Behind the Scenes Minis: Murder and Home Decor

Holly discusses the strange reassurance she finds in examining historical crime stories. Tracy talks about the way Lenormand cartomancy decks differ from tarot.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, we talked about a gruesome
murder this week. Yeah, we had two of those this October.

(00:25):
I don't think we went into it being like, We're
gonna just do murder. Murder. It is, as I said,
I mean, this is one that has stuck with me
and stayed on my mind for several years, and I
don't know, it just felt important for that reason. There
were a few things I wanted to mention that. As
I said during the episode, this is one of those
cases where there is a lot of coverage of it,

(00:49):
so like to Minutia, just day to day long articles
being written about like every single thing the suspects were
doing in custody and the weird things they were saying
contradicting each other. So I was trying to pare it
down because it was going to run really long otherwise.
But I did want to revisit a couple of points
in it, one just in case anyone listening was like, huh,

(01:12):
how'd that work? This was a time when it was
perfectly legal to buy cocaine from a drug store. Yeah.
I was thinking about that that as Yeah. Yeah, it
came up a couple of times, and I was like, yeah,
they were just going to get that from the pharmacy. Yeah,
just could go grab some you know, not even like

(01:32):
there are still medical uses for cocaine. It's not. There's
just like an over the counter situation. Yes, this was
not added to various things, no barrier to purchase. There
another thing I wanted to talk about. There's a detail
that came up in the description of the body that
we didn't really revisit. We sort of mentioned a thing

(01:53):
that might have eased people's minds about it. There is
a mention that the top of her dress is open.
But then the coroner's in quest did not find any
indication of sexual assault, and what most people came to
believe was that Scott Jackson was looking for anything like

(02:14):
a letter, any kind of evidence that would tie him
to the body, and that that was really what he
was after in Yeah, in taking off her corset and
looking under her her dress. Yeah, it, I'll say it
like it. It is possible for a person to be
sexually assaulted and not have a lot of physical evidence

(02:35):
left behind and with the entire crime scene having been
trampled and souvenirs taken and stuff like that before like,
which is a running theme. I thought about that as
as I was reading that part of the outline for
the first time, I remembered one time we talked about
if we had a time machine, we would go back

(02:56):
into we go back in time and like stop people
from ampling all the crime scenes. We'll just go back
in time and introduce the idea of crime scene tape
way it exists. And somebody was like, you wouldn't go
back in time and try to stop the crime from happening,
And I was like, sure, that would be better. But
what what I was thinking of in that moment was like,
how consistently for so long, like we have so many

(03:18):
episodes where we talk about and then the crime scene
was completely trampled and people took away all kinds of
souvenirs from it. So I am I am reluctant to
like one hundred percent get behind any of the physical
evidence part of the coroner's in quest. Yeah, I mean,

(03:39):
I think I felt more comfortable with it because there
were two of them right done. I believe by two
different corners, So I mean, granted, two people can miss
the same stuff, but yeah, I don't know will Wood,
so her second cousin. He is a weird character to
consider in all of this one because some accounts suggest

(04:02):
that he had been kind of sweet on her, but
she was not interested in him before any of this happened. Obviously,
Scott Jackson tries to implicate him as actually having been
the father of her child. And when I said in
the episode, he kind of vanishes from the historical record,
like he definitely vanishes from the Cincinnati and Newport, Kentucky area.

(04:30):
There are in paper some sightings of him in other
places or people that people think are him, because friends
of Scott Jackson and Alonzo Walling actually wanted him to
also be prosecuted for the crime, and even after the executions,
they were still trying to find him. I don't know

(04:52):
that anybody ever did. And here's why there's a point
of diminishing returns when you are looking at old historical
records and papers, because William Wood is not an uncommon name.
So at that point it was like, well, here are
seventeen thousand hits. I'm not sure I have time to

(05:13):
go through all that. Yeah, so that's why we don't.
I don't. I will confess I did not go down
that rabbit hole perhaps one day. Does it seem real
squirrely that he took off right after they were like, um,
we'll charge you with this much lesser crime and kind
of slap on the wrist situation. Yeah, I think that's

(05:34):
super super sticy, but we don't know what happened there.
I also mentioned in the episode that I would explain
why to me there is an odd sort of comfort
is not the right word, but there is an odd
sort of reassurance to me in examining these things. And

(05:56):
here is why I hope I don't sound like a
utter ghoul. I am. I feel like pretty sensitive to
any such things like this happening. But I think there
is always I mean, we've seen it in many historical
accounts of various events going on of all kinds. People

(06:20):
always think their time is the worst time. And so
when we can look back in history and say, no, no,
horrible things were always happening. It is obviously bad that
they have always been happening, but the fact that humans
have continued to endure and do some good things despite

(06:43):
this always having kind of been the condition gives me
an odd sort of like hope, does that sound like
I am just a broken person looking for happiness and goulishness.
I don't know. I just don't I yeah, I don't
think so. I mean I think right, like we always
want to be like it has never been as bad

(07:05):
as it is now. We are dealing with, you know,
modern crime statistics. We get all of that information all
the time. We feel like every day is a danger
and surely that's the case for any living thing, just
because we get a lot more information now, and we
get a lot more information faster now, and in a
lot of ways it is inescapable, and you know, unless

(07:29):
you want to stay totally off the internet, which we
increasingly live in a world where the day to day
necessities of life are conducted on websites. So it's like
real hard to do that. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, it's
a little bit different for me than the kind of

(07:51):
thing that happens. You know, there are lots of psychological
theories and studies about how people watching horror films first
like a release of that natural anxiety that comes with life.
This is a little different because it contextualizes human behavior
as almost a constant. In some ways, that makes it
seem like, well, okay, there have always been horrible people,

(08:14):
there have also always been good people, Like we can
keep trying to make the good stuff more prominent. I know,
it's odd, like I said, oddly reassuring to consider it.
I also am one of those people who is a
little uncomfortable with recent history true crime. Oh sure, I

(08:37):
think we've talked about this before, because you know, those
are often immediately stories that are immediately impacting people connected
to them. Yeah, whereas if you go back, you know,
one hundred and thirty years, there may certainly still be
descendants of those families, but it's not quite as yeah,

(08:58):
fresh a wound. It is perhaps jarring and something that
people live through and live with. Yeah. I there have
definitely been multiple true crime podcasts about like recent crimes
and recent murders whose families, like the families of the victims,
have been like, hey, this actually sucked to have my

(09:21):
loved one's death become popular entertainment. Yeah. So, yeah, it does.
It feels a little different when we're looking at something
that happened more than a century ago. Yeah, Yeah, it's
a little easier. I mean that's the whole reason, right
that criminilia is a historical true crime, right, because we
could talk about those things with a little bit more

(09:41):
levity and a little less uh feeling a little less
voyeuristic because it is not anybody that person was three
hundred years ago. I think we're okay, we're safe anyway,
Sorry that our Halloween episode wasn't jolly well our If
I had done this this month better planning wise, this

(10:04):
would have come earlier and we might have ended on
jack o' lanterns. Well, we have not exactly a bonus
episode of Halloween. But the episode that is coming out
on the Wednesday of the week of this one is
Marianne adelaide Le Normal, So that is some somewhat still

(10:24):
kind of HALLOWEENI like, I had originally thought of it
as an October episode, but it got bumped into November.
So it's kind of like a there's a lot of
French Revolution in it, but not quite as grim as
this one. Yeah, yeah, you'll hear about that episode in
like five more seconds. We talked about Marianne Adelaideal. Oh

(10:55):
I love her, Yet we mostly pronounced it in a
Frenchish way, even though most people I only found one
person who was like a person who works with these
decks who said the deck name in a French way.
Almost universally, everyone just said Le Normand in regards to
like the cardamancy decks and some of those, I watched

(11:17):
a number of videos of people sort of doing readings
and doing tutorials about how to do readings and things
like that, and it just a number of them were like,
if you do Taro, if you read Taro, like a
lot of times I'm paraphrasing, you're sort of interpreting. There
might be sort of a subjective, kind of intuitive quality

(11:38):
to all of it. But the Le Norman cards have
specific meetings, and so they were like, this deck will
be very direct with you, so don't ask it a question.
You don't want a direct answer to you, and you
might not like the answer right, and that will just
be how it is. So I feel like we talked
about this sum in our Tarot episode, like I'm not
a practitioner of any of these things, but I have

(12:02):
used similar things as sort of like an exercise, like
a like a meditation exercise or a meditation tool or
something like that. So I found all of that really interesting.
I will also know we didn't say this in an episode.
Apparently she is a character, or at least someone who
appears in Assassin's Creed Unity that is not one of
the Assassin's Creed games I have played, so I don't

(12:24):
know anything about it. I feel like we could say
that about almost any historical figure at this point. So
many yea, they are jam packed into those games. There
is a brand new Assassin's Creed game that I have
not played at all because I'm still playing Balder Skate three.
I haven't had time to play video games in so long,
and I miss it. Yeah, but when I play, it's
usually like Star Wars Lego, So yes, yeah, I As

(12:52):
I said, I've tried to start on this episode so
many times, and every time it's been like, oh, it's
not going to be October any gotta save this for
next year. I'm actually kind of glad about that, because
I'm having trouble with research, and also kind of in
the back of my mind there's been maybe next year, Tracy,
We'll be able to read French well enough to read
some of these French language sources. I still cannot read

(13:15):
French well enough, although in my defense, I have been
studying more Spanish over the last six months or so
so that I am I can hope not totally lost.
When we go to Barcelona, which this episode I think
will be coming out, I will be in Barcelona able

(13:35):
to say such things as where's the bathroom? And my
name is Tracy. I learned that from Bob's Burgers, like
I learned everything. Yeah, because there's a song where Tina
sings about it. Yeah, I try. I tried to learn
a little Italian before we went to Italy last year,
and I found trying to switch from French to Italian

(13:58):
for some reason just brain melting in a way that
Spanish versus French has not really happened. And I don't
know if that's because I did learn a very tiny
amount of Spanish as a kid. Also, I mean, living
in the United States at this point, we're just surrounded
by a lot of Spanish and a lot of day
to day lives that we might not even really recognize

(14:20):
in terms of like food, taco Bell commercials, Like just
even if you don't personally know somebody who speaks Spanish
at home, I feel like there's just a lot, a
lot more Spanish out in our lives than a lot
of other languages. Yeah, sure, so, yeah, I have a
question for you. Okay, I think it's a question. Okay,

(14:43):
I feel like the guy at a con who is like,
this is more of a common than a question. And
I I'm trying to I'm trying to put this together
because my brain is spinning on this as I'm asking it.
I was struck. We mentioned in the episode twice the
word jue, which is game. Oh, just where she asked

(15:03):
clients if they wanted the grand updi ju, the big
game or the little game, and then the decks were
called the game. And I thought of two things. One,
this is interesting because Taro, which gets used for divination
we talked about in our Tarot episode, started strictly as
a game and then got kind of used for divination.

(15:26):
And still you can play the game of Taro in
some places in France. But that also this may have
been terminology that was used to obfuscate the fact that
it was divination. Oh maybe yeah, to avoid legal problems,
like even when she sat down with someone and did
their reading, if the place got raided and she was busted,

(15:47):
she could say I asked them if they wanted to
play a game. Yeah, maybe, And I don't. I had
never thought of it before until just today while we
were hadness either And like she did write a lot
of books about like divination and uh and and that
kind of thing. And what I found, like English translations

(16:11):
of were mostly like her books about Marie Antoinette, not
so much the things that were specifically about cardamancy as
I understand it, though, because her nephew, who inherited all
of her property, had religious objections to what she was doing.
As I understand it, like he destroyed all of her
actual cards, and so we don't really know specifically what

(16:35):
the cards she was using were. Like, so was it
also and I could look this up, I'm sure, but
I'm not a hundred sure where I would start. Was
it illegal to write about it or was it just
illegal to practice it? Because those would be ques a

(16:58):
few different things to get more specific information about what
the actual law was, uh huh, because I just kept
reading fortune telling was illegal, and it was a very
general statement, like there wasn't a specific citation of which
law was in play, right, And so I started trying
to find more specific detail and I did not have

(17:18):
success with that. I also found some contradictory stuff about
like what administrations was it illegal under right? Well, and
I know this actually came up in Criminalia because there
have been a few episodes where we have talked about
fortune tellers and specifically in France, and if I recall correctly,

(17:38):
part of why you are probably having difficulty finding any
kind of specificity is that the laws were pretty terse
and very open to interpretation in terms of like it
is illegal to predict, to engage in prediction, or something
as simple as that, which is very like nebulous and

(18:02):
fluffy and easy to invoke when you needed it. But
I am wondering if it would have been nebulous enough
that there would have been an exclusion of written examinations
of the ideas versus And I don't know. It's it's
pretty brazen to write a biography of someone you knew

(18:24):
who died where you make up a lot of stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
My impression of that is that a lot of it
is like fanciful, and that's like one of the big
one of the big difficulties of working on this episode
at all is that a lot of the stuff that
we know about here comes from what she said about herself.

(18:44):
And so if I made my living as a fortune
teller and there were big, dramatic world events happening, and
then I wrote a book about my career, I would
one hundred percent claim that I had predicted all that biziness. Yeah, yeah,
here's all the things that I wrote before the revolution started.
So I don't know. I find her very interesting and

(19:09):
all of the writing about her interesting and sometimes funny.
And that whole thing about the Earl of Sterling, I
think it was was a headache. That was the only
unfun thing of reading in all of this. And I
was reading and I was like, I there's so many
pages of this and I don't fully understand what's happening.

(19:29):
And she was involved with it, had a lot of letters,
and I have that like question in the back of
my mind of like, would he have gone after this
so hard had he not had a fortune teller being like, Oh, yes,
you're going to go through some trials, but then you're
definitely going to become very important, right. I literally am
a little obsessed in my head trying to figure out

(19:52):
if I can redecorate a room in my house to
look like her fortune Telling Room. Yeah, I love everything
about it. The magic words wax fruits were uttered, and
I don't know, there's something so odd and wonderful about
true wax fruits, not what we call wax fruit today

(20:12):
that's actually plastic, but true waxwims that I love. There's
a translucency to them that I'm really obsessed with visually.
But this also sounds great to me. And the whole
thing of like it was so busy your eye couldn't
settle on any place that wasn't busy, and I'm like, yeah, yeah,
that sounds like my house. I love all of this.

(20:34):
I love all of this. I think the only thing
that really disturbed me about it was the the idea
of having bats on the walls, pinned up by their wings,
and I was like, are these I'm assuming these are
either like fake bats or taxidermy bats, but either way,
surely bats are so cute that I was like, oh,
but the pat like, I presume they must be fake
or taxidermine, and we don't really know if they're if

(20:57):
his description of how they were hung as accurate either correct? Yeah, yeah,
I mean I also love bats and have a lot
of bat things in my house. So I'm halfway there. Really,
I mean, I actually am. It's I would not have
to buy many things to create this room. I'll just
put it that way. I would just have to collect
things that are scattered about into one place. The thing

(21:19):
I would have to buy would be maple furniture, because
I I know every time I say this, people look
at me like I have questionable taste intellect. I don't
know what I do, not like wood grain anything. Uh huh.
I don't know why. So I don't have any maple furniture,
but I could get some in the service of creating

(21:42):
her fortune telling room. I would, I would do it. Well,
I look forward to your work in progress photo. I
don't know where i'd put it. That's the problem, Like
our rooms are accounted for. I can't build another room
on the house. And then I'm like, maybe I could
like that. Yeah, Well, if you're going to work on

(22:04):
turning a room of your house into a reproduction of
Mademoiselle Denorman's Salon, send us your work in progress pictures
or pictures of your pets and Halloween costumes or not
in Halloween costumes, or you know, just a cute, cute
bumble bee you saw outside. Any of these things are great. Uh,
whatever's coming up on your weekends. I hope that's great too.

(22:27):
We will be back with a brand new episode on Monday,
first of every Saturday, Classic Tomorrow Stuff You Missed in
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