June 14, 2023 • 47 mins
On today's episode, Paul and Kate head to 1896 Dayton, Ohio for the first part of a two-part series. A woman is found in the river after a suspected suicide, but a persistent police chief starts to uncover concerns as he investigates.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes, and.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new
insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Hi, Paul, how are you?
Speaker 2 (01:04):
No, I'm doing good. I've got my energy drink. I'm
getting ready. How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I'm doing pretty well. I am excited to say that
we are opening up Wicked Words for business once again.
We've concluded tenfold more Wicked and it's three seasons and
Wicked Words premieres in just a few days. The trailers
out right now, and I love love that show. That
was our origin story, that's the beginning of it. You
(01:30):
and I were on Wicked Words together.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Was that? So that was for Bessie Ferguson.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Right, That was Bessie Ferguson, and we actually have another
Bessie in this story that we're going to talk about.
But wicked Words. Going down that road with journalists and
you know, with people who are authors like yourself, it's
such a wonderful journey for me to take a break
from talking and to just listen. I listened to you,
(01:55):
but I also talk it off a lot, and I
like to listen to two journalists. And you were such
a help on that story about Bessie Ferguson that I
am always excited to talk to a new slew of people.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
And so remind me the wicked words is you are
bringing in somebody who has written an article, written a
book and they tell the story themselves.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
That's right. Yeah, So it's the stories behind the stories.
And I'm always surprised about how open and honest the
journalists can be about mistakes that they've made and the
reporting and things they've done that made them feel a
little bit uncomfortable with sources, challenges that they had their
points of view of the story. Because oftentimes you'll read
one of my books, or you'll read you something written
(02:37):
in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times,
and I often wonder, I wonder what the journalists really
thought about this person that they were covering, And in
wicked words, you find out a lot of details because
I ask questions like that, what did you really think
of this guy? Did you really believe he did it
or didn't do it? Or what made you uncomfortable about
the story?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah? No, And that's an interesting perspective, you know. Over
my career, of course, I've had many interactions with journalists
on on cases where they're trying to get information and
sometimes it's off the record, sometimes it's on the record,
and it's been hit or miss in terms of the
accuracy of what they've written, you know. So that's where
I've always just been, oh, you know, how is this
going to be portrayed in the article that they're writing.
(03:19):
And sometimes it's not negligence on their part or even
purposeful deceit. It's if they're covering, let's say a lab result,
and they're now trying to write about something like a
complicated science, they summarize it and they don't recognize that
they've summarized it wrong, at least factually.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
And I know that that can be damaging in some
of these cases. Let me ask what technique works on
you with a journalist. Is it someone who just sounds
like they've done loads of research on the story already
and sounds educated, or what's the best way to get
an investigator to talk to you with details that they're
comfortable with they just are unsure about journalists in general?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
I would say there's definitely times where it doesn't matter
who the journalist is or what the journalist is asking,
there's just no way that details are going to be
passed on just due to the sensitivity of the details
of the case. You know. Notably, as an example, you know,
we had Lacy Peterson wash up in my jurisdiction, and
that was the biggest story in the world at the time.
(04:22):
The big news trucks, satellite trucks are parked out in
the corners parking lot, et cetera, and this is where
from on high you receive orders you will not talk
to the media. But for routine stuff, it really is
oftentimes it's journalists that have established a relationship. You know,
it's somebody I've talked to before. They definitely appear to
(04:45):
be above board in terms of how they cover stories.
They're not scandalous, they're not going for that type of thing.
They're really just trying to report the facts, and that
type of journalist. Once I have a relationship, I'm more
likely to say, hey, you know the record, just be prepared.
There's going to be this new information coming and you're
going to have a head start in terms of researching it.
(05:08):
So it really is somebody that has proven themselves over
time to me, not only in the interactions, but in
what they've written, you know. And I think notably people
who are familiar with my career was Michelle McNamara, and
that really was somebody that we established a relationship. But
I was unsure because I'd never seen her write anything
(05:30):
until she wrote something and I had divulged some information
that I didn't want out there that was off the record,
and she kept it out in the article and she
earned my trust and from that point on I was
wide open with.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Her, and I think that's really important. I teach journalism
students people know at the University of Texas, and they
asked me how do you establish trust? And I said,
it takes time. It is also the people going back
and reading your books, your articles and getting a sense
for who you are as a journalist, who you write for.
Are you sensational? And one of the things that I
(06:01):
do at the end of every interview is I'll say, listen,
this has been really great. You've given me some valuable information.
I will probably have questions. I might be confused. Can
I make sure that you know, I said, okay, if
I circle back and ask you more questions, and you know,
make sure that these quotes were accurate, and that might
not happen. I might not circle back, I might not
(06:23):
need to. But I think it leaves my sources with
a sense that why she actually cares, she wants to
be accurate, and she is willing to come back and say, well,
I don't really understand this part. And I think that's
very important and I think most of my students do
that now well.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
And especially you know, working with law enforcement, you know,
if an investigator is releasing information on a case, they
want that information to be accurate as to the forum
and which law enforcement is putting it out there. There's
usually a reason why law enforcement wants that information out
in that manner at that particular time, and so that
(07:01):
fact checking becomes important. Oftentimes. So what ends up happening
is is that you release, law enforcement releases information, but
then the journalists, investigati journalists, they are good researchers, and
they start digging, and pretty soon now they have found
out more information, They've tracked down witnesses on the case,
and now that information gets added into the article, and
(07:22):
law enforcement was going, oh, that's not exactly what we
wanted to broadcast at this point in time due to
where we are at in our investigation. But there's no
way to stop that process. You know, that's just part
of the freedom of speech aspect. But it is that
when in a a roundtable discussion within law enforcement, what
are we going to tell the media? It's also okay,
(07:44):
what is going to be the domino effect? Are we
willing to risk the investigation because of that particular domino
effect happening?
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, And my hope is that all investigators are offering
evidence that they are comfortable with offering that will help
the public or help them track down a suspect or
clarify what's happening in the case. And certainly my hope
is that the journalists who are responding to these stories
are taking that information and doing the right thing with it,
because ultimately, what we're supposed to do is serve the
(08:12):
public shine light on things that are in the darkness.
So when you and I go through these episodes, we're
always aiming to be as accurate as possible, as detailed
as possible. Things fall through. It happens with any sort
of journalistic piece that you do, but always the intent
is there, at least for the journalists that I know
and I'm close to do the very best we can
(08:35):
to offer the amount of information and with the accuracy
that I think the public deserves when they're consuming information
from us. So that's enough of my rant I think
about good journalism, and you're done with your rant about
good journalists also, and we will move on to hopefully
good journalism with a case that is just wild to me.
(08:55):
Lots of yellow all over my prep document, lots of
questions for you, and some nice little twists and turns,
which is a little surprising to me because we're in
the late eighteen hundreds where we don't often get a
huge amount of details, and this is pretty detailed. So
I'm setting the scene. Now. We are in Dayton, Ohio,
so let's talk more about this story. Okay, so this
(09:20):
is such a big case that we've had to make
it a two part episode. I assume that you never
get tired of hearing about a really complicated, in depth case.
You did just ask me if you need to take
more extensive notes than usual, So we'll see. He may
be nervous about a two parter.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
No. I know for me, as I listened to the story,
where I start losing tracks just if there's a lot
of names, you know, And so that's where sometimes I'll
just say, and what was the wife's name or who's
the boyfriend's name? And I'll need that reminder.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Well, the very first person we're talking about is a
woman named Bessie Little. So let's first talk about where
we are. This is Dayton, Ohio, eighteen ninety six. So
this is smack in the middle of the guilded Age,
which I love to write about. The guilded age. I
think when we think of the guilded age in America,
I often think about New York Boss Tweed, corrupt politicians,
(10:16):
gold and diamonds and money and parties where you get
a ten thousand dollars bill under your plate, very very opulent,
and Dayton Ohio. Don't get the impression. Is that sort
of place in eighteen ninety six. I think that there are,
you know, the typical amount in any city where you
would have, you know, people who are in poverty, people
who are wealthy. And we have two people here who
(10:38):
come from both sides, one who is wealthy, one who
is not, and how their social circles sort of collide
in what might be a crime and what might not
be a crime. And I know that this is the
most vague information possible going into a story, but I
sometimes like to tell you stuff like that so you're
(10:59):
sort of key to up and ready to unravel this.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Yeah, is there a case or not?
Speaker 1 (11:05):
All right, Paul, Okay, let's jump right into it. Then
there's a man swimming in the Miami River in September
of eighteen ninety six, and this is in Dayton, Ohio,
and he sees something horrific which you would call, I
think a bobber? Right? Is that what you would call
somebody a body in the water?
Speaker 2 (11:24):
You know, at least out of where I come from,
we just would call them floaters.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Floaters, that's a floaters. And it was some terrible term.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yeah, there was one case a man whose head and
hands had been cut off, and he has weighed down
at his ankles, and so his decapitated body was bobbing
up and down. So in that instance I would say, yeah,
that's probably a bobber. But yeah, typically we say floater.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Well, this one, we'll see. So he is swimming and
he sees a woman's foot bobbing just above the river's surface,
and he freaks out as anyone, and he calls the police.
The police chief comes. His name is Thomas Ferrell. There
are only a few characters I think in this story
that really matter. And when I do the research, and
(12:10):
when Maren does a research, I try to sort of
minimize the amount of names, because I know you don't
want to be confused by names. So I've tried to
pair this down to only the people who really count.
So they retrieve the body. It's of a woman, and
they send it over to the coroner in Dayton, and
the coroner looks for signs of an assault or a struggle,
(12:31):
and he rules this a suicide. He doesn't see any
marks anywhere, and he thinks that this is just a
woman who jumped off the bridge and into the river.
He does not do an autopsy that shows what we
would talk about with a drowning water and the lungs
or any of that. And I straight away don't understand
(12:52):
why you would not look deeper into a body in
the river.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Well the pathologist should you know, there's no ques question
that a complete autopsy is the standard of practice under
these circumstances, especially today, But it does beg the question
in terms of, Okay, so you have a woman's body,
is this body fully closed? How decomposed is the body?
You know, more information to see why the pathologist came
(13:19):
to such an opinion just with a superficial examination of the.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Body, right, so, very fresh body, very little decomposition at all,
fully clothed, no signs of sexual assault, which we know
doesn't mean anything, no signs of trauma, and just a
cursory look. He just thought, this is somebody who had
jumped off of the bridge. And she is unclaimed, so
(13:44):
we don't know who this person is and unidentified. Nobody
is saying there's a missing woman, and she is subsequently
buried in a potter's field and labeled as someone who
had taken her own life. Then she has forgotten for
just a few days and I think again, the most
startling part of this to me was, I don't know
(14:07):
if it was out of propriety, he didn't undress her
what the issue was, but the corner just didn't look
very deeply on whether or not this really was suicide.
And I was surprised.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, you know this, but basically there is no autopsy
that was done in this case. And that is very unfortunate,
you know, because even with this theory that this is
a woman who jumped off the bridge, Okay, how high
is the bridge, What is the depth of the water
at that location. You know, there's going to be aspects
that you know, let's say it's a fairly tall bridge,
(14:40):
it's shallow water. Is there any aspect of the structure
of the bridge that she may have impacted on the
way down? You know, I would be looking to see
is there evidence to say that, yes, she could have
jumped off this bridge and there would be no expectation
of injury as noted on this particular body in order
(15:00):
to support that theory. But he must have been in
a rush to get out for a dinner date or something.
You know, there is no excuse to do what he
did in this case. Right, a complete lack of effort.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
I agree. So let me show you the bridge. I
was going to show you this a little bit later
because there are some things involving that bridge that are important,
and I don't think this is going to give you
all of the information. But you did ask about is
there anything that would have been an object that she
could have struck her head against or anything like that.
So this is the bridge. This is the bridge that
several different sources have said they believe. This is what
(15:34):
the bridge. It was kind of unnamed in a lot
of the contemporary newspapers. So this seems really wide. This
is consistent with what it looked like in eighteen ninety six.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, you know, this is just a you know, standard
little road bridge. I'm not sure you know, in terms
of the engineering term. But you see the steel infrastructure
with fencing along both sides the roadway. It appears you
know that, you know, somebody who wants to jump off
the bridge would have to get over that fencing. What
(16:04):
I can't see from this photo is if there's any
aspect of the structure of the bridge beneath it that
sticks out, Are there any piers? And then of course,
you know, what is the depth of the water if
she were to jump off this bridge, because at least
judging by what I can see on either side of
the bridge that the bridge goes over this bridge, there's
(16:26):
trees that look like fairly mature trees that I'm assuming
are twenty feet or higher. It almost appears at this bridge,
you know, down to the water is maybe as high
as twenty feet or more. So this is a substantial
distance for human body to fall and impact the water.
And even just that impact, especially when we see out
(16:50):
in the Bay Area, you know, people that jump off
of like the Golden Gate Bridge. You know, they hit
the water with such speed that that causes injuries. I
can't say that that would happen here, but it's something
that has to be taken into.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Consideration, right and again, you know, one of the points
is is we don't know how she ended up in
the water. They're assuming that if this were a suicide,
it would be of her jumping off of this bridge.
So the chief of police does not agree necessarily with
the corner. He had been hearing rumors that there was
(17:24):
a man who said that he had a girlfriend he
had seen her take her own life, and that he
had dumped her body from the bridge into the water.
This was a rumor that had been started by a
confession that this man, Albert Frantz, made to a reverend.
So the chief of police had heard this, but there
(17:45):
was really no reason to approach him because it was
sort of a rumor. But then when this woman shows
up in the river, he thinks, okay, well maybe there
is something to this. Again, not really suspicious. He had
just heard that this happened and it was something that
kind of stayed in his mind. So when this woman
was discovered in the river, he just thought, well, this
(18:07):
is something to investigate, and I'm not one hundred percent
sure that this was actually a suicide.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Well, and part of what the chief has is local
knowledge in terms of the frequency of the various types
of crime that occur within his jurisdiction.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Right, so the chief wants to know more about this man.
And the way that all of this goes down is
the man is named Albert Franz, and Albert Franz is
the one who went to his reverend and said, my
girlfriend took her own life. I tossed her body over
the Dayton Bridge out of despair. I didn't know what
else to do. I didn't want her family to be embarrassed.
(18:43):
The reverend connected France with a judge for legal advice
because he said, I need this off my hands. So
he sends them to someone else who is committed to
keeping a secret, and the judge gave him some legal advice,
which I'm pretty sure is keep your mouth shut. And
they tried to keep this all under wraps. So the
reverend had really not said anything, the judge had not,
(19:06):
and yet this gets out, and it starts spreading around
that Albert and his girlfriend, a woman named Bessie Little,
this had happened with Bessie, and that he has confessed
that he disposed of the body. The first big question
to me is why are people trying to keep this
under wraps, because you would think that that's a little odd.
(19:28):
You know, I understand disposing of a body is against
the law, but you now have a judge and a
reverend who are really trying to keep this quiet. And
it's because Albert is from a very wealthy family, which
starts to explain a little bit more about this story,
because Bessie is not from a wealthy family.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Well, it's interesting is that at this point, you have
three people who have knowledge, Albert, the judge, and the reverend,
and yet there's a leak. There's a rumor that got started.
So somebody told somebody was the judge Mary Did he
talked to his wife did? She ends up saying, Hey,
I'm hearing this to maybe her you know, best friend,
(20:06):
And that's how things start. You think you're just talking
to a confidant, and then that person thinks they're talking
to a confidant, but it just spreads. So that's that's
just an interesting phenomenon that we experience all the time
in law enforcement. You know, the rumors on the street
just spread like wildfire, and oftentimes the facts are wrong,
(20:26):
but there's frequently a core nugget that has some truth
to it for the reason of that rumor, but also
this she took her own life and then I'm disposing
of the body or you have to get to the
bottom of that, you know, right, and do you have
a desecration of human corpse? You know, there's different types
(20:48):
of statutes against doing it, but they're typically minor crimes
versus is this a homicide and trying to cover up
the homicide and second guessing am I going to be
able to get away with this, and now seeding through
this confession and talking to the judge that it really
was a suicide and who's just trying to get rid
(21:08):
of the body.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
I agree, And to Chief Ferrell's credit, we often talk
about the lack of effort from corners and investigators in
the eighteen hundreds, I think simply because they just didn't
have as many resources as we do now. Of course,
Chief Ferrell, throughout this entire investigation goes above and beyond
as far as I'm concerned. He talks to France. France
(21:31):
gives him the story she took her own life. He's
very vague about why I threw her body over the bridge,
and you know, have been mourning her death ever since.
He does not take his word for it. He arranges
to have the corpse to be exhumed, and this is
one exhumation of two that happens to poor Bessie Little.
(21:52):
He has exhumed the body and he looks to confirm.
He wants to just confirm that this is her, first
of all, because remember she's in a potter's field. She's
on identified. He identifies her using dental records and this
is confirmed twenty three year old Bessie Little. He goes
to her parents, who are her adoptive parents, to corroborate
the identification, and her mother and father say, we haven't
(22:15):
talked to her in several weeks, but they didn't think
that this was suspicious because they had sort of had
a lack of communication with her ever since she moved
out of their house and moved into this local boarding house. Again,
lack of communication in the eighteen hundreds is not at
all surprising to me. This happened all the time. People
(22:35):
just wouldn't see each other or talk for weeks or
months at a time.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Well, you could have just pick up a phone and
say hi, you know, it was a different era. He
had to actually go walk down the street to go
and talk to somebody. You know something you said. Though,
that was surprising to me is the use of dental
records in eighteen ninety six. Okay, I was not expecting that.
I thought that they would have resorted to almost having
(23:00):
to have the parents come in and take a look
at Bessie's remains in order to do this. So the
fact that a dentist had paper records that had sufficient
detail to be able to be matched to the dentician
in the body is surprising to me.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
And I'm often surprised about what they did have as
a resource. Toxicology in the late eighteen hundreds was viable,
there were quite a lot of forensic tools. Still it's
the lack of resources still stymied investigators. But again, I
see Chief Ferrell as being the real hero here because
he is concerned about the supposed suicide of this young
(23:38):
woman from his town, and he is pursuing it, and
he is not trusting who turns out to be an
affluent member of their society. Chief Ferrell is a little
confused about the lack of communication between the parents and
Bessie Little, and it's because they don't live very far apart,
and he assumed that a woman of her age twenty three,
(24:00):
you would have kept in better touch with her parents.
So he goes back and says to the Littles, why
did she leave again? And they said, well, you know,
she wanted to be independent. She wanted to strike out
on her own and find more work opportunities. But he
keeps asking them questions and at some point the Littles
confess that they kicked Bessie out of the house because
(24:23):
she had been having premarital sex with Albert Franz. I'm
surprised they didn't cut her off completely because in the
eighteen hundreds that would have been expected. They found out
(24:45):
she was having sex before marriage, goodbye, and that's it.
There was a very little sympathy for a woman in
the eighteen hundreds, So that is the story. They booted
her out and she was on her own at this hotel.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yeah, you know, it's obviously information that goes to Bessie's victimology.
It's establishing that her and Albert had a physical relationship,
you know, so it really shows that Albert and Bessie
are in this very close relationship. But the parents kicking
the daughter out isn't a crime, you know, this isn't
anything that would be something that the chief would be
(25:17):
following up on. It's just of note. It's establishing her
timeline at the boarding home. Is Albert frequently coming over?
You know? Do they have witnesses there? And is Bessie
going over to Albert's place? And do you have witnesses there?
Start branching, you know, now that you have identified the
victim and you understand the relationship between the victim and
(25:37):
Albert is a suspect at this point. You know, you're
trying to determine did he kill her or is he
just disposing of her body? This provides the direction of
the investigation now that you know this background.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Well, here's the issue. Poor Chief Ferrell is relegated to
using the same corner who had examined Bessie in a
crappy way as far as I'm to begin with. And
when he makes a positive identification and goes back to
the corner and says, let's take another look, the coroner
takes another look and still says, I think she died
(26:11):
by suicide. I do not think this was murder, and
she is reburied once again. I still don't understand how
that can happen, and that he doesn't do a more
thorough investigation, because I'll give you a hint, pol another
doctor does, and he does find things.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
With this second attempt by this pathologist. Does he actually
do a dissection of the body this time?
Speaker 1 (26:35):
It doesn't sound like it. I think it's just a
cursory examination yet again, and says I am not convinced
that this is anything other than a suicide.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
You know this just smacks it incompetence by this initial pathologist.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Which must be frustrating to a chief of police who
I consider to be very competent. At this point, he
is working all of the angles, and he has managed
to get some very important victimology information out of the
Littles in that they had a acrimonious relationship with their
daughter because she was having premarital sex, and that premarital
(27:08):
sex causes some pretty big issues in a little bit,
as we'll find out. But let's talk about one half
of this couple, Albert Frantz. He's twenty, so he's three
years younger than Bessie. And you know, Bessie was from
a fairly poor family and France is very wealthy, as
I had mentioned before, and I think that might have
been an influence over the corner that this would have
(27:31):
never occurred to him, that anyone like Albert who would
have been involved with Bessie would have taken her life.
I think this might have been a classist thing. I'm
not really sure, or as you said, just a really incompetent,
lazy corner.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Or is this pathologist on the take?
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Is there a possibility that Franz whether on his own
are talking to this judge. It was brought up. Well,
Bessie's body is going to be found. She'll end up
at the corner's office. And now you know, before the
body comes in, you have somebody looking out for Franz
telling the coroner if this body comes in, it's a suicide.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
I don't think i've ever heard you say on the
take before. I think you need to use that phrase
on the take. I think the more mobby type phrases
we could use, the better. And it never occurs to me.
I'm so innocent. It never occurs to me that people
are being paid off. It takes a lot for me
to think, oh, man, maybe that person is being paid off.
And I would never have thought of paying off the corner,
(28:33):
but that does make sense as one option.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Well, you're putting a rumor out on the street, you
know of this suicide, and then you're also now paying off,
you know, people who would have influence over the direction
of the investigation, and you have the resources to do it.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Well, let's say that this is a murder, and let's
say that Albert is our prime suspect. If we're looking
at his history, he doesn't have a criminal history at all.
People say in the town he's snotty, he spoiled, he's
given too much in life, but he has a good
reputation and he seems to be respected by friends and acquaintances.
(29:08):
And friends of Bessie and Albert say there doesn't appear
to be physical violence or any verbal abuse anything like that.
We also know that doesn't mean anything. There is an
awful lot of things that happen behind closed doors. But
on the surface Albert seems to be a little spoiled.
But other than that, an okay person for her to
(29:29):
be involved.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
With, right, you know, But you still have to come
down to how did Bessie truly die? Yep, And no
matter Albert's past behavioral history and lack of violence doesn't
mean he's not capable of violence in a particular moment.
And so that's really key to understand is, of course,
(29:52):
in evaluating suspects, their past history does factor in in
terms of I think this person is more like likely
than not to be capable of committing this type crime.
But just because you have somebody who has got a
clean criminal history, no known behavioral issues, doesn't mean that
in a particular moment that they could flare up and
(30:16):
commit violence.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
What I'm about to tell you, I think I sometimes
like to categorize when we're talking about murder versus suicide,
what category this would go under? This information, And I'm
afraid that this kind of goes in both columns. And
you know, we'll see why Chief Pharaoh wanted to know
how long they had been together, how they met. People
had very vague answers. Nobody really knew. I'm not sure
(30:38):
that this was some huge public romance. I think that
they were dating, that Albert seemed to like her, but
I don't know if he felt like they were on
track to be married. And it could have simply been
from where she came from and what her socioeconomic level was.
But police eventually learn after a lot of questioning, that
(30:58):
Bessie had been pressuring Albert to marry her before she died,
and they search her house and she ferrel finds a
letter that was addressed to Albert Franz's father that begged
the father to force Albert to marry her. And now
that seems like a motive for murder right now, So
(31:20):
she is saying, for whatever reason your son has to
marry me.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Well is she holding the fact that they're having premieral
sex over his head. You know, I will expose you,
cause you and your family damage to your reputations unless
you marry me. And maybe she's truly in love, but
she's also seeing deep pockets.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yes, And this letter was never sent, but Albert's father
later said that he had received other letters from Bessie
before she wrote him a letter saying that she was
this is a quote, sorry to trouble an old man
like him with his son's misdoings, but that she wanted
Albert to marry her and right the wrong he had
(32:01):
done to her, and that if he didn't, she would
take her own life. So to put that in context
in eighteen hundred terms, we've talked about the heartbalm lawsuits before.
This does not necessarily mean he got her pregnant and
she needs to be married. This absolutely could mean we've
had sex. I am sullied to other men. Unless he
(32:25):
marries me. He has no other choice. So at first
I thought, oh, maybe she's pregnant, But it doesn't have.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
To be that.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
In the eighteen hundreds, it could be as simple as
we had sex. He has to marry me otherwise, no
one else will marry me.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
So she's writing the letters to Albert's father. Yeah, and
Albert's father is the one probably that controls the monies.
He's reasoned this family is wealthy, he has a reputation
in town. He now is recognizing this woman could hurt
the family. So from my perspective, of course Albert is
(33:00):
a suspect. Is it possible that he caused harm to
Bessy to get himself out of this predicament? But now
is Albert's father who would be the type that could
have a corner on the take? Yeah, you know, have
that political influence and the life experience to recognize we
need to nip this in the bud, right, And so
(33:23):
now I think the chief has almost another prong to
his investigation. You have to take a look at Albert's father.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
And what's interesting is she refers to him as an
old man. So as you were talking, I was thinking,
so what if he does it? What if the father
does it but an old man? And then I remember
you saying old man's strength, And then I remember the
reality is is that in the eighteen hundreds of sorry Paul,
but old man could have been a fifty five year
old because life expectancy was not what it is now.
(33:54):
So the son was twenty, he could have been in
his fifties, and of course perfectly capable of killing someone
and tossing them over a bridge, as I'm assuming you
would be capable if need be. So I guess my
old man theory is out the window.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
I am not going to confirm nor deny my ability
to get rid of.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
A bible old man's strength.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
No, well, I mean you really think about it of
Albertus twenty in all likelihood as fathers in his forties.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Yeah, could be. So this is again a very common thing,
the Heartbalum lawsuit. And she might not have even been
threatening a lawsuit, but that was a thing where you
could sue a man and it would ruin them, and
it was always in the newspapers. So this is a
very valid reason to kill someone in the eighteen hundreds, and.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
It's going to be very apparent to the Franz family.
You know the direction that this possibly can go.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Yep. So let's talk about the timeline. And I know
you want to talk about cause of death, and I
have one, but I just am trying to get the
characters out of the way. The victimology out of the
way and the timeline out of the way, and we'll
talk about the confusing forensics involved with her death. So
here's the timeline. Police are interviewing Bessie's landlady, because remember
she's now out of her parents' house and into the
(35:10):
boarding house, and she was there for the last week
of her life. And the woman's name is Minnie Many
confirms that Albert Franz had been paying Bessie's rent at
the boarding house. So what does that say to you.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Well, it's interesting. Albert is twenty years old, right, how
is he paying? Is he paying with money that he
has personally earned? Is he paying with money that his
dad is giving him as a weekly allowance. It also
shows that Bessie is relying upon Albert for those financial
resources after her parents have kicked her out. And so
(35:45):
this kind of weaves a tighter web in terms of
the burden that Bessie was having on the Franz family.
She's not an independent woman like the parents initially claimed
that she wanted to be. She is relying on the
frans As in.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Order to Now this timeline becomes very important and it
will be to you for a body in the river.
So Minnie says, is she is the last person to
see Bessie alive as far as we know, aside from
if there is a killer or not. She says that
about six days before Bessie's body is discovered in the river,
(36:20):
which was this is August twenty seventh, on that night,
she told Minnie that she was going to go out
on a buggy ride with France. Again, this is not
a secret relationship. He doesn't appear to be ashamed of her.
They seem to be openly dating. I don't think he's
flaunting her anywhere. But Minnie says that she never actually
saw Bessie get into the buggy with Albert. She says,
(36:44):
then I became alarmed because Bessie never came home that night,
and that was the last time anybody had seen Bessie little.
So if we think that that was her last night
August twenty seventh, and she was discovered six days later,
what sort of bloating in early September in Ohio. It's
(37:05):
probably not blazing hot. What sort of bloating can we
expect after being in a river for five and a
half days.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Maybe if she had been killed that night, the night
going into the buggy. So we're now talking six days,
and she's been in the water for six days. There
is going to be obvious changes to the body just
due to floating in the water, let alone to the
decomposition that is going to be occurring. Now. The amount
of decomposition, of course, is going to be dependent on
(37:34):
the water temperature. As I've talked about before, when bodies
are cooled down, it slows down the decompositional process. And
I would imagine even though this is August to September,
this river water is probably going to be cool. It's
not warm water, so that is going to slow things down. However,
she is in the water and she is going to
(37:56):
be Obviously you look at her, it's probably skin slippage.
There's going to be a lot of deposits on the body.
I wouldn't imagine there's much in terms of organisms that
are going to necessarily be consuming aspects of the body
within this river environment, as long as she's completely submerged
and we're not having insects landing on her while she's
(38:18):
floating on the surface. But it would be pretty apparent
after six days that, yes, she's been in this river
for a while.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Okay, I'm going to ask you that again a little
bit later on, if there is a possibility that the
corner missed something because of the state of decomposition, potentially
for being in the river for that long. So what
Mani says to Chief Feral is that after she didn't
see Bessie come home that night, Minnie says that France
(38:48):
stopped by the boarding house and he said, where's Bessie.
I don't know where she is? And Mani says she
hadn't seen Bessie since Bessie was supposed to go on
a buggy ride with Albert Frantz. And France is confused,
and he says, I didn't go out with her last night.
I don't know what you're talking about. He doesn't seem alarmed,
(39:09):
but he is denying that they were ever together the
night before. One little note that I think is interesting,
but I know it's not hard evidence, is that Albert
told Minnie here is Bessie's rent in advance for next month,
but just so you know, this will be the last
payment for her room and board at your boarding house.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
That's a coincidental, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
I wanted to say dun Dundon afterwards. That's how I felt.
I just thought, well, okay, how do you know that?
And is he cutting her off? What's happening if we're
on the suicide side, I guess that's what that could mean.
Is he was planning to break up with her, or
he told her, I'm breaking up with you, I'm not
supporting you anymore. She takes her own life, he dumps
her body over, like he says, and everything that he
(39:55):
has said is true, but this does sound a little
odd and inconcern with what he had been saying in
the past. So now everybody's confused. And when the police
go and speak to Albert France, he said exactly the
same thing that he told many. He hadn't been with
her that night. But because of the rumors surrounding everything
(40:15):
about Albert Frantz, Chief Ferrel is not convinced. He knows
they're involved. He knows that she has been threatening his
father with either her taking her own life or something
where she's trying to pressure the family into pressuring him
to marry her. So this is all one big mess
at this point. The problem is is the chief is
(40:37):
having an issue finding very specific hard evidence any kind
of forensic evidence that can directly tie Albert France to
what might be a murder. They aren't sure just yet.
Three days after Bessie's body is discovered, the police are
examining the bridge that I showed you, and they find
a pool of blood recently dried, so three days or so,
(41:01):
on the still Water bridge, and this is only about
a half a mile from where Bessie was found on
the river. I wonder if recently dried, it must have
been recently within ten days, not recently within two years
or something. So they find blood is the big deal.
They find this blood on the bridge, which is just
about a half a mile from where Bessie is found
in the river. That's not good.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
No, well, it's also you know, in eighteen ninety six,
how do we show that this blood is Bessie's. Yeah,
you can't, can't really, And I think, you know, maybe
there's an assumption and it could be a correct assumption.
This now gets back to the autopsy. I don't know
how big this blood pool is, but there's going to
be a bleeding injury, and yet the pathologist is saying
(41:45):
she has no injuries.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Okay, I'll get to it. You always make me move
my drama up. I know it tortures you. So Chief
Ferrell is stymied and he's had just about enough of
this coroner, and he hires his own person, surgeon for
the police department, a brand new person to take another look.
So they dig up this poor woman's body once again.
(42:07):
And I'm now concerned because now we're talking about let's
say she died the night she disappeared, so that six
days and then another three or four days later of
investigation work, So we're talking about almost two weeks of
her being in the ground, out of the ground, back
in the ground, and we cannot assume that she has
(42:28):
been embalmed, because embalming became a really big deal in
the Civil War so that they could preserve soldiers' bodies
to come back and be properly buried and viewed and
everything by family. But the first undertaker classes weren't until
maybe ten years before this, So I don't think a
woman who was in a sort of a poor family
(42:49):
would have been embalmed. And I'm wondering, after two weeks
under the ground, what this might have done with her body.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
Well, it's less than ideal, you know, of course, it
also is dependent upon how she is buried. Is she
in a sealed casket, is she just in a wooden box.
If her body is protected, she's not below the water
table in the ground, there is still going to be
active decomposition without any embalming going on. But it's possible
(43:16):
that there is still going to be sufficient soft tissue
and of course the skeleton in order for the pathologist
to be able to possibly see, yes, here is you know,
whether it be stab wounds or blunt force trauma or
broken bones, et cetera, that would be fairly readily present
even two weeks after burial.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Well, the surgeon for the police department comes up with
some really good information. He performs this examination the third
on Bessie Little, and let's just start with my suspicion,
which was that she was pregnant, and that's what the
threat was. Your son needs to do the right thing.
He must marry me. Doctor Weaver looks at Bessie's internal organs.
(43:57):
They all seem to be healthy. There, don't seem to
be dizzy or anything. But when he looks at her uterus,
he concludes she was not pregnant at the time of
her death. Is that possible to ascertain knowing that the
body has deteriorated over a couple of weeks. Is that
something that he would be able to definitively say?
Speaker 2 (44:16):
Yeah, I think it all depends on what's present, but
I do believe that he would be able to form
that opinion.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Okay, so then he looks at her head, so he's
doing a very thorough examination. Here's the technique which is horrifying,
and I've had to write about this technique for breaking
into a head and looking at a brain. This is
a quote from the Dayton Harold article in eighteen ninety six.
The skull was sawed through and the top removed. When
the outer skin like covering of the brain was punctured,
(44:45):
brain matter ran out like water. Is that from being
in the river?
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Well, that's just she's putrefying.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
You know.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
This is where you know, when the brain decomposes, it
kind of turns into sort of a mess. Uh So,
the removal of the top of the skull the calvarium,
you know, by using the bone saw, and then this
covering the door of moter, which is this very tough,
fibrous protective covering of the brain. You know, that's it's
(45:15):
almost like this really thick plastic y cover that protects
the brain. And of course if the brain is gelatinous
at this point, you know, the brain, a brain that
hasn't decomposed has the consistency of jello almost you know,
it's not a real rigid tissue. But as you have
the decomposition, then yes, you do get this putrid fluid.
(45:38):
And that's with all these organs. You know, as the
body decomposes, you have this liquid faction that occurs. And
so the further along the body is in the decompositional process,
the more the tissues have been broken down, the structured
tissues have been broken down, and they are they turn
fluid like.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
And we know that when a body deteriorates, there are
simple manners of death that we're not going to be
able to determine because the toxicology would not be available,
or strangulation marks would be gone. There I know a
myriad of things. So what happens next is very fortuitous
for doctor Weaver and for Chief Ferreal. So doctor Weaver
(46:17):
is looking at her head, examining everything, and he notices
two gunshot wounds near Bessie's right ear.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Oh good god, so.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
We'll talk more about this case next week, because there's
a lot more to this case from eighteen ninety six.
All right, see you next week, Paul. This has been
an exactly right production.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
For sources and show notes go to exactly Rightmedia dot
com slash Berrybones Sources.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Our senior producer is Alexis Emirosi.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Research by Mare Nick and Kate Winklerdossa.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Our mixing engineer is Leona Scolacci.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfobel.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Buried Bones pod.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now
Speaker 1 (47:25):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life solving America's
Cold Cases, is also available now
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes, and.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new
insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Hi, Paul, how are you?
Speaker 2 (01:04):
No, I'm doing good. I've got my energy drink. I'm
getting ready. How are you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I'm doing pretty well. I am excited to say that
we are opening up Wicked Words for business once again.
We've concluded tenfold more Wicked and it's three seasons and
Wicked Words premieres in just a few days. The trailers
out right now, and I love love that show. That
was our origin story, that's the beginning of it. You
(01:30):
and I were on Wicked Words together.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Was that? So that was for Bessie Ferguson.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Right, That was Bessie Ferguson, and we actually have another
Bessie in this story that we're going to talk about.
But wicked Words. Going down that road with journalists and
you know, with people who are authors like yourself, it's
such a wonderful journey for me to take a break
from talking and to just listen. I listened to you,
(01:55):
but I also talk it off a lot, and I
like to listen to two journalists. And you were such
a help on that story about Bessie Ferguson that I
am always excited to talk to a new slew of people.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
And so remind me the wicked words is you are
bringing in somebody who has written an article, written a
book and they tell the story themselves.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
That's right. Yeah, So it's the stories behind the stories.
And I'm always surprised about how open and honest the
journalists can be about mistakes that they've made and the
reporting and things they've done that made them feel a
little bit uncomfortable with sources, challenges that they had their
points of view of the story. Because oftentimes you'll read
one of my books, or you'll read you something written
(02:37):
in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times,
and I often wonder, I wonder what the journalists really
thought about this person that they were covering, And in
wicked words, you find out a lot of details because
I ask questions like that, what did you really think
of this guy? Did you really believe he did it
or didn't do it? Or what made you uncomfortable about
the story?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah? No, And that's an interesting perspective, you know. Over
my career, of course, I've had many interactions with journalists
on on cases where they're trying to get information and
sometimes it's off the record, sometimes it's on the record,
and it's been hit or miss in terms of the
accuracy of what they've written, you know. So that's where
I've always just been, oh, you know, how is this
going to be portrayed in the article that they're writing.
(03:19):
And sometimes it's not negligence on their part or even
purposeful deceit. It's if they're covering, let's say a lab result,
and they're now trying to write about something like a
complicated science, they summarize it and they don't recognize that
they've summarized it wrong, at least factually.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
And I know that that can be damaging in some
of these cases. Let me ask what technique works on
you with a journalist. Is it someone who just sounds
like they've done loads of research on the story already
and sounds educated, or what's the best way to get
an investigator to talk to you with details that they're
comfortable with they just are unsure about journalists in general?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
I would say there's definitely times where it doesn't matter
who the journalist is or what the journalist is asking,
there's just no way that details are going to be
passed on just due to the sensitivity of the details
of the case. You know. Notably, as an example, you know,
we had Lacy Peterson wash up in my jurisdiction, and
that was the biggest story in the world at the time.
(04:22):
The big news trucks, satellite trucks are parked out in
the corners parking lot, et cetera, and this is where
from on high you receive orders you will not talk
to the media. But for routine stuff, it really is
oftentimes it's journalists that have established a relationship. You know,
it's somebody I've talked to before. They definitely appear to
(04:45):
be above board in terms of how they cover stories.
They're not scandalous, they're not going for that type of thing.
They're really just trying to report the facts, and that
type of journalist. Once I have a relationship, I'm more
likely to say, hey, you know the record, just be prepared.
There's going to be this new information coming and you're
going to have a head start in terms of researching it.
(05:08):
So it really is somebody that has proven themselves over
time to me, not only in the interactions, but in
what they've written, you know. And I think notably people
who are familiar with my career was Michelle McNamara, and
that really was somebody that we established a relationship. But
I was unsure because I'd never seen her write anything
(05:30):
until she wrote something and I had divulged some information
that I didn't want out there that was off the record,
and she kept it out in the article and she
earned my trust and from that point on I was
wide open with.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Her, and I think that's really important. I teach journalism
students people know at the University of Texas, and they
asked me how do you establish trust? And I said,
it takes time. It is also the people going back
and reading your books, your articles and getting a sense
for who you are as a journalist, who you write for.
Are you sensational? And one of the things that I
(06:01):
do at the end of every interview is I'll say, listen,
this has been really great. You've given me some valuable information.
I will probably have questions. I might be confused. Can
I make sure that you know, I said, okay, if
I circle back and ask you more questions, and you know,
make sure that these quotes were accurate, and that might
not happen. I might not circle back, I might not
(06:23):
need to. But I think it leaves my sources with
a sense that why she actually cares, she wants to
be accurate, and she is willing to come back and say, well,
I don't really understand this part. And I think that's
very important and I think most of my students do
that now well.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
And especially you know, working with law enforcement, you know,
if an investigator is releasing information on a case, they
want that information to be accurate as to the forum
and which law enforcement is putting it out there. There's
usually a reason why law enforcement wants that information out
in that manner at that particular time, and so that
(07:01):
fact checking becomes important. Oftentimes. So what ends up happening
is is that you release, law enforcement releases information, but
then the journalists, investigati journalists, they are good researchers, and
they start digging, and pretty soon now they have found
out more information, They've tracked down witnesses on the case,
and now that information gets added into the article, and
(07:22):
law enforcement was going, oh, that's not exactly what we
wanted to broadcast at this point in time due to
where we are at in our investigation. But there's no
way to stop that process. You know, that's just part
of the freedom of speech aspect. But it is that
when in a a roundtable discussion within law enforcement, what
are we going to tell the media? It's also okay,
(07:44):
what is going to be the domino effect? Are we
willing to risk the investigation because of that particular domino
effect happening?
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Yeah, And my hope is that all investigators are offering
evidence that they are comfortable with offering that will help
the public or help them track down a suspect or
clarify what's happening in the case. And certainly my hope
is that the journalists who are responding to these stories
are taking that information and doing the right thing with it,
because ultimately, what we're supposed to do is serve the
(08:12):
public shine light on things that are in the darkness.
So when you and I go through these episodes, we're
always aiming to be as accurate as possible, as detailed
as possible. Things fall through. It happens with any sort
of journalistic piece that you do, but always the intent
is there, at least for the journalists that I know
and I'm close to do the very best we can
(08:35):
to offer the amount of information and with the accuracy
that I think the public deserves when they're consuming information
from us. So that's enough of my rant I think
about good journalism, and you're done with your rant about
good journalists also, and we will move on to hopefully
good journalism with a case that is just wild to me.
(08:55):
Lots of yellow all over my prep document, lots of
questions for you, and some nice little twists and turns,
which is a little surprising to me because we're in
the late eighteen hundreds where we don't often get a
huge amount of details, and this is pretty detailed. So
I'm setting the scene. Now. We are in Dayton, Ohio,
so let's talk more about this story. Okay, so this
(09:20):
is such a big case that we've had to make
it a two part episode. I assume that you never
get tired of hearing about a really complicated, in depth case.
You did just ask me if you need to take
more extensive notes than usual, So we'll see. He may
be nervous about a two parter.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
No. I know for me, as I listened to the story,
where I start losing tracks just if there's a lot
of names, you know, And so that's where sometimes I'll
just say, and what was the wife's name or who's
the boyfriend's name? And I'll need that reminder.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Well, the very first person we're talking about is a
woman named Bessie Little. So let's first talk about where
we are. This is Dayton, Ohio, eighteen ninety six. So
this is smack in the middle of the guilded Age,
which I love to write about. The guilded age. I
think when we think of the guilded age in America,
I often think about New York Boss Tweed, corrupt politicians,
(10:16):
gold and diamonds and money and parties where you get
a ten thousand dollars bill under your plate, very very opulent,
and Dayton Ohio. Don't get the impression. Is that sort
of place in eighteen ninety six. I think that there are,
you know, the typical amount in any city where you
would have, you know, people who are in poverty, people
who are wealthy. And we have two people here who
(10:38):
come from both sides, one who is wealthy, one who
is not, and how their social circles sort of collide
in what might be a crime and what might not
be a crime. And I know that this is the
most vague information possible going into a story, but I
sometimes like to tell you stuff like that so you're
(10:59):
sort of key to up and ready to unravel this.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Yeah, is there a case or not?
Speaker 1 (11:05):
All right, Paul, Okay, let's jump right into it. Then
there's a man swimming in the Miami River in September
of eighteen ninety six, and this is in Dayton, Ohio,
and he sees something horrific which you would call, I
think a bobber? Right? Is that what you would call
somebody a body in the water?
Speaker 2 (11:24):
You know, at least out of where I come from,
we just would call them floaters.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Floaters, that's a floaters. And it was some terrible term.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yeah, there was one case a man whose head and
hands had been cut off, and he has weighed down
at his ankles, and so his decapitated body was bobbing
up and down. So in that instance I would say, yeah,
that's probably a bobber. But yeah, typically we say floater.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Well, this one, we'll see. So he is swimming and
he sees a woman's foot bobbing just above the river's surface,
and he freaks out as anyone, and he calls the police.
The police chief comes. His name is Thomas Ferrell. There
are only a few characters I think in this story
that really matter. And when I do the research, and
(12:10):
when Maren does a research, I try to sort of
minimize the amount of names, because I know you don't
want to be confused by names. So I've tried to
pair this down to only the people who really count.
So they retrieve the body. It's of a woman, and
they send it over to the coroner in Dayton, and
the coroner looks for signs of an assault or a struggle,
(12:31):
and he rules this a suicide. He doesn't see any
marks anywhere, and he thinks that this is just a
woman who jumped off the bridge and into the river.
He does not do an autopsy that shows what we
would talk about with a drowning water and the lungs
or any of that. And I straight away don't understand
(12:52):
why you would not look deeper into a body in
the river.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Well the pathologist should you know, there's no ques question
that a complete autopsy is the standard of practice under
these circumstances, especially today, But it does beg the question
in terms of, Okay, so you have a woman's body,
is this body fully closed? How decomposed is the body?
You know, more information to see why the pathologist came
(13:19):
to such an opinion just with a superficial examination of the.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Body, right, so, very fresh body, very little decomposition at all,
fully clothed, no signs of sexual assault, which we know
doesn't mean anything, no signs of trauma, and just a
cursory look. He just thought, this is somebody who had
jumped off of the bridge. And she is unclaimed, so
(13:44):
we don't know who this person is and unidentified. Nobody
is saying there's a missing woman, and she is subsequently
buried in a potter's field and labeled as someone who
had taken her own life. Then she has forgotten for
just a few days and I think again, the most
startling part of this to me was, I don't know
(14:07):
if it was out of propriety, he didn't undress her
what the issue was, but the corner just didn't look
very deeply on whether or not this really was suicide.
And I was surprised.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, you know this, but basically there is no autopsy
that was done in this case. And that is very unfortunate,
you know, because even with this theory that this is
a woman who jumped off the bridge, Okay, how high
is the bridge, What is the depth of the water
at that location. You know, there's going to be aspects
that you know, let's say it's a fairly tall bridge,
(14:40):
it's shallow water. Is there any aspect of the structure
of the bridge that she may have impacted on the
way down? You know, I would be looking to see
is there evidence to say that, yes, she could have
jumped off this bridge and there would be no expectation
of injury as noted on this particular body in order
(15:00):
to support that theory. But he must have been in
a rush to get out for a dinner date or something.
You know, there is no excuse to do what he
did in this case. Right, a complete lack of effort.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
I agree. So let me show you the bridge. I
was going to show you this a little bit later
because there are some things involving that bridge that are important,
and I don't think this is going to give you
all of the information. But you did ask about is
there anything that would have been an object that she
could have struck her head against or anything like that.
So this is the bridge. This is the bridge that
several different sources have said they believe. This is what
(15:34):
the bridge. It was kind of unnamed in a lot
of the contemporary newspapers. So this seems really wide. This
is consistent with what it looked like in eighteen ninety six.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, you know, this is just a you know, standard
little road bridge. I'm not sure you know, in terms
of the engineering term. But you see the steel infrastructure
with fencing along both sides the roadway. It appears you
know that, you know, somebody who wants to jump off
the bridge would have to get over that fencing. What
(16:04):
I can't see from this photo is if there's any
aspect of the structure of the bridge beneath it that
sticks out, Are there any piers? And then of course,
you know, what is the depth of the water if
she were to jump off this bridge, because at least
judging by what I can see on either side of
the bridge that the bridge goes over this bridge, there's
(16:26):
trees that look like fairly mature trees that I'm assuming
are twenty feet or higher. It almost appears at this bridge,
you know, down to the water is maybe as high
as twenty feet or more. So this is a substantial
distance for human body to fall and impact the water.
And even just that impact, especially when we see out
(16:50):
in the Bay Area, you know, people that jump off
of like the Golden Gate Bridge. You know, they hit
the water with such speed that that causes injuries. I
can't say that that would happen here, but it's something
that has to be taken into.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Consideration, right and again, you know, one of the points
is is we don't know how she ended up in
the water. They're assuming that if this were a suicide,
it would be of her jumping off of this bridge.
So the chief of police does not agree necessarily with
the corner. He had been hearing rumors that there was
(17:24):
a man who said that he had a girlfriend he
had seen her take her own life, and that he
had dumped her body from the bridge into the water.
This was a rumor that had been started by a
confession that this man, Albert Frantz, made to a reverend.
So the chief of police had heard this, but there
(17:45):
was really no reason to approach him because it was
sort of a rumor. But then when this woman shows
up in the river, he thinks, okay, well maybe there
is something to this. Again, not really suspicious. He had
just heard that this happened and it was something that
kind of stayed in his mind. So when this woman
was discovered in the river, he just thought, well, this
(18:07):
is something to investigate, and I'm not one hundred percent
sure that this was actually a suicide.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Well, and part of what the chief has is local
knowledge in terms of the frequency of the various types
of crime that occur within his jurisdiction.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Right, so the chief wants to know more about this man.
And the way that all of this goes down is
the man is named Albert Franz, and Albert Franz is
the one who went to his reverend and said, my
girlfriend took her own life. I tossed her body over
the Dayton Bridge out of despair. I didn't know what
else to do. I didn't want her family to be embarrassed.
(18:43):
The reverend connected France with a judge for legal advice
because he said, I need this off my hands. So
he sends them to someone else who is committed to
keeping a secret, and the judge gave him some legal advice,
which I'm pretty sure is keep your mouth shut. And
they tried to keep this all under wraps. So the
reverend had really not said anything, the judge had not,
(19:06):
and yet this gets out, and it starts spreading around
that Albert and his girlfriend, a woman named Bessie Little,
this had happened with Bessie, and that he has confessed
that he disposed of the body. The first big question
to me is why are people trying to keep this
under wraps, because you would think that that's a little odd.
(19:28):
You know, I understand disposing of a body is against
the law, but you now have a judge and a
reverend who are really trying to keep this quiet. And
it's because Albert is from a very wealthy family, which
starts to explain a little bit more about this story,
because Bessie is not from a wealthy family.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Well, it's interesting is that at this point, you have
three people who have knowledge, Albert, the judge, and the reverend,
and yet there's a leak. There's a rumor that got started.
So somebody told somebody was the judge Mary Did he
talked to his wife did? She ends up saying, Hey,
I'm hearing this to maybe her you know, best friend,
(20:06):
And that's how things start. You think you're just talking
to a confidant, and then that person thinks they're talking
to a confidant, but it just spreads. So that's that's
just an interesting phenomenon that we experience all the time
in law enforcement. You know, the rumors on the street
just spread like wildfire, and oftentimes the facts are wrong,
(20:26):
but there's frequently a core nugget that has some truth
to it for the reason of that rumor, but also
this she took her own life and then I'm disposing
of the body or you have to get to the
bottom of that, you know, right, and do you have
a desecration of human corpse? You know, there's different types
(20:48):
of statutes against doing it, but they're typically minor crimes
versus is this a homicide and trying to cover up
the homicide and second guessing am I going to be
able to get away with this, and now seeding through
this confession and talking to the judge that it really
was a suicide and who's just trying to get rid
(21:08):
of the body.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
I agree, And to Chief Ferrell's credit, we often talk
about the lack of effort from corners and investigators in
the eighteen hundreds, I think simply because they just didn't
have as many resources as we do now. Of course,
Chief Ferrell, throughout this entire investigation goes above and beyond
as far as I'm concerned. He talks to France. France
(21:31):
gives him the story she took her own life. He's
very vague about why I threw her body over the bridge,
and you know, have been mourning her death ever since.
He does not take his word for it. He arranges
to have the corpse to be exhumed, and this is
one exhumation of two that happens to poor Bessie Little.
(21:52):
He has exhumed the body and he looks to confirm.
He wants to just confirm that this is her, first
of all, because remember she's in a potter's field. She's
on identified. He identifies her using dental records and this
is confirmed twenty three year old Bessie Little. He goes
to her parents, who are her adoptive parents, to corroborate
the identification, and her mother and father say, we haven't
(22:15):
talked to her in several weeks, but they didn't think
that this was suspicious because they had sort of had
a lack of communication with her ever since she moved
out of their house and moved into this local boarding house. Again,
lack of communication in the eighteen hundreds is not at
all surprising to me. This happened all the time. People
(22:35):
just wouldn't see each other or talk for weeks or
months at a time.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Well, you could have just pick up a phone and
say hi, you know, it was a different era. He
had to actually go walk down the street to go
and talk to somebody. You know something you said. Though,
that was surprising to me is the use of dental
records in eighteen ninety six. Okay, I was not expecting that.
I thought that they would have resorted to almost having
(23:00):
to have the parents come in and take a look
at Bessie's remains in order to do this. So the
fact that a dentist had paper records that had sufficient
detail to be able to be matched to the dentician
in the body is surprising to me.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
And I'm often surprised about what they did have as
a resource. Toxicology in the late eighteen hundreds was viable,
there were quite a lot of forensic tools. Still it's
the lack of resources still stymied investigators. But again, I
see Chief Ferrell as being the real hero here because
he is concerned about the supposed suicide of this young
(23:38):
woman from his town, and he is pursuing it, and
he is not trusting who turns out to be an
affluent member of their society. Chief Ferrell is a little
confused about the lack of communication between the parents and
Bessie Little, and it's because they don't live very far apart,
and he assumed that a woman of her age twenty three,
(24:00):
you would have kept in better touch with her parents.
So he goes back and says to the Littles, why
did she leave again? And they said, well, you know,
she wanted to be independent. She wanted to strike out
on her own and find more work opportunities. But he
keeps asking them questions and at some point the Littles
confess that they kicked Bessie out of the house because
(24:23):
she had been having premarital sex with Albert Franz. I'm
surprised they didn't cut her off completely because in the
eighteen hundreds that would have been expected. They found out
(24:45):
she was having sex before marriage, goodbye, and that's it.
There was a very little sympathy for a woman in
the eighteen hundreds, So that is the story. They booted
her out and she was on her own at this hotel.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yeah, you know, it's obviously information that goes to Bessie's victimology.
It's establishing that her and Albert had a physical relationship,
you know, so it really shows that Albert and Bessie
are in this very close relationship. But the parents kicking
the daughter out isn't a crime, you know, this isn't
anything that would be something that the chief would be
(25:17):
following up on. It's just of note. It's establishing her
timeline at the boarding home. Is Albert frequently coming over?
You know? Do they have witnesses there? And is Bessie
going over to Albert's place? And do you have witnesses there?
Start branching, you know, now that you have identified the
victim and you understand the relationship between the victim and
(25:37):
Albert is a suspect at this point. You know, you're
trying to determine did he kill her or is he
just disposing of her body? This provides the direction of
the investigation now that you know this background.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Well, here's the issue. Poor Chief Ferrell is relegated to
using the same corner who had examined Bessie in a
crappy way as far as I'm to begin with. And
when he makes a positive identification and goes back to
the corner and says, let's take another look, the coroner
takes another look and still says, I think she died
(26:11):
by suicide. I do not think this was murder, and
she is reburied once again. I still don't understand how
that can happen, and that he doesn't do a more
thorough investigation, because I'll give you a hint, pol another
doctor does, and he does find things.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
With this second attempt by this pathologist. Does he actually
do a dissection of the body this time?
Speaker 1 (26:35):
It doesn't sound like it. I think it's just a
cursory examination yet again, and says I am not convinced
that this is anything other than a suicide.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
You know this just smacks it incompetence by this initial pathologist.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Which must be frustrating to a chief of police who
I consider to be very competent. At this point, he
is working all of the angles, and he has managed
to get some very important victimology information out of the
Littles in that they had a acrimonious relationship with their
daughter because she was having premarital sex, and that premarital
(27:08):
sex causes some pretty big issues in a little bit,
as we'll find out. But let's talk about one half
of this couple, Albert Frantz. He's twenty, so he's three
years younger than Bessie. And you know, Bessie was from
a fairly poor family and France is very wealthy, as
I had mentioned before, and I think that might have
been an influence over the corner that this would have
(27:31):
never occurred to him, that anyone like Albert who would
have been involved with Bessie would have taken her life.
I think this might have been a classist thing. I'm
not really sure, or as you said, just a really incompetent,
lazy corner.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Or is this pathologist on the take?
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Is there a possibility that Franz whether on his own
are talking to this judge. It was brought up. Well,
Bessie's body is going to be found. She'll end up
at the corner's office. And now you know, before the
body comes in, you have somebody looking out for Franz
telling the coroner if this body comes in, it's a suicide.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
I don't think i've ever heard you say on the
take before. I think you need to use that phrase
on the take. I think the more mobby type phrases
we could use, the better. And it never occurs to me.
I'm so innocent. It never occurs to me that people
are being paid off. It takes a lot for me
to think, oh, man, maybe that person is being paid off.
And I would never have thought of paying off the corner,
(28:33):
but that does make sense as one option.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Well, you're putting a rumor out on the street, you
know of this suicide, and then you're also now paying off,
you know, people who would have influence over the direction
of the investigation, and you have the resources to do it.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Well, let's say that this is a murder, and let's
say that Albert is our prime suspect. If we're looking
at his history, he doesn't have a criminal history at all.
People say in the town he's snotty, he spoiled, he's
given too much in life, but he has a good
reputation and he seems to be respected by friends and acquaintances.
(29:08):
And friends of Bessie and Albert say there doesn't appear
to be physical violence or any verbal abuse anything like that.
We also know that doesn't mean anything. There is an
awful lot of things that happen behind closed doors. But
on the surface Albert seems to be a little spoiled.
But other than that, an okay person for her to
(29:29):
be involved.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
With, right, you know, But you still have to come
down to how did Bessie truly die? Yep, And no
matter Albert's past behavioral history and lack of violence doesn't
mean he's not capable of violence in a particular moment.
And so that's really key to understand is, of course,
(29:52):
in evaluating suspects, their past history does factor in in
terms of I think this person is more like likely
than not to be capable of committing this type crime.
But just because you have somebody who has got a
clean criminal history, no known behavioral issues, doesn't mean that
in a particular moment that they could flare up and
(30:16):
commit violence.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
What I'm about to tell you, I think I sometimes
like to categorize when we're talking about murder versus suicide,
what category this would go under? This information, And I'm
afraid that this kind of goes in both columns. And
you know, we'll see why Chief Pharaoh wanted to know
how long they had been together, how they met. People
had very vague answers. Nobody really knew. I'm not sure
(30:38):
that this was some huge public romance. I think that
they were dating, that Albert seemed to like her, but
I don't know if he felt like they were on
track to be married. And it could have simply been
from where she came from and what her socioeconomic level was.
But police eventually learn after a lot of questioning, that
(30:58):
Bessie had been pressuring Albert to marry her before she died,
and they search her house and she ferrel finds a
letter that was addressed to Albert Franz's father that begged
the father to force Albert to marry her. And now
that seems like a motive for murder right now, So
(31:20):
she is saying, for whatever reason your son has to
marry me.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Well is she holding the fact that they're having premieral
sex over his head. You know, I will expose you,
cause you and your family damage to your reputations unless
you marry me. And maybe she's truly in love, but
she's also seeing deep pockets.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yes, And this letter was never sent, but Albert's father
later said that he had received other letters from Bessie
before she wrote him a letter saying that she was
this is a quote, sorry to trouble an old man
like him with his son's misdoings, but that she wanted
Albert to marry her and right the wrong he had
(32:01):
done to her, and that if he didn't, she would
take her own life. So to put that in context
in eighteen hundred terms, we've talked about the heartbalm lawsuits before.
This does not necessarily mean he got her pregnant and
she needs to be married. This absolutely could mean we've
had sex. I am sullied to other men. Unless he
(32:25):
marries me. He has no other choice. So at first
I thought, oh, maybe she's pregnant, But it doesn't have.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
To be that.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
In the eighteen hundreds, it could be as simple as
we had sex. He has to marry me otherwise, no
one else will marry me.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
So she's writing the letters to Albert's father. Yeah, and
Albert's father is the one probably that controls the monies.
He's reasoned this family is wealthy, he has a reputation
in town. He now is recognizing this woman could hurt
the family. So from my perspective, of course Albert is
(33:00):
a suspect. Is it possible that he caused harm to
Bessy to get himself out of this predicament? But now
is Albert's father who would be the type that could
have a corner on the take? Yeah, you know, have
that political influence and the life experience to recognize we
need to nip this in the bud, right, And so
(33:23):
now I think the chief has almost another prong to
his investigation. You have to take a look at Albert's father.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
And what's interesting is she refers to him as an
old man. So as you were talking, I was thinking,
so what if he does it? What if the father
does it but an old man? And then I remember
you saying old man's strength, And then I remember the
reality is is that in the eighteen hundreds of sorry Paul,
but old man could have been a fifty five year
old because life expectancy was not what it is now.
(33:54):
So the son was twenty, he could have been in
his fifties, and of course perfectly capable of killing someone
and tossing them over a bridge, as I'm assuming you
would be capable if need be. So I guess my
old man theory is out the window.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
I am not going to confirm nor deny my ability
to get rid of.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
A bible old man's strength.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
No, well, I mean you really think about it of
Albertus twenty in all likelihood as fathers in his forties.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Yeah, could be. So this is again a very common thing,
the Heartbalum lawsuit. And she might not have even been
threatening a lawsuit, but that was a thing where you
could sue a man and it would ruin them, and
it was always in the newspapers. So this is a
very valid reason to kill someone in the eighteen hundreds, and.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
It's going to be very apparent to the Franz family.
You know the direction that this possibly can go.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Yep. So let's talk about the timeline. And I know
you want to talk about cause of death, and I
have one, but I just am trying to get the
characters out of the way. The victimology out of the
way and the timeline out of the way, and we'll
talk about the confusing forensics involved with her death. So
here's the timeline. Police are interviewing Bessie's landlady, because remember
she's now out of her parents' house and into the
(35:10):
boarding house, and she was there for the last week
of her life. And the woman's name is Minnie Many
confirms that Albert Franz had been paying Bessie's rent at
the boarding house. So what does that say to you.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Well, it's interesting. Albert is twenty years old, right, how
is he paying? Is he paying with money that he
has personally earned? Is he paying with money that his
dad is giving him as a weekly allowance. It also
shows that Bessie is relying upon Albert for those financial
resources after her parents have kicked her out. And so
(35:45):
this kind of weaves a tighter web in terms of
the burden that Bessie was having on the Franz family.
She's not an independent woman like the parents initially claimed
that she wanted to be. She is relying on the
frans As in.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Order to Now this timeline becomes very important and it
will be to you for a body in the river.
So Minnie says, is she is the last person to
see Bessie alive as far as we know, aside from
if there is a killer or not. She says that
about six days before Bessie's body is discovered in the river,
(36:20):
which was this is August twenty seventh, on that night,
she told Minnie that she was going to go out
on a buggy ride with France. Again, this is not
a secret relationship. He doesn't appear to be ashamed of her.
They seem to be openly dating. I don't think he's
flaunting her anywhere. But Minnie says that she never actually
saw Bessie get into the buggy with Albert. She says,
(36:44):
then I became alarmed because Bessie never came home that night,
and that was the last time anybody had seen Bessie little.
So if we think that that was her last night
August twenty seventh, and she was discovered six days later,
what sort of bloating in early September in Ohio. It's
(37:05):
probably not blazing hot. What sort of bloating can we
expect after being in a river for five and a
half days.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Maybe if she had been killed that night, the night
going into the buggy. So we're now talking six days,
and she's been in the water for six days. There
is going to be obvious changes to the body just
due to floating in the water, let alone to the
decomposition that is going to be occurring. Now. The amount
of decomposition, of course, is going to be dependent on
(37:34):
the water temperature. As I've talked about before, when bodies
are cooled down, it slows down the decompositional process. And
I would imagine even though this is August to September,
this river water is probably going to be cool. It's
not warm water, so that is going to slow things down. However,
she is in the water and she is going to
(37:56):
be Obviously you look at her, it's probably skin slippage.
There's going to be a lot of deposits on the body.
I wouldn't imagine there's much in terms of organisms that
are going to necessarily be consuming aspects of the body
within this river environment, as long as she's completely submerged
and we're not having insects landing on her while she's
(38:18):
floating on the surface. But it would be pretty apparent
after six days that, yes, she's been in this river
for a while.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Okay, I'm going to ask you that again a little
bit later on, if there is a possibility that the
corner missed something because of the state of decomposition, potentially
for being in the river for that long. So what
Mani says to Chief Feral is that after she didn't
see Bessie come home that night, Minnie says that France
(38:48):
stopped by the boarding house and he said, where's Bessie.
I don't know where she is? And Mani says she
hadn't seen Bessie since Bessie was supposed to go on
a buggy ride with Albert Frantz. And France is confused,
and he says, I didn't go out with her last night.
I don't know what you're talking about. He doesn't seem alarmed,
(39:09):
but he is denying that they were ever together the
night before. One little note that I think is interesting,
but I know it's not hard evidence, is that Albert
told Minnie here is Bessie's rent in advance for next month,
but just so you know, this will be the last
payment for her room and board at your boarding house.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
That's a coincidental, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
I wanted to say dun Dundon afterwards. That's how I felt.
I just thought, well, okay, how do you know that?
And is he cutting her off? What's happening if we're
on the suicide side, I guess that's what that could mean.
Is he was planning to break up with her, or
he told her, I'm breaking up with you, I'm not
supporting you anymore. She takes her own life, he dumps
her body over, like he says, and everything that he
(39:55):
has said is true, but this does sound a little
odd and inconcern with what he had been saying in
the past. So now everybody's confused. And when the police
go and speak to Albert France, he said exactly the
same thing that he told many. He hadn't been with
her that night. But because of the rumors surrounding everything
(40:15):
about Albert Frantz, Chief Ferrel is not convinced. He knows
they're involved. He knows that she has been threatening his
father with either her taking her own life or something
where she's trying to pressure the family into pressuring him
to marry her. So this is all one big mess
at this point. The problem is is the chief is
(40:37):
having an issue finding very specific hard evidence any kind
of forensic evidence that can directly tie Albert France to
what might be a murder. They aren't sure just yet.
Three days after Bessie's body is discovered, the police are
examining the bridge that I showed you, and they find
a pool of blood recently dried, so three days or so,
(41:01):
on the still Water bridge, and this is only about
a half a mile from where Bessie was found on
the river. I wonder if recently dried, it must have
been recently within ten days, not recently within two years
or something. So they find blood is the big deal.
They find this blood on the bridge, which is just
about a half a mile from where Bessie is found
in the river. That's not good.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
No, well, it's also you know, in eighteen ninety six,
how do we show that this blood is Bessie's. Yeah,
you can't, can't really, And I think, you know, maybe
there's an assumption and it could be a correct assumption.
This now gets back to the autopsy. I don't know
how big this blood pool is, but there's going to
be a bleeding injury, and yet the pathologist is saying
(41:45):
she has no injuries.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Okay, I'll get to it. You always make me move
my drama up. I know it tortures you. So Chief
Ferrell is stymied and he's had just about enough of
this coroner, and he hires his own person, surgeon for
the police department, a brand new person to take another look.
So they dig up this poor woman's body once again.
(42:07):
And I'm now concerned because now we're talking about let's
say she died the night she disappeared, so that six
days and then another three or four days later of
investigation work, So we're talking about almost two weeks of
her being in the ground, out of the ground, back
in the ground, and we cannot assume that she has
(42:28):
been embalmed, because embalming became a really big deal in
the Civil War so that they could preserve soldiers' bodies
to come back and be properly buried and viewed and
everything by family. But the first undertaker classes weren't until
maybe ten years before this, So I don't think a
woman who was in a sort of a poor family
(42:49):
would have been embalmed. And I'm wondering, after two weeks
under the ground, what this might have done with her body.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
Well, it's less than ideal, you know, of course, it
also is dependent upon how she is buried. Is she
in a sealed casket, is she just in a wooden box.
If her body is protected, she's not below the water
table in the ground, there is still going to be
active decomposition without any embalming going on. But it's possible
(43:16):
that there is still going to be sufficient soft tissue
and of course the skeleton in order for the pathologist
to be able to possibly see, yes, here is you know,
whether it be stab wounds or blunt force trauma or
broken bones, et cetera, that would be fairly readily present
even two weeks after burial.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Well, the surgeon for the police department comes up with
some really good information. He performs this examination the third
on Bessie Little, and let's just start with my suspicion,
which was that she was pregnant, and that's what the
threat was. Your son needs to do the right thing.
He must marry me. Doctor Weaver looks at Bessie's internal organs.
(43:57):
They all seem to be healthy. There, don't seem to
be dizzy or anything. But when he looks at her uterus,
he concludes she was not pregnant at the time of
her death. Is that possible to ascertain knowing that the
body has deteriorated over a couple of weeks. Is that
something that he would be able to definitively say?
Speaker 2 (44:16):
Yeah, I think it all depends on what's present, but
I do believe that he would be able to form
that opinion.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Okay, so then he looks at her head, so he's
doing a very thorough examination. Here's the technique which is horrifying,
and I've had to write about this technique for breaking
into a head and looking at a brain. This is
a quote from the Dayton Harold article in eighteen ninety six.
The skull was sawed through and the top removed. When
the outer skin like covering of the brain was punctured,
(44:45):
brain matter ran out like water. Is that from being
in the river?
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Well, that's just she's putrefying.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
You know.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
This is where you know, when the brain decomposes, it
kind of turns into sort of a mess. Uh So,
the removal of the top of the skull the calvarium,
you know, by using the bone saw, and then this
covering the door of moter, which is this very tough,
fibrous protective covering of the brain. You know, that's it's
(45:15):
almost like this really thick plastic y cover that protects
the brain. And of course if the brain is gelatinous
at this point, you know, the brain, a brain that
hasn't decomposed has the consistency of jello almost you know,
it's not a real rigid tissue. But as you have
the decomposition, then yes, you do get this putrid fluid.
(45:38):
And that's with all these organs. You know, as the
body decomposes, you have this liquid faction that occurs. And
so the further along the body is in the decompositional process,
the more the tissues have been broken down, the structured
tissues have been broken down, and they are they turn
fluid like.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
And we know that when a body deteriorates, there are
simple manners of death that we're not going to be
able to determine because the toxicology would not be available,
or strangulation marks would be gone. There I know a
myriad of things. So what happens next is very fortuitous
for doctor Weaver and for Chief Ferreal. So doctor Weaver
(46:17):
is looking at her head, examining everything, and he notices
two gunshot wounds near Bessie's right ear.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Oh good god, so.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
We'll talk more about this case next week, because there's
a lot more to this case from eighteen ninety six.
All right, see you next week, Paul. This has been
an exactly right production.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
For sources and show notes go to exactly Rightmedia dot
com slash Berrybones Sources.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Our senior producer is Alexis Emirosi.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Research by Mare Nick and Kate Winklerdossa.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Our mixing engineer is Leona Scolacci.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfobel.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark, and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Buried Bones pod.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now
Speaker 1 (47:25):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, My life solving America's
Cold Cases, is also available now
Hosts And Creators
Kate Winkler Dawson
Paul Holes
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