January 7, 2026 • 36 mins
Jean Baptiste's crime of robbing graves shocked Salt Lake City in the 1860s. This history mystery offers insight into the way a community deals with the unthinkable.
Research:
- Devitry-Smith, John. “The Saint and the grave Robber.” BYU Studies Quarterly. Volume 33, Issue 1. January 1, 1993. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2856&context=byusq
- “Exciting and terrifying Occurences.” The Deseret News. Jan. 22, 1862. https://www.newspapers.com/image/286318980/?match=1&terms=%22moroni%20clawson%22
- “A Gruesome Tale.” Salt Lake herald. April 2, 1893. https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=11053821
- Ison, Yvette D. “Unsolved Mysteries in Utah—The Bizarre Case of Grave Robber Jean Baptiste.” History Blazer. March 1995. Utah History to Go. https://historytogo.utah.gov/jean-baptiste/
- Morgan, Dale L. “The Great Salt Lake.” New York. Bobbs-Merrill. 1947.
- “Robber of the Dead.” Deseret Evening News. May 27, 1893. https://www.newspapers.com/image/73717015/?match=1&terms=jean%20baptiste%20grave%20robber
- Van Leer, Twyla. “HISTORY OF GRAVE ROBBER IS BURIED IN MYSTERY.” Deseret News. May 30, 1995. https://www.deseret.com/1995/5/30/19215360/history-of-grave-robber-is-buried-in-mystery/
- Watt, G.D. “Remarks by President Brigham Young, Tabernacle, Feb. 9th, 186.” The Deseret News. March 26, 1862. https://www.newspapers.com/image/286319797/?match=1&terms=%22baptiste%22
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So this is another
one of those episodes which I feel like have been
happening to me lately, which probably suggests something about how
(00:23):
my mind is working. But it started as one thing
and then became something very different. I was originally planning
to do an anthology style episode where we talk about
like three or four criminals who vanished and were never found,
like that escaped and just went away. That still might happen,
but not today because I got to digging in on
(00:43):
one in particular, and it held my attention for a
whole episode's worth of content. I sort of watched this
happen virtually in real RBM, and then when I got
the outline, said that this was the right decision. Yeah,
I would hate to they're sore. It's interesting because in
some ways there's not a ton of news coverage of
(01:06):
it from contemporary sources, but what there is is really fascinating.
If you are one of our Salt Lake City listeners,
and I know we have a lot there because every
time I'm in that town. Wonderful people come up and
tell me that they listen to the show aw and
I love Salt Lake. This one will probably be familiar
to you. It is the story of Jean Baptiste, who
(01:27):
is sometimes referred to as the with his Anglicized version
of his name as John in various accounts. That was
part of why he was hard to find in newspapers,
but we figured it out. His story is a little
bit odd and harrowing. It's about grave robbing, but there
are themes that emerge about how communities deal with unthinkable
(01:50):
crimes and the ways that the stories of those crimes
change to support hoped for conclusions. And in this case
there is an escape with a big question mark at
the end. So it does remain a history mystery, which
makes it kind of fun and kind of thrilling to
talk about. So. Jean Baptiste was born in eighteen fourteen
(02:12):
according to census records, although there are some questions about
how accurate that is, the place of his birth is
also a matter of debates. Although it's often cited as Venice, Italy,
that's contradicted by later accounts that refer to him as
a Frenchman, and there just isn't real clarity one way
or the other. We also don't know much about his
(02:35):
early life. We do know that in the eighteen fifties
he was drawn to the gold rush, not the California
gold Rush or the Alaska gold Rush or any of
the other gold rush as we've spent a ton of
time on recently, the one that was happening in Victoria, Australia.
And while in Victoria, Baptiste came in contact with missionaries
(02:55):
from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.
They had traveled to the area to minister to the
huge influx of gold seekers. There were nearly half a
million people who had flooded into Victoria during the gold rush,
and it had a reputation as being completely void of morality,
where things like robberies happened out in the open in
(03:16):
the light of day. So that's why they were drawn there,
thinking maybe these people need religion. But Baptiste, unlike these
other people, was very ready to convert. He seemed to
have been casting about for the right religion for a bit.
He had been raised Roman Catholic, but he had problems
with the church and he left that church to join
(03:37):
the Church of England. He was not happy in the
Anglican Church, and then he moved on to the Methodist
Church and then in Castlemaine, Victoria. He had actually built
his own small chapel while he was there for the
gold rush on property that he held. It's unclear to
me if he owned this property, if he just claimed it, etc.
But he did build this small chapel there and he
(04:00):
actually had services there for other gold rushers on Sundays.
When Baptiste spoke with missionary leaders in Australia, he told
them that he believed in God and the Bible, and
then after talking to them about the LDS Church, he
wanted to convert. Immediately he said, quote, I will become
a baby. I want to be baptized. He gave them
(04:20):
this chapel that he had built and it immediately went
into use as a place to give sermons, something that
they had really been lacking before Baptiste's property donation. Yeah.
According to most accounts, they were like, you don't have
to convert right now, you can think this through and
he was like, no, Breddy, let's go, let's do this thing.
In the eighteen fifties, At the same time, Salt Lake
(04:42):
City was still really brand new. It had been founded
in eighteen forty seven, and the LDS leaders in Australia
wanted to send some of their newly converted members back
to Utah to bolster numbers there and help support the
new municipality, and Jehan Baptiste was to be part of
that effort. He and others boarded a ship called the
(05:04):
Tarkania in April eighteen fifty five and they headed for
California with the plan that once they made poured at California,
they would make the rest of the journey over land.
But the Tarkania had some problems. That included with the
vessel itself, which started taking on water, and also among
the seventy two people aboard. They developed a number of conflicts.
(05:26):
Some of the interpersonal conflict was because there was a
lot of disagreement about whether they should abandon the Tarkania completely.
The ship made it to Honolulu, Hawaii for repairs, but
even after it was patched up, a number of passengers
just refused to go on, and that included Baptiste. They
were the smart ones. The Tarkania didn't make it very far.
(05:48):
It had more problems, it had to just limp back
to Hawaii. In the meantime, Baptists stayed in Hawaii and
worked as a teacher for a few months before continuing
on to San Francisco in February of eighteen fifty six,
and then in eighteen fifty nine he was finally in
Salt Lake City as planned. Yeah, the Turkinia got scuttled.
(06:11):
It's a little unclear to me what ship Baptiste took
to get to California, but he did make it there.
And although he had made some pretty lucrative moves in
the Australian gold Rush and had not needed money for
a while, eventually Baptiste did need a job, and he
was employed as a grave digger. He both dug the
graves at the Salt Lake Cemetery and he interred the bodies,
(06:34):
and he had a home next to the cemetery. He
got married, and he also diversified his income by opening
a tailor and military shop with his new wife. We
do not have the name of that woman. To set
up Baptiste's arrest, we need to veer off into an
explanation of how he came to bury. A man named
Moroni Clawson In late eighteen sixty one, after just three
(06:58):
weeks in office, Governor John W. Dawson, who had been
appointed to his leadership role in Utah Territory by Abraham Lincoln,
fled that territory after accusations that he had made improper
advances to a widow in the Salt Lake community. Dawson
was tracked down and beaten nearly to death by several men,
(07:20):
and one of those was Morony Clawson. Clawson was shot
and killed several days later as police were chasing him.
Clawson's body was uncleimed, so after a police officer named
Henry Heath paid for a suit for the dead man
to be buried in he was interred at the Salt
Lake Cemetery by Jean Baptiste. Heath later said of this
(07:43):
act of charity, quote, I purchased his clothes myself, and
though I thought he was a very bad man, I
wanted to see him laid away as nicely as possible.
This I did, and I don't believe any pauper ever
had better or cleaner burial clothing than he. Long after
the burial, some of Clawson's relatives showed up in town
with the intent to have him exhumed so that they
(08:06):
could bring him to draper Utah, twenty miles south of
Salt Lake and have him interred there near the family.
And once Clawson was dug up, it became apparent that
something fishy was happening at the cemetery because the suit
Henry Heath had paid for was missing. Clawson wasn't wearing
any clothes at all, and when Heath found out this detail,
(08:28):
which he apparently learned from Clawson's brother, who was really mad,
he started investigating after first getting the go ahead from
a judge. We'll talk about this investigation and how it
yielded results pretty quickly after we pause for a quick
sponsor break. Policeman Henry Heath first went to the sexton
(08:56):
who oversaw the cemetery grounds to investigate this odd situation,
but the sexton had no information. So the next stop
was Jean Baptiste's home. Baptiste was not there, but his
wife was, and Heath and Clawson's brother, George, asked her
about the missing clothes. She had invited them in, but
she had no information to offer them. But as they
(09:19):
looked around the home, they were struck by the sight
of a number of boxes that were stacked inside of it.
One of the men looked inside one of the boxes
and made the awful discovery that it contained what appeared
to be funeral shrouds. Of course, this led to the
examination of the other boxes, and things were more and
(09:40):
more unsettling from there, as a grizzly tallly of garments
was uncovered. Heath later wrote of this moment, quote, judge
if you can our horror and surprise when we discovered
that this clothing was the funeral robes of people who
had been buried in the city cemetery for several years past.
(10:00):
Heath also recounted later a fear that he immediately had
regarding his own family, quote, when I tell you that
I had a short time previously buried in idolized daughter,
and when I feared that her grave, too had been desecrated,
and that her funeral shroud was among the motley, sickening
heap of flesh soiled linen we found in the grave
(10:21):
digger's hut. Perhaps you can partly comprehend it. He was
very frank in thinking about this, that his first instinct
was actually to kill Baptiste for what he had done,
and as the men combed through these boxes, they found
clothing that was estimated to have been stolen from more
than three hundred graves, including a box full of baby
(10:42):
clothes and sixty pairs of children's shoes. Heath, George Clawsen,
and two other men next went to the cemetery where
Baptiste was working, and they found him wearing a suit
that was alleged to have been the burial clothing of
a saloon keeper who had died not long before this confrontation.
(11:03):
According to Heath's account, when Baptiste was initially confronted, he
fell to his knees, proclaiming his innocence, but after Heath
quote choked the wretch into a confession the policeman's own description,
he was then dragged through the cemetery to various graves,
asking if he had robbed them. He said yes to
(11:23):
a lot of them, although he vehemently proclaimed that he
had not robbed the grave of Heath's daughter, which Heith
later said was the only reason that Baptiste survived this encounter.
As these events in the cemetery were playing out, words
started to spread in the city, and soon people were
(11:44):
rushing the graveyard to try to exhume their family members
to see if their graves had been robbed, as well
as to try to confront Baptiste. Per the police account,
getting Baptiste to the jail safely was very difficult as
a consequence, but even after he had been taken to jail,
there was a need to transport Baptiste again. The police
(12:05):
wanted to walk him through the cemetery so he could
point out himself which graves he had desecrated. Because of
the community's iron they had to try to keep all
of this under wraps, so he had to lie down
in the bed of a wagon and be covered up
so that people in the street wouldn't know he was
there and passing by, and headed to the cemetery. Once
(12:26):
they got there, he did point out a number of
graves that he admitted to grave robbing, although it appears
he did not disclose all of them. The theory was
that he was scared that as the numbers mounted, more
and more people would want to kill him. Some of
the graves that had been buried during the time he
was working as the grave digger, he outright denied robbing,
(12:49):
but some of them were exhumed and bodies were found
with no clothes, and in some cases the coffins were
also missing, with the deceased then just reburied directly into
the earth. Accounts from the time say that Baptiste was
using those coffins for kindlingwood to help people of the
community get answers to their concerns about whether or not
(13:11):
their relatives' graves had been affected. Police displayed all of
the clothes that they had found at Baptiste's home in
the courthouse so that people could come and see if
they recognized any of them. Henry Heath later said of
the clothing displayed, quote, yes, it was a sorrowful spectacle
to see a mother identify and weep over an article
(13:32):
of clothing which belonged to a darling child long since dead,
or a husband or wife recognized the funeral apparel of
the life partner who had preceded them into the unseen world.
Once the clothing had been seen by everyone who wished
to come, the police had to decide what to do
with the rest, because it was not all claimed. Today
(13:55):
that kind of thing would be admitted into evidence, but
in eighteen sixty two, a very different solution was decided.
According to Albert Dewey, another man who was involved in
the case and worked for the police, quote, there was
some doubt in the minds of the officers of the
law as to what should be done with all the clothing,
and finally it was decided to bury it in one
(14:16):
big grave in the city cemetery, which was done. It
was a painful task and was keenly remembered by those
to whom the work was assigned. There has been an
alternate version of the discovery of Baptiste's grave robbing, although
it appeared in papers thirty years after the events actually
played out. In that version, Lawson's relatives had Baptiste with
(14:40):
them when they went to exhume the body, and Baptiste
protested that they should not open the coffin because it
was sacrilegious. When the coffin was opened, the grave digger
was said to have appeared as horrified as anyone else
present at the state of the body. This version further
departs from the earlier eyewitness acount out of Heath and
(15:01):
that it indicates that police did not stumble upon boxes
of clothes, but instead that a woman recognized a baby
dress in the window of the Baptiste's shop that looked
exactly like the dress her infant daughter had been buried
in in this account, because of that mother's insistence, the
baby's grave was exhumed, and that was when it became
(15:23):
apparent that there was a serial grave robber, and suspicion
turned to Baptiste. We're going to talk a little bit
more later about that differing account that came out thirty
years later, so keep it in mind. When Baptiste was
asked why he had robbed the graves, he stated that
he intended to sell the clothes for money, although the
(15:43):
sheer volume that he had snashed in his house made
some people wonder if he wasn't just holding onto these
items for some more demented reason. Albert Dewey at one
point said that he was just like a man that
was obsessed, and insisted that he had the devilition about him.
Baptiste also told authorities that he had started robbing graves
(16:06):
well before he arrived in Salt Lake, and that he
had built a chapel in Australia with the money that
he made selling grave robbed items. So that piece of
information had triple implications for the LDS Church. For one,
it meant that that chapel that their missionaries in Victoria
had been using was deeply upsetting in its prominence. This
(16:27):
whole situation also meant that a devout member of their church,
one whose zeal was often commented upon positively in the community,
had been committing unthinkable crimes. And it also meant that
for a religion with very specific beliefs regarding proper burials,
that there was deep concern about the afterlife fates of
(16:47):
all of the affected. Deceased. People were so concerned about
their dead loved ones that Brigham Young finally made a
statement about it to try to reassure everyone. This statement
was made and the tabernacle on February ninth, eighteen sixty two,
and it was also published in the local papers. He
noted that grave robbing was something that had been happening
(17:10):
for many years, and that he had previously had the
responsibility of watching graves to prevent robbery on various occasions.
He then brought up the John Baptiste situation and told
those in attendance how he thought justice should be handled. Quote.
To hang a man for such a deed would not
satisfy my feelings. What shall we do? With him. Shoot him, No,
(17:34):
that would do no good to anybody but himself. Would
you imprison him during life? That would do nobody any good.
What I would do came to me quickly after I
heard of the circumstance. This I will mention before I
make other remarks. If it was left to me, I
would make him a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth.
(17:54):
This would be my sentence. But probably the people will
not want this done. This does sort of sound like
a call to let Baptiste suffer the rest of his
days knowing no peace, and it does bring up some questions.
That was well known by February when the sermon was
given that a lot of people in Salt Lake wanted vengeance,
(18:16):
and it had been really difficult for the authorities to
keep Baptiste out of the hands of vigilantes, so much
so that initially there was not really any news coverage
about what was going on with the case because they
wanted to avoid stirring people up even further. Henry Heath
had believed that there was a very real danger that
Baptiste would be lynched if the mobs of people who
(18:38):
kept showing up at the jail got a hold of him.
So it's unclear exactly what Young is suggesting here. If
he thinks that people who want vengeance are the ones
who quote will not want this done, then what exactly
is the punishment for the acts he described to his
congregation as quote A mean, contemptible, damnable trick. Is it
(18:58):
simply just not having ye home? Is unclear what he
was suggesting here. Perhaps more importantly, Brigham Young reassured the
members of the church that they did not have to
worry about the immortal souls of their loved ones not
having proper attire when the expected rapture came. He addressed
this directly, opening with quote, many are anxious to know
(19:20):
what effect it will have upon their dead who have
been robbed. He notes that he has two wives, three sisters,
and several children buried in the graveyard where these crimes
were committed, and that he has no intention of exuming
their bodies to see if they were victimized, stating quote,
I gave them as good a burial as I could,
and in burying are dead, we all have made everything
(19:43):
as agreeable and as comfortable as we could. According to
the best of our judgments. We have done our duty
in this particular, and I, for one am satisfied I
will defy any thief there is on earth or in
Hell to rob a saint of one blessing. We also
addressed the question of whether people should put fresh linens
(20:03):
in the coffins of the disturbed graves, and he indicated
that people should quote pursue the course that will give
you the most contentment and satisfaction. While I was doing
the research for this, I saw these sentiments that we've
just talked about on the part of Brigham. Young discussed
a number of times, both in news articles and papers
(20:25):
about the Jean Baptiste grave robbing. But there's a portion
of Young's oration that I found completely fascinating that just
did not seem to come up anywhere else outside of
the full text printing of it in the eighteen sixty
two papers. Because he addressed the concerns that people had
about their relatives' ghosts coming to them and asking for clothes.
(20:47):
He stated, quote, some I have been informed, can now
remember having had singular dreams, and others have heard rapping
on the door, on the bedstead, on the floor, on
the table, et cetera, and have imagined that they might
have proceeded from the spirits of the dead calling on
their friends to give them clothing, for they were naked.
My dead friends have not been to me to tell
(21:08):
me they were naked, cold, et cetera. And if any
such rappings should come to me, I should tell them
to go to their own place. I have little faith
in these rappings, he urged the community. Quote, let the
minds of the people be at rest upon this matter.
What has been done. They cannot help. We're going to
pause to hear from some of the sponsors that keep
(21:30):
stuff you musts in history class going, and when we
are back we will talk about Baptiste's punishment. After Jean
Baptiste was held for several weeks in jail, it appears
that there was no trial or court action of any kind. Instead,
(21:54):
it was decided among the police and city leadership that
Baptiste just had to be gotten rid of. According to
Albert Dewey, quote, it meant death to turn him loose
in the community, death that he deserved and in any
country would have received. But he was such a hateful
object that the sooner and farther he got away from
sight without being put underground himself the better everybody would feel,
(22:18):
so to give him a chance for his life, to
save him in reality, from an exasperated public, it was
decided to banish him, and a well stocked island in
the Great Salt Lake was chosen for his future home.
Dewey stated that he did not remember who initially proposed
the ideal of exile as a punishment. When it comes
(22:38):
to how this punishment was carried out, the narrative once
again diverges into two different versions. All accounts agree that
Baptiste was taken first to Antelope Island, which is the
largest of the islands in the Great Salt Lake. The
men who took him there did so by wagon. The
island is in really shallow water at its southern tip,
(22:59):
and it becomes a peninsula when the water level dips.
The men who are tasked with this job, which included
Albert Dewey, had to swear when they removed him from
the county jail, that they would not kill him and
would indeed take him to the island to meet a
second group of men who were going to pick him
up in a boat, and then he would go to
his final destination. But before Baptiste was handed off to
(23:23):
the boatman. He was tattooed on his forehead to brand
him for his crime. The specific words that were tattooed
there have been recounted differently. Albert Dewey's account stated that
the tattoo read branded for robbing the dead, although an
alternate account said that it simply said grave robber. That
second alternate account also states that Baptiste's ears were cut
(23:47):
off after he was transferred to the boats. Baptiste was
taken to Fremont Island, which is in the deeper water
than was believed to be inescapable. This is not an
especially big island, and it's less than five square miles,
but there were cattle there and a little shack that
had some basic food in it. The cattle and the
(24:07):
shack belonged to a pair of brothers by the name
of Miller. They used this island to keep some of
their cattle, and there, with only the cattle for company,
Jean Baptiste was left to fund for himself. One of
the big differences in how this exile story has been
shared over the years involves the detail that he was
(24:28):
shackled with a ball and chain before being set loose
on the Island. This is something that the Heath and
Dewey accounts do not include, but it is included in
a lot of retellings, and this became important years later,
which we will get to. The millers who used the
island were aware of Baptiste's exile there, and they still
(24:49):
kept their cattle on Fremont Island, and they went to
check on the cattle and kind of Baptiste roughly three
weeks after the grave robber had been dropped off, and
the millers reported back to folks in Salt Lake Baptiste
was managing there. But when they returned three weeks after that,
so six weeks in total after he had been dropped
for his exile, they discovered a very different scene. Baptiste
(25:12):
was nowhere to be found on the island. It was
apparent that he had slaughtered one of the cattle. The
remains of it were right outside the shack, and the
shack itself was destroyed. The roof was gone, and so
were portions of the sidewalls, and as the millers looked
around they pieced together what had happened. The heifer that
Baptiste had killed had been skinned, and the remnants of
(25:35):
hide that they could see, made it apparent that that
hide had been cut into strips. So Baptiste, it appeared,
had ransacked the shack for wood, used hide to strap
the planks together into some kind of raft, and then
dropped it in the water and took off. And he
was never seen again, at least not conclusively. In April
(25:56):
of eighteen ninety three, so thirty one years after all
of this happened, an article appeared in the Salt Lake
Herald titled a Gruesome Tale, and it retold the entire
story of John Baptiste and his crimes in his exile
and this disappearance. But this article also had an update.
The updated section had a subtitle of the Ghastly Sequel,
(26:20):
and it stated quote, Nearly three years ago, a party
of hunters near the mouth of the Jordan River where
it empties into the lake, while walking across the sandy marsh,
found the skull of a human protruding from the mud.
The hunters scooped up this skull and brought it back
to Salt Lake City, where it was left with a
reporter from the Herald named R. G. Taysum. According to
(26:43):
the Herald, just days before this article was published, another hunter,
John Weingar Junior, had found a headless skeleton near the
mouth of the Jordan River, and according to this rite
up quote, around one of the leg bones was an
iron cla and in an attempt to lift this up,
a chain was found attached, necessitating a little digging up
(27:06):
of the ground, and there attached to the chain was
an iron ball, and the Herald states plainly that this
has to have been the missing exile quote. The find
undoubtedly is the skeleton of old Jean Baptiste. In his
wandering around the island, he no doubt became crazed from hunger,
fear and cold, and, falling into the briny water of
(27:29):
the lake, was drowned or strangled. The article goes on
to explain that the intense winds that run down the
eastern side of the lake must have carried the body
to the place where it was found, and that the
wind also caused sand to cover it over. This rite
up is the place where most of the alternate versions
of the events stem from, and it seems to people
(27:50):
in eighteen ninety three that the paper was running a
retconned version of the Baptiste affair to support the assertion
that the grave robbers Ultimate and was no longer a mystery.
The Deserete News ran a counter article a month and
a half later, calling out the Harold story as a
fable and claiming to have the real information. The Deserete
(28:13):
News version included statements from Henry Heath and Albert Dewey.
Heath stated plainly, quote, I helped take care of Baptiste
during the three weeks time he was confined in the
county jail. Steel nor iron shackles were never put on
his limbs, and there is absolutely no truth in the
statement that he was turned loose on the island with
(28:34):
a ball and chain on. Dewey reiterated that fact again
later when he talked about leaving Baptiste on Fremont Island. Quote,
he was conveyed there, but there was no ball and
chain or shackles or jives of any kind on his limbs.
He was absolutely untrammeled. So they of course are saying
(28:54):
that that skeleton was absolutely not Jean Baptiste. So if
it wasn't became him, that is a matter of speculation.
Although there have certainly been a lot of theories over
the years, it is unlikely that he stayed on the island.
It is, as we mentioned, a relatively small place. I
think it's the third largest island in the Great Salt Lake,
(29:15):
but still five mile square is not that big, and
it has been combed over repeatedly since all of this happened,
and there's been no sign of him. Some people living
at the time of Baptist's disappearance thought that he made
his way north to Montana, and there were actually rumors
at the time that he was recognized there and actually
confessed his identity to a man who started asking him
(29:36):
rather pointed questions, and that he even told Batman how
he had escaped. But there were also people who believed
that he backtracked the route that he took years earlier,
and that he went to San Francisco for a while,
but then decided to move to southern California amidst worries
that someone in the Bay Area might know him on site.
There have even been speculations that he went all the
(29:59):
way back to austral and one would think that eventually
someone would have noted a person with a tattoo across
their forehead that said they were a grave robber. If
not alive then dead, he could certainly keep his hat
on and cover that up, but he's not in charge
of what's on his head after he's deceased. But no
account has ever surfaced that mentions that detail in a description.
(30:22):
There was a heavily fictionalized movie about Baptiste and Henry
Heath titled Redemption for Robbing the Dead. The depiction of
Heath in particular has been noted as a big departure
from his actual life. Yeah, I haven't watched the whole movie.
I watched part of it, but it depicts Heath as
having his own dark secrets that he's working through, and
(30:44):
his descendants have been like, none of that's supported by
anything real. It's like a dramatic tool that's used to
make the story more interesting, but it doesn't appear to
really portray him very accurately. It's super interesting. Where's the
guy with the tattoo on his head? We don't know.
What I do know is that I have listener mail, though,
(31:04):
and I love this because it lets me talk about
something else that I love, which is spiders. So if
you're not into spiders, this is not the time for you.
This goes from our listener, Alice, who writes hello, Holly
and Tracy. I love your show. I'm a recent adopter,
and I've been going back through your podcast systematically to
catch up on everything I had missed. I loved the
story on Cranberry's and wondered if your research included any
(31:27):
information about the wolf spiders used in the production. As
you may know, in order to avoid pesticides, wolf spiders
are often used and released in large numbers to help
keep the pest populations down before the bogs are flooded.
As a fellow spider lover, I have to admit I
have always been worried that the wolf spiders who are
used in pest control are not sufficiently looked after when
(31:47):
the bogs are flooded. I tried to do my own
research into whether the farmers did anything to save the spiders,
but did not find anything clearly about that. Do you know, Oh,
I have answers, but I'm going to finish this email first. Also,
you may have already done this at some point, but
I've not yet found that episode. I would love an
episode on the history of nursery rhymes and lullabies. My
daughter loves Rockabye Baby and it always creeps me out.
(32:09):
Good News there as well. Tracy has done a number
of episodes on mother Goose and nursery rhymes. Yeah so
I think probably if you search mother Goose you'll find them.
And then Alice continues for pet tax I have four
cats and four birds. I will attach a sample Dina,
my long haired queen of the house at sixteen, and Harley,
my youngest cokatil, who is such a sassy girl. Everyone
(32:32):
asks how the birds and cats get along. First. I
never leave the birds out when I'm not around to supervise.
But between the size of the cockatils, which must be
just big enough to deter cat aggression, and the general
demeanor of my cats, the cats understand that the cockatils
are off limits and respectfully ignore them. I also banned
the use of feather cat toys in my home just
(32:52):
to avoid confusion. Thank you both for all you do.
I absolutely love your show and regularly share new things
I learned on it with my friends and family. I
love this idea of being like, don't train your cats
to chase feather toys. They will think my birds are
the things. It's super smart, okay, spiders. Yeah, so I
(33:12):
didn't include this in the episode. I hadn't done as
much research as I have now about them because it
did come up. But there is a really wonderful person
named Travis McHenry who is a spider expert and a
science communicator, and he has done a longish I think
it's like twenty five minute video about it that you
(33:32):
can find on YouTube. But for here, the quick answers
are the spiders are not actually put thereby cranberry farmers.
They are naturally attracted to bogs. It's a good habitat
for them. They love it. Not all of those spiders
are wolfies, and even so, they are smaller varieties of
wolf spiders than you baby envisioning in your head if
(33:55):
you think about those there are, and Travis McHenry mentions this,
there are a lot videos online that are very much
made to make it seem like this is a terrifying,
scary scenario and that's really not what's going on. And
they can save the need for pesticides to be used,
but they don't. Sometimes there still is, but basically farmers
(34:18):
kind of waited out and see how the spiders are
doing their job before they get any pesticides involved. The
other thing that happens that is cool. That will answer
your concerns about flooding is that the spiders actually float
to the top when they flood, and there's beautiful footage
you can see if you like spiders. It's beautiful of
them kind of running along the tops of the floating cranberries.
(34:39):
They're aces. The thing that gets sensationalized is that when
they harvest cranberries, these spiders will often kind of just
start walking right up the arms and torsos of the
workers that are doing that job. And people are often
like they're coated in spiders, and there's definitely spiders on them,
but they're little, they're not a aggressive. Nobody seems to
(35:03):
must up about it. It's fine. Spiders are good. And
then when the waters recede and they restart that bog
with a new season of growth on the vines, the
spiders just like once again stick around. They go down
with the water and then they're on the ground and
can do their hunting again and all that. So the
spiders are good. One they're helping and two I'm sure
(35:24):
some of them don't make it, but that's just because
it's nature. But they're not especially in danger from the flooding.
They do. Great. That's a lot of spider information that
people may not have been anticipating at the end of
this episode, but here you go. If you ask me
about spiders, I'm talking about spiders. That relieves your concerns, Alice,
and thank you for sharing your adorable babies with us.
(35:47):
That cat is so cute. I want to brush it
and kiss it, as I have learned having two very
long haired cats in my life right now. Not all
long haired cats want to be brushed. So I don't
know if you're a sweet or not, But if you
would like to write to us, share questions about spiders,
pictures of your cats and birds, or whatever comes to
your mind, you can do that at History Podcast at
(36:07):
iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to the show
It is easy as Pie. You can do that right
on the iHeart app or anywhere you listen to your
favorite shows. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(36:31):
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So this is another
one of those episodes which I feel like have been
happening to me lately, which probably suggests something about how
(00:23):
my mind is working. But it started as one thing
and then became something very different. I was originally planning
to do an anthology style episode where we talk about
like three or four criminals who vanished and were never found,
like that escaped and just went away. That still might happen,
but not today because I got to digging in on
(00:43):
one in particular, and it held my attention for a
whole episode's worth of content. I sort of watched this
happen virtually in real RBM, and then when I got
the outline, said that this was the right decision. Yeah,
I would hate to they're sore. It's interesting because in
some ways there's not a ton of news coverage of
(01:06):
it from contemporary sources, but what there is is really fascinating.
If you are one of our Salt Lake City listeners,
and I know we have a lot there because every
time I'm in that town. Wonderful people come up and
tell me that they listen to the show aw and
I love Salt Lake. This one will probably be familiar
to you. It is the story of Jean Baptiste, who
(01:27):
is sometimes referred to as the with his Anglicized version
of his name as John in various accounts. That was
part of why he was hard to find in newspapers,
but we figured it out. His story is a little
bit odd and harrowing. It's about grave robbing, but there
are themes that emerge about how communities deal with unthinkable
(01:50):
crimes and the ways that the stories of those crimes
change to support hoped for conclusions. And in this case
there is an escape with a big question mark at
the end. So it does remain a history mystery, which
makes it kind of fun and kind of thrilling to
talk about. So. Jean Baptiste was born in eighteen fourteen
(02:12):
according to census records, although there are some questions about
how accurate that is, the place of his birth is
also a matter of debates. Although it's often cited as Venice, Italy,
that's contradicted by later accounts that refer to him as
a Frenchman, and there just isn't real clarity one way
or the other. We also don't know much about his
(02:35):
early life. We do know that in the eighteen fifties
he was drawn to the gold rush, not the California
gold Rush or the Alaska gold Rush or any of
the other gold rush as we've spent a ton of
time on recently, the one that was happening in Victoria, Australia.
And while in Victoria, Baptiste came in contact with missionaries
(02:55):
from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.
They had traveled to the area to minister to the
huge influx of gold seekers. There were nearly half a
million people who had flooded into Victoria during the gold rush,
and it had a reputation as being completely void of morality,
where things like robberies happened out in the open in
(03:16):
the light of day. So that's why they were drawn there,
thinking maybe these people need religion. But Baptiste, unlike these
other people, was very ready to convert. He seemed to
have been casting about for the right religion for a bit.
He had been raised Roman Catholic, but he had problems
with the church and he left that church to join
(03:37):
the Church of England. He was not happy in the
Anglican Church, and then he moved on to the Methodist
Church and then in Castlemaine, Victoria. He had actually built
his own small chapel while he was there for the
gold rush on property that he held. It's unclear to
me if he owned this property, if he just claimed it, etc.
But he did build this small chapel there and he
(04:00):
actually had services there for other gold rushers on Sundays.
When Baptiste spoke with missionary leaders in Australia, he told
them that he believed in God and the Bible, and
then after talking to them about the LDS Church, he
wanted to convert. Immediately he said, quote, I will become
a baby. I want to be baptized. He gave them
(04:20):
this chapel that he had built and it immediately went
into use as a place to give sermons, something that
they had really been lacking before Baptiste's property donation. Yeah.
According to most accounts, they were like, you don't have
to convert right now, you can think this through and
he was like, no, Breddy, let's go, let's do this thing.
In the eighteen fifties, At the same time, Salt Lake
(04:42):
City was still really brand new. It had been founded
in eighteen forty seven, and the LDS leaders in Australia
wanted to send some of their newly converted members back
to Utah to bolster numbers there and help support the
new municipality, and Jehan Baptiste was to be part of
that effort. He and others boarded a ship called the
(05:04):
Tarkania in April eighteen fifty five and they headed for
California with the plan that once they made poured at California,
they would make the rest of the journey over land.
But the Tarkania had some problems. That included with the
vessel itself, which started taking on water, and also among
the seventy two people aboard. They developed a number of conflicts.
(05:26):
Some of the interpersonal conflict was because there was a
lot of disagreement about whether they should abandon the Tarkania completely.
The ship made it to Honolulu, Hawaii for repairs, but
even after it was patched up, a number of passengers
just refused to go on, and that included Baptiste. They
were the smart ones. The Tarkania didn't make it very far.
(05:48):
It had more problems, it had to just limp back
to Hawaii. In the meantime, Baptists stayed in Hawaii and
worked as a teacher for a few months before continuing
on to San Francisco in February of eighteen fifty six,
and then in eighteen fifty nine he was finally in
Salt Lake City as planned. Yeah, the Turkinia got scuttled.
(06:11):
It's a little unclear to me what ship Baptiste took
to get to California, but he did make it there.
And although he had made some pretty lucrative moves in
the Australian gold Rush and had not needed money for
a while, eventually Baptiste did need a job, and he
was employed as a grave digger. He both dug the
graves at the Salt Lake Cemetery and he interred the bodies,
(06:34):
and he had a home next to the cemetery. He
got married, and he also diversified his income by opening
a tailor and military shop with his new wife. We
do not have the name of that woman. To set
up Baptiste's arrest, we need to veer off into an
explanation of how he came to bury. A man named
Moroni Clawson In late eighteen sixty one, after just three
(06:58):
weeks in office, Governor John W. Dawson, who had been
appointed to his leadership role in Utah Territory by Abraham Lincoln,
fled that territory after accusations that he had made improper
advances to a widow in the Salt Lake community. Dawson
was tracked down and beaten nearly to death by several men,
(07:20):
and one of those was Morony Clawson. Clawson was shot
and killed several days later as police were chasing him.
Clawson's body was uncleimed, so after a police officer named
Henry Heath paid for a suit for the dead man
to be buried in he was interred at the Salt
Lake Cemetery by Jean Baptiste. Heath later said of this
(07:43):
act of charity, quote, I purchased his clothes myself, and
though I thought he was a very bad man, I
wanted to see him laid away as nicely as possible.
This I did, and I don't believe any pauper ever
had better or cleaner burial clothing than he. Long after
the burial, some of Clawson's relatives showed up in town
with the intent to have him exhumed so that they
(08:06):
could bring him to draper Utah, twenty miles south of
Salt Lake and have him interred there near the family.
And once Clawson was dug up, it became apparent that
something fishy was happening at the cemetery because the suit
Henry Heath had paid for was missing. Clawson wasn't wearing
any clothes at all, and when Heath found out this detail,
(08:28):
which he apparently learned from Clawson's brother, who was really mad,
he started investigating after first getting the go ahead from
a judge. We'll talk about this investigation and how it
yielded results pretty quickly after we pause for a quick
sponsor break. Policeman Henry Heath first went to the sexton
(08:56):
who oversaw the cemetery grounds to investigate this odd situation,
but the sexton had no information. So the next stop
was Jean Baptiste's home. Baptiste was not there, but his
wife was, and Heath and Clawson's brother, George, asked her
about the missing clothes. She had invited them in, but
she had no information to offer them. But as they
(09:19):
looked around the home, they were struck by the sight
of a number of boxes that were stacked inside of it.
One of the men looked inside one of the boxes
and made the awful discovery that it contained what appeared
to be funeral shrouds. Of course, this led to the
examination of the other boxes, and things were more and
(09:40):
more unsettling from there, as a grizzly tallly of garments
was uncovered. Heath later wrote of this moment, quote, judge
if you can our horror and surprise when we discovered
that this clothing was the funeral robes of people who
had been buried in the city cemetery for several years past.
(10:00):
Heath also recounted later a fear that he immediately had
regarding his own family, quote, when I tell you that
I had a short time previously buried in idolized daughter,
and when I feared that her grave, too had been desecrated,
and that her funeral shroud was among the motley, sickening
heap of flesh soiled linen we found in the grave
(10:21):
digger's hut. Perhaps you can partly comprehend it. He was
very frank in thinking about this, that his first instinct
was actually to kill Baptiste for what he had done,
and as the men combed through these boxes, they found
clothing that was estimated to have been stolen from more
than three hundred graves, including a box full of baby
(10:42):
clothes and sixty pairs of children's shoes. Heath, George Clawsen,
and two other men next went to the cemetery where
Baptiste was working, and they found him wearing a suit
that was alleged to have been the burial clothing of
a saloon keeper who had died not long before this confrontation.
(11:03):
According to Heath's account, when Baptiste was initially confronted, he
fell to his knees, proclaiming his innocence, but after Heath
quote choked the wretch into a confession the policeman's own description,
he was then dragged through the cemetery to various graves,
asking if he had robbed them. He said yes to
(11:23):
a lot of them, although he vehemently proclaimed that he
had not robbed the grave of Heath's daughter, which Heith
later said was the only reason that Baptiste survived this encounter.
As these events in the cemetery were playing out, words
started to spread in the city, and soon people were
(11:44):
rushing the graveyard to try to exhume their family members
to see if their graves had been robbed, as well
as to try to confront Baptiste. Per the police account,
getting Baptiste to the jail safely was very difficult as
a consequence, but even after he had been taken to jail,
there was a need to transport Baptiste again. The police
(12:05):
wanted to walk him through the cemetery so he could
point out himself which graves he had desecrated. Because of
the community's iron they had to try to keep all
of this under wraps, so he had to lie down
in the bed of a wagon and be covered up
so that people in the street wouldn't know he was
there and passing by, and headed to the cemetery. Once
(12:26):
they got there, he did point out a number of
graves that he admitted to grave robbing, although it appears
he did not disclose all of them. The theory was
that he was scared that as the numbers mounted, more
and more people would want to kill him. Some of
the graves that had been buried during the time he
was working as the grave digger, he outright denied robbing,
(12:49):
but some of them were exhumed and bodies were found
with no clothes, and in some cases the coffins were
also missing, with the deceased then just reburied directly into
the earth. Accounts from the time say that Baptiste was
using those coffins for kindlingwood to help people of the
community get answers to their concerns about whether or not
(13:11):
their relatives' graves had been affected. Police displayed all of
the clothes that they had found at Baptiste's home in
the courthouse so that people could come and see if
they recognized any of them. Henry Heath later said of
the clothing displayed, quote, yes, it was a sorrowful spectacle
to see a mother identify and weep over an article
(13:32):
of clothing which belonged to a darling child long since dead,
or a husband or wife recognized the funeral apparel of
the life partner who had preceded them into the unseen world.
Once the clothing had been seen by everyone who wished
to come, the police had to decide what to do
with the rest, because it was not all claimed. Today
(13:55):
that kind of thing would be admitted into evidence, but
in eighteen sixty two, a very different solution was decided.
According to Albert Dewey, another man who was involved in
the case and worked for the police, quote, there was
some doubt in the minds of the officers of the
law as to what should be done with all the clothing,
and finally it was decided to bury it in one
(14:16):
big grave in the city cemetery, which was done. It
was a painful task and was keenly remembered by those
to whom the work was assigned. There has been an
alternate version of the discovery of Baptiste's grave robbing, although
it appeared in papers thirty years after the events actually
played out. In that version, Lawson's relatives had Baptiste with
(14:40):
them when they went to exhume the body, and Baptiste
protested that they should not open the coffin because it
was sacrilegious. When the coffin was opened, the grave digger
was said to have appeared as horrified as anyone else
present at the state of the body. This version further
departs from the earlier eyewitness acount out of Heath and
(15:01):
that it indicates that police did not stumble upon boxes
of clothes, but instead that a woman recognized a baby
dress in the window of the Baptiste's shop that looked
exactly like the dress her infant daughter had been buried
in in this account, because of that mother's insistence, the
baby's grave was exhumed, and that was when it became
(15:23):
apparent that there was a serial grave robber, and suspicion
turned to Baptiste. We're going to talk a little bit
more later about that differing account that came out thirty
years later, so keep it in mind. When Baptiste was
asked why he had robbed the graves, he stated that
he intended to sell the clothes for money, although the
(15:43):
sheer volume that he had snashed in his house made
some people wonder if he wasn't just holding onto these
items for some more demented reason. Albert Dewey at one
point said that he was just like a man that
was obsessed, and insisted that he had the devilition about him.
Baptiste also told authorities that he had started robbing graves
(16:06):
well before he arrived in Salt Lake, and that he
had built a chapel in Australia with the money that
he made selling grave robbed items. So that piece of
information had triple implications for the LDS Church. For one,
it meant that that chapel that their missionaries in Victoria
had been using was deeply upsetting in its prominence. This
(16:27):
whole situation also meant that a devout member of their church,
one whose zeal was often commented upon positively in the community,
had been committing unthinkable crimes. And it also meant that
for a religion with very specific beliefs regarding proper burials,
that there was deep concern about the afterlife fates of
(16:47):
all of the affected. Deceased. People were so concerned about
their dead loved ones that Brigham Young finally made a
statement about it to try to reassure everyone. This statement
was made and the tabernacle on February ninth, eighteen sixty two,
and it was also published in the local papers. He
noted that grave robbing was something that had been happening
(17:10):
for many years, and that he had previously had the
responsibility of watching graves to prevent robbery on various occasions.
He then brought up the John Baptiste situation and told
those in attendance how he thought justice should be handled. Quote.
To hang a man for such a deed would not
satisfy my feelings. What shall we do? With him. Shoot him, No,
(17:34):
that would do no good to anybody but himself. Would
you imprison him during life? That would do nobody any good.
What I would do came to me quickly after I
heard of the circumstance. This I will mention before I
make other remarks. If it was left to me, I
would make him a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth.
(17:54):
This would be my sentence. But probably the people will
not want this done. This does sort of sound like
a call to let Baptiste suffer the rest of his
days knowing no peace, and it does bring up some questions.
That was well known by February when the sermon was
given that a lot of people in Salt Lake wanted vengeance,
(18:16):
and it had been really difficult for the authorities to
keep Baptiste out of the hands of vigilantes, so much
so that initially there was not really any news coverage
about what was going on with the case because they
wanted to avoid stirring people up even further. Henry Heath
had believed that there was a very real danger that
Baptiste would be lynched if the mobs of people who
(18:38):
kept showing up at the jail got a hold of him.
So it's unclear exactly what Young is suggesting here. If
he thinks that people who want vengeance are the ones
who quote will not want this done, then what exactly
is the punishment for the acts he described to his
congregation as quote A mean, contemptible, damnable trick. Is it
(18:58):
simply just not having ye home? Is unclear what he
was suggesting here. Perhaps more importantly, Brigham Young reassured the
members of the church that they did not have to
worry about the immortal souls of their loved ones not
having proper attire when the expected rapture came. He addressed
this directly, opening with quote, many are anxious to know
(19:20):
what effect it will have upon their dead who have
been robbed. He notes that he has two wives, three sisters,
and several children buried in the graveyard where these crimes
were committed, and that he has no intention of exuming
their bodies to see if they were victimized, stating quote,
I gave them as good a burial as I could,
and in burying are dead, we all have made everything
(19:43):
as agreeable and as comfortable as we could. According to
the best of our judgments. We have done our duty
in this particular, and I, for one am satisfied I
will defy any thief there is on earth or in
Hell to rob a saint of one blessing. We also
addressed the question of whether people should put fresh linens
(20:03):
in the coffins of the disturbed graves, and he indicated
that people should quote pursue the course that will give
you the most contentment and satisfaction. While I was doing
the research for this, I saw these sentiments that we've
just talked about on the part of Brigham. Young discussed
a number of times, both in news articles and papers
(20:25):
about the Jean Baptiste grave robbing. But there's a portion
of Young's oration that I found completely fascinating that just
did not seem to come up anywhere else outside of
the full text printing of it in the eighteen sixty
two papers. Because he addressed the concerns that people had
about their relatives' ghosts coming to them and asking for clothes.
(20:47):
He stated, quote, some I have been informed, can now
remember having had singular dreams, and others have heard rapping
on the door, on the bedstead, on the floor, on
the table, et cetera, and have imagined that they might
have proceeded from the spirits of the dead calling on
their friends to give them clothing, for they were naked.
My dead friends have not been to me to tell
(21:08):
me they were naked, cold, et cetera. And if any
such rappings should come to me, I should tell them
to go to their own place. I have little faith
in these rappings, he urged the community. Quote, let the
minds of the people be at rest upon this matter.
What has been done. They cannot help. We're going to
pause to hear from some of the sponsors that keep
(21:30):
stuff you musts in history class going, and when we
are back we will talk about Baptiste's punishment. After Jean
Baptiste was held for several weeks in jail, it appears
that there was no trial or court action of any kind. Instead,
(21:54):
it was decided among the police and city leadership that
Baptiste just had to be gotten rid of. According to
Albert Dewey, quote, it meant death to turn him loose
in the community, death that he deserved and in any
country would have received. But he was such a hateful
object that the sooner and farther he got away from
sight without being put underground himself the better everybody would feel,
(22:18):
so to give him a chance for his life, to
save him in reality, from an exasperated public, it was
decided to banish him, and a well stocked island in
the Great Salt Lake was chosen for his future home.
Dewey stated that he did not remember who initially proposed
the ideal of exile as a punishment. When it comes
(22:38):
to how this punishment was carried out, the narrative once
again diverges into two different versions. All accounts agree that
Baptiste was taken first to Antelope Island, which is the
largest of the islands in the Great Salt Lake. The
men who took him there did so by wagon. The
island is in really shallow water at its southern tip,
(22:59):
and it becomes a peninsula when the water level dips.
The men who are tasked with this job, which included
Albert Dewey, had to swear when they removed him from
the county jail, that they would not kill him and
would indeed take him to the island to meet a
second group of men who were going to pick him
up in a boat, and then he would go to
his final destination. But before Baptiste was handed off to
(23:23):
the boatman. He was tattooed on his forehead to brand
him for his crime. The specific words that were tattooed
there have been recounted differently. Albert Dewey's account stated that
the tattoo read branded for robbing the dead, although an
alternate account said that it simply said grave robber. That
second alternate account also states that Baptiste's ears were cut
(23:47):
off after he was transferred to the boats. Baptiste was
taken to Fremont Island, which is in the deeper water
than was believed to be inescapable. This is not an
especially big island, and it's less than five square miles,
but there were cattle there and a little shack that
had some basic food in it. The cattle and the
(24:07):
shack belonged to a pair of brothers by the name
of Miller. They used this island to keep some of
their cattle, and there, with only the cattle for company,
Jean Baptiste was left to fund for himself. One of
the big differences in how this exile story has been
shared over the years involves the detail that he was
(24:28):
shackled with a ball and chain before being set loose
on the Island. This is something that the Heath and
Dewey accounts do not include, but it is included in
a lot of retellings, and this became important years later,
which we will get to. The millers who used the
island were aware of Baptiste's exile there, and they still
(24:49):
kept their cattle on Fremont Island, and they went to
check on the cattle and kind of Baptiste roughly three
weeks after the grave robber had been dropped off, and
the millers reported back to folks in Salt Lake Baptiste
was managing there. But when they returned three weeks after that,
so six weeks in total after he had been dropped
for his exile, they discovered a very different scene. Baptiste
(25:12):
was nowhere to be found on the island. It was
apparent that he had slaughtered one of the cattle. The
remains of it were right outside the shack, and the
shack itself was destroyed. The roof was gone, and so
were portions of the sidewalls, and as the millers looked
around they pieced together what had happened. The heifer that
Baptiste had killed had been skinned, and the remnants of
(25:35):
hide that they could see, made it apparent that that
hide had been cut into strips. So Baptiste, it appeared,
had ransacked the shack for wood, used hide to strap
the planks together into some kind of raft, and then
dropped it in the water and took off. And he
was never seen again, at least not conclusively. In April
(25:56):
of eighteen ninety three, so thirty one years after all
of this happened, an article appeared in the Salt Lake
Herald titled a Gruesome Tale, and it retold the entire
story of John Baptiste and his crimes in his exile
and this disappearance. But this article also had an update.
The updated section had a subtitle of the Ghastly Sequel,
(26:20):
and it stated quote, Nearly three years ago, a party
of hunters near the mouth of the Jordan River where
it empties into the lake, while walking across the sandy marsh,
found the skull of a human protruding from the mud.
The hunters scooped up this skull and brought it back
to Salt Lake City, where it was left with a
reporter from the Herald named R. G. Taysum. According to
(26:43):
the Herald, just days before this article was published, another hunter,
John Weingar Junior, had found a headless skeleton near the
mouth of the Jordan River, and according to this rite
up quote, around one of the leg bones was an
iron cla and in an attempt to lift this up,
a chain was found attached, necessitating a little digging up
(27:06):
of the ground, and there attached to the chain was
an iron ball, and the Herald states plainly that this
has to have been the missing exile quote. The find
undoubtedly is the skeleton of old Jean Baptiste. In his
wandering around the island, he no doubt became crazed from hunger,
fear and cold, and, falling into the briny water of
(27:29):
the lake, was drowned or strangled. The article goes on
to explain that the intense winds that run down the
eastern side of the lake must have carried the body
to the place where it was found, and that the
wind also caused sand to cover it over. This rite
up is the place where most of the alternate versions
of the events stem from, and it seems to people
(27:50):
in eighteen ninety three that the paper was running a
retconned version of the Baptiste affair to support the assertion
that the grave robbers Ultimate and was no longer a mystery.
The Deserete News ran a counter article a month and
a half later, calling out the Harold story as a
fable and claiming to have the real information. The Deserete
(28:13):
News version included statements from Henry Heath and Albert Dewey.
Heath stated plainly, quote, I helped take care of Baptiste
during the three weeks time he was confined in the
county jail. Steel nor iron shackles were never put on
his limbs, and there is absolutely no truth in the
statement that he was turned loose on the island with
(28:34):
a ball and chain on. Dewey reiterated that fact again
later when he talked about leaving Baptiste on Fremont Island. Quote,
he was conveyed there, but there was no ball and
chain or shackles or jives of any kind on his limbs.
He was absolutely untrammeled. So they of course are saying
(28:54):
that that skeleton was absolutely not Jean Baptiste. So if
it wasn't became him, that is a matter of speculation.
Although there have certainly been a lot of theories over
the years, it is unlikely that he stayed on the island.
It is, as we mentioned, a relatively small place. I
think it's the third largest island in the Great Salt Lake,
(29:15):
but still five mile square is not that big, and
it has been combed over repeatedly since all of this happened,
and there's been no sign of him. Some people living
at the time of Baptist's disappearance thought that he made
his way north to Montana, and there were actually rumors
at the time that he was recognized there and actually
confessed his identity to a man who started asking him
(29:36):
rather pointed questions, and that he even told Batman how
he had escaped. But there were also people who believed
that he backtracked the route that he took years earlier,
and that he went to San Francisco for a while,
but then decided to move to southern California amidst worries
that someone in the Bay Area might know him on site.
There have even been speculations that he went all the
(29:59):
way back to austral and one would think that eventually
someone would have noted a person with a tattoo across
their forehead that said they were a grave robber. If
not alive then dead, he could certainly keep his hat
on and cover that up, but he's not in charge
of what's on his head after he's deceased. But no
account has ever surfaced that mentions that detail in a description.
(30:22):
There was a heavily fictionalized movie about Baptiste and Henry
Heath titled Redemption for Robbing the Dead. The depiction of
Heath in particular has been noted as a big departure
from his actual life. Yeah, I haven't watched the whole movie.
I watched part of it, but it depicts Heath as
having his own dark secrets that he's working through, and
(30:44):
his descendants have been like, none of that's supported by
anything real. It's like a dramatic tool that's used to
make the story more interesting, but it doesn't appear to
really portray him very accurately. It's super interesting. Where's the
guy with the tattoo on his head? We don't know.
What I do know is that I have listener mail, though,
(31:04):
and I love this because it lets me talk about
something else that I love, which is spiders. So if
you're not into spiders, this is not the time for you.
This goes from our listener, Alice, who writes hello, Holly
and Tracy. I love your show. I'm a recent adopter,
and I've been going back through your podcast systematically to
catch up on everything I had missed. I loved the
story on Cranberry's and wondered if your research included any
(31:27):
information about the wolf spiders used in the production. As
you may know, in order to avoid pesticides, wolf spiders
are often used and released in large numbers to help
keep the pest populations down before the bogs are flooded.
As a fellow spider lover, I have to admit I
have always been worried that the wolf spiders who are
used in pest control are not sufficiently looked after when
(31:47):
the bogs are flooded. I tried to do my own
research into whether the farmers did anything to save the spiders,
but did not find anything clearly about that. Do you know, Oh,
I have answers, but I'm going to finish this email first. Also,
you may have already done this at some point, but
I've not yet found that episode. I would love an
episode on the history of nursery rhymes and lullabies. My
daughter loves Rockabye Baby and it always creeps me out.
(32:09):
Good News there as well. Tracy has done a number
of episodes on mother Goose and nursery rhymes. Yeah so
I think probably if you search mother Goose you'll find them.
And then Alice continues for pet tax I have four
cats and four birds. I will attach a sample Dina,
my long haired queen of the house at sixteen, and Harley,
my youngest cokatil, who is such a sassy girl. Everyone
(32:32):
asks how the birds and cats get along. First. I
never leave the birds out when I'm not around to supervise.
But between the size of the cockatils, which must be
just big enough to deter cat aggression, and the general
demeanor of my cats, the cats understand that the cockatils
are off limits and respectfully ignore them. I also banned
the use of feather cat toys in my home just
(32:52):
to avoid confusion. Thank you both for all you do.
I absolutely love your show and regularly share new things
I learned on it with my friends and family. I
love this idea of being like, don't train your cats
to chase feather toys. They will think my birds are
the things. It's super smart, okay, spiders. Yeah, so I
(33:12):
didn't include this in the episode. I hadn't done as
much research as I have now about them because it
did come up. But there is a really wonderful person
named Travis McHenry who is a spider expert and a
science communicator, and he has done a longish I think
it's like twenty five minute video about it that you
(33:32):
can find on YouTube. But for here, the quick answers
are the spiders are not actually put thereby cranberry farmers.
They are naturally attracted to bogs. It's a good habitat
for them. They love it. Not all of those spiders
are wolfies, and even so, they are smaller varieties of
wolf spiders than you baby envisioning in your head if
(33:55):
you think about those there are, and Travis McHenry mentions this,
there are a lot videos online that are very much
made to make it seem like this is a terrifying,
scary scenario and that's really not what's going on. And
they can save the need for pesticides to be used,
but they don't. Sometimes there still is, but basically farmers
(34:18):
kind of waited out and see how the spiders are
doing their job before they get any pesticides involved. The
other thing that happens that is cool. That will answer
your concerns about flooding is that the spiders actually float
to the top when they flood, and there's beautiful footage
you can see if you like spiders. It's beautiful of
them kind of running along the tops of the floating cranberries.
(34:39):
They're aces. The thing that gets sensationalized is that when
they harvest cranberries, these spiders will often kind of just
start walking right up the arms and torsos of the
workers that are doing that job. And people are often
like they're coated in spiders, and there's definitely spiders on them,
but they're little, they're not a aggressive. Nobody seems to
(35:03):
must up about it. It's fine. Spiders are good. And
then when the waters recede and they restart that bog
with a new season of growth on the vines, the
spiders just like once again stick around. They go down
with the water and then they're on the ground and
can do their hunting again and all that. So the
spiders are good. One they're helping and two I'm sure
(35:24):
some of them don't make it, but that's just because
it's nature. But they're not especially in danger from the flooding.
They do. Great. That's a lot of spider information that
people may not have been anticipating at the end of
this episode, but here you go. If you ask me
about spiders, I'm talking about spiders. That relieves your concerns, Alice,
and thank you for sharing your adorable babies with us.
(35:47):
That cat is so cute. I want to brush it
and kiss it, as I have learned having two very
long haired cats in my life right now. Not all
long haired cats want to be brushed. So I don't
know if you're a sweet or not, But if you
would like to write to us, share questions about spiders,
pictures of your cats and birds, or whatever comes to
your mind, you can do that at History Podcast at
(36:07):
iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to the show
It is easy as Pie. You can do that right
on the iHeart app or anywhere you listen to your
favorite shows. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(36:31):
favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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