also yeah, people called him at chiseler, which was
a big insult at the time. They called him at cheapskate.
They they did not like him. It reminds me of
that movie. It is an interesting comparison. It reminds me
of that film based on the real life event I
want to see. It was a small town somewhere in
Texas where there was a known bully who eventually got
(14:41):
killed and everybody knew who killed him but refused to
go to the police.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
Yep, movie is called Bully.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Oh it's a bully, ok. Larry Clark.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
Yeah, it's a gnarly film, not for the faint of heart.
It's it's pretty mean spirited.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Stumbled it to the answer. Yeah, this guy was unpopular.
A lot of people hated him. There's something mentioned. I
believe this isn't the Canadian encyclopedia. It's repeated in several
different places about a quote from a journalist in Toronto
at the time named Hector charles Worth. Hector Charlesworth knows
small personally, and in nineteen twenty eight, after the events
(15:18):
that we're about to really explore, here the stuff they
don't want, you know. Hector comes out with a book
called More Candid Chronicles and he says, if I heard once,
I heard a score of times the ominous words. Somebody
will get to Amby someday.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
They called him Amby as a nickname for Ambrose. I
don't know if he liked the nickname Amby. Even his
longtime assistants did not care for him. Guy named John
Dody Jack to his friends, worked for this guy for years,
and he also seemed to hate the dude, which will
be important later.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So let's talk about movie theaters. These are performance arts theaters,
many of the ones that Small has taken over and
is now running, and he has such control over them.
As we stated before, it's about the players, the actual
human beings that are going to get on stage. I
assume also it's the players who are going to be
underneath the stage, maybe the musicians. Right, He probably is
(16:16):
exerting control over everybody that is going to take part
in any kind of performance in these venues. And we're
talking thirty four or more of them as well, all
across Toronto in different parts of Canada. In eighteen ninety six,
the First movie theater shows up in Toronto. Now that
is a while ago, right, If if we're following through
(16:37):
the timeline here, which we're in, I guess we're in
what the nineteen teens at this point something like that.
Around this time, the concept of movie theaters is a
threat to his business and his way of life, and
it's kind of been looming in the background. But it's
(16:57):
been this technology that has been advancing pretty quickly and
growing a lot, especially to the south. Right in the
United States, movie theaters are becoming the thing, and as
they are now proliferating across Canada. Small things. Maybe there's
something else I need to do here, Maybe there's a
pivot I can make to either cash out or change
(17:22):
my wealth, change the way I make my wealth.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
Yeah. Yeah. To be clear, we don't have a sense
that this guy was necessarily a creative participant in the
entertainment industry. Like he was not writing his own plays, right,
he was not doing a Kevin Costner thing where he
directs and stars and stuff. He is about the money.
So whatever can accelerate his personal wealth is what he
(17:48):
will look into. The rise of motion pictures sends live
theater into decline, and so it comes to pass. In
nineteen nineteen, Small decides to exit the business. He's going
to sell out. You know, this is like if you
run AMC and you decide to sell AMC. And so
he says, I'm going to sell my theater Empire to
(18:12):
a competing force, trans Canada Theaters Limited over in Montreal.
And he says, I got to get the right price, though,
I got to get my big So he sells. In
nineteen nineteen, he strikes a deal to sell off his
entire business for one point the US equivalent of one
point seven million dollars one million dollars up front, the
(18:34):
other seven hundred thousand in installments over time. If we
want to pull a ridiculous history card and do a
little inflation calculator, that is thirty million, eight hundred and
twenty four thousand, nine hundred and thirty dollars and sixty
four cents in twenty twenty four money.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
Oof, my goodness, that is a lot of cash. Then
on the first of December nineteen nineteen, at the law
offices of Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt in the Dominion Bank
building on King Street, Small, Theresa and their attorney E. W. M.
Flock met Trans Canada Theaters representative William Shaughnessy. It's a
(19:14):
great theater man name to sign over those theaters. They
got a check for a million dollars. The check was
deposited at that bank Dominion the next morning, perhaps by
Small but also possibly by Teresa. Then on December twod
he vanished.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
So what happened? We'll dive into it after a word
from our sponsor, here's river did's increase to this day?
No one knows, at least by which we mean, no
one has an official solution to the case. Again, as
(19:55):
I stated earlier, there are a lot of opinions right.
There are things that initial investigators were convinced would solve
the case. There are things that later authors and researchers
are convinced they have discovered. We want to be fair
to all of them. But you'll see what we mean
when we delve into the theories. So maybe maybe we
(20:15):
step it back forensically into the day of the disappearance
December second, nineteen nineteen. Now no one is one hundred
percent sure of the exact timeline here, and honestly that's
typical for cases of this nature. We know that after
making this sale after getting the initial million dollars just
(20:35):
crazy money. Ambrose small, however distant he and his spouse
may have been. He made some purchases, ostensibly for her,
some kind of celebratory gifts. He bought her jewelry, a
fur coat, a Cadillac that's pretty nuts. And then he
had lunch with the guy who mentioned earlier in Noel Flock,
and with his wife Teresa, and he walked Esa to
(20:59):
a nearby orphan because she regularly volunteered at this orphanage.
And then he went back to his office with his
buddy Flock. They were having a meeting and they planned
to get out around five point thirty, at which point
they would maybe go and meet up for dinner. Flock
(21:19):
had a train to catch to London. Side note for
US Yankees in the crowd, that's London, Ontario. If anybody's wondering, WHOA,
that's amazing a train from Canada to London. We thought
so too, but it's not. So we know then that
Flock is gone. He's off to London, Ontario, and his
(21:42):
train leaves at six pm, so he leaves at five
point thirty, which makes him the last person that we
can confirm on record saw Ambrose small. After that, the
trail runs cold, or the trail is actually cold, but
no one knows about it for two weeks. His own
(22:03):
family does not report him missing until two weeks have passed.
It's not till December sixteenth, And I got to ask you, guys,
what's the implication there? Does his wife think he's just
off with a mistress. Maybe do a lot of associates
just say, hey, he made it, you know, he got
the golden goose. He's kicking back as a newly minted millionaire.
(22:25):
Or did the people who not like him, were they
just happy not to hear from him.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
It's one of two things. Either his wife was aware
that he does this kind of thing, especially when he's
got a windfall, goes and spends some of it and
spends his time with other women, if not his mistress,
because he did have one longtime mistress that his wife
was aware of, unfortunately, because she had found some letters
(22:50):
and some other things from that specific person. But she
knew he spent his time with other women, and she
knew that he liked to gamble and he liked to
be away, So maybe she just thought he was out
of town doing his thing, and she was either embarrassed
about that or has just gotten so used to that
that that's just what she deals with, right right.
Speaker 4 (23:08):
I think she was even aware of his casting couch situation. Yes,
whether it was completely against her will or whether they
had some sort of understanding or whatever, I think is
maybe not fully clear. But she was aware of his
patterns and didn't report him missing to the police because
just figured he was out catting around.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Or or she specifically didn't talk about him and his
disappearance for two weeks because stuff had to get done, okay.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
Which is yeah, like as always saying earlier, there are
a lot of places there, there are a lot of
possibilities that might not involve her as a culprit, right,
we have to remember this, Ley's been through a pretty
tough marriage. I do think it's worth noting that when
investigators do ask her when the family goes public on
sixteenth of December nineteen nineteen, investigators do ask Teresa Small
(24:05):
about this, and she says she had not reported his
disappearance because she wanted to avoid a scandal. She had
this specific statement that is in the papers of the time.
It's quoted in every source pretty much. She says, I
believe my Ambi is in the hands of a designing
woman somewhere and will come back. And this just a
(24:26):
side note for us here in the US. This finally
explains to me the double meaning, the double entendre of
that sitcom from back in the day designing women, because
they were a crew of interior designers or.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
But they were also you know, the amorous Yes, but
that's just as I was saying earlier, I think this
is potentially a statement you would say if you're trying
to cover your tracks because maybe you did something wrong.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
I'm just saying, and we're taking people at their word,
that's all. That's all I was saying.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, And I'm just saying that these are different possibilities,
man like, like there's no proof, there's no smoking gun.
Maybe she was waiting for a two week time window.
But the disappearance does go public. And when it goes public,
what does what does Teresa Small do? She offers a reward.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
Yes, five hundred dollars I believe, which at the time
would have been no small reward. I guess we better
inflation calculator that too. While we're at it.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
Oh, yes, sir, that is going to five hundred dollars
US equivalency in nineteen nineteen, Well would be nine thousand,
sixty six dollars and sixteen cents in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
Well, she should have gone for an even five oh
four to make it an even ten grand and twenty
twenty four numbers. You know what was she thinking? No,
but this was a big deal. This was the kind
of money that would get things done. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Yeah, And this is not for returning him, right, this
is information on his whereabouts. In addition to the five
hundred dollars reward. I believe she has missing persons flyers
distributed across Canada and across the United States. And the
investigators welcome this. They need the help. Honestly, they're flummoxed.
Everything they're looking at for this guy, at least again,
(26:17):
as you were saying, according to what the investigators say,
according to their word, is a dead end. He has
im packed any suitcases, by which they mean none of
the suitcases he previously possessed are missing. It doesn't seem
like he pulled that million dollars out of the bank.
There's no track record or no trail, I should say
(26:38):
of him using a check to pay for a train
ticket or to get a hotel somewhere. They go to
the usual spots he hangs out at, including we can
only imagine some of his gambling connections. He's not there.
No one there is speaking to the police. And I guess,
to be fair, the police burst into a gambling hall
(27:02):
or a den of iniquity, people aren't going to say, oh, yeah, yeah,
that guy was here. They're just not going to talk
to the authorities in general.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Well, especially if it's the big spender of that establishment. Right,
if it's one of the bosses that hangs out of
that establishment, you're never going to speak a word about
that person and what they're doing.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
It's just bad business.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Yeah, you got to reward your loyal customers, right, they do.
To that note about the longtime mistress, we know of,
authorities reach out to Clara Smith. Clara Smith is living
in Minneapolis in nineteen nineteen, and she says, look, I
don't know what happened to Aby. I'm over here in Minneapolis,
(27:46):
and they could prove that she was there, so maybe
did they surveil her, right, maybe he was hiding out
or something like that. That's a valid question at this point, Well.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
This dude is a serious public figure in this scene
at this point, correct. I mean he is a player,
so he's known, and this would not have gone unnoticed.
This was a pretty big news item.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, yeah, the big thing to notice here in this story.
Nothing is missing besides the man. It's not as though
the money was taken out, right. He wasn't walking around
with a million dollars. He wasn't even walking around with
a couple hundred thousand dollars. He was just gone.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Vanish, as if into thin air. Look, this is to
the point you were making. This is such a public figure.
This is kind of like Harvey Weinstein going missing. Even
though his I'm going to say it, doubtlessly he coerced
some women, right, even though that may not be front
of mind for the public sphere or the press at
(28:53):
the time. It's unescapable or inescapable reality. All sorts of
rumors pop up. Eventually, Teresa Small increases the reward for
information to fifty thousand dollars if found alive. Fifteen thousand
just for the body of Ambrose Small. The story goes global.
This guy's the Elvis Presley of his time, or the
(29:15):
Bigfoot if you like. There are all sorts of people
claiming that they have seen him. People were claiming they
were using their psychic powers or pseudo scientific powers to
be the last hope to find this guy, and none
of these things worked. Do we want to talk about
Arthur Conan Doyle.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
He shows up in this Oh yes, mister Sherlock Holmes himself.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Yeah, that's just a side note. You can read more
about it. But he's reporters in again this muckraking era
of newspapers. They reach out to other celebrities. This becomes
a celebrity story and they say, hey, will you help
the Canadian police find Ambrose small.
Speaker 4 (29:56):
Right, And that included a Viennese criminologist by the name
of mac Similian A. Langsner. He had a method that
I'm with pat or trademarked or whatever, but that's a
pretty cool name. It's called the thought wave system that
he believed could help locate this person. It sounds like
a bit of quackery to me. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
The thought wave system, whatever the efficacy may be, did
not work in this regard. And, as often happens in
a case of this magnitude, multiple people from across Canada
and the US and later the world started claiming to
have seen Small And some of these were claims made
in good faith for sure, some were made for attention,
(30:38):
all were apparently incorrect. There were also people claiming that
they were in fact Ambro Small. They were coming forward.
It maybe was I don't know, maybe it was all
the money on the line. What do you guys think
had to be I mean.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
Like I said that five hundred bucks and you know
it was enough to get stuff done. What I'm saying
is like this would have been a massive motivator, all
of these top people showing up trying to get on
the publicity wagon. It just seems like if something was
going to be found, that there was something out there
at clue of any kind, that it would have turned up. Well.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Yeah, and once it became fifty thousand dollars going on,
that's like lobbery.
Speaker 4 (31:12):
And that five hundred turning into fifty thousand, five hundred
already being a mega respectable reward. You would think that
if there was something out there to be found, with
all of these top people coming in to jump on
the publicity wagon, it was going to be found.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Yeah, there were so many false claims, including people who
said I am Ambrose small, very like I am Spartacus.
They eventually the Attorney General keeps a folder for all
these reports they don't take seriously, and they called it
letters from cranks, Comma, et cetera. This search is initially, yes,
(31:45):
aided by newspapers, but I think we can make a
strong argument it's only partially aided by newspapers. In this
mad rush to grab headlines to grab attention, just like
a precedent of social media today, there were a lot
of unscrupulous public They were super happy to print any
and all outrageous claims because if you got the right headline,
(32:06):
you sold the paper and they bought that instead of
you know, your competitor's news outfit. So newspaper readers also
got Can we talk about the cryptogram? I'm still so
confused about this. How would we pronounce this? Would it
be one p eb eighty six.
Speaker 4 (32:21):
And sounds like an aim handle?
Speaker 2 (32:24):
You got no idea?
Speaker 3 (32:26):
This is I can't remember if this mentioned in every source,
but in the Toronto Star if you if you look
at their reporting of this, apparently there was this cryptogram
that was released to newspaper readers and people were invited
to analyze it, and so a bunch of people tried
to crack the cipher and the going public opinion was
(32:50):
that this meant Ambrose Small was alive, but he was
trapped in a limehouse kill there a place called Brampton Junction,
and he was suffocating as you read this paper to.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
The cryptogram was just something that was sent by some
kind of crank that I was just trying to get
some attention.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
There's a book that I'm hoping to read by Katie Dobbs,
who wrote for the Toronto Star. It will hopefully have
more about the cryptogram, but we're honestly going to have
to dig into that.
Speaker 4 (33:22):
One.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Book's called The Missing Millionaire, The True Story of Ambrose Small.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
Yeah, and in full disclosure. I don't think any of
us have read that in full yet.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Okay, not yet.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
So this cryptogram spelled spelled like it sounds, it leads
nowhere and this is where we get to. I don't
know if we want to talk about some of the
weird alleged sightings. One that stands out is the work
of a private detective named John J. Brothy And pardon
my cat there, everybody say hey to doctor.
Speaker 4 (33:54):
Vankmin Hey, doctor V. Looking good.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
So this guy brought He says, Look, I found Small
and I found him doing poorly as they would say
at the time. This is nineteen twenty one. He says,
this guy, the real Ambrose Small, was a victim of
a hit and run in Des Moines, Iowa. And he
was dropped off by the person who had hit him.
(34:19):
So someone hit this guy in the road and then
they dropped him off and left. And this PI says
Small or the guy he believes as small as a
gunshot wound in his neck. He's got a crazy concussion
and both his legs have been amputated.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Yeah, like, what could that have been from? Was he
in war? Did he hop a train incorrectly?
Speaker 4 (34:46):
Yes, I've never heard that put quite like that, Matt,
I love it.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
And apparently this guy is non responsive, at least nonverbal
for three weeks, so the better part of a month.
And when he finds speaks up, he says, I am
John Dowdy. I came here from Obaha. That is all
I remember. Oh yeah, we remember though the name John
(35:12):
Dowdy or Jack to his friends, the longtime assistant slash
secretary of Ambrose.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
Small oh, James, right, yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
James, that's correct. Sorry, I just called him Jack because
we're friends.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
Of course, so we should hold onto this. Put a
pin in this fact for a little later, and we'll
see as well why this couldn't possibly have been the truth.
So moving forward in the timeline, the private investigator claimed
he showed this this man very unfortunate case, a photograph
of Ambrose Small, and the man allegedly replied, yes, that
(35:47):
is me.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Okay, we'll switch of the story.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
There's like a Memento man type situation, you know.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Yeah, sorry, I'm editorializing when I'm pointing that out. The
guy does get taken into custody in Des Moines, we
know that for sure, but we also know from that
point the trail falls cold. All we can assume is
that this very troubled individual was not in fact the
missing theater Agne. Because there's no other real reporting about them,
(36:15):
and despite all of this kerfuffle, this bruhaha, no one
can find the actual Ambrose Small. None of the people
claiming to be Ambrose Small turned out to be Ambrose Prime. Further,
no one can find a solid lead or a clue
that goes anywhere. And because there are no solid leads
because there are no solid clues. There are these wild rumors, theories, speculation,
(36:39):
these people. As I mentioned, I think I keep mentioning
it too much, but I just can't imagine. I have
a difficult time imagining deciding to go to the media
or to police and saying that you are the missing person.
It reminds me a little bit of those unscrupulos as
(37:00):
crazy scams where people would say they were a missing
kid would be gone for years. You know. Also, maybe
there's mental instability involved, and maybe some people just begin
to believe that they are, in fact Ambrose Small. That's
the magnitude of this case.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
Well, Ambrose is still missing, but the question remains, was
there foul play? We'll return after a word from our
sponsor and explore that very thought.
Speaker 4 (37:32):
And we're back. So why don't we start by jumping
into some theories and a handful of suspects. Theory number
one we've alluded to quite a few times already, and
certainly seems credible that Small ran off with one of
his many lady friends paramoors. Unfortunately, each lead in that
(37:53):
particular genre turned out to not hold water. If he
did leave with one of his ladies was someone completely
unknown or unsuspected to police. In addition to Small's friends,
quote unquote, his circle of associates, let's call them.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Yeah, I'm calling circle of associates because I'm not sure
if they would consider each other friends, you know what
I mean, based on the infamy of his business dealings.
The second theory is murder by employee, the guy we've
mentioned before, James Jack Doty, who I'm mistakenly called John
(38:30):
a second ago, but we introduced him at the top.
He was their primary suspect. He's the first person they
look at because Dottie has worked with Small for years,
and Dottie is often complaining to his friends, because he
does have friends. He's complaining about his salary. He says,
my salary is let me put it in an extremely
diplomatic way. He tells people his salary is insufficient. And
(38:53):
he makes something like I want to say, forty bucks
a week, forty three something like that.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Well, yeah, and he does a lot of work, a
guy who makes a lot of money, and he likely
watches his boss do all kinds of unscrupulous things, knowing
that he's making money in other ways. And he still
gets paid that much.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Yeah, and he's feeling like a dog's body, which is
just a fancy word for pretty much a servant or
a man of all needs, you know, like a valet,
a secretary. He's a fixer, and he feels unappreciated, and
you know, everybody feels unappreciated at some point. But this
went on for years for this guy. And initially the police,
(39:33):
well they can't get Jack's opinion because Jack disappears pretty
much right after Ambrose is gone.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Uh oh, that seems suspicious.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Yeah, not the best thing to do. Really.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Well, Well, he just went on vacation, just like Ambrose.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
Right, sure, why not? And when he went on vacation,
he took a lot more money than Ambrose appeared to take,
because Dowdy made off with the equivalent of one hundred
thousand to one hundred and five thousand US dollars worth
of victory bonds from the Ambrose small safety deposit over
at Dominion Bank, which you mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Nor is this World War One victory bonds?
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Stealing victory bonds? That feels I mean, I guess it
was a different time, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Now, Hold on, guys, correct me if I'm wrong here.
Those victory bonds. Let's say Daughtry. It's such a weird
doug h t Y Dotty.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Don't you keep saying Dotty or dough Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Sorry, there's another person in the story like Doughty or
it's very close and my brain keeps like smashing them together.
But this guy takes these victory bonds, right, Those bonds
have to mature before you can cash them out, right,
or maybe you can cash them out. They're just not
worth what they would be.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
They haven't matured.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, so I guess you would just hold on to
them and is a long game.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Or maybe he thought it was different from just taking cash.
Or maybe he opened the safety deposit box because he
did have access to it and just took what he found.
That might be a maybe more opportunistic. But this is
our second disappearance, and in the wake of the second disappearance,
investigators learn more troubling stuff about Jack. According to what
(41:26):
are loosely called informants, Jack had multiple times spoken of
what it would be like if he kidnapped or murdered
Ambrose small Now where they just mad at each other
after a business dealing. Was he, you know, rubbed raw
about something and said I wish I could just you know,
strangle this guy or something, or did he have an
(41:47):
actual plan? Either way, it doesn't look great. He's a
person of interest. You have to talk to him, definitely.
He's a guy you need to reach out and touch exactly,
and anyone could get touched, right. We know that's for
sure in this case. Because the law does catch up
to Jack. He's not in London, Ontario, he's not in Toronto.
(42:09):
He is arrested in Oregon on charges of theft and
conspiracy to kidnap Small, but not on murder, just to you.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Know, hang on to him for a while, as he
had said earlier, which again, don't say that stuff out loud, please.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
The kidnapping charges were eventually dropped because of lack of evidence,
and he wasn't able to be charged with the murder
because no one had confirmed Small's death in the first place.
He was still simply missing.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
Yeah, and he went away for six years. I want
to say he was extradited to Canada. Again, a crime solved.
That's a good thing, the theft of the bonds. But
this does not solve the disappearance. And police become convinced
over the course of their investigation that Jack could not
have done this. The Jack is not the prime mover
(43:03):
of Ambrose Small's disappearance, which leads us to the third theory.
Sometimes it's the one's closest to you who betray you. Right.
What if his family did it? What about his wife? Right?
And they're what seems to be, by many accounts, an
unhappy marriage. Ambrose Small has sisters, Gertrude and Florence. They
(43:27):
are the initial proponents who say, we think our sister
in law pay to have our brother killed.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
It's kind of whoa whoa, I.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
Mean awkward Thanksgiving labor for sure.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah, well, that's one of the primary things in any investigation.
Who benefits from this person no longer being here or
from this person being dead? Right? The primary beneficiary in
this situation would be the spouse because all of that
money just got deposited into their accounts, right, A million
(44:05):
dollar check got deposited and then he goes missing immediately afterwards.
That's it's just suspicious. And if this person, this other
person Jack high tailed it with a bunch of money
as well that was also his, that's weird. It does
make you wonder if it wasn't some kind of maybe
a combo meal.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
Right, Yeah, because Jack doubtlessly knew Teresa. Right, Yeah, that's
inescapable and it's proven. Yeah, Gertrude and Florence are convinced that,
or they are convinced enough. They clearly seem to believe
this enough that they pony up some of their own
funds and they hire a private detective named Patrick Sullivan.
(44:49):
Patrick Sullivan is solid at his detective work, we could argue,
but he's even better at getting press. He loves pr
a good headline. He does not find any trace of
Ambrose Small that we know of. But along the way,
he's talking to every reporter that he can put get
(45:10):
on the horn, you know, everybody he can button a
hole into talking about this, and he's publishing in these tabloids,
in these what we call yellow journalist rags, where he's
accusing multiple people. Sometimes he's saying, well, it might be
the Catholic church who Adam kidnapped because they hate theater
(45:32):
or whatever, or the reason the police can't find this
guy is because the police killed him and they're pretending
to look for him and now they're covering it up.
So this is the kind of stuff you see in
you know, a lot of talk shows or different even
podcasts today, that kind of speculation. None of it led anywhere, Oh.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Yeah, but the way he talked about it, he ended
up in a bunch of lawsuits himself, a bunch of libel,
obscenities stuff that he trouble for it, because again, that
type of writing in papers was so common, but the
law was catching up on. This is what happens when
you say clearly false things in newspapers about public folks
or the Catholic church.
Speaker 3 (46:14):
Right right, which was a big deal then and still
is a big deal today. And it's similar to the
earlier investigation of the assistant. The police eventually say, all right,
Teresa's small didn't have it in her character right to
murder her husband herself, but we are still concerned she
(46:34):
may have hired some unseemly gents to do the.
Speaker 4 (46:37):
Deed, which certainly seems in line with her station, you know,
I mean, being a moneyed and cultured person certainly wouldn't
be the one to wield the knife herself. And probably,
you know, even if she didn't know unscrupulous characters directly,
there's a guy for that, you know, there's people around.
If you're powerful and have enough money to spend, you
(46:58):
can find someone who will help you, the right people
to do the job.
Speaker 3 (47:02):
You'll know someone who knows someone. Yes, yeah, and there.
This is a serious thing. There's a valid line of questioning. Still,
after investigation, law enforcement says, we don't think it's her.
She is never convicted of any crime related to the
disappearance of Ambrose Small, which leads us to our fourth theory,
(47:27):
back to the racetrack.
Speaker 4 (47:28):
That's right, what if Small, who was famously a philandering
pill and a degenerate gambler, And finally, you know made
enemies are the wrong people. Let's not forget that newspaper
writer quote was saying, one day someone's gonna get amby,
whether it be a business partner, someone he had wronged financially.
More likely, though, once you get into the unseemly world
(47:48):
of professional betting and bookmaking, that's when people will actually
come for you, and maybe you know, decap you to start,
give you a little bit of time, but then if
you don't pay its curtains.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
I've seen peaky blinders world, just like.
Speaker 3 (48:03):
Wearing the hat. Now we're big fans.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Exactly, but The whole point is like that it could
be anybody in that world, because we already stated at
the top there he was using his wealth and influence
in that world to fix racing. So if somebody, the
wrong person loses enough money, uh, in one of those scenarios,
you could have a real problem on your hands. And
if you make enemies of the wrong folks in that
(48:28):
realm uh. We've mentioned before how expensive it is to
keep horses and to train horses to race like that
and to you know, be in that world. It is expensive.
Speaker 4 (48:38):
Not to mention the fact that he was capable of
fixing these races, which I don't even fully then you
mentioned is doable. I guess it would have to do
with injuring a horse or something, or having a jockey
that was, you know, on your payroll who perhaps you
know hold back is that the idea.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
Get that horse through the jockey.
Speaker 4 (48:55):
That makes it a little more sense. But what if
he fixed the wrong race and you know it, it
deprived somebody of some serious money, Even if it wasn't
him owing money, you know that that could have happened
as well.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Or what if you just what if you just betrayed
somebody else in the entertainment business, and I'm also very powerful.
These things could happen. The reason we include this speculation
with no hard proof is because it is possible. It's
it's very possible. We know that similar situations have occurred
(49:28):
in the past. So could he have could he have
just pushed the envelope too far and gone off the
deep end, like literally murdered and tossed away in a
ravine somewhere for gambling debts, Or could someone have thought,
you know, this guy screwed me over so much, I'm
not going to let him have a happy ending with
(49:48):
his one point seven million dollars, right, And you know then,
as now, law enforcement does often have a very difficult
time investigating the real powerful people. And the really powerful
people aren't the ones cavorting on stage, right, The really
powerful people are the ones who owned the stage. Or
(50:09):
what's that old Chris Rock quote about rich versus wealthy,
Like the star athlete and your favorite sports team is rich,
but the guy who signs his checks is wealthy. So
the idea then would be that maybe law enforcement got stonewalls.
You know, maybe there was some kind of some kind
(50:31):
of cover up, some kind of conspiracy from the wrong
person in the world of gambling or organized crime, or
even the world of entertainment. But there's the fifth theory,
which may be a little happier, maybe a little Shawshank
redemption esque. What a small squirreled away another nest egg
of money that no one knew about, and he skipped down,
(50:53):
you know what I mean, It was easier to skip
town back then. We just shave your mustache or whatever.
Speaker 4 (50:58):
I wanted a fresh star. He was gonna live a
new life where he wasn't a total jerk. Doubtful.
Speaker 3 (51:03):
Maybe people can turn over a new leaf. I mean
that one's possible, but I don't know if it fits
what we know about his psychological profile. It's a guy
who loves money, right, loves money. What would compel you
to willingly leave a million dollars and the chance of
another seven hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Behind unless he had more money, like black market money
squirreled away somewhere else. I mean, that's really the only reason, right,
And maybe he would feel okay about leaving his wife
that large sum of money that's going to continue. There's
another well, at the time, the equivalent of seven hundred
thousand dollars that would be doled out to her over
(51:45):
the course of however, many years right to that deal.
So my wife is all set. Now I've got all
this other money that's way more actually, and I'm going
to go do my thing. I can imagine that. Yeah, ye.
Speaker 3 (51:57):
Possibly. The think is none of these theories have been
conclusively proven even now in twenty Oh my gosh, you guys,
I did it. I put twenty twenty four instead of
twenty twenty five.
Speaker 4 (52:09):
Yeah, it's okay, it happens.
Speaker 3 (52:11):
Has that happened to you guys? Yet?
Speaker 4 (52:13):
Oh? Yeah, for sure, there wasn't. The Supreme Court in all,
the Supreme Court of Ontario at least.
Speaker 3 (52:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nineteen twenty three, time passes, they say, okay,
for legal purposes, we're gonna have to say it. We're
going to call it he is dead, which means that
we will enact his will as it stands on record,
and the will leaves most of his estate to his wife,
(52:39):
Teresa Small. Fast forward to nineteen thirty five. Again, never
convicted of anything, she passes away.
Speaker 4 (52:46):
After the estate was rated for all those back taxes
that were owed. Most of the remaining funds went to
various Catholic charities. The Toronto Police, however, officially closed the
small case in nineteen sixty, almost half a century after
the initial disappearance.
Speaker 3 (53:05):
Yeah, that's an important point to note, right, because as
student listeners, we'll all hear that weird discrepancy. Nineteen twenty
three declared dead, nineteen sixty, case closed. That's a long
time window.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
Isn't it weird to have the case closed and still
not have an answer. That's a little weird. Yeah, case
is still open.
Speaker 4 (53:26):
I didn't think you're supposed to close cases unless you
found out you've done it.
Speaker 3 (53:30):
You just call them cold, right, But they closed it,
and as a result, people have still been speculating about
this over time. In fact, there have been calls for reinvestigations,
new investigations. I mean, we know there was a second
investigation in nineteen thirty six that also went nowhere. That
was part of the impetus to declare the case closed
(53:51):
in nineteen sixty. You can see countless again magazine articles,
some great books. Even there was a play in twenty
twenty two that I don't think any of us have seen,
but I'm very curious to see what it what it entails.
Or what conclusions it draws. There is one thing though,
There's one piece we have to mention, right, it's the
(54:13):
letter from Reuter's not the news organization from Ruder.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
Yeah, maybe it is Reuter. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (54:20):
I like saying Reuter. Just yeah, yeah, it makes a joke,
it makes sense.
Speaker 2 (54:24):
But it also looks like it looks like, yeah, this
is weird. This is a letter that allegedly came through
that had had some information in it. It was allegedly
pinned by the wife, right by Teresa, allegedly, and it
(54:45):
was basically a deathbed confession.
Speaker 4 (54:49):
Yeah. I'll read a little bit of it if I could.
Poor Ambrose was killed on December second, nineteen nineteen. And
I know that part of his body, the trunk, was
buried in the Rosedale Ravine dump and other parts of
the body were burned in the Grand Opera House furnace.
This is very specific.
Speaker 2 (55:08):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (55:10):
It continues, You will be surprised, my dear Florence.
Speaker 2 (55:13):
And Gertrude, that the sisters, right.
Speaker 3 (55:16):
The sisters of Ambrose Small. You will be surprised, my
dear Florence and Gertrude, to learn that I am more
responsible for your brother's death, God forgive me, Reuter Comma
the news agency. No, that last part, that last Comma
part is not true, but the but I thought it
was worth the joke. So this comes out after Teresa's
small passes away, and this is coming from Ambrose's small sister, Florence,
(55:41):
the person at least the way they identify in the letter,
the way it's signed is just again Reuter.
Speaker 2 (55:49):
Yeah, it's very weird. And in the the concept here
is that after Teresa is dead, this letter would prove
that Teresa had something to do with the death of
a Ambrose, or at least was involved in some way,
so that the sisters now should be fully in control
or be the beneficiaries of other monies that were out there.
(56:10):
Even though most of the money in the fortune there,
as we said before, was given away to Catholic charities
and was tied up in legal stuff. The thought was
that the sisters came up with this idea and forged
a letter they would say that kind of thing. That's
the speculation, the speculation about it, guys. I want to
go back to the combo meal. What if, please, what
(56:33):
if the secretary who is there suffering through every day
with Ambrose right as he states, you know, I can't
believe I'm having to do all this stuff for so
little money. For this guy's doing all this crap. I
don't like him at all, but I need this job.
I got to do this check Dowdy. Then you got
the wife who is living at the house. Oh my gosh,
I can't believe I'm living with this guy. I know
(56:54):
we have this business partnership, you know, marriage thing going on,
but I know all the stuff he's doing and the
way he treats me and all this other stuff. Don't
you think those two wouldluded some kind of trauma bond
that we mentioned before in other episodes. Don't you think
maybe there's something in there where the two of them
conspire to, uh, you know, take the money basically after
(57:16):
that huge windfall.
Speaker 4 (57:17):
I don't know, Matt, I think that's a pretty pretty
solid alternative theory.
Speaker 2 (57:20):
Well, when what what is the secretary doing when he's
in his Heidi hole that he made, you know, for
his trysts or whatever. Maybe he's at the house with
Teresa just and again that's all complete utter bs speculation
on my part, but I can just imagine the two
of them being closer than soult.
Speaker 3 (57:42):
Yeah, I'll play these reindeer games further. What if like,
what if you say, Okay, for a big enough payoff,
I'll sacrifice six years of my life in the pen.
You know people have cracked that deal before.
Speaker 4 (57:53):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (57:53):
Well, and he was just trying to get away to
the US. He was in Oregon.
Speaker 3 (57:57):
But like, I don't know, Yeah, I'm saying, but that
that could explain to the speculation. That could explain why
he didn't squeal because he thought he would be made
whole toward the end of Uh, toward the end of
the conspiracy. Uh. These these are great questions. And yes, folks,
we know law enforcement at the time was asking these
(58:18):
questions as well. But whatever they found, they did not
go forward with it, right, They did not release an
official conclusion. And that leads us to ask the question
we asked at the beginning, what happened to Ambrose Small?
There are tons of people who, for one reason or another,
are certain they've cracked the case. But despite all the
investigations over over decades, decades, decades, no one has universally
(58:43):
agreed on anything.
Speaker 4 (58:45):
Well, do we do we feel like this deathbed confession
is sincere or Is this just another bit of a
kind of smoke.
Speaker 3 (58:53):
That's a great question, and it's it's tough. You know,
at some point it's almost like a rorshack because they
didn't have the same forensic methods available. Now, you know,
like if this came out this we're twenty or post
two thousand case, people will be checking DNA, right, that's
(59:14):
the reality of it. It reminds me of our earlier conversation
we had about DNA found on the belongings of a
victim of Jack the Ripper. Right now we ask about
chain of custody. Was this kept sacra saying that might interfere?
We know that nothing yet has led us closer to
figuring out the truth, unless that is, you have a lead,
(59:36):
fellow conspiracy realist. If so, what a coincidence, because we
have an email address and a telephone number and ways
to contact us online.
Speaker 4 (59:45):
That's right. You can find us at the handle conspiracy
Stuff where it exists all over the internet. On Facebook,
we have a Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy.
On YouTube, we have video content color for your perusing enjoyment.
And on x FKA, Twitter, on Instagram and TikTok. For
the time being, we are conspiracy stuff show. If you
wish to contact us as individual human beings, you may
(01:00:05):
do so. I am on Instagram at how now Noel
Brown and Bolin How about yourself? Ah?
Speaker 3 (01:00:11):
Yes they do call me ben bullin here A big
thanks to Hidulgo for reaching out. Maybe it was a
U tree. Maybe these were willow bows if you want
to find If you want to find or interact with
me online, any questions, comments, love a limerick or a
picture of corvids at ben Bulan where people use ats, Instagram,
(01:00:31):
you can find me the air. You can also check
out the website Bembolin dot com. Matt, Matt, what's kicking?
What's ticking? What's talking?
Speaker 4 (01:00:38):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
Just want to point out guys. For Monster the Zodiac Killer,
we interviewed this author and historian Peter Vronsky about the
Zodiac case. He is from Canada and specifically has written
a book titled The Disappearance of Ambrose Small case closed.
Huhh And I just didn't even think about that until
(01:01:00):
I stumbled upon his book in research for this episode.
So shout out to Peter Vronsky and check out his socials.
That's vr o n Sky. Yeah. Hey, we also have
a phone number. If you want to call us, our
number is one eight three three st d WYTK. It
is a voicemail system. When you call in, you've got
(01:01:22):
three minutes. Give yourself a cool nickname and let us
know if we can use your name and message on
the air. If you've got more to say than can
fit in that three minute voice fail, maybe some links,
maybe some images? Why not use our email.
Speaker 3 (01:01:32):
We are the entities who read every piece of correspondence
we receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void
writes back, we cannot wait to hear from you overdue
with some uh, with some excellent correspondents. We can't wait
to share with you in an upcoming listener mail. Do
you want to be a part of it? Do we
really write back? There's one way to find out. Step
(01:01:53):
a little further from the light. Join us here in
the dark conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
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Noel Brown
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