July 31, 2024 • 52 mins
On today’s episode, Paul and Kate head to 1836 New York where there's a suspicious fire in a brothel and a hyper-vigilant Madam spots a figure in a long coat. With one fatality that night, can the technology and investigative techniques of the time find the culprit?
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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.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And 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 3 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I'm doing really well. I have an odd question for you? Uh,
and I know I always do. I start every episode
like that. I have an odd question for you both.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I get little nervous about this. It's like, what's going
to happen? What am I going to be forced to.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Have to reveal?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
No, No, it's not that interesting. It is odd. So
the case of what we're going to talk about today
is a really well known case from eighteen thirties New York,
well known to me and any history geek who likes
true crime. But the reason I'm bringing that up is
because the subject of the case was featured in a
(01:38):
really unusual museum in the eighteen hundreds that a lot
of well known authors like to visit, the wax museum.
Have you ever been to one of those wax museum anywhere?
Like I went to one in London and I can't
remember which one it was. Have you done that before?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, you know, when I was young, I remember going,
is it Madam Tussaut?
Speaker 1 (01:59):
I don't remember how to pronounce it. Please don't kill
us listeners, but yes, everybody knows what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, and if I remember right, that was out in Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
What did you think?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Well, you know, it's interesting because of course now that
you see these famous individuals, because typically you see them
in magazines or on TV or something, and so to
actually see them not quite real life, you know, it's
sort of like at least you get us a better
sense on what they look like. But also as good
(02:29):
as these these wax replicas are, you can still see
well that's not quite right, you know, there is some
minor differences, you know, but it is it's interesting for sure.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Well, the funny story about this is is that I
have a book that's going to come out in January,
January seventh, and it's called The Sinner's All Bell, And
we can talk about this, you know, at a later episode.
But the book features the story of a young woman
who was a personer at a Methodist and she is
found hanging from a haystack poll in New England in
(03:05):
the eighteen thirties. So a very famous author years later
is at a wax museum in Boston, and it is
a wax museum that is featuring several different true crime
contemporary for them eighteen thirties eighteen forties true crime stories.
One of them is the story we're going to talk
(03:26):
about Helen Jewett. The other is the story from The
Sinner's All Bow, my book, and I'll just tell you
it's Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote The Scarlet Letter, and the
woman at the center of my book is believed to
be his inspiration for Hester Prynne, the main character in
The Scarlet Letter, and his comments, Nathaniel Hawthorne's comments about
(03:48):
the way that the supposed killer and the victim we're
standing near each other. It's very clear that the way
that whomever was in charge of the wax Museum had
him sort of hover over her in a very menacing way.
So it wasn't just someone standing there in a pose.
They were kind of staging people in different action poses.
(04:12):
And you know, I'm not going to the case is complicated.
I'm not going to give away what happens in the case.
But I think Nathaniel Hawthorne really looked at this and said, well,
it's very clear that he's guilty, and it's the way
that the wax Museum owner staged it. It was very influential,
and you're right that three D feeling makes people feel
like they're right there and it can really shift opinions
(04:34):
about stories.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
This was very popular well, and I find it fascinating
that all the way back in the eighteen thirties and
eighteen forties is that the wax Museum was paying attention
to true crime.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
I know, Oh yeah, Well, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan
Poe were crazy about true crime stories. They both went
to trials, they both read all the newspaper accounts of
all types of different stories. And there are stories that
we talk about in this show that inspire you know
true crime stories like we just talked about, Remember the
(05:04):
story of Mary Rogers, the woman who went missing from
her boarding house, a cigar girl, a woman who worked
at the scar shop and then labor. She was rumored
to have died from a failed abortion, and so you know,
these are the kinds of stories that these authors really
picked up on. So it's interesting to you know, you're
at this sort of attraction and you're getting all of
(05:27):
this information and it's really framing these stories in a
certain way. And the story that we're going to talk
about was a huge story in Manhattan in the eighteen thirties,
and anybody who is a history true crime geek might
know the story of Helen Jewett. So get ready, because
(05:47):
talk about somebody who's been exposed to a lot of
different types of people. We are really going to be
right in the middle of Manhattan, which is now the
area is known as Tribeca, but we're right in the
middle of it. So let's go ahead and set the scene.
So this is eighteen thirty six, a very cold night
in April. You know, this is kind of the end
(06:10):
of a very cold winter in New York. I had
mentioned before that we are in an area on Thomas
Street which is now known as Tribeca, and we are
at a well known brothel. When I wrote my book
about Edward Ruloff, which was set around this time period,
there was a book that I quoted a little bit
(06:33):
called The Gentleman's Guide to Manhattan and it was a
no joke paul a Rundown of eighteen sixties, eighteen seventies brothels,
almost like what you would get on Yelp, like the
two dollar signs, the three dollars signs, the different people
that were recommended, who work there, what block to go
(06:56):
on to, what not. It was written in a very
civilized kind of like shopping for someone, and they would
talk about, you know, brothels where the women would steal
from you, brothels where they wouldn't, where you could feel
safe where you know, I mean it it's called The
Gentleman's Guide to New York and I thought, that's, I guess,
(07:16):
good advice for people I don't know.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
That still goes on to this day. You know.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
So like when I was investigating, you know, unsolved series
of sex workers. They're on the street, they're in stroll areas,
and so of course I'm looking to see what the
johns are saying about the locations, if there is anybody
that would pop up as a suspect. And these johns
are doing the exact same thing. They're saying, Hey, look
for so and so. She's usually dressed like this, She'll
(07:43):
do this, this, and this for this amount of money.
She's you know, and gives ratings on the women. Or
they will get online and say, hey, it looks like
there's a visting going on. Avoid this area. So they swap.
They swap information to help each other out.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
That doesn't have anything to do with our case. This
Gentleman's Handbook. I just remember thinking it was really interesting,
you know, that you could get this thing for like
five cents or something like that and have a pretty
decent rundown of what was happening in New York. This
is a brothel and it is run by a woman
named Rosina Townsend. She's thirty nine, she's a madam, and
(08:23):
she has a very very tight security system. She knows
how to run this place. I'm sure she's encountered every
kind of man, gentleman and not in this brothel over
the years. And she has several sex workers who work there.
Live there, and she has a lot of systems in
place that I think are pretty interesting. So this is
(08:47):
what happens. Rosina is awoken on April tenth, eighteen thirty six,
this cold day, She's awoken in the very early hours
of the morning to a knock at her bedroom door.
She opens the door and there's a man who says,
we presume as a client, who says, I need to
get out of the brothel. So what happened is she
(09:11):
had a front door that was locked both from the
inside and the outside, and after midnight, Rosina would lock
both sides, so if you wanted to get out as
a client or as a sex worker, you would have
to talk to her. She's the only one who had
the key, and she would unlock it and let you
out for security purposes. She won't give him the key.
(09:32):
She says, go get your woman to let you out.
So he says, okay. She shuts the door, but none
of the sex workers come to her door to say,
you know, where's the key, So she would loan the
key out. They would unlock the door for the client
and then give the key back. No one comes to
her door, so she sort of just blew it off,
(09:52):
and maybe I assumed that thought that he went back
to the woman he was with. A few hours later,
she's awoken by a much louder knocking at the front door,
this time, not her bedroom door or any of the
doors of the nine women who lived there. At the
front door, she's sleeping next to a man. He wakes
up and they both look at the clock on the
(10:14):
mantel and it's three o'clock in the morning. This is
a different client who has made a pre arranged appointment
at three in the morning with one of the women.
So Rozina says okay and lets him in. And when
she does, she looks around and notices there's a gas
lamp that's out of place. It's lit. It's sitting on
the table on the first floor parlor. It's not supposed
(10:37):
to be there. It's actually supposed to be upstairs on
the second floor, in one of the bedrooms. And she
thinks this is odd. I mean, this woman is on
top of stuff. She understands how to run this place.
So she takes the lamp and she goes to the
parlor and when she's kind of walking back there, she
looks at the back of the building and she sees
that the door to the backyard is unlocked. So this
(11:00):
is a door that has a latch, doesn't have a
key lock on it, and anyone can get out from
the inside anytime they want. I don't think most of
the client the men know about this, But if you
know about this door, you can go down and unlatch
the door and go out the back door, which is
where the yard is, and then there's an outhouse. So
(11:22):
she thinks the sex worker who was with the first
man who wanted out of the building, she thinks that
the woman said to him, just go down the back
way and unlatch it yourself, and that's how he went out.
So do you have anything you need to say? I
have another about half a page of information here. There's
(11:42):
a lot of that told you there's a lot going on.
We don't even have a death yet.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
No.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Right now, it's just sort of what sounds like routine
happenings every night, except you've got this light that has
been noticed out of place. So we'll see where you
go from here.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
So she looks out into the backyard. It's like I said,
three in the morning. This is the way the backyard
is set up. It's completely fenced in, and the fence
varies from like eight feet to twelve feet tall, and
on one side the neighbor's stable horse stable backs up
to the fence, and that part of the fence has
pickets to prevent anyone from climbing onto it from the
(12:22):
stable roof. And this is considered pretty tight security. So
they don't want men hopping in and hopping out of
this yard. They want to know who's there the whole time.
It's very very high fencing. There's an outhouse in the yard,
and so you know, Rosina is thinking, okay, well, maybe
the guy went out to use it, or one of
(12:43):
the women maybe, and that's why the latch was off
on this back door. But she said that doesn't make
any sense because it's a really cold, nasty, drizzly night,
and everybody has a chamber plot gross in their room,
so you know, Rosina is really trying to figure out
what exactly happened. She says that she calls out who's
(13:04):
there in the backyard a few times, nobody answers. She
goes upstairs and she's trying to figure out which bedroom
the lamp is missing from. She goes to the first
bedroom upstairs and the door is locked, which means there's
a woman who wants privacy with a client. She goes
to the other bedroom, which belongs to the woman we're
(13:25):
going to be talking about, Helen Juitt. The door swings open,
it's not locked, and we have it sounds like a fire.
There are thick plumes of smoke coming out of the room.
She yells fire and runs down to her bedroom which
faces the street on the first floor, and yells fire
out the window. And there's a watchman. There's no organized
(13:48):
police in New York in the eighteen thirties, just sort
of like night watchman. Watchman is posted nearby. Here's her,
and everybody has now woken up in the whole house
because people are yelling fire. Can pause here because I
will tell you as a spoiler alert, Helen will be
found dead inside this room. And we have a similar
(14:08):
story that we've talked about, a similar type of setup.
You know, someone is murdered and someone is using fire
to try to cover it up.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, you know, and this is of course I've had
cases with burning bodies or crime scenes that have been burned,
you know, And it is it's a tough, tough type
of case to work because fire can be so destructive.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
The case that you and I talked about before, I
think you remember Albert Tarell, the man who was in
a relationship with a woman named Marianne Bickford, who was
kind of an on again off against sex worker. He
kills her and then tries to set the whole you know,
aira on fire and then claims he was sleepwalking. There
is some speculation that this is where Albert Trell got
(14:55):
the idea from. Was this story to be able to
kind of commit his crime to you know, murder this
woman and then set the place on fire. That seems
a little far fetched. I don't think it's a genius.
It takes a genius to think if you're going to
kill someone, maybe a fire would be helpful. We've talked
about this before, I think, right, do you really believe
that killers are inspired by other killers pick up tips
(15:18):
from other killers?
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Absolutely, I've seen it firsthand.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
I've got Phil Hughes following the Hillside stranglers, and Hughes
himself was a strangler.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Like picking up tips or what happens? Do you think
they're just inspired?
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Well, it's both.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
You know, they're of course, paying attention to how other
killers are getting away with their crimes, you know, how
details about the crimes are being reported in the press,
how law enforcement is you know, trying to you know.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Work to solve the case.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
But then they also get inspired to try the various
different things that these other killers are doing, just to
see if they like it. So, you know, it's it's
a different psychology.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Well let's get back to the case. So the night
watchmen sound the alarm on the fire, and I don't
think it's enough of a fire to cause major damage
because they are able to go back up into the room.
Because Rosina is very concerned about Helen Jewett, so she
is afraid that Helen and her companion are going to
die of smoke in elation, so they go up to
(16:22):
try to rescue her. It's Rosina and a woman named
Maria Stevens, and they go up and they find Helen
with no male client with her. So when the night
watchmen get to the house and they find out that
Helen has been killed, they try to you know, get
together their resources and get some more officers. They also
call the corner and a corner brings two doctors to
(16:45):
the house and they start to examine her body. So
the fires out. It doesn't look like it really did
any damage. It did not do what I'm assuming the
killer thought it was going to do. And I told
you I talked to a friend a chemists who said
it often does not do what a killer hopes it
will do. You know, it's hard to predict whether or
not it's going to work or not, and it's risky.
(17:06):
I would not have thought fire would be risky, but
she said, it just doesn't behave the way you want
it to behave a lot of times.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
It goes where it wants to go, you know. And
there's so many different factors within any environment. You know
where the fuel source is, you know where the oxygen
supply is. Unless you have literally a body doused with
gasoline and lit directly on fire, if you're just trying
to set a fire inside a room, it's not necessarily
(17:36):
going to consume everything in that room right off the
bat or if at all. You know, that's it really
takes a level of expertise to kind of understand how
to set a fire in order to completely obliterate a room,
accounting for all the various different types of variables that
are within that particular scene.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
And it attracts people, maybe sooner than the killer would
have wanted, certainly sooner than if he had covered it up.
I mean, this is probably several hours at the very most,
I would assume, because you know, there's a.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Fire, sure, you know, and sometimes a fire will just smolder,
you know. And now you have a fair amount of
heat and smoke present within the room, and you can
get these flashover points where the heat gets it gets
hot enough inside the room where the other flammables inside
the room just instantaneously will light, and now they've accomplished
(18:28):
what they wanted to do.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
But it can smolder for hours.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
This fire does no good to the killer, it sounds like.
Because they are able to obviously identify her, they're able
to look at her body and determine how she died
and get some pretty good details. So, as I said,
the corner brings two doctors to the house. They examine
Helen's body. She is twenty four years old, and I'll
tell you a little bit about her in a second.
(18:53):
But I now know the most important thing for you,
you big smile on your face, The most important thing
to you is to talk about the injuries and the
autopsy and the examination first, and then we can get
to all the you know, victimology stuff.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Right.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yes, there you go, see, I know you It only
took about what a year and a half, maybe two years.
I'm getting there, Okay. The doctors say they found a large,
deep gash on the right side of her head above
the temple that was likely made by a hatchet, so
it doesn't sound like they found the murder weapon. The
(19:28):
gash goes through the skull into the brain, and they
perform an autopsy and find that she was they say,
mostly healthy, though they find evidence. Now I don't know
what this means, Paul. They find evidence that her uterus
had been quote laboring under an old disease. Does that
sound like maybe of an aerial disease or something of
(19:49):
venereal infection.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
I'm not entirely sure, or endometriosis, you know, something like that.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Yeah, I don't know. But she's not pregnant and they're
not seeing anything else, and obviously they know the cause
of death. She's been hitting the head by what they
think is a hatchet and the gash goes through her
skull into her brain, and I know that you'll say
that it doesn't take very much to do that, right
with a hatchet. I'm assuming like this could be a woman,
this could be anybody.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Oh sure, it doesn't provide enough information to indicate, you know,
how strong or robust the offender is. It's just, you know,
a hatchet is a very effective weapon, you know, And
you know I've seen cases with hatcheting deaths, and you
see where the sharp edge of the hatchet will go
through the skull, just like what we're seeing here in
(20:39):
Helen's case.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Well, let me tell you more about Helen little victimology
stuff here. So she was twenty four years old, as
I said, when she died. She came from Halliwell, Maine,
and her birth name was Dorcas Duncan. I love Dorcas.
That is like a totally old fashioned to me, eighteen
hundreds name that I've read quite a bit. She was
known as a local beauty. Of course we hear that
(21:01):
all the time. Her parents died when she was young
and she was adopted by a local judge. But when
she was seventeen, she had what the newspapers would later
describe as a quote unquote affair with a local prominent banker,
which at seventeen, I'm not sure we could define that
as an affair at all, because this is a grown man.
This caused a huge uproar in her community, and I'm
(21:24):
sure that people blamed her to a certain extent, because
that's what they would have done in the eighteen hundreds.
She changed her name from Dorcas Duncan to Helen Jewett,
and she moved to New York and she had no
other resources, so she became a sex worker.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Okay, and now she's in the brothel and she's dead
with a hatchet wound, and the offender has tried to
set the room on fire. Now do you know, would
Helen have kept any amount of.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
The proceeds from the clients within the room?
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Like?
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Could there be a financial motive to this crime?
Speaker 1 (22:01):
It didn't sound like it was like a theft thing,
because I think Rosina would have known that.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
One thing they don't talk about also is whether or
not this hatchet was brought to the scene or if
it was something that the killer had found at the house.
So I don't think that robbery is the motive, is
the very long answer to that. Okay, let me tell
you about what they know about that day. So the
night before her body was discovered was a Friday, and
(22:29):
on most Fridays, Helen had a regular client. I mean,
these are some fake names. His name was Bill Easy,
fake name. However, on this day, she asked Rosina to
not let Bill into the brothel and to reschedule him
because she said she had another date, another person coming.
(22:51):
So Rosina lets in a man later that night wearing
a long black cloak, and his name, also a fake name,
was Frank Rivers. You would think people could be more creative,
but I guess, I guess they need to be able
to remember it, right, if it's their fake name.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
He had been covering his face with his cloak so
nobody could see what he looked like. But you know, Rosina,
who is just as sharp as attack, made sure that
she at least could look at his height, listen to
his voice, pick out details. And she said that was
not Bill Easy. This was a different guy. This was
(23:30):
not her normal guy, based on everything that she remembers.
So this guy comes. Frank Rivers comes between nine o'clock
and ten o'clock. Then about eleven o'clock Helen called down
for a bottle of champagne, which apparently Rosina had on hand.
She brought up the bottle and two glasses, and she
saw the guy, the mystery guy, but only the back
(23:52):
of his head because he was laying on her bed
reading a book. Now we are caught up. We have
no suspect except the guy who provided a fake name.
The only person, the only person who saw him was
the Madam Rosina, which I know you can imagine is
(24:13):
at some point going to cause a problem. This is
the only witness in what she does for a living.
So what's your impression so far?
Speaker 2 (24:20):
So Rosina saying. When she looks into the room in
Helen's room, she sees this Frank Rivers, laying on Helen's
bed reading a book.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
He must be on his side because she can only
see the back of his head.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Okay, this seems like an unusual thing to be doing
when you've gone to a brothel to hire a sex worker.
But yeah, maybe that's what he was doing. Fundamentally, none
of the other women in the brothel see Frank Rivers.
It's just Rosina and Helen, and Helen is dead.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Yep, you got it.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Of course, I can.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
See where this possibly is going to go is, did
Rosina have any issues with Helen, not.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
That we know of.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
No.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
She seemed like a wonderful person to work for, it
sounds like, and that's what the other women said, well organized,
good security, all of that. We don't know of any
problems between them, and she was very upset about obviously
what happened with Helen.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Okay, yeah, obviously it'd be nice to have other people
corroborate Rosina's story of Frank Rivers being present within Helen's room.
And Rosina is the one that's reporting the slamp that's
moved out of place, as well as the back door
being unlatched, so she's kind of controlling all the information
flow in this investigation.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
So the night watchmen, remember who are not trained police necessarily,
the night watchmen spread out and they start trying to
figure out who murdered this woman, this young sex worker.
To their credit, I would say that this was not
a time when police would have necessarily been enthusiastic about
doing this, but they did. And as the story goes along,
(25:57):
you see, of course, an interesting divide between people who
were supportive of the sex workers and this was a
tragedy and the people who thought well, you know, they're
putting themselves in this position, and of course we see
that today with the media. So the night watchmen are
going out and they look in the neighborhood and they
find out that there is a guy named Richard Robinson.
(26:20):
Richard Robinson lives in a boarding house nearby. And when
I say boarding house, I know it sounds like a flophouse.
They're not. Sometimes they're very nice. I mean, you can
have a nice boarding house. It doesn't have to be
some rancid place. And he is living nearby. At some point,
Rosina sees him and says, this is the guy. This
(26:42):
is Frank Rivers, Richard Robinson. He's nineteen years old. And
of course he says, you're nuts. I had nothing to
do with this. So this is haphazard. I would say,
at best, they kind of run into this guy. He's
known to have a long black jacket coat. Rosina then
season and says, yep, that's him, never having actually seen
(27:03):
this guy's face before.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah, and that was what I was going to point out.
He comes in with this cloak wrapped around his face.
He only sees the back of his head when he's
laying on Helen's bed, you know, so that ID is
really weak this case.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
I'm telling you, you know, the struggle is real for
investigators in the nineteen hundreds. I will read these stories
sometimes and I'll just think, gosh, to be a detective
in the eighteen you know, in the eighteen nineties, even
when there were detectives, it's just sounds awful. I don't know,
unless you just run across a murder as it's happening,
(27:39):
I don't know how they were able to really solve
these I do know the third degree. You know, they
would harass people. They would have informants who probably were
not very accurate, certainly witnesses that were not accurate. But
this sounds like a nightmare of a case in a
big city with a lot of pressure on people to
solve it.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Oh sure, you know. And this is where I mean.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
There are investigators that are so good at reading people
and doing interviews and stitching together circumstantial cases. But even
the best investigators could potentially just relying on circumstantial evidence
be wrong. Our limitations as humans is, you know, we
kind of add things together and think, oh, this must
(28:21):
be it. And in my experience, I've done that myself,
and then had physical evidence go Nope, you're wrong.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Yeah, And I like hearing you say that, and I
will say, Paul, you know I've said this before. One
of your superpowers again is you're I think, humble, and
you're aware of your limitations, and you know when to
call people, and you, certainly on our show, know when
to say this is not my jam. I don't know
anything about botanical toxicology or whatever it is. I have
(28:52):
told people in interviews before that. With American Sherlock, I
read two to three thousand of Oscar Heinrich's letters and
not once did he say maybe I was wrong, you know,
when they were released and he had had them essentially convicted.
I mean, he never doubted himself. And I just think
that's such a problem, A big problem. I think you
(29:14):
have to think about when new information comes out, Man,
I might have screwed this up. And there's so much
responsibility on somebody like you, especially you're doing these active cases.
Now you know there's a lot of responsibility on your
shoulders with these cases.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yeah, and you know the cases, they're the ultimate challenge.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
They're very humbling.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
I often would go into a case with an ego
thinking and I can solve this and then as time
goes on, recognizing oh, you know it's it's just you
have to stay humble. You constantly have to assess the
information and hope that you know your efforts ultimately pay
off with a solid case in one way or the other.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Well, the people investigating this case have a lot to
deal with because when the media gets involved, like I said,
it's pretty polarizing. So who they're targeting. Richard Robinson? Who
is this nineteen year old He is a clerk for
a prominent cloth merchant, and he's the son of a
relatively wealthy landowner and a politician from outside New Haven, Connecticut,
(30:17):
So lots of money. Remember I said boarding houses. I
know it sounds like they're not the greatest place, but
it's a flat with a bunch of other people, and
they can be nice and expensive. So Richard is from
a good family, he's from that neighborhood. And I'm already
sensing a pretty bad dynamic here that we've also heard
about in the past. A client with a wealthy family
(30:39):
or a potential offender from a wealthy family and a
sex worker who will be easily dismissed as a victim.
Most likely based on her profession. And then of course
our main witness, who is a madam. So this is
a familiar story over and over again. You know who
gets justice in this country.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, I can see where this is. This is going
to be heading now. A lot of this is going
to end up being dependent upon the prosecutor. And can
you know what kind of political influence does the Robinson
family have on the prosecutor or is the prosecutor independent?
That's a tough dynamic when you have this disparity, if
you will, on the defendant versus the victims and the
(31:20):
social status or the perceisd social status that they have.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Well, let me give you some information that will shine
a light on eighteen hundreds and before Manhattan. So number one,
the police say, okay, this sounds like Rosina. The madam
says that Richard is the guy. Let's go pick him up.
So they go to his boarding house to see what's
(31:45):
going on with him, to interview him, you know, just
to get more information. I'm sure they don't want to
rely specifically on Rosina. And they get there and he
is asleep. His roommate answers the door. He wakes up
Richard and Richard pulls on a pair of pants that
have a stain that looks like white paint or whitewash
(32:06):
on his pants, and detectives make a mental note of that.
So this is the quirky part of policing in the
eighteen hundreds, Instead of taking him down to the police station,
they decide to do a little bit of a gotcha
thing with Richard. They take him to the brothel. So
the custom of the time in the sixteen hundreds a
couple hundred years earlier, was that it was a superstition.
(32:28):
If you bring a murderer to the scene of the
crime and you make him touch the victim, the victim
will bleed fresh blood, and that is damning. I know
you're smiling, and that is very damning. And I told
you that in my tenfold more Wicked. They believed that
somebody who bled after they died, or had any sort
of bodily fluid come out, that it was a sign
(32:49):
that they were possessed by the devil. So I'm getting
mixed messages here, but essentially, the body of a victim
could really tell you a lot. They could, in this
case point to the identity of the murderer. Are you
going to debunk this. I'm assuming you will do I
even have to debunk it. Definitely not the possessed by
(33:11):
the double part. I think we're okay.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
You know how many bodies I've touched and they bled
after they bled? You move a body and then you
start getting you know, bleeding out of bullet injuries or
knife stab wounds.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
You know, it's just nap. This is silly.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Well, I will say, in the eighteen hundreds, they don't
believe that anymore. Thank goodness, we've progressed from the sixteen
hundreds to the eighteen hundreds. They do use it as
a little bit of a like I like to think
of it as a light detector. They did this with
Edward rule off too. So they bring Richard down and
they show him Helen's body and they're looking for a reaction.
(33:50):
That's all they want to know. And they feel like
they can really read whether he is guilty or innocent
based on his reaction to seeing her body. So or
sees they're going to the brothel, and they said that
his face goes pale, but when he sees her body, nothing,
no reaction whatsoever, just sort of like nothing's there. And
(34:11):
that was it, I assuming you're gonna say that you
cannot obviously predict based on someone's reaction. I see this
on the movies all the time, where they'll show the
potential offender the suspect photos of the body to see
what the reaction is. Is that a common Is that
a real tool that police officers use?
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Well, they shouldn't, because you know, if you're displaying aspects
of the crime scene to your suspect, how do you
know when the suspects starts providing certain details. Did they
acquire those details based on what they've seen like they're
Now let's say you have somebody who's falsely confessing or
are they purposely altering their statements because now they know
(34:53):
what they're perceiving happened at the crime scene. You know,
you really don't want to have that type of contamination,
you know. So with with Richard Robinson, I put no
weight on his reactions. You know, he's he's recognizing when
he's being brought to the brothel. Uh, oh, I'm under
suspicion here, right, you know, and that could be part
(35:15):
of the reason for his uh not appearing to be
in good shape en route, And then you never know
how somebody's going to react when they're taking a look
at a dead body. So it just underscores that these
investigators really don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
And one of the issues is that Richard doesn't deny
that he's been at the brothel. In fact, he and
his roommate had been at the brothel. So you know,
he says, yes, I was there, and let me tell
you what he says. So Richard says he was home
just after eleven o'clock that night, and you know, another
brothel owner comes over and says, Richard, how could you
(35:54):
kill this poor woman? And he says, I didn't do anything.
And then he says, maybe the madam did it. Just
what you said, maybe the madam did it. But he
denies doing anything, and he says, in fact, Helen has
a handkerchief with another guy's name under her pillow, which
she did. So you know, he's placing himself there. He's
(36:14):
saying I was there, but he's not admitting, obviously to
killing her. There's a corner's inquest. The jury is made
up from people. This is funny. The jury is made
up of people from the crowd. Whoever shows up first.
It gets to be in the corner's jury. It sounds like,
I mean, that's what they did in the eighteen och
they were just pulling people off the street, anybody, anybody.
(36:37):
I mean, in the case of my book and the
Center's all about the corner's inquest, the only restriction or
the only guide, was they had to be a landowner.
That was it okay to be on a corner's jury.
You just had to be a landowner and that was it.
They considered that meant you were a gentleman, or you
were an upstanding citizen, and that's all that was required
of it, and that's it. So the jury sits, the
(36:59):
corner starts bringing information to the jury. Richard's roommate goes
to the jury and says, yeah, we had been at
the brothel the night before. He thinks that Richard came
home around ten o'clock, he said, but I'm not one
hundred percent sure. And then when he thinks about it,
he says, well, maybe it was more like one am,
even though Richard says it was eleven PM. So it
(37:21):
sounds like the roommate comes home first and then Richard
comes home later. But because the roommate was asleep, he
couldn't really quite figure out how late it was. And
of course, you know there's no cell phones or watches.
Well there's watches, but nobody's wearing a watch at night,
so you have to kind of squint and look at
the clock, probably on the mantle. I think you have
(37:42):
to be pretty motivated to see what the time is.
And I'm not sure that the roommate was that motivated.
He just heard Richard come in late, so I don't
know about this alibi. And he puts himself there, So
what do you think about that? I mean, you still
have to prove that he was the one holding the hatchet.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Yeah, So does he put himself with Helen that night
before she's killed?
Speaker 3 (38:01):
I'm kind of confused on that he does.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
So he says, yes, I was there, but I left
and she was alive, and the madam probably did it,
or the man whose name is etched on a handkerchief
under her pillow.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Rosina picked Richard out, Richard Robinson out as being Frank Rivers. Right, yep,
Robinson is placing him there with Helen that night.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
You know, it's just one.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Little detail where it makes you just kind of stop
and go, Okay, Richard Robinson potentially had an opportunity to
have been involved with Helen's homicide. There seems to be
some looseness with the time frame that the roommate is
saying that Robinson came.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Home, you know.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
But all it does is it just from just an
assessment of Robinson, It's like, well, he's in play, but
it definitely does not prove that he's responsible for Helen's homicide.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Nowhere near that at this point in time.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
So they turned to the cloak the prosecutors that Rosina
said Frank Rivers was wearing, and they find this cloak
kind of in a neighbor's yard, and he denies, this
is my cloak, but with some prodding, the roommate says, yes,
Richard had worn that cloak. Then they turned to the
(39:24):
pants that the detective saw him wearing. The corner's inquest
finds that one of the fences that Richard would have
had to climb to get out of the yard if
he were the killer, was whitewashed, which is where those
stains on his pants came from. And this seems to
be enough Paul for the corner's jury to charge Richard
with her murder. That's not a lot.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
No, it's not a lot. You know.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Part of it this cloak being found, you know, this
is where now that kind of diminishes my initial thought
of Rosina.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
You know, unless she planted this.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Cloak, maybe she is telling the truth about Frank River
showing up with the cloak, you know, And I guess
it's you know, how common is this type of cloak
during this era? You know, That's what I would want
to know. Is this just going to be I mean,
we see like hoodies all over the place on the ground,
you know, but doesn't mean that that hoodie was used
by the offender in any particular case today. It's just
(40:22):
it's a common item out there. But I don't know,
you know, I think there isn't a case against Robinson
at this point, you know, the whitewash thing. No, the cloak,
they can't even really prove that it's his. You know,
it's just you've got the roommates saying, yeah, it looks
like a cloak that he had, But let's see what
else they develop.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Well, and you know, you're talking about nine women in
this house, plus Rosina the madam, and they have men
coming in and out. She has regulars. I mean, there's
just a lot of things happening here. So even if
it is Frank Rivers, whether it's Robin or not, if
there is this Frank Rivers and he's wearing this cloak
(41:04):
and he jumps over a fence and it's whitewashed, and
all of this stuff comes together, it still doesn't put
the hatchet in his hand, you know. It just proves
that he had sex with her. Or maybe they didn't
even have sex. Maybe they were just you know, drinking
champagne and reading. We don't know, and that's one of
the issues with this case. So it becomes what many
(41:25):
people have called I've heard this a million times, but
you know, the first public sex scandal. I'm pretty sure
there were big sex scandals in the seventeen hundreds too,
but this is this is a tabloid sex scandal in
New York. It's a huge amount of interest. As I
told you, you know, Nathaniel Hawthorne also wrote about that
case of Helen Jewett in what he saw depicted in
(41:46):
the Wax Museum. The newspapers go crazy over this case
because she's attractive. There are all sorts of trial pamphlets printed,
and he is arrested for her murder. The corners in
quest found that he was likely responsible, so they arrest him.
This is a very polarizing case because there are, you know,
(42:07):
people who are obviously defending him he's from a really
well known, good family, and then attacking her because she's
a sex worker. And then there are, of course the opposite,
which is that he is this rogue who frequents sex
workers brothels, and you know, he's a disgusting person and
she didn't deserve to be killed. Now we have some
(42:27):
more information, and this is where I think the case
takes a little bit of a turn, and you could
tell me if this is enough. So you know, what
we know so far is that he said he was there,
he said he was a client, he said he left,
she was alive. He has nothing to do with it.
They do some digging and the prosecutor comes up with
(42:48):
letters that Helen and Richard have written each other, because
it turns out that they had known each other for
almost a year and that he had either been a
regular client of hers or a relation relationship for her.
But it was very tumultuous. There were instances in the
letters that prosecutors picked up on where he admits that
(43:09):
he physically hurt her. And then the flip side of
that is they also exchanged portrait miniatures, which is a
huge deal. Those little miniatures, you know, that depict different
scenes that are incredibly expensive. And when Richard writes kind
of this final letter that says, I'm breaking up with
you your nuts, I want my miniature back, you know, this
(43:31):
becomes this big media frenzy. And they were reproducing the
pictures of the miniatures because they were collector's items at
this point. So that's kind of how big this case was.
But the big highlight here that I'm asking you about
is the letters, and you know how much we have
an established relationship between them. It sounds like he was
(43:52):
breaking up with her. He had admitted to being violent
with her. Does the case get more solid with these.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Letters, Well, he gets more interesting as a suspect because
now it appears that there may even be a motive
that's identified. You know, he's upset with her, he wants
his miniature back. Part of the question that I had
is if he was a routine customer of Helen's over
the past year, how many times in the past that
(44:19):
he used the pseudonym of Frank Rivers. Then why does
he do it that night? Well, maybe he does it
that night because he's trying to pose as somebody else
and knowing that he's probably going to minimally rob Helen
of this miniature. And then if he's bringing a hatchet
to the scene, he may have had bad intent from
(44:39):
the very beginning. But I don't know, you know, he's
I think he's more interesting because of the prior relationship
and the history of some level of physical violence against Helen.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
It's still you.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Have to prove the case of homicide, and just this
prior relationship doesn't do that. It's just investigators need to
pay attention to him a little bit more. But as
of now, I still don't think that they've got a
case against Richard.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
No. And it's interesting when you talk about the relationship,
whatever that was. If this was a regular boyfriend of hers,
not a client, but a regular boyfriend, you would think
that if Rosina knew him for a year, that she
would be able to recognize him, even like with his head,
I would recognize you with your head, you know, turned
(45:25):
away from me. Probably, I don't know, maybe not, but
I would think this might have been a relationship that
she kept very quiet, and maybe this is, you know,
one of the first times that he's visited the brothel before.
I don't know, we don't have that much context. But
the violent part of it I thought was interesting too.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yeah, you know, but again it doesn't prove the homicide.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
No, don't be picky, Paul. Two weeks after the murder,
Richard is sitting in jail and there's a grocer who
comes over to see him and says, listen, I saw
a picture of you in the paper, and I think
you were in my store buying cigars that night. Richard agrees,
and eventually the grocer will testify, giving him kind of
(46:07):
a partial alibi, but certainly not for the whole night.
So the majority of Richard's defense is are you really
going to believe in Madam over Richard Robinson? And are
you really going to make this big of a fuss
over a sex worker? That was pretty much the defense.
And you know, I mean, this is no surprise as
(46:27):
somebody who works in the eighteen hundreds all the time,
but it's still disgusting every time this comes up. The
misogyny of it, and just in general, you know, the
kind of the dismissiveness in the media, but also the
polarization of it, you know. I mean, these are two
people who turned into avatars for you know, specific parts
of society. It's hard to know if Helen Jewett at
(46:50):
this point is going to get any kind of justice
or if Richard Robinson is responsible for anything.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
I think there's a lot of flames that are fanned
by the media frenzy around this, you know. And I
can see what you're saying about the polarization, you know,
but on both sides, you've got a woman who's lost
her life and now you've got this nineteen year old
Richard Robinson who sounds like he's being drug through the ringer.
(47:17):
And if he's responsible, so be it. But as of
right now, I'm questioning that. And also it's sort of like, Okay,
where is this going to go? I'm kind of curious.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Well, we don't have very much longer, you know, the
trial goes on. He has great defense attorneys who, as
I said, attack Helen's character, attack Rosina, the madam's character.
The grocer is helpful with providing a partial alibi. And
really you've got sex workers who talk about Helen's relationship
with Richard and saying that they knew him and they
(47:53):
had a tumultuous relationship. But as soon as they are called,
they're completely diminished, of course, because if they're bad character.
But you're right, there's not very much evidence here. I mean,
certainly Richard from the letter sounds like he's a jerk,
probably violent. Doesn't mean he killed her. So you know,
this is a fast trial. The jury goes and deliberates
(48:15):
and they are gone for between eight and fifteen minutes.
Oh jeez, okay, yeah, and they say not guilty. And
that is that very weak, circumstantial case, even for the
eighteen hundred's usually we get more than that, you know,
and this was a very very well known case because
(48:36):
it was considered such a tragedy where you know, you
just didn't we didn't have enough information. But you know,
on the other hand, it's almost like they felt like
they couldn't get a foothold because of the status of
the people involved in the case, both the high and
the lower status.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
Right, you know, And that's my concern.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
I think, you know, they're not guilty verdict with the
information that was being you us, I can't argue against that.
At all, you know, but for them to only deliberate
for eight to fifteen minutes, that suggests to me that
probably the Robinson family influence was huge, you know, and
(49:13):
you'd like to see the jurors at least, you know,
really think about the case a little bit harder versus
just dismissing Helen. You know, that's in essence what they did.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
Definitely. Richard moves to Texas, he opens a saloon and
eventually becomes a deputy clerk of the court. And Helen
Jewett goes down in history as a sex worker who
was murdered and kind of thrown away in the eyes
of the media oftentimes, but then immortalized in a wax
(49:44):
museum in Boston and seen by several different well known
authors and probably they were inspired by her story. So
I often think about that sort of scenario, like Sarah
Maria Cornell in my case, you know, a case that
a lot of people had never heard of before, and
then I think about it. I pick up her story
and I think, this is why the story is important,
(50:06):
and I think a lot of people have done that
in Helen Jewett's case, in Mary Rogers case. You know,
these women in history who I had heard of. And
you've got these authors who want to write books, and
you know, they credit the tragic story, but oftentimes the
bravery of these women. There are circumstances limiting them, they're
(50:26):
time periods limiting them and them doing the best they can,
and then they end up much more famous when they're
dead than when they were alive.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
No, for sure.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Fascinating to hear how this case ended up in the
wax Museum and how it inspired you know, those authors.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
I've never heard of it, you know, but but here
we go. You know, there's been books written because of
this case.
Speaker 1 (50:50):
And I think when I write my books and do
the podcast, when I think about the victims, who are
most of the time women, you know, people know who've
read my books, most of the time they're women. And
I think that there is some element of bravery from
the women in every book that I've done. Something has
happened in their lives that they've overcome. And I think
(51:10):
it's important to shine a light on those kinds of stories,
even when they in tragically. I think they're inspiring. And
you know, with Helen Jewett, she sounds like she was
run out of town when she was young, and yeah,
seventeen year old seduced. It sounds like or manipulated or
assaulted by a grown man and drummed out of town
(51:32):
and taken on sex work and was just trying to
do the best she could and then did not receive justice.
But she has been immortalized in so many trial transcripts
and just it's pretty incredible. So I'm happy to have
told her story. I hadn't told her story yet, And
I'm glad that you were available and interested in listening.
Speaker 3 (51:52):
Paul No, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you, Kate.
Speaker 1 (51:55):
All right, well, we'll see you next week with another story.
Speaker 3 (51:58):
Awesome, see you.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
This has been an exactly right production for our.
Speaker 2 (52:06):
Sources and show notes go to exactlyrightmedia dot com slash
Buried Bones sources.
Speaker 1 (52:11):
Our senior producer is Alexis Emirosi.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 3 (52:21):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (52:23):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgaroff, Georgia hard Stark and Daniel Kramer.
Speaker 1 (52:30):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Baried Bones.
Speaker 2 (52:34):
Pod 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 (52:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And 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 3 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Hey Paul, Hey Kate, how are you.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I'm doing really well. I have an odd question for you? Uh,
and I know I always do. I start every episode
like that. I have an odd question for you both.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I get little nervous about this. It's like, what's going
to happen? What am I going to be forced to.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Have to reveal?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
No, No, it's not that interesting. It is odd. So
the case of what we're going to talk about today
is a really well known case from eighteen thirties New York,
well known to me and any history geek who likes
true crime. But the reason I'm bringing that up is
because the subject of the case was featured in a
(01:38):
really unusual museum in the eighteen hundreds that a lot
of well known authors like to visit, the wax museum.
Have you ever been to one of those wax museum anywhere?
Like I went to one in London and I can't
remember which one it was. Have you done that before?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, you know, when I was young, I remember going,
is it Madam Tussaut?
Speaker 1 (01:59):
I don't remember how to pronounce it. Please don't kill
us listeners, but yes, everybody knows what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, and if I remember right, that was out in Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
What did you think?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Well, you know, it's interesting because of course now that
you see these famous individuals, because typically you see them
in magazines or on TV or something, and so to
actually see them not quite real life, you know, it's
sort of like at least you get us a better
sense on what they look like. But also as good
(02:29):
as these these wax replicas are, you can still see
well that's not quite right, you know, there is some
minor differences, you know, but it is it's interesting for sure.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Well, the funny story about this is is that I
have a book that's going to come out in January,
January seventh, and it's called The Sinner's All Bell, And
we can talk about this, you know, at a later episode.
But the book features the story of a young woman
who was a personer at a Methodist and she is
found hanging from a haystack poll in New England in
(03:05):
the eighteen thirties. So a very famous author years later
is at a wax museum in Boston, and it is
a wax museum that is featuring several different true crime
contemporary for them eighteen thirties eighteen forties true crime stories.
One of them is the story we're going to talk
(03:26):
about Helen Jewett. The other is the story from The
Sinner's All Bow, my book, and I'll just tell you
it's Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote The Scarlet Letter, and the
woman at the center of my book is believed to
be his inspiration for Hester Prynne, the main character in
The Scarlet Letter, and his comments, Nathaniel Hawthorne's comments about
(03:48):
the way that the supposed killer and the victim we're
standing near each other. It's very clear that the way
that whomever was in charge of the wax Museum had
him sort of hover over her in a very menacing way.
So it wasn't just someone standing there in a pose.
They were kind of staging people in different action poses.
(04:12):
And you know, I'm not going to the case is complicated.
I'm not going to give away what happens in the case.
But I think Nathaniel Hawthorne really looked at this and said, well,
it's very clear that he's guilty, and it's the way
that the wax Museum owner staged it. It was very influential,
and you're right that three D feeling makes people feel
like they're right there and it can really shift opinions
(04:34):
about stories.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
This was very popular well, and I find it fascinating
that all the way back in the eighteen thirties and
eighteen forties is that the wax Museum was paying attention
to true crime.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
I know, Oh yeah, Well, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan
Poe were crazy about true crime stories. They both went
to trials, they both read all the newspaper accounts of
all types of different stories. And there are stories that
we talk about in this show that inspire you know
true crime stories like we just talked about, Remember the
(05:04):
story of Mary Rogers, the woman who went missing from
her boarding house, a cigar girl, a woman who worked
at the scar shop and then labor. She was rumored
to have died from a failed abortion, and so you know,
these are the kinds of stories that these authors really
picked up on. So it's interesting to you know, you're
at this sort of attraction and you're getting all of
(05:27):
this information and it's really framing these stories in a
certain way. And the story that we're going to talk
about was a huge story in Manhattan in the eighteen thirties,
and anybody who is a history true crime geek might
know the story of Helen Jewett. So get ready, because
(05:47):
talk about somebody who's been exposed to a lot of
different types of people. We are really going to be
right in the middle of Manhattan, which is now the
area is known as Tribeca, but we're right in the
middle of it. So let's go ahead and set the scene.
So this is eighteen thirty six, a very cold night
in April. You know, this is kind of the end
(06:10):
of a very cold winter in New York. I had
mentioned before that we are in an area on Thomas
Street which is now known as Tribeca, and we are
at a well known brothel. When I wrote my book
about Edward Ruloff, which was set around this time period,
there was a book that I quoted a little bit
(06:33):
called The Gentleman's Guide to Manhattan and it was a
no joke paul a Rundown of eighteen sixties, eighteen seventies brothels,
almost like what you would get on Yelp, like the
two dollar signs, the three dollars signs, the different people
that were recommended, who work there, what block to go
(06:56):
on to, what not. It was written in a very
civilized kind of like shopping for someone, and they would
talk about, you know, brothels where the women would steal
from you, brothels where they wouldn't, where you could feel
safe where you know, I mean it it's called The
Gentleman's Guide to New York and I thought, that's, I guess,
(07:16):
good advice for people I don't know.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
That still goes on to this day. You know.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
So like when I was investigating, you know, unsolved series
of sex workers. They're on the street, they're in stroll areas,
and so of course I'm looking to see what the
johns are saying about the locations, if there is anybody
that would pop up as a suspect. And these johns
are doing the exact same thing. They're saying, Hey, look
for so and so. She's usually dressed like this, She'll
(07:43):
do this, this, and this for this amount of money.
She's you know, and gives ratings on the women. Or
they will get online and say, hey, it looks like
there's a visting going on. Avoid this area. So they swap.
They swap information to help each other out.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
That doesn't have anything to do with our case. This
Gentleman's Handbook. I just remember thinking it was really interesting,
you know, that you could get this thing for like
five cents or something like that and have a pretty
decent rundown of what was happening in New York. This
is a brothel and it is run by a woman
named Rosina Townsend. She's thirty nine, she's a madam, and
(08:23):
she has a very very tight security system. She knows
how to run this place. I'm sure she's encountered every
kind of man, gentleman and not in this brothel over
the years. And she has several sex workers who work there.
Live there, and she has a lot of systems in
place that I think are pretty interesting. So this is
(08:47):
what happens. Rosina is awoken on April tenth, eighteen thirty six,
this cold day, She's awoken in the very early hours
of the morning to a knock at her bedroom door.
She opens the door and there's a man who says,
we presume as a client, who says, I need to
get out of the brothel. So what happened is she
(09:11):
had a front door that was locked both from the
inside and the outside, and after midnight, Rosina would lock
both sides, so if you wanted to get out as
a client or as a sex worker, you would have
to talk to her. She's the only one who had
the key, and she would unlock it and let you
out for security purposes. She won't give him the key.
(09:32):
She says, go get your woman to let you out.
So he says, okay. She shuts the door, but none
of the sex workers come to her door to say,
you know, where's the key, So she would loan the
key out. They would unlock the door for the client
and then give the key back. No one comes to
her door, so she sort of just blew it off,
(09:52):
and maybe I assumed that thought that he went back
to the woman he was with. A few hours later,
she's awoken by a much louder knocking at the front door,
this time, not her bedroom door or any of the
doors of the nine women who lived there. At the
front door, she's sleeping next to a man. He wakes
up and they both look at the clock on the
(10:14):
mantel and it's three o'clock in the morning. This is
a different client who has made a pre arranged appointment
at three in the morning with one of the women.
So Rozina says okay and lets him in. And when
she does, she looks around and notices there's a gas
lamp that's out of place. It's lit. It's sitting on
the table on the first floor parlor. It's not supposed
(10:37):
to be there. It's actually supposed to be upstairs on
the second floor, in one of the bedrooms. And she
thinks this is odd. I mean, this woman is on
top of stuff. She understands how to run this place.
So she takes the lamp and she goes to the
parlor and when she's kind of walking back there, she
looks at the back of the building and she sees
that the door to the backyard is unlocked. So this
(11:00):
is a door that has a latch, doesn't have a
key lock on it, and anyone can get out from
the inside anytime they want. I don't think most of
the client the men know about this, But if you
know about this door, you can go down and unlatch
the door and go out the back door, which is
where the yard is, and then there's an outhouse. So
(11:22):
she thinks the sex worker who was with the first
man who wanted out of the building, she thinks that
the woman said to him, just go down the back
way and unlatch it yourself, and that's how he went out.
So do you have anything you need to say? I
have another about half a page of information here. There's
(11:42):
a lot of that told you there's a lot going on.
We don't even have a death yet.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
No.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Right now, it's just sort of what sounds like routine
happenings every night, except you've got this light that has
been noticed out of place. So we'll see where you
go from here.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
So she looks out into the backyard. It's like I said,
three in the morning. This is the way the backyard
is set up. It's completely fenced in, and the fence
varies from like eight feet to twelve feet tall, and
on one side the neighbor's stable horse stable backs up
to the fence, and that part of the fence has
pickets to prevent anyone from climbing onto it from the
(12:22):
stable roof. And this is considered pretty tight security. So
they don't want men hopping in and hopping out of
this yard. They want to know who's there the whole time.
It's very very high fencing. There's an outhouse in the yard,
and so you know, Rosina is thinking, okay, well, maybe
the guy went out to use it, or one of
(12:43):
the women maybe, and that's why the latch was off
on this back door. But she said that doesn't make
any sense because it's a really cold, nasty, drizzly night,
and everybody has a chamber plot gross in their room,
so you know, Rosina is really trying to figure out
what exactly happened. She says that she calls out who's
(13:04):
there in the backyard a few times, nobody answers. She
goes upstairs and she's trying to figure out which bedroom
the lamp is missing from. She goes to the first
bedroom upstairs and the door is locked, which means there's
a woman who wants privacy with a client. She goes
to the other bedroom, which belongs to the woman we're
(13:25):
going to be talking about, Helen Juitt. The door swings open,
it's not locked, and we have it sounds like a fire.
There are thick plumes of smoke coming out of the room.
She yells fire and runs down to her bedroom which
faces the street on the first floor, and yells fire
out the window. And there's a watchman. There's no organized
(13:48):
police in New York in the eighteen thirties, just sort
of like night watchman. Watchman is posted nearby. Here's her,
and everybody has now woken up in the whole house
because people are yelling fire. Can pause here because I
will tell you as a spoiler alert, Helen will be
found dead inside this room. And we have a similar
(14:08):
story that we've talked about, a similar type of setup.
You know, someone is murdered and someone is using fire
to try to cover it up.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, you know, and this is of course I've had
cases with burning bodies or crime scenes that have been burned,
you know, And it is it's a tough, tough type
of case to work because fire can be so destructive.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
The case that you and I talked about before, I
think you remember Albert Tarell, the man who was in
a relationship with a woman named Marianne Bickford, who was
kind of an on again off against sex worker. He
kills her and then tries to set the whole you know,
aira on fire and then claims he was sleepwalking. There
is some speculation that this is where Albert Trell got
(14:55):
the idea from. Was this story to be able to
kind of commit his crime to you know, murder this
woman and then set the place on fire. That seems
a little far fetched. I don't think it's a genius.
It takes a genius to think if you're going to
kill someone, maybe a fire would be helpful. We've talked
about this before, I think, right, do you really believe
that killers are inspired by other killers pick up tips
(15:18):
from other killers?
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Absolutely, I've seen it firsthand.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
I've got Phil Hughes following the Hillside stranglers, and Hughes
himself was a strangler.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Like picking up tips or what happens? Do you think
they're just inspired?
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Well, it's both.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
You know, they're of course, paying attention to how other
killers are getting away with their crimes, you know, how
details about the crimes are being reported in the press,
how law enforcement is you know, trying to you know.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Work to solve the case.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
But then they also get inspired to try the various
different things that these other killers are doing, just to
see if they like it. So, you know, it's it's
a different psychology.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Well let's get back to the case. So the night
watchmen sound the alarm on the fire, and I don't
think it's enough of a fire to cause major damage
because they are able to go back up into the room.
Because Rosina is very concerned about Helen Jewett, so she
is afraid that Helen and her companion are going to
die of smoke in elation, so they go up to
(16:22):
try to rescue her. It's Rosina and a woman named
Maria Stevens, and they go up and they find Helen
with no male client with her. So when the night
watchmen get to the house and they find out that
Helen has been killed, they try to you know, get
together their resources and get some more officers. They also
call the corner and a corner brings two doctors to
(16:45):
the house and they start to examine her body. So
the fires out. It doesn't look like it really did
any damage. It did not do what I'm assuming the
killer thought it was going to do. And I told
you I talked to a friend a chemists who said
it often does not do what a killer hopes it
will do. You know, it's hard to predict whether or
not it's going to work or not, and it's risky.
(17:06):
I would not have thought fire would be risky, but
she said, it just doesn't behave the way you want
it to behave a lot of times.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
It goes where it wants to go, you know. And
there's so many different factors within any environment. You know
where the fuel source is, you know where the oxygen
supply is. Unless you have literally a body doused with
gasoline and lit directly on fire, if you're just trying
to set a fire inside a room, it's not necessarily
(17:36):
going to consume everything in that room right off the
bat or if at all. You know, that's it really
takes a level of expertise to kind of understand how
to set a fire in order to completely obliterate a room,
accounting for all the various different types of variables that
are within that particular scene.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
And it attracts people, maybe sooner than the killer would
have wanted, certainly sooner than if he had covered it up.
I mean, this is probably several hours at the very most,
I would assume, because you know, there's a.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Fire, sure, you know, and sometimes a fire will just smolder,
you know. And now you have a fair amount of
heat and smoke present within the room, and you can
get these flashover points where the heat gets it gets
hot enough inside the room where the other flammables inside
the room just instantaneously will light, and now they've accomplished
(18:28):
what they wanted to do.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
But it can smolder for hours.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
This fire does no good to the killer, it sounds like.
Because they are able to obviously identify her, they're able
to look at her body and determine how she died
and get some pretty good details. So, as I said,
the corner brings two doctors to the house. They examine
Helen's body. She is twenty four years old, and I'll
tell you a little bit about her in a second.
(18:53):
But I now know the most important thing for you,
you big smile on your face, The most important thing
to you is to talk about the injuries and the
autopsy and the examination first, and then we can get
to all the you know, victimology stuff.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Right.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yes, there you go, see, I know you It only
took about what a year and a half, maybe two years.
I'm getting there, Okay. The doctors say they found a large,
deep gash on the right side of her head above
the temple that was likely made by a hatchet, so
it doesn't sound like they found the murder weapon. The
(19:28):
gash goes through the skull into the brain, and they
perform an autopsy and find that she was they say,
mostly healthy, though they find evidence. Now I don't know
what this means, Paul. They find evidence that her uterus
had been quote laboring under an old disease. Does that
sound like maybe of an aerial disease or something of
(19:49):
venereal infection.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
I'm not entirely sure, or endometriosis, you know, something like that.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Yeah, I don't know. But she's not pregnant and they're
not seeing anything else, and obviously they know the cause
of death. She's been hitting the head by what they
think is a hatchet and the gash goes through her
skull into her brain, and I know that you'll say
that it doesn't take very much to do that, right
with a hatchet. I'm assuming like this could be a woman,
this could be anybody.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Oh sure, it doesn't provide enough information to indicate, you know,
how strong or robust the offender is. It's just, you know,
a hatchet is a very effective weapon, you know, And
you know I've seen cases with hatcheting deaths, and you
see where the sharp edge of the hatchet will go
through the skull, just like what we're seeing here in
(20:39):
Helen's case.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Well, let me tell you more about Helen little victimology
stuff here. So she was twenty four years old, as
I said, when she died. She came from Halliwell, Maine,
and her birth name was Dorcas Duncan. I love Dorcas.
That is like a totally old fashioned to me, eighteen
hundreds name that I've read quite a bit. She was
known as a local beauty. Of course we hear that
(21:01):
all the time. Her parents died when she was young
and she was adopted by a local judge. But when
she was seventeen, she had what the newspapers would later
describe as a quote unquote affair with a local prominent banker,
which at seventeen, I'm not sure we could define that
as an affair at all, because this is a grown man.
This caused a huge uproar in her community, and I'm
(21:24):
sure that people blamed her to a certain extent, because
that's what they would have done in the eighteen hundreds.
She changed her name from Dorcas Duncan to Helen Jewett,
and she moved to New York and she had no
other resources, so she became a sex worker.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Okay, and now she's in the brothel and she's dead
with a hatchet wound, and the offender has tried to
set the room on fire. Now do you know, would
Helen have kept any amount of.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
The proceeds from the clients within the room?
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Like?
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Could there be a financial motive to this crime?
Speaker 1 (22:01):
It didn't sound like it was like a theft thing,
because I think Rosina would have known that.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
One thing they don't talk about also is whether or
not this hatchet was brought to the scene or if
it was something that the killer had found at the house.
So I don't think that robbery is the motive, is
the very long answer to that. Okay, let me tell
you about what they know about that day. So the
night before her body was discovered was a Friday, and
(22:29):
on most Fridays, Helen had a regular client. I mean,
these are some fake names. His name was Bill Easy,
fake name. However, on this day, she asked Rosina to
not let Bill into the brothel and to reschedule him
because she said she had another date, another person coming.
(22:51):
So Rosina lets in a man later that night wearing
a long black cloak, and his name, also a fake name,
was Frank Rivers. You would think people could be more creative,
but I guess, I guess they need to be able
to remember it, right, if it's their fake name.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
He had been covering his face with his cloak so
nobody could see what he looked like. But you know, Rosina,
who is just as sharp as attack, made sure that
she at least could look at his height, listen to
his voice, pick out details. And she said that was
not Bill Easy. This was a different guy. This was
(23:30):
not her normal guy, based on everything that she remembers.
So this guy comes. Frank Rivers comes between nine o'clock
and ten o'clock. Then about eleven o'clock Helen called down
for a bottle of champagne, which apparently Rosina had on hand.
She brought up the bottle and two glasses, and she
saw the guy, the mystery guy, but only the back
(23:52):
of his head because he was laying on her bed
reading a book. Now we are caught up. We have
no suspect except the guy who provided a fake name.
The only person, the only person who saw him was
the Madam Rosina, which I know you can imagine is
(24:13):
at some point going to cause a problem. This is
the only witness in what she does for a living.
So what's your impression so far?
Speaker 2 (24:20):
So Rosina saying. When she looks into the room in
Helen's room, she sees this Frank Rivers, laying on Helen's
bed reading a book.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
He must be on his side because she can only
see the back of his head.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Okay, this seems like an unusual thing to be doing
when you've gone to a brothel to hire a sex worker.
But yeah, maybe that's what he was doing. Fundamentally, none
of the other women in the brothel see Frank Rivers.
It's just Rosina and Helen, and Helen is dead.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Yep, you got it.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Of course, I can.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
See where this possibly is going to go is, did
Rosina have any issues with Helen, not.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
That we know of.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
No.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
She seemed like a wonderful person to work for, it
sounds like, and that's what the other women said, well organized,
good security, all of that. We don't know of any
problems between them, and she was very upset about obviously
what happened with Helen.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Okay, yeah, obviously it'd be nice to have other people
corroborate Rosina's story of Frank Rivers being present within Helen's room.
And Rosina is the one that's reporting the slamp that's
moved out of place, as well as the back door
being unlatched, so she's kind of controlling all the information
flow in this investigation.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
So the night watchmen, remember who are not trained police necessarily,
the night watchmen spread out and they start trying to
figure out who murdered this woman, this young sex worker.
To their credit, I would say that this was not
a time when police would have necessarily been enthusiastic about
doing this, but they did. And as the story goes along,
(25:57):
you see, of course, an interesting divide between people who
were supportive of the sex workers and this was a
tragedy and the people who thought well, you know, they're
putting themselves in this position, and of course we see
that today with the media. So the night watchmen are
going out and they look in the neighborhood and they
find out that there is a guy named Richard Robinson.
(26:20):
Richard Robinson lives in a boarding house nearby. And when
I say boarding house, I know it sounds like a flophouse.
They're not. Sometimes they're very nice. I mean, you can
have a nice boarding house. It doesn't have to be
some rancid place. And he is living nearby. At some point,
Rosina sees him and says, this is the guy. This
(26:42):
is Frank Rivers, Richard Robinson. He's nineteen years old. And
of course he says, you're nuts. I had nothing to
do with this. So this is haphazard. I would say,
at best, they kind of run into this guy. He's
known to have a long black jacket coat. Rosina then
season and says, yep, that's him, never having actually seen
(27:03):
this guy's face before.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah, and that was what I was going to point out.
He comes in with this cloak wrapped around his face.
He only sees the back of his head when he's
laying on Helen's bed, you know, so that ID is
really weak this case.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
I'm telling you, you know, the struggle is real for
investigators in the nineteen hundreds. I will read these stories
sometimes and I'll just think, gosh, to be a detective
in the eighteen you know, in the eighteen nineties, even
when there were detectives, it's just sounds awful. I don't know,
unless you just run across a murder as it's happening,
(27:39):
I don't know how they were able to really solve
these I do know the third degree. You know, they
would harass people. They would have informants who probably were
not very accurate, certainly witnesses that were not accurate. But
this sounds like a nightmare of a case in a
big city with a lot of pressure on people to
solve it.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Oh sure, you know. And this is where I mean.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
There are investigators that are so good at reading people
and doing interviews and stitching together circumstantial cases. But even
the best investigators could potentially just relying on circumstantial evidence
be wrong. Our limitations as humans is, you know, we
kind of add things together and think, oh, this must
(28:21):
be it. And in my experience, I've done that myself,
and then had physical evidence go Nope, you're wrong.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Yeah, And I like hearing you say that, and I
will say, Paul, you know I've said this before. One
of your superpowers again is you're I think, humble, and
you're aware of your limitations, and you know when to
call people, and you, certainly on our show, know when
to say this is not my jam. I don't know
anything about botanical toxicology or whatever it is. I have
(28:52):
told people in interviews before that. With American Sherlock, I
read two to three thousand of Oscar Heinrich's letters and
not once did he say maybe I was wrong, you know,
when they were released and he had had them essentially convicted.
I mean, he never doubted himself. And I just think
that's such a problem, A big problem. I think you
(29:14):
have to think about when new information comes out, Man,
I might have screwed this up. And there's so much
responsibility on somebody like you, especially you're doing these active cases.
Now you know there's a lot of responsibility on your
shoulders with these cases.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yeah, and you know the cases, they're the ultimate challenge.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
They're very humbling.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
I often would go into a case with an ego
thinking and I can solve this and then as time
goes on, recognizing oh, you know it's it's just you
have to stay humble. You constantly have to assess the
information and hope that you know your efforts ultimately pay
off with a solid case in one way or the other.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Well, the people investigating this case have a lot to
deal with because when the media gets involved, like I said,
it's pretty polarizing. So who they're targeting. Richard Robinson? Who
is this nineteen year old He is a clerk for
a prominent cloth merchant, and he's the son of a
relatively wealthy landowner and a politician from outside New Haven, Connecticut,
(30:17):
So lots of money. Remember I said boarding houses. I
know it sounds like they're not the greatest place, but
it's a flat with a bunch of other people, and
they can be nice and expensive. So Richard is from
a good family, he's from that neighborhood. And I'm already
sensing a pretty bad dynamic here that we've also heard
about in the past. A client with a wealthy family
(30:39):
or a potential offender from a wealthy family and a
sex worker who will be easily dismissed as a victim.
Most likely based on her profession. And then of course
our main witness, who is a madam. So this is
a familiar story over and over again. You know who
gets justice in this country.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, I can see where this is. This is going
to be heading now. A lot of this is going
to end up being dependent upon the prosecutor. And can
you know what kind of political influence does the Robinson
family have on the prosecutor or is the prosecutor independent?
That's a tough dynamic when you have this disparity, if
you will, on the defendant versus the victims and the
(31:20):
social status or the perceisd social status that they have.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Well, let me give you some information that will shine
a light on eighteen hundreds and before Manhattan. So number one,
the police say, okay, this sounds like Rosina. The madam
says that Richard is the guy. Let's go pick him up.
So they go to his boarding house to see what's
(31:45):
going on with him, to interview him, you know, just
to get more information. I'm sure they don't want to
rely specifically on Rosina. And they get there and he
is asleep. His roommate answers the door. He wakes up
Richard and Richard pulls on a pair of pants that
have a stain that looks like white paint or whitewash
(32:06):
on his pants, and detectives make a mental note of that.
So this is the quirky part of policing in the
eighteen hundreds, Instead of taking him down to the police station,
they decide to do a little bit of a gotcha
thing with Richard. They take him to the brothel. So
the custom of the time in the sixteen hundreds a
couple hundred years earlier, was that it was a superstition.
(32:28):
If you bring a murderer to the scene of the
crime and you make him touch the victim, the victim
will bleed fresh blood, and that is damning. I know
you're smiling, and that is very damning. And I told
you that in my tenfold more Wicked. They believed that
somebody who bled after they died, or had any sort
of bodily fluid come out, that it was a sign
(32:49):
that they were possessed by the devil. So I'm getting
mixed messages here, but essentially, the body of a victim
could really tell you a lot. They could, in this
case point to the identity of the murderer. Are you
going to debunk this. I'm assuming you will do I
even have to debunk it. Definitely not the possessed by
(33:11):
the double part. I think we're okay.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
You know how many bodies I've touched and they bled
after they bled? You move a body and then you
start getting you know, bleeding out of bullet injuries or
knife stab wounds.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
You know, it's just nap. This is silly.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Well, I will say, in the eighteen hundreds, they don't
believe that anymore. Thank goodness, we've progressed from the sixteen
hundreds to the eighteen hundreds. They do use it as
a little bit of a like I like to think
of it as a light detector. They did this with
Edward rule off too. So they bring Richard down and
they show him Helen's body and they're looking for a reaction.
(33:50):
That's all they want to know. And they feel like
they can really read whether he is guilty or innocent
based on his reaction to seeing her body. So or
sees they're going to the brothel, and they said that
his face goes pale, but when he sees her body, nothing,
no reaction whatsoever, just sort of like nothing's there. And
(34:11):
that was it, I assuming you're gonna say that you
cannot obviously predict based on someone's reaction. I see this
on the movies all the time, where they'll show the
potential offender the suspect photos of the body to see
what the reaction is. Is that a common Is that
a real tool that police officers use?
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Well, they shouldn't, because you know, if you're displaying aspects
of the crime scene to your suspect, how do you
know when the suspects starts providing certain details. Did they
acquire those details based on what they've seen like they're
Now let's say you have somebody who's falsely confessing or
are they purposely altering their statements because now they know
(34:53):
what they're perceiving happened at the crime scene. You know,
you really don't want to have that type of contamination,
you know. So with with Richard Robinson, I put no
weight on his reactions. You know, he's he's recognizing when
he's being brought to the brothel. Uh, oh, I'm under
suspicion here, right, you know, and that could be part
(35:15):
of the reason for his uh not appearing to be
in good shape en route, And then you never know
how somebody's going to react when they're taking a look
at a dead body. So it just underscores that these
investigators really don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
And one of the issues is that Richard doesn't deny
that he's been at the brothel. In fact, he and
his roommate had been at the brothel. So you know,
he says, yes, I was there, and let me tell
you what he says. So Richard says he was home
just after eleven o'clock that night, and you know, another
brothel owner comes over and says, Richard, how could you
(35:54):
kill this poor woman? And he says, I didn't do anything.
And then he says, maybe the madam did it. Just
what you said, maybe the madam did it. But he
denies doing anything, and he says, in fact, Helen has
a handkerchief with another guy's name under her pillow, which
she did. So you know, he's placing himself there. He's
(36:14):
saying I was there, but he's not admitting, obviously to
killing her. There's a corner's inquest. The jury is made
up from people. This is funny. The jury is made
up of people from the crowd. Whoever shows up first.
It gets to be in the corner's jury. It sounds like,
I mean, that's what they did in the eighteen och
they were just pulling people off the street, anybody, anybody.
(36:37):
I mean, in the case of my book and the
Center's all about the corner's inquest, the only restriction or
the only guide, was they had to be a landowner.
That was it okay to be on a corner's jury.
You just had to be a landowner and that was it.
They considered that meant you were a gentleman, or you
were an upstanding citizen, and that's all that was required
of it, and that's it. So the jury sits, the
(36:59):
corner starts bringing information to the jury. Richard's roommate goes
to the jury and says, yeah, we had been at
the brothel the night before. He thinks that Richard came
home around ten o'clock, he said, but I'm not one
hundred percent sure. And then when he thinks about it,
he says, well, maybe it was more like one am,
even though Richard says it was eleven PM. So it
(37:21):
sounds like the roommate comes home first and then Richard
comes home later. But because the roommate was asleep, he
couldn't really quite figure out how late it was. And
of course, you know there's no cell phones or watches.
Well there's watches, but nobody's wearing a watch at night,
so you have to kind of squint and look at
the clock, probably on the mantle. I think you have
(37:42):
to be pretty motivated to see what the time is.
And I'm not sure that the roommate was that motivated.
He just heard Richard come in late, so I don't
know about this alibi. And he puts himself there, So
what do you think about that? I mean, you still
have to prove that he was the one holding the hatchet.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Yeah, So does he put himself with Helen that night
before she's killed?
Speaker 3 (38:01):
I'm kind of confused on that he does.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
So he says, yes, I was there, but I left
and she was alive, and the madam probably did it,
or the man whose name is etched on a handkerchief
under her pillow.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Rosina picked Richard out, Richard Robinson out as being Frank Rivers. Right, yep,
Robinson is placing him there with Helen that night.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
You know, it's just one.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Little detail where it makes you just kind of stop
and go, Okay, Richard Robinson potentially had an opportunity to
have been involved with Helen's homicide. There seems to be
some looseness with the time frame that the roommate is
saying that Robinson came.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Home, you know.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
But all it does is it just from just an
assessment of Robinson, It's like, well, he's in play, but
it definitely does not prove that he's responsible for Helen's homicide.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Nowhere near that at this point in time.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
So they turned to the cloak the prosecutors that Rosina
said Frank Rivers was wearing, and they find this cloak
kind of in a neighbor's yard, and he denies, this
is my cloak, but with some prodding, the roommate says, yes,
Richard had worn that cloak. Then they turned to the
(39:24):
pants that the detective saw him wearing. The corner's inquest
finds that one of the fences that Richard would have
had to climb to get out of the yard if
he were the killer, was whitewashed, which is where those
stains on his pants came from. And this seems to
be enough Paul for the corner's jury to charge Richard
with her murder. That's not a lot.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
No, it's not a lot. You know.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Part of it this cloak being found, you know, this
is where now that kind of diminishes my initial thought
of Rosina.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
You know, unless she planted this.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Cloak, maybe she is telling the truth about Frank River
showing up with the cloak, you know, And I guess
it's you know, how common is this type of cloak
during this era? You know, That's what I would want
to know. Is this just going to be I mean,
we see like hoodies all over the place on the ground,
you know, but doesn't mean that that hoodie was used
by the offender in any particular case today. It's just
(40:22):
it's a common item out there. But I don't know,
you know, I think there isn't a case against Robinson
at this point, you know, the whitewash thing. No, the cloak,
they can't even really prove that it's his. You know,
it's just you've got the roommates saying, yeah, it looks
like a cloak that he had, But let's see what
else they develop.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Well, and you know, you're talking about nine women in
this house, plus Rosina the madam, and they have men
coming in and out. She has regulars. I mean, there's
just a lot of things happening here. So even if
it is Frank Rivers, whether it's Robin or not, if
there is this Frank Rivers and he's wearing this cloak
(41:04):
and he jumps over a fence and it's whitewashed, and
all of this stuff comes together, it still doesn't put
the hatchet in his hand, you know. It just proves
that he had sex with her. Or maybe they didn't
even have sex. Maybe they were just you know, drinking
champagne and reading. We don't know, and that's one of
the issues with this case. So it becomes what many
(41:25):
people have called I've heard this a million times, but
you know, the first public sex scandal. I'm pretty sure
there were big sex scandals in the seventeen hundreds too,
but this is this is a tabloid sex scandal in
New York. It's a huge amount of interest. As I
told you, you know, Nathaniel Hawthorne also wrote about that
case of Helen Jewett in what he saw depicted in
(41:46):
the Wax Museum. The newspapers go crazy over this case
because she's attractive. There are all sorts of trial pamphlets printed,
and he is arrested for her murder. The corners in
quest found that he was likely responsible, so they arrest him.
This is a very polarizing case because there are, you know,
(42:07):
people who are obviously defending him he's from a really
well known, good family, and then attacking her because she's
a sex worker. And then there are, of course the opposite,
which is that he is this rogue who frequents sex
workers brothels, and you know, he's a disgusting person and
she didn't deserve to be killed. Now we have some
(42:27):
more information, and this is where I think the case
takes a little bit of a turn, and you could
tell me if this is enough. So you know, what
we know so far is that he said he was there,
he said he was a client, he said he left,
she was alive. He has nothing to do with it.
They do some digging and the prosecutor comes up with
(42:48):
letters that Helen and Richard have written each other, because
it turns out that they had known each other for
almost a year and that he had either been a
regular client of hers or a relation relationship for her.
But it was very tumultuous. There were instances in the
letters that prosecutors picked up on where he admits that
(43:09):
he physically hurt her. And then the flip side of
that is they also exchanged portrait miniatures, which is a
huge deal. Those little miniatures, you know, that depict different
scenes that are incredibly expensive. And when Richard writes kind
of this final letter that says, I'm breaking up with
you your nuts, I want my miniature back, you know, this
(43:31):
becomes this big media frenzy. And they were reproducing the
pictures of the miniatures because they were collector's items at
this point. So that's kind of how big this case was.
But the big highlight here that I'm asking you about
is the letters, and you know how much we have
an established relationship between them. It sounds like he was
(43:52):
breaking up with her. He had admitted to being violent
with her. Does the case get more solid with these.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Letters, Well, he gets more interesting as a suspect because
now it appears that there may even be a motive
that's identified. You know, he's upset with her, he wants
his miniature back. Part of the question that I had
is if he was a routine customer of Helen's over
the past year, how many times in the past that
(44:19):
he used the pseudonym of Frank Rivers. Then why does
he do it that night? Well, maybe he does it
that night because he's trying to pose as somebody else
and knowing that he's probably going to minimally rob Helen
of this miniature. And then if he's bringing a hatchet
to the scene, he may have had bad intent from
(44:39):
the very beginning. But I don't know, you know, he's
I think he's more interesting because of the prior relationship
and the history of some level of physical violence against Helen.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
It's still you.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Have to prove the case of homicide, and just this
prior relationship doesn't do that. It's just investigators need to
pay attention to him a little bit more. But as
of now, I still don't think that they've got a
case against Richard.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
No. And it's interesting when you talk about the relationship,
whatever that was. If this was a regular boyfriend of hers,
not a client, but a regular boyfriend, you would think
that if Rosina knew him for a year, that she
would be able to recognize him, even like with his head,
I would recognize you with your head, you know, turned
(45:25):
away from me. Probably, I don't know, maybe not, but
I would think this might have been a relationship that
she kept very quiet, and maybe this is, you know,
one of the first times that he's visited the brothel before.
I don't know, we don't have that much context. But
the violent part of it I thought was interesting too.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yeah, you know, but again it doesn't prove the homicide.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
No, don't be picky, Paul. Two weeks after the murder,
Richard is sitting in jail and there's a grocer who
comes over to see him and says, listen, I saw
a picture of you in the paper, and I think
you were in my store buying cigars that night. Richard agrees,
and eventually the grocer will testify, giving him kind of
(46:07):
a partial alibi, but certainly not for the whole night.
So the majority of Richard's defense is are you really
going to believe in Madam over Richard Robinson? And are
you really going to make this big of a fuss
over a sex worker? That was pretty much the defense.
And you know, I mean, this is no surprise as
(46:27):
somebody who works in the eighteen hundreds all the time,
but it's still disgusting every time this comes up. The
misogyny of it, and just in general, you know, the
kind of the dismissiveness in the media, but also the
polarization of it, you know. I mean, these are two
people who turned into avatars for you know, specific parts
of society. It's hard to know if Helen Jewett at
(46:50):
this point is going to get any kind of justice
or if Richard Robinson is responsible for anything.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
I think there's a lot of flames that are fanned
by the media frenzy around this, you know. And I
can see what you're saying about the polarization, you know,
but on both sides, you've got a woman who's lost
her life and now you've got this nineteen year old
Richard Robinson who sounds like he's being drug through the ringer.
(47:17):
And if he's responsible, so be it. But as of
right now, I'm questioning that. And also it's sort of like, Okay,
where is this going to go? I'm kind of curious.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Well, we don't have very much longer, you know, the
trial goes on. He has great defense attorneys who, as
I said, attack Helen's character, attack Rosina, the madam's character.
The grocer is helpful with providing a partial alibi. And
really you've got sex workers who talk about Helen's relationship
with Richard and saying that they knew him and they
(47:53):
had a tumultuous relationship. But as soon as they are called,
they're completely diminished, of course, because if they're bad character.
But you're right, there's not very much evidence here. I mean,
certainly Richard from the letter sounds like he's a jerk,
probably violent. Doesn't mean he killed her. So you know,
this is a fast trial. The jury goes and deliberates
(48:15):
and they are gone for between eight and fifteen minutes.
Oh jeez, okay, yeah, and they say not guilty. And
that is that very weak, circumstantial case, even for the
eighteen hundred's usually we get more than that, you know,
and this was a very very well known case because
(48:36):
it was considered such a tragedy where you know, you
just didn't we didn't have enough information. But you know,
on the other hand, it's almost like they felt like
they couldn't get a foothold because of the status of
the people involved in the case, both the high and
the lower status.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
Right, you know, And that's my concern.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
I think, you know, they're not guilty verdict with the
information that was being you us, I can't argue against that.
At all, you know, but for them to only deliberate
for eight to fifteen minutes, that suggests to me that
probably the Robinson family influence was huge, you know, and
(49:13):
you'd like to see the jurors at least, you know,
really think about the case a little bit harder versus
just dismissing Helen. You know, that's in essence what they did.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
Definitely. Richard moves to Texas, he opens a saloon and
eventually becomes a deputy clerk of the court. And Helen
Jewett goes down in history as a sex worker who
was murdered and kind of thrown away in the eyes
of the media oftentimes, but then immortalized in a wax
(49:44):
museum in Boston and seen by several different well known
authors and probably they were inspired by her story. So
I often think about that sort of scenario, like Sarah
Maria Cornell in my case, you know, a case that
a lot of people had never heard of before, and
then I think about it. I pick up her story
and I think, this is why the story is important,
(50:06):
and I think a lot of people have done that
in Helen Jewett's case, in Mary Rogers case. You know,
these women in history who I had heard of. And
you've got these authors who want to write books, and
you know, they credit the tragic story, but oftentimes the
bravery of these women. There are circumstances limiting them, they're
(50:26):
time periods limiting them and them doing the best they can,
and then they end up much more famous when they're
dead than when they were alive.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
No, for sure.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Fascinating to hear how this case ended up in the
wax Museum and how it inspired you know, those authors.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
I've never heard of it, you know, but but here
we go. You know, there's been books written because of
this case.
Speaker 1 (50:50):
And I think when I write my books and do
the podcast, when I think about the victims, who are
most of the time women, you know, people know who've
read my books, most of the time they're women. And
I think that there is some element of bravery from
the women in every book that I've done. Something has
happened in their lives that they've overcome. And I think
(51:10):
it's important to shine a light on those kinds of stories,
even when they in tragically. I think they're inspiring. And
you know, with Helen Jewett, she sounds like she was
run out of town when she was young, and yeah,
seventeen year old seduced. It sounds like or manipulated or
assaulted by a grown man and drummed out of town
(51:32):
and taken on sex work and was just trying to
do the best she could and then did not receive justice.
But she has been immortalized in so many trial transcripts
and just it's pretty incredible. So I'm happy to have
told her story. I hadn't told her story yet, And
I'm glad that you were available and interested in listening.
Speaker 3 (51:52):
Paul No, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you, Kate.
Speaker 1 (51:55):
All right, well, we'll see you next week with another story.
Speaker 3 (51:58):
Awesome, see you.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
This has been an exactly right production for our.
Speaker 2 (52:06):
Sources and show notes go to exactlyrightmedia dot com slash
Buried Bones sources.
Speaker 1 (52:11):
Our senior producer is Alexis Emirosi.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 3 (52:21):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (52:23):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgaroff, Georgia hard Stark and Daniel Kramer.
Speaker 1 (52:30):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Baried Bones.
Speaker 2 (52:34):
Pod 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 (52:42):
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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