June 23, 2021 • 59 mins
June and Jennifer Gibbons made a pact with each other when they were eight: they weren’t going to speak to anyone but each other. Decades later, they found themselves in a high-security psychiatric hospital, putting the final touches on their pact that had turned surreal, all-encompassing, and…deadly.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Sisters. Sisters, there were never such teeth voted sisters never
had to have a chapera. No soon. I'm Hudicky Man
on whom Hello, Hello, Hello, Welcome to Criminal broad a
(00:24):
true crime podcast about wild women on the wrong side
of the law. I'm your host, Tory Telfer, and we
are in the final week of Sister Month. Guys, have
we liked Sister Month? I know the subject matter has
ranged from dark to super dark and back again. Well,
(00:45):
the Mirror Ball Sisters were very inspiring, but there was
still darkness there, but subject matter aside, I have just
loved having a theme. Does not everything feel so nice?
When you have a theme so tidy and organized, It's
like I know my place in the world. I'm in
week three of Sister Month. So next month we're going
(01:05):
to go back to business as usual with the only
theme being Criminal Broads. But I'm definitely gonna do more
theme months in the future. I think that it just
feels right. So if you have any suggestions for themes,
and don't tell me, like, just don't don't suggest the
theme that's like hacked up body parts, because you know
how I feel about that. If you have any suggestions
(01:26):
for themes email me criminal broads at gmail dot com.
Speaking of email, I have another magical mystical sister anecdote
to share with you that was shared with me via email.
This one's from Stephanie. She says, I met my sister
when I was thirty three years old. She reached out
to me due to a medical issue with her son.
(01:48):
Shocked and dismayed to learn I had a half sister
so late in my life, I was lost as to
what to do. I ended up assisting her with the
information she was looking for and we began to talk.
It turned out that she had known about me for
about five years prior, and had formed a relationship with
my mother after a letter she sent looking for her father.
Upon talking and eventually meeting in person, we realized how
(02:10):
much alike we really were. Not only did we look
like twins, but how we viewed the world and raised
our children along the same lines. To make it even
more eerie, we shared a birthday two years apart. When
we are together, others are in shock as to our
mirrored mannerisms, wording, and sense of humor. We are the
essence of nature versus nurture. I grew up with my
(02:33):
dad and my mom, while she grew up without a
dad and a mom who is absent. I hate the
fact that I lost so many years I could have
had with my sister, but I am thankful she reached
out to me. Our bond is as if no time
has passed between us. All Right, Today's sister story is
an incredibly spooky, strange, heartbreaking one. This was recommended by
(02:58):
my amazing listener case F And thank you Caitlin for
alerting me to this story because I'd never heard it before.
We're going to talk about the lives of the Gibbons Twins. Now.
I write and podcast and write about a lot of
female criminals and ladies of all stripes, and while I'm
(03:20):
in each case, they definitely move me. But I do
sometimes feel like the sheer volume of cases I cover,
it's like I can't get too attached, so to speak.
Sometimes I write and produce and then I move on.
But the case of the Gibbons Twins, this one has
(03:40):
gotten under my skin. Guys. This is just one of
those one of those stories where I just felt super weird.
After researching it. I was kind of in a funk,
walking around in a haze and you'll see why. It
will probably affect you too. It's a very gosh I
don't even know how to describe this story. Let's just
(04:00):
get into it, okay, and we can unpack it at
the end, or you can email me your thoughts. But
it's definitely a striking one, all right. So we are
going to England, no to Wales, to the United Kingdom,
and we're let's see, they were born in the sixties.
I believe a lot of this action happens like in
(04:21):
the late seventies eighties, where we are going to meet
our final pair of sisters. June and Jennifer Gibbons were
(04:46):
born ten minutes apart on an April day in the
nineteen sixties. Later as teens, they became obsessed with star signs,
and they thought that June was born at eight am
and Jennifer was born at eight ten. They used those
birth times to pore over their horoscopes, interpret their personalities,
(05:07):
and predict their futures eight am and eight to ten.
But then their mother told them that they were wrong.
June wasn't born at eight she was born at eight ten,
and Jennifer was born at eight twenty. In other words,
Jennifer's horoscope actually belonged to June. This broke Jennifer's heart.
(05:32):
It's all a mistake, a tragedy, she wrote in her diary.
My horoscope has nothing to do with me. My position
has been taken by June. My poor beloved sign has
been snatched from me. June Allison and Jennifer Lorraine were
born into a family that was close knit and happy.
(05:53):
At least at first. There were five of them. Parents,
Gloria and Aubrey, older siblings Greta and David, twins June
and Jennifer, and eventually a younger sister named Rosie. Gloria
and Aubrey were from Barbados, but they had moved their
whole family to England to live a happy, little British life.
(06:14):
At least that was Aubrey's dream. He loved England. He
was obsessed with England, and he envisioned a proper English
life for himself. There green Yard, White Fence, tea time
the Queen. He found work as a technician for the
Royal Air Force, and he moved his family from station
to station around the United Kingdom. But every little town
(06:36):
they moved to was chillier and whiter and more suspicious
of outsiders than the last one. And as the years
went by, Aubrey seemed to let go of his British dream.
He'd come home from work, switch on the TV, and
wait to be served his dinner there. Perhaps what he
(06:57):
saw on screen was happier and more communal than what
he experienced in real life. By the time the twins
were three, they were happy and healthy, but they were
hardly talking. They had maybe three or four words that
they'd say, and that was it. Their parents knew this
wasn't totally normal, but they figured that speech would come eventually,
(07:19):
as most milestones did. But instead of talking more, the
twins begin to talk less. When they were eight, the
Gibbons family moved like they always did, and the girls
were the only black kids at their new school. They
were bullied horribly by their fellow eight year olds. To survive,
(07:40):
the twins stopped making eye contact with anyone but each other,
and then they went a step further. They made a
pact to stop talking. They couldn't have predicted at eight
years old how terribly this pact would change their lives.
It wasn't just that they stopped talking to everyone, but
(08:01):
each other. The pact seemed to go deeper than that.
It was like they couldn't be different at all. They
had to do everything the same. They had to move
in the same way and feel the same way about things.
The girls would communicate with each other with barely perceptible
eye movements, so that from the outside it looked like
they were the same person who just happened to be
(08:23):
split into two identical bodies. They didn't talk to their
teachers and their tormentors, and they didn't talk to their
family either. As June told a journalist later, we started
suffering and we stopped talking. When they spoke to each other,
they spoke in English mixed with slang from Barbados, but
(08:43):
they spoke so fast that no one could understand them
at all. Instead, the girls sounded like birds, twittering to
each other in a language all their own. At age eleven,
the twins moved again to a town in Wales called
Haverford West. This was a town that one journalist described
as being full of chili xenophobes. The bullying got worse there,
(09:07):
so did the silence from the twins at the family
dinner table. They wouldn't look up from their plates at school.
When they were attacked, they'd turned to face each other
and they would put their arms on each other's shoulders
in a pathetic little huddle. They were bullied so badly
there that they had to be dismissed five minutes early.
To get a head start on their bullies. They would
(09:30):
walk home in single file, perfectly synced up in a
strange march that one observer called a kind of goose step.
And still their parents insisted that they were just kind
of shy, and their teachers mostly shrugged and gave up
on them. Nobody knew what to do with these two
(09:51):
skinny black girls who just stood there and looked at
the floor for hours and hours. They looked so much
alike and acted exactly this that sometimes people couldn't tell
them apart, and people sometimes suspected uneasily that the girls
were pretending to be each other. Who was June and
who was Jennifer. The twins didn't always know this themselves,
(10:15):
As June said later, one day she'd wake up and
be me, and one day I would wake up and
be her. And we used to say to each other,
give me back myself. If you give me back myself,
I'll give you back yourself. There was one difference between
the girls that some people picked up on. One of
(10:36):
them seemed more powerful than the other. I've had six
thousand children go through my hands in thirty years, said
one of their teachers. And I've encountered only four I
felt were evil. One was a boy who raped the
daughter of a best friend. Another eventually shot a boy.
A third was found guilty of rape and assault. The
(10:59):
fourth was Jennifer. The first person to really insist that
(11:20):
the twins needed help was a guy with a needle.
He was a school medical officer, and he came by
the girls' school to vaccinate all the children. He was
used to children being scared of the shot, and so
he had all sorts of little jokes prepared to make
kids feel at ease, and so he was struck, well shocked, really,
when the twins didn't react at all to the vaccine.
(11:44):
They reminded him of zombies. When he held their arms
to vaccinate them, he said that their arms felt dead.
He was so disturbed by this that he went to
the headmaster and then to a child psychiatrist. When the
psychiatrists met with June and Jennifer, they sat there like stones,
eyes downcast, but when he turned away he could hear
(12:07):
them moving with incredible speed right behind him. They were
taunting him, playing a game. This irritated him. Lots of
adults found the girls kind of irritating. Actually, many of
them would note that they could tell the girls had
incredible will power. They seemed to be choosing to be silent,
choosing not to move, rather than unable to speak unable
(12:30):
to move. Of course, these interpretations underestimated the power of
the girl's pact, but eventually, faced with their silence, the
psychiatrist turned them over to a speech therapist. The girls
started working with the speech therapist, and in February of
nineteen seventy seven, Anne gave it her best shot, but
she too found the twins incredibly difficult. They wouldn't budge
(12:54):
an inch. Still, through their silence, Anne could sense something
unequal about their relationship. I could see June dying to
tell me things, she said. Then something would happen. Jennifer
was stopping June. She never moved. I watched and could
barely detect the slightest eye movement, but I know she
(13:17):
was stopping June. It was strange, like extra sensory perception.
She sat there with an expressionless gaze, but I felt
her power. She made all the decisions. The thought entered
my mind that June was possessed by her twin. But
what could Anne do. You couldn't force someone to talk.
(13:40):
So the girls moved through specialist after specialist, making very
little progress. At age fourteen, they were sent to a
different school, the Eastgate Center for Special Education, eight miles
away from their home. There, they continued to resist any
and all treatment. Every morning, a teacher drove them to school,
and the girls would never get inside of her car
(14:02):
of their own accord. Neither wanted to get in first,
and so they were paralyzed. Their teacher would have to
physically push each girl into the car, one by one,
making their knees bend and maneuvering their heads under the
roof of the car like she was a policeman and
they were two tiny, silent criminals. Now behind the scenes,
(14:24):
the girls were growing sick of their pact. They wanted
to talk. They wanted to make friends at school, tell jokes,
flirt with their crushes. They longed to talk to their family.
At night, the twins would kneel by their beds chant
versus from the Bible and beg God to let them talk.
We'd pray to him not to let us hurt our
(14:46):
family by ignoring them, to give us strength to talk
to our mother, our father, June said later. We couldn't
do it hard. It was too hard. It became clear
to some of their teachers that the twins needed to
be separated. They were locked in something toxic, and maybe
(15:06):
separation could yank them out of it. Strangely enough, the
twins agreed with this. They fantasized about being separated sent
to different countries. In her diary, Jennifer wrote, we think
it best if we separate. We are both awaiting each
other to talk and change. We are both willing to
lead our own lives, but when we are together, we
just keep depending on each other too much. But when
(15:30):
a teacher told the girls that the separation was actually
going to happen, the girls sprang at each other, fighting
so violently that they drew blood. The idea of separation
was appealing, but the reality was unbearable. Still, it had
to happen. Jennifer was left at Eastgate while June was
(15:51):
taken to another school. At the new school, June refused
to move. She would sit in her classes crying silently
as tears poured down her cheeks, but she wouldn't lift
a single finger to wipe them away. In her diary,
she wrote that she was lonely, hungry, bitter, angry, and
furious that Jennifer was the one who got to stay
(16:12):
at their old, familiar school. The girls could never stand
the slightest whiff of inequality in their relationship. It made
them sick to think that one of them was leading
a better life than the other. A teacher at the
new school noticed that June seemed like she was on
a leash to her sister. There was something almost mystic
(16:32):
about their relationship, said the teacher, like black magic. After
a weekend spent at home, neither twin would return to
their school, so they were reunited. But despite the joy
of being back together, things were getting worse for the twins.
They were losing weight, and they didn't seem to care
(16:52):
about their appearances anymore. They would hold their hair back
with paper clips and curling tongs. They'd tie their underwear
together with rope or wire. Surely none of this made
their classmates treat them any better. Meanwhile, their mom continued
to insist that they were just shy. Their dad continued
(17:13):
to watch TV. Their older siblings were sick of the girls,
sick of their silence. Their teachers were starting to despair.
June herself was starting to despair. Sometimes Jennifer would look
at her and chant, you are Jennifer, you are me.
(17:33):
In response, June would sob, I am June, I am June.
But it didn't change anything, It didn't break the pact.
(17:58):
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That's thirty of full access for free. When you go
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dot com slash criminal broads. By the time the girls
(21:36):
were sixteen, the educational system had pretty much given up
on them. The girls left Eastgate and were now on
unemployment living at home. Their narrow lives grew even narrower,
at least from the outside. They would go out on
Tuesdays to collect their unemployment checks and otherwise they would
leave notes for their mom if they wanted something. Here's
(21:57):
one from Jennifer, Mom, could you get us a line
notebook today? Here's one from June. Don't bring lunch until
four pm. We're busy, Thanks June. They would watch TV
while sitting on the stairs because they refused to be
in the living room with their family members. If anyone
came out of the living room while they were watching
TV to use the bathroom or grab a snack from
(22:19):
the kitchen, the twins would scatter. They went to their
older sister, Greta's wedding in matching clothes, and they ruined
it by standing stock still for four hours, looking at
the floor the entire time. The Gibbons family thought that
June and Jennifer hated them. Their older siblings couldn't stand them.
(22:44):
They found the girls infuriating difficult. But one of the
many tragedies of the twins' lives was that the girls
actually loved their family. They wanted a happy family, they
wanted to be a real part of their family, and
they also couldn't wait to get married and have kids themselves.
They were obsessed with the idea of being mothers, but
(23:05):
they just couldn't open their mouths and talk, so they
tried to show their love in other ways. They bought
Christmas presents for their family, and on their parents' anniversary,
the twins brought them breakfast in bed, but they did
it all in silence, without eye contact, and then they'd
run upstairs and pour out their hearts and their diaries.
(23:28):
June wrote, I lack something, but it's not love. I
love Rosy, Greta, David, Phil, Mom and Dad. I worry
about my mother. I see grief for all those years
in her eyes. She is not young, but she is
a romantic, a child at heart. I cannot bear to
die before my parents. I cannot bear to walk on
(23:50):
the graves of my parents, put down flowers and feel lost.
When their older sister Greta brought over her new baby.
The girls turn their back on her and Greta rushed
away crying. The tragedy was that the girls had been
dying to meet their little niece. They dreamed about it
for days, and they'd even stolen two Teddy bears as
(24:12):
a gift for the baby. They wanted so badly to
hold her. And then the big moment came and they're
packed kicked in. Not only could they not talk, but
they couldn't even look at the baby. They were trapped,
and so they poured all their hopes and dreams and
(24:34):
vivid teenage imaginations into other things like dolls. The girls
were obsessed with dolls, along with their little sister Rosie,
who was the only member of their family that they
would ever sometimes talk to. They created elaborate doll families
full of twins and adopted babies and children who died
(24:57):
young of terrible things. They sewed clothes for them. They
made their own radio station for the dolls called Radio Gibbons,
where the twins would tell their faithful doll listeners all
about the weather, They would share the latest recipes, and
they would even dole out helpful hints for taking care
of children. There was a pastor doll, a doctor doll.
(25:18):
They kept faithful records of all the many ways that
their dolls died. One died from a back injury, another
from a cracked skull, a third from eczema. Once the
twins even gathered up their courage and went trick or treating,
hiding under sheets as their tape recorder chirped trick or Treat.
They did all this to gather candy so that they
(25:39):
could throw an elaborate Halloween party for their dolls. One Christmas,
their mom gave the twins red diaries with the little locks,
and then writing became another way that the twins could
express themselves. They kept incredibly detailed diaries. They'd edit their
(26:00):
entries multiple times until they were perfect. They asked their
mom for typewriters and would stay up all night banging
away at the keys, writing short stories and poems and
essays and novels. They signed up for a writing course
as one person student eight two one, and they made
lists of difficult words, rhyming words, similes, metaphors, synonyms, antonyms.
(26:25):
They read every classic book they could get their hands
on from the Bronte sisters to D. H. Lawrence, it
was an education better than many an English major could
hope for. And just as they did with their dolls,
they packed their writing full of all the color and
horror of a life that was passing them by. And
(26:45):
the girls weren't just writing to write. They weren't sure
they'd become famous writers. This was going to be their
ticket to money and love and happiness and normalcy. They
took author photos of each other, and they pooled their
welfare checks to self publish June's novel, which was called
Pepsi Cola Addict. Pepsi Cola Addict was the wild story
(27:08):
of a fourteen year old white American boy who was
addicted to pepsi and who eventually died after washing down
a bunch of pills with a can of the good stuff.
It was teenage writing, a bit moralistic, but overall the
girl's writing was good. It was vivid, surprising, unusual, self aware.
(27:30):
Not to make too fine a point of it, but
it was really the only way the twins could speak,
and their speech on the page was lovely. As the
(27:59):
girls from sixteen to seventeen and then eighteen, they were
forced to come face to face with the fact that
they were growing up. At first, they didn't like it.
They bound their breasts and they worried about their sexual urges,
thinking that they were total freaks for feeling turned on.
But by age seventeen and a half, they had gone
(28:20):
from resisting womanhood to craving it. As Jennifer wrote in
her diary, it was the most turbulent period of my youth.
Jay and I endlessly arguing, lost, bored, frustrated, angry. Ah,
we thought youth was passing us by. They became obsessed
(28:41):
with boys, and they would stalk local teenagers, spying on
them through a shared pair of binoculars. They bought books
on witchcraft and tried to cast spells to bring their
crushes to their house. They'd make prank calls to boys
giggling on the other line, and they slipped notes under
one boy's door that had things like, dearest Darren, we
(29:02):
adore you, we love you, We will have you for ourselves,
your secret admirers. Now remember how their father, Aubrey Gibbons,
was obsessed with England. The girls had their own country
that they were obsessed with, America. They loved America. They
set all their stories in America. They made their dolls American.
(29:25):
They even made up American slang to use in their novels,
like this great line from Pepsi Cole Addict, Listen, don't
get nifty with me. Actually, it wasn't just America that
they were obsessed with, but specifically Malibu. All their dolls
and protagonists seemed to live in Malibu. Not a sparkly,
celebrity driven Malibu, but a gritty, crime ridden Malibu, a
(29:50):
Malibu that their biographer described as being sort of like
clockwork Orange. Their characters were often white, high school age
and troubled. They slept with their tea teachers and robbed
convenience stores, and so perhaps it was no surprise that
the girls got their biggest crush on three white American
boys who lived nearby. June and Jennifer had had a
(30:14):
classmate at Eastgate named Lance Kennedy, a beautiful but troubled
American boy who'd been nice to them. They were never
able to talk to him, but they left him love notes,
and now several years later they managed to find his parents'
house and they began frankly stalking the family. They took
a taxi there, they walked through the unlocked door, and
(30:37):
they made themselves at home, eating peanut butter sandwiches, drinking
orange juice, and rifling through all of their stuff. The
parents came home and found the girls. The girls immediately
fell silent, and the parents took pity on them and
let them go. But the girls weren't done. Lance Kennedy
himself lived in America by then, but he had three
(30:59):
younger brothers who were handsome and toussled and rude and
very troubled. Their mother had killed herself when the three
of them were in the house, and now their father
and stepmother ignored them, so the boys spent all their
time drinking and smoking and huffing glue and running around
with local girls. June and Jennifer tried, with creepy persistence
(31:24):
and outrageous outfits to integrate themselves into the boys' lives.
They would spend hours getting ready, putting on long wigs, lipstick,
mini skirts, sunglasses, high heels. Then they'd take a taxi
to the boy's house, and then they'd kind of lurk around,
waiting for the boys to notice them and hoping that
(31:46):
this time they'd be able to talk. The boys introduced
them to whiskey and weed, and the girls discovered that
substances had the magical ability of loosening their tongues. What
luck without the whiskey, we didn't speak, said June. Later,
We reckon that God told us to buy drink and
(32:06):
it worked. We sniffed glue and lighter fluid. We were
different then, laughing and talking. We were so relaxed and
laid back. As the summer went on, the girls became
more and more obsessed with thoughts of sex. Once they
tried to seduce their taxi driver, jumping on him and
scratching at him with their long nails. But their hottest
(32:29):
dreams were reserved for the Kennedy boys. In the meantime,
the boys treated them like dirt. They ignored the girls,
they hit them once. They literally threw food into their mouths,
as though the girls were dogs. But to the girls,
who were starved for interaction with their peers and desperate
(32:53):
for boyfriends, everything the Kennedy boys did seemed like love.
The youngest brother was named Carl, and he was only fourteen,
but he was just as troubled and sexually active as
his older brothers. One night, he took the girls into
a church, and he told them both to strip. They
(33:14):
were all high and drunk and barely conscious. June watched
as Jennifer lost her virginity to Carl. It was the
ultimate inequality for the sisters. Jennifer was ecstatic she'd done it.
She was a woman now, she'd beaten her sister. It
was almost too much to process. Two days later, she
(33:37):
tried to strangle June, and then later that same day,
June tried to drown her in a river. A car
drove by and interrupted them, and the girls gasped for
air and spluttered, I love you, God help us, God
have mercy on us. Almost two weeks after Jennifer had
sex for the first time, it was June's turn. She
(34:00):
also lost her virginity to Carl in a barn, not
a church. Everyone was drunk and high again. The girls
felt sexy and mysterious and desirable, even though Carl was
frankly terrible to them. He would say things like, why
don't you goddamn bitches stop hassling us and get out
(34:21):
of here, and June would write in her diary, we
were very happy. When Carl ripped off Jennifer's wig and
set it on fire. She took it as a compliment,
telling herself that he found her prettier without it. The
twins would always look back on that summer as the
best time of their lives, the first time they had
(34:44):
truly lived. Everything that occurred was magic, wrote Jennifer. It
has brought a new awakening in me. It is like
God gave me a chance, a chance to prove who
I really am. June wrote about Carl, I thank you
for hurting me when you did. But like everything, the
(35:04):
summer came to an end. The boys moved back to America,
and the girls looked around for something else to do
with their boundless creativity and their stifled lives. At first,
(35:30):
June and Jennifer continued to focus on boys. They made
a little nest of hay at the edge of a park,
and they managed to lure a few local boys to it.
But it was the same old story. The boys used
them and were cruel to them. The girls thought that
they were in love. Before long, all the local teenagers
were tired of the sisters. As their biographer wrote, everywhere
(35:54):
they went they were teased, used and rejected, and though
they glimpsed the reasons, they never understood what they were
doing wrong. They made an odd sight, two skinny girls
slinking around town in their strange outfits. Sometimes they'd wear
multiple layers of clothing. Sometimes they'd wear huge jackets that
(36:14):
they'd bought from the Kennedy boys. They tried to look pretty,
but everyone just thought that they looked weird. June wrote
in her diary, what's wrong with us? Why is everyone
running from us? It hurt her feelings that none of
the boys wanted to be in a relationship with her,
even though they were happy to use her for sex.
(36:36):
Is it my color? She wrote? My bad luck. Slowly,
the twins formed a new identity for themselves. If they
couldn't be famous writers or beloved girlfriends, they'd become criminals
Instead famous criminals, they started committing small, odd crimes. They
(36:59):
smashed the window of a school, wriggled inside, and watched TV.
Why do this? Wrote June? Nothing else to do, no friends,
nothing to fill in the cold hour. Winter is here
and all the birds will fly back south. I wish
I could be with them. They broke in a few
more times and started stealing little things. I love being
(37:21):
a burglar, wrote Jennifer. Of course I feel guilty, but
that's the cost of being a perfect thief. I think
my ambition now is to be a thief, a real thief.
They scrawled graffiti on a school. They tried to cut
a phone cable and failed. They tried to cut the
tires of a motorcycle and failed. They looked through the
pockets of a stolen jacket and found nothing. They called
(37:44):
the police to confess their crimes. Desperate for excitement, for
something to make them special, they broke windows, prank, called
the fire station, and talked about making bombs. It was
notable that the girls often called the police. They really
seemed to want to get caught. They were always writing
(38:04):
down their dreams and recording their meaning using a little
book of dream Interpretations, and in that book, police represented
protection and prison represented security. The girls also often dreamed
of fire, and, as their biographer wrote, fire offered its
ancient symbolism of purification sacrifice in being born again. Only
(38:27):
through flames could a new June and Jennifer emerge as separate,
successful human beings. And so perhaps it's not surprising that
the twins' biggest crime, their only big crime, really was arson.
They burned down a tractor store, causing hundreds of thousands
of dollars worth of damage. The flames thrilled them even
(38:49):
more than the Kennedy boys had. It was the biggest
night of my life, wrote June. I know the Lord
will forgive me. It's been a long, painful, hard year.
Don't I deserve to express my distress. The twins were
finally caught on November eighth, nineteen eighty one, while trying
(39:09):
to start another fire. Their parents were shocked their daughters,
who were just a little shy, were arsonists. Gloria and
Aubrey had assumed the girls were upstairs the whole time,
working on their stories or playing with their dolls. They
had no idea that their girls had taken their fate
into their own hands and forced themselves to leave the house,
(39:33):
forced themselves to grow up. No one in the criminal
(39:54):
justice system knew what to do about the twins. They
were held in Puckle Church Prison for seven long months
as everyone tried to figure out how they should be
locked up and where They were arsonists. So they were
supposed to be a danger to society, and yet they
were teenagers children. Really they were undeniably weird. Some people
(40:16):
even found them straight up spooky with their synchronized movements
and their downcast eyes. But it didn't seem right to
sentence them to hard prison time. What to do with them?
Where should they go? At first, the girls hardly moved
in prison. One of the prison matrons had to put
them in bed, tuck them in, and then use her
(40:39):
own fingers to shut their eyelids. Then June and Jennifer
started moving and fighting over food, mostly alternatively starving and
gorging themselves. Each one wanted to be thinner than the other.
They thought that the thinner they were, the more their
cheekbones would stand out, and the more beautiful they'd be.
(41:00):
They fought so much that they were separated, and of
course this distressed them because they could never decide if
they needed to be together or separate. The prison staff
would spy on them when they were separated, fascinated by
the girls, and they found that even when the girls
were apart, they were almost always doing the same thing
and sitting in the same position. Despite their synchronicity. The
(41:25):
girls were fantasizing about killing each other again. Jennifer wrote
in her diary that she wanted to strangle her sister
saying it would be the best thing I would have
done in my life. June luxuriated in a similar fantasy,
writing one of us is plotting to kill one of us,
(41:45):
a thud on the head on a cool evening, dragging
the lifeless body, digging a secret grave. I'm in a
dangerous situation, a scheming, insidious plot. How will it end?
We have become fatal enemies in each other's eyes. We scheme,
we plot, and who will win? A deadly day is
(42:07):
getting closer each minute, coming to a point of imminent death.
Like hands creeping out against the night sky, intentions of evil, blood,
a knife, a mincer. I say to myself, how can
I get rid of my own shadow? Impossible or not impossible?
Without my shadow? Would I die without my shadow? Would
(42:32):
I gain life? Sometimes the girls would lay in their
beds mere feet from each other, sensing the other's presence, power,
and intentions as vividly as if they were each other.
Jennifer wrote about lying in her bed, refusing to move
because June wasn't moving either. I read her mind. I
(42:53):
knew all about her mood, my mood, her mood clash
like spilled blood, my perception, her perception, twisting and clashing, knowing, cunning,
sly and where will it all end? In death? In separation.
The day before their nineteenth birthday, the twins' parents came
(43:15):
to visit. The conversation was awkward. The twins barely spoke,
but in her diary, where her tongue always loosened, Jennifer wrote, heartbreakingly,
a most amazing and glorious thing has occurred. My parents
actually came to visit me. It means more to me
than anything. I always wanted something big to happen before
(43:38):
I was nineteen. Finally, the girls were tried in May
of nineteen eighty two. Their defense lawyer hired a psychiatrist
who diagnosed them as psychopaths and recommended that they be
sent to broad More, which was the notorious high security
psychiatric hospital that held gangsters, rapists, free killers, and serial killers.
(44:02):
The youngest person there at the time was twenty seven,
The twins were barely nineteen. They pled guilty to sixteen
joint counts of burglary, theft and arson, and their sentence
they would be sent to Broadmoor indefinitely. It was the
same sentence given to people like the Yorkshire Ripper the
(44:26):
girls were happy though. They had a beautiful vision of Broadmoor,
thinking that it was a place where kindly doctors and
nurses would save them from themselves. They pictured a hotel
like place with a gym and a swimming pool and
disco dances every night. They figured that they'd be there
for a year or two at MAX, and then they'd
(44:47):
be released back into the real world, where their lives
could finally begin. After arriving at Broadmoor, the twins quickly
(45:11):
realized that it wasn't the paradise they'd hoped for. It
was just another form of prison. It didn't take long
for them to break down. Jennifer attacked a nurse, June
tried to strangle herself to death. They were separated. They despaired,
Same old, same old. The girls had hoped that they'd
(45:33):
thrive in broad More and even make friends there, but
as usual, their packed trapped them even more than handcuffs.
Ever could. They fantasized about turning to their neighbors and
just making small talk, cracking an easy joke, but they couldn't.
Jennifer wrote, I really am getting fed up with my
(45:53):
lack of self confidence. Why can't I just say hello
and break the barrier. One year stretched into two and
then three, and still the girls weren't released. They were
put on medication that made their eyesight blurry. They lost
the urge to read and write. But something did happen
(46:15):
in Broadmoor that changed their story, if not their lives.
They befriended a reporter, a woman from the London Sunday Times.
She was a white woman named Marjorie Wallace, and she'd
become obsessed with the twins story. Marjorie had made friends
with the twin's parents at first and gained access to
a lot of their writing, and she was struck by
(46:36):
the girl's skill with words, and the difference between their
reputation as strange, silent, possibly stupid people and the personalities
that their writing revealed. These were intelligent girls with rich
inner lives, and almost nobody in the world knew that.
Slowly the girls actually started talking to Marjorie. She became
(46:59):
the friend an advocate they'd always longed for. They desperately
wanted to be recognized and famous through their writings, Marjorie
said later, to have them published and to have their
story told. And I thought that maybe one way of
freeing them Liberating them would be to unlock them from
that silence. But even as Marjorie advocated for their release
(47:22):
and tried to encourage them to write, the girls remained
in Broadmoor, locked up, their creativity slowly dripping away. Marjorie
was writing a book about them, their biography, and Jennifer quipped,
why don't you call it rag dolls? They really did
feel like rag dolls, floppy, useless, hopeless. Jennifer was starting
(47:48):
to grow paranoid, really paranoid, and she started to think
that people were spying on her and plotting to kill her.
June was trying to get out of there. She wrote
a letter to the Queen, asking the Queen to pardon
her and her sister. Sometimes they filled their time by
getting crushes on male inmates, many of whom were rapists
(48:09):
and murderers, or dressing up in elaborate costumes like they
used to do, old flashes of their creative inner lives,
but nothing really changed. The twins watched murderer after murderer
get released from Broadmoor, but no one came to release them.
(48:44):
When I read excerpts from June and Jennifer's diaries, here's
what strikes me the most. It's not their strange behavior
or the creepy packed between them, or their cane and
able type rivalry, or their crimes or their sentences. It's
how ordinary they are. June and Jennifer could never figure
(49:06):
out how to be normal girls in the world, but
on the page, they sound just like I did. As
a teenage girl. I too, wrote obsessively in my diary,
thinking that every guy who smiled at me was my soulmate,
stressing over socialization, dreaming of being a writer, worrying that
I was wasting my youth, wishing I could be nicer
(49:27):
to my parents. So many times, June and Jennifer sound
just like me. They sound just like you too, I'm
sure of it. They longed to be famous, but they
also longed to be normal, And while they achieved fame
for being abnormal, I don't think they ever realized just
(49:47):
how normal they were. In so many ways. Everything around
them told them that they were freaks. The white kids
who bullied them, the local boys who used them, the
teachers who up on them. But so much about them
was just teenage. They're weird inner lives, their imaginative play,
(50:08):
their obsession with dressing up, their painfully intense crushes, their
feelings as outsiders. If only someone could have told them,
you feel weird, you feel alone, you want a relationship,
you don't know how to make friends. Every other teenager
feels that way too. If only someone could have gone
(50:29):
up to the girls and opened the gates to the
bizarre and intense world of being a teenager and just said,
come on in. Everyone here is a weirdo too. But
by the time June and Jennifer were released from Broadmoor,
it was far too late to be normal. They weren't
(50:50):
teenagers anymore. They had been locked up for almost twelve years.
Finally they got word that they were going to be
released and sent to a new clinic and then on
into the outside world. This was what they had been
waiting for, right But it wasn't that simple for them anymore.
One more thing had to happen. The twins talked and
(51:13):
talked and thought about it. They had decided that in
order to be truly free, one of them would have
to die. The twins had always known there was something
unhealthy about their bond. Why do you think their diaries
were so full of murder fantasies? They knew that they
(51:35):
couldn't live forever like this. Nobody suffers the way I do,
June wrote, not with a sister with a husband, yes,
with a wife, yes, with a child, yes, But this
sister of mine, a dark shadow, robbing me of sunlight,
is my one and only torment. And so the twins
(51:56):
decided that in order for one of them to live
a normal life, the other one would have to go,
because there was no normal If both of them were around,
they wouldn't happen. Yet, they didn't want to die in Broadmoor.
It would have to happen. Once they were released. Marjorie
(52:17):
Wallace went to visit them one last time before they're
transferred to the new clinic. She brought her daughter. They
were all having tea, laughing, and then suddenly Jennifer said, Marjorie, Marjorie,
I'm going to have to die. Marjorie laughed nervously and responded,
don't be silly. You're thirty one years old, you're just
about to be freed from Broadmore. You're not ill. But
(52:40):
Jennifer said, we've decided, and Marjorie felt a stab of
real fear. The twins had argued and argued about which
one of them would have to die, but eventually they
decided that it would have to be Jennifer. As June
said later, Jennifer knew that she wouldn't be able to
(53:02):
live without her sister. Jennifer believed that June would have
a better chance at the life they longed for, with
a husband, a family, a job as a writer if
she wasn't around. She released me, June said later. The
day before the girls were going to be transferred out
(53:22):
of Broadmoor, Jennifer felt tired and she kept throwing up,
but she kept it secret from the staff so that
they wouldn't make her stay behind. The Next morning, a
pair of nurses accompanied the girls onto a little bus
that was going to drive them to the new clinic.
The twins sat down, Jennifer put her head on June's
(53:42):
shoulder and fell asleep with her eyes wide open. She
never woke up. She was taken to the clinic and
then rushed to the hospital, where she died less than
an hour after arriving. Technically, she died of viral myo carditis,
a rare heart condition known fittingly as a silent VIRIS,
(54:07):
but June says she died on purpose. Died to set
her sister free. When Marjorie heard the news, she felt
a chill. The girls hadn't been choking. June laid a
red rose on her sister's body and wrote in her diary,
I kissed her stone colored face. I went hysterical with grief.
(54:33):
June wasn't just sad, though, she was feeling another strong emotion, relief.
Jennifer had set her free, and now she was going
to live. She spent a year at the new clinic,
taking classes, and then she was released fully. She moved
(54:54):
into a halfway house and eventually into her own apartment
near to her parents. She tried to go by her
middle name Alison. A fresh start, she started talking more,
even giving interviews to journalists. She wrote less and less.
(55:15):
She used to be afraid to sleep too deeply because
she was sure that her twin was waiting there, down
in the depths of sleep, waiting to draw her into death.
But now June saw Jennifer in her dreams, and she
welcomed her. I used to miss her, she told a journalist.
(55:38):
Now I've accepted her. She's in me. She makes me stronger.
I accept the fact that she's gone. Now that took
me five years of grieving, crying all the time. Now
all my tears are gone, they all dried up inside
my eyes. I don't get lonely now I've got her,
(56:01):
haven't I? Well? Well, well everyone, those are the Gibbons Twins.
(56:36):
Are you like me standing stock still in shock, sort
of feeling in this fog of like what just happened?
They are so relatable and yet so mysterious and so
sisterly and so otherworldly? And are they just in your
heads now? Like their voices from their diaries? And they
(56:57):
are going to haunt you all day? Sorry, welcome to
my life. Please tell me all your thoughts and feelings
about the Gibbons Twins at criminal Broads at gmail dot com,
or go to Instagram dot com slash criminal brods to
see photos of them. Okay, a couple other Do you
need ninety things before I release you? Thank you all
(57:20):
for your kind kind kind kind kind kind kind responses
to the Lloyd Dean update of the last episode. Listen
to the last episode. If you don't know what I'm
talking about, I really appreciate it. None of you made
me feel like an idiot, which is really valuable to me.
Thank you, and just to clarify one thing because a
couple of people I don't think it was clear. Lloyd
(57:44):
Dean never lied to me. He never tried to trick me.
He was never He never withheld information from me. The information,
the information that I was wrong about was a combination
of seeing something in a newspaper article and my own
like not putting several pieces together. So Lloyd Dean was
not trying to con me, I promise you. Second of all,
(58:05):
I'd like to thank this week's patrons, which I'm gonna
call the J Squad, Jennifer W. And Juliene J. Thank
you so much for supporting the podcast. Everyone else, you
can go to patreon dot com slash Criminal Brods if
you too would like to join the J Squad. And
you know, I told you this was the last week
of Sister Month, and it is. It is, it is.
(58:27):
But I might have a small, teeny tiny surprise for you.
I might be popping back into your podcast feeds later
this week. I'm ninety percent sure I am, but I'm
still saying might just in case you know, something happens.
But I think you'll see me in a couple days. Okay.
Thank you always for being the best listeners ever. And
(58:47):
I love you all, and I hope you're doing well
and enjoying your summer. I'll see you later this week
and then again next week as we plunge back into
the wild world of should we say, criminal broads who
aren't necessarily sisters. Ex story I have for you is
a very unknown one and also a very intense one,
So get excited, love you, talk to you later. Bye.
(59:09):
Lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister,
And Lord help the sister who comes between me and
my man.
Sisters. Sisters, there were never such teeth voted sisters never
had to have a chapera. No soon. I'm Hudicky Man
on whom Hello, Hello, Hello, Welcome to Criminal broad a
(00:24):
true crime podcast about wild women on the wrong side
of the law. I'm your host, Tory Telfer, and we
are in the final week of Sister Month. Guys, have
we liked Sister Month? I know the subject matter has
ranged from dark to super dark and back again. Well,
(00:45):
the Mirror Ball Sisters were very inspiring, but there was
still darkness there, but subject matter aside, I have just
loved having a theme. Does not everything feel so nice?
When you have a theme so tidy and organized, It's
like I know my place in the world. I'm in
week three of Sister Month. So next month we're going
(01:05):
to go back to business as usual with the only
theme being Criminal Broads. But I'm definitely gonna do more
theme months in the future. I think that it just
feels right. So if you have any suggestions for themes,
and don't tell me, like, just don't don't suggest the
theme that's like hacked up body parts, because you know
how I feel about that. If you have any suggestions
(01:26):
for themes email me criminal broads at gmail dot com.
Speaking of email, I have another magical mystical sister anecdote
to share with you that was shared with me via email.
This one's from Stephanie. She says, I met my sister
when I was thirty three years old. She reached out
to me due to a medical issue with her son.
(01:48):
Shocked and dismayed to learn I had a half sister
so late in my life, I was lost as to
what to do. I ended up assisting her with the
information she was looking for and we began to talk.
It turned out that she had known about me for
about five years prior, and had formed a relationship with
my mother after a letter she sent looking for her father.
Upon talking and eventually meeting in person, we realized how
(02:10):
much alike we really were. Not only did we look
like twins, but how we viewed the world and raised
our children along the same lines. To make it even
more eerie, we shared a birthday two years apart. When
we are together, others are in shock as to our
mirrored mannerisms, wording, and sense of humor. We are the
essence of nature versus nurture. I grew up with my
(02:33):
dad and my mom, while she grew up without a
dad and a mom who is absent. I hate the
fact that I lost so many years I could have
had with my sister, but I am thankful she reached
out to me. Our bond is as if no time
has passed between us. All Right, Today's sister story is
an incredibly spooky, strange, heartbreaking one. This was recommended by
(02:58):
my amazing listener case F And thank you Caitlin for
alerting me to this story because I'd never heard it before.
We're going to talk about the lives of the Gibbons Twins. Now.
I write and podcast and write about a lot of
female criminals and ladies of all stripes, and while I'm
(03:20):
in each case, they definitely move me. But I do
sometimes feel like the sheer volume of cases I cover,
it's like I can't get too attached, so to speak.
Sometimes I write and produce and then I move on.
But the case of the Gibbons Twins, this one has
(03:40):
gotten under my skin. Guys. This is just one of
those one of those stories where I just felt super weird.
After researching it. I was kind of in a funk,
walking around in a haze and you'll see why. It
will probably affect you too. It's a very gosh I
don't even know how to describe this story. Let's just
(04:00):
get into it, okay, and we can unpack it at
the end, or you can email me your thoughts. But
it's definitely a striking one, all right. So we are
going to England, no to Wales, to the United Kingdom,
and we're let's see, they were born in the sixties.
I believe a lot of this action happens like in
(04:21):
the late seventies eighties, where we are going to meet
our final pair of sisters. June and Jennifer Gibbons were
(04:46):
born ten minutes apart on an April day in the
nineteen sixties. Later as teens, they became obsessed with star signs,
and they thought that June was born at eight am
and Jennifer was born at eight ten. They used those
birth times to pore over their horoscopes, interpret their personalities,
(05:07):
and predict their futures eight am and eight to ten.
But then their mother told them that they were wrong.
June wasn't born at eight she was born at eight ten,
and Jennifer was born at eight twenty. In other words,
Jennifer's horoscope actually belonged to June. This broke Jennifer's heart.
(05:32):
It's all a mistake, a tragedy, she wrote in her diary.
My horoscope has nothing to do with me. My position
has been taken by June. My poor beloved sign has
been snatched from me. June Allison and Jennifer Lorraine were
born into a family that was close knit and happy.
(05:53):
At least at first. There were five of them. Parents,
Gloria and Aubrey, older siblings Greta and David, twins June
and Jennifer, and eventually a younger sister named Rosie. Gloria
and Aubrey were from Barbados, but they had moved their
whole family to England to live a happy, little British life.
(06:14):
At least that was Aubrey's dream. He loved England. He
was obsessed with England, and he envisioned a proper English
life for himself. There green Yard, White Fence, tea time
the Queen. He found work as a technician for the
Royal Air Force, and he moved his family from station
to station around the United Kingdom. But every little town
(06:36):
they moved to was chillier and whiter and more suspicious
of outsiders than the last one. And as the years
went by, Aubrey seemed to let go of his British dream.
He'd come home from work, switch on the TV, and
wait to be served his dinner there. Perhaps what he
(06:57):
saw on screen was happier and more communal than what
he experienced in real life. By the time the twins
were three, they were happy and healthy, but they were
hardly talking. They had maybe three or four words that
they'd say, and that was it. Their parents knew this
wasn't totally normal, but they figured that speech would come eventually,
(07:19):
as most milestones did. But instead of talking more, the
twins begin to talk less. When they were eight, the
Gibbons family moved like they always did, and the girls
were the only black kids at their new school. They
were bullied horribly by their fellow eight year olds. To survive,
(07:40):
the twins stopped making eye contact with anyone but each other,
and then they went a step further. They made a
pact to stop talking. They couldn't have predicted at eight
years old how terribly this pact would change their lives.
It wasn't just that they stopped talking to everyone, but
(08:01):
each other. The pact seemed to go deeper than that.
It was like they couldn't be different at all. They
had to do everything the same. They had to move
in the same way and feel the same way about things.
The girls would communicate with each other with barely perceptible
eye movements, so that from the outside it looked like
they were the same person who just happened to be
(08:23):
split into two identical bodies. They didn't talk to their
teachers and their tormentors, and they didn't talk to their
family either. As June told a journalist later, we started
suffering and we stopped talking. When they spoke to each other,
they spoke in English mixed with slang from Barbados, but
(08:43):
they spoke so fast that no one could understand them
at all. Instead, the girls sounded like birds, twittering to
each other in a language all their own. At age eleven,
the twins moved again to a town in Wales called
Haverford West. This was a town that one journalist described
as being full of chili xenophobes. The bullying got worse there,
(09:07):
so did the silence from the twins at the family
dinner table. They wouldn't look up from their plates at school.
When they were attacked, they'd turned to face each other
and they would put their arms on each other's shoulders
in a pathetic little huddle. They were bullied so badly
there that they had to be dismissed five minutes early.
To get a head start on their bullies. They would
(09:30):
walk home in single file, perfectly synced up in a
strange march that one observer called a kind of goose step.
And still their parents insisted that they were just kind
of shy, and their teachers mostly shrugged and gave up
on them. Nobody knew what to do with these two
(09:51):
skinny black girls who just stood there and looked at
the floor for hours and hours. They looked so much
alike and acted exactly this that sometimes people couldn't tell
them apart, and people sometimes suspected uneasily that the girls
were pretending to be each other. Who was June and
who was Jennifer. The twins didn't always know this themselves,
(10:15):
As June said later, one day she'd wake up and
be me, and one day I would wake up and
be her. And we used to say to each other,
give me back myself. If you give me back myself,
I'll give you back yourself. There was one difference between
the girls that some people picked up on. One of
(10:36):
them seemed more powerful than the other. I've had six
thousand children go through my hands in thirty years, said
one of their teachers. And I've encountered only four I
felt were evil. One was a boy who raped the
daughter of a best friend. Another eventually shot a boy.
A third was found guilty of rape and assault. The
(10:59):
fourth was Jennifer. The first person to really insist that
(11:20):
the twins needed help was a guy with a needle.
He was a school medical officer, and he came by
the girls' school to vaccinate all the children. He was
used to children being scared of the shot, and so
he had all sorts of little jokes prepared to make
kids feel at ease, and so he was struck, well shocked, really,
when the twins didn't react at all to the vaccine.
(11:44):
They reminded him of zombies. When he held their arms
to vaccinate them, he said that their arms felt dead.
He was so disturbed by this that he went to
the headmaster and then to a child psychiatrist. When the
psychiatrists met with June and Jennifer, they sat there like stones,
eyes downcast, but when he turned away he could hear
(12:07):
them moving with incredible speed right behind him. They were
taunting him, playing a game. This irritated him. Lots of
adults found the girls kind of irritating. Actually, many of
them would note that they could tell the girls had
incredible will power. They seemed to be choosing to be silent,
choosing not to move, rather than unable to speak unable
(12:30):
to move. Of course, these interpretations underestimated the power of
the girl's pact, but eventually, faced with their silence, the
psychiatrist turned them over to a speech therapist. The girls
started working with the speech therapist, and in February of
nineteen seventy seven, Anne gave it her best shot, but
she too found the twins incredibly difficult. They wouldn't budge
(12:54):
an inch. Still, through their silence, Anne could sense something
unequal about their relationship. I could see June dying to
tell me things, she said. Then something would happen. Jennifer
was stopping June. She never moved. I watched and could
barely detect the slightest eye movement, but I know she
(13:17):
was stopping June. It was strange, like extra sensory perception.
She sat there with an expressionless gaze, but I felt
her power. She made all the decisions. The thought entered
my mind that June was possessed by her twin. But
what could Anne do. You couldn't force someone to talk.
(13:40):
So the girls moved through specialist after specialist, making very
little progress. At age fourteen, they were sent to a
different school, the Eastgate Center for Special Education, eight miles
away from their home. There, they continued to resist any
and all treatment. Every morning, a teacher drove them to school,
and the girls would never get inside of her car
(14:02):
of their own accord. Neither wanted to get in first,
and so they were paralyzed. Their teacher would have to
physically push each girl into the car, one by one,
making their knees bend and maneuvering their heads under the
roof of the car like she was a policeman and
they were two tiny, silent criminals. Now behind the scenes,
(14:24):
the girls were growing sick of their pact. They wanted
to talk. They wanted to make friends at school, tell jokes,
flirt with their crushes. They longed to talk to their family.
At night, the twins would kneel by their beds chant
versus from the Bible and beg God to let them talk.
We'd pray to him not to let us hurt our
(14:46):
family by ignoring them, to give us strength to talk
to our mother, our father, June said later. We couldn't
do it hard. It was too hard. It became clear
to some of their teachers that the twins needed to
be separated. They were locked in something toxic, and maybe
(15:06):
separation could yank them out of it. Strangely enough, the
twins agreed with this. They fantasized about being separated sent
to different countries. In her diary, Jennifer wrote, we think
it best if we separate. We are both awaiting each
other to talk and change. We are both willing to
lead our own lives, but when we are together, we
just keep depending on each other too much. But when
(15:30):
a teacher told the girls that the separation was actually
going to happen, the girls sprang at each other, fighting
so violently that they drew blood. The idea of separation
was appealing, but the reality was unbearable. Still, it had
to happen. Jennifer was left at Eastgate while June was
(15:51):
taken to another school. At the new school, June refused
to move. She would sit in her classes crying silently
as tears poured down her cheeks, but she wouldn't lift
a single finger to wipe them away. In her diary,
she wrote that she was lonely, hungry, bitter, angry, and
furious that Jennifer was the one who got to stay
(16:12):
at their old, familiar school. The girls could never stand
the slightest whiff of inequality in their relationship. It made
them sick to think that one of them was leading
a better life than the other. A teacher at the
new school noticed that June seemed like she was on
a leash to her sister. There was something almost mystic
(16:32):
about their relationship, said the teacher, like black magic. After
a weekend spent at home, neither twin would return to
their school, so they were reunited. But despite the joy
of being back together, things were getting worse for the twins.
They were losing weight, and they didn't seem to care
(16:52):
about their appearances anymore. They would hold their hair back
with paper clips and curling tongs. They'd tie their underwear
together with rope or wire. Surely none of this made
their classmates treat them any better. Meanwhile, their mom continued
to insist that they were just shy. Their dad continued
(17:13):
to watch TV. Their older siblings were sick of the girls,
sick of their silence. Their teachers were starting to despair.
June herself was starting to despair. Sometimes Jennifer would look
at her and chant, you are Jennifer, you are me.
(17:33):
In response, June would sob, I am June, I am June.
But it didn't change anything, It didn't break the pact.
(17:58):
Let's take a quick break to hear from our fairy
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That's thirty of full access for free. When you go
to dip Sea Stories dot com slash criminal Brods dipsystories
dot com slash criminal broads. By the time the girls
(21:36):
were sixteen, the educational system had pretty much given up
on them. The girls left Eastgate and were now on
unemployment living at home. Their narrow lives grew even narrower,
at least from the outside. They would go out on
Tuesdays to collect their unemployment checks and otherwise they would
leave notes for their mom if they wanted something. Here's
(21:57):
one from Jennifer, Mom, could you get us a line
notebook today? Here's one from June. Don't bring lunch until
four pm. We're busy, Thanks June. They would watch TV
while sitting on the stairs because they refused to be
in the living room with their family members. If anyone
came out of the living room while they were watching
TV to use the bathroom or grab a snack from
(22:19):
the kitchen, the twins would scatter. They went to their
older sister, Greta's wedding in matching clothes, and they ruined
it by standing stock still for four hours, looking at
the floor the entire time. The Gibbons family thought that
June and Jennifer hated them. Their older siblings couldn't stand them.
(22:44):
They found the girls infuriating difficult. But one of the
many tragedies of the twins' lives was that the girls
actually loved their family. They wanted a happy family, they
wanted to be a real part of their family, and
they also couldn't wait to get married and have kids themselves.
They were obsessed with the idea of being mothers, but
(23:05):
they just couldn't open their mouths and talk, so they
tried to show their love in other ways. They bought
Christmas presents for their family, and on their parents' anniversary,
the twins brought them breakfast in bed, but they did
it all in silence, without eye contact, and then they'd
run upstairs and pour out their hearts and their diaries.
(23:28):
June wrote, I lack something, but it's not love. I
love Rosy, Greta, David, Phil, Mom and Dad. I worry
about my mother. I see grief for all those years
in her eyes. She is not young, but she is
a romantic, a child at heart. I cannot bear to
die before my parents. I cannot bear to walk on
(23:50):
the graves of my parents, put down flowers and feel lost.
When their older sister Greta brought over her new baby.
The girls turn their back on her and Greta rushed
away crying. The tragedy was that the girls had been
dying to meet their little niece. They dreamed about it
for days, and they'd even stolen two Teddy bears as
(24:12):
a gift for the baby. They wanted so badly to
hold her. And then the big moment came and they're
packed kicked in. Not only could they not talk, but
they couldn't even look at the baby. They were trapped,
and so they poured all their hopes and dreams and
(24:34):
vivid teenage imaginations into other things like dolls. The girls
were obsessed with dolls, along with their little sister Rosie,
who was the only member of their family that they
would ever sometimes talk to. They created elaborate doll families
full of twins and adopted babies and children who died
(24:57):
young of terrible things. They sewed clothes for them. They
made their own radio station for the dolls called Radio Gibbons,
where the twins would tell their faithful doll listeners all
about the weather, They would share the latest recipes, and
they would even dole out helpful hints for taking care
of children. There was a pastor doll, a doctor doll.
(25:18):
They kept faithful records of all the many ways that
their dolls died. One died from a back injury, another
from a cracked skull, a third from eczema. Once the
twins even gathered up their courage and went trick or treating,
hiding under sheets as their tape recorder chirped trick or Treat.
They did all this to gather candy so that they
(25:39):
could throw an elaborate Halloween party for their dolls. One Christmas,
their mom gave the twins red diaries with the little locks,
and then writing became another way that the twins could
express themselves. They kept incredibly detailed diaries. They'd edit their
(26:00):
entries multiple times until they were perfect. They asked their
mom for typewriters and would stay up all night banging
away at the keys, writing short stories and poems and
essays and novels. They signed up for a writing course
as one person student eight two one, and they made
lists of difficult words, rhyming words, similes, metaphors, synonyms, antonyms.
(26:25):
They read every classic book they could get their hands
on from the Bronte sisters to D. H. Lawrence, it
was an education better than many an English major could
hope for. And just as they did with their dolls,
they packed their writing full of all the color and
horror of a life that was passing them by. And
(26:45):
the girls weren't just writing to write. They weren't sure
they'd become famous writers. This was going to be their
ticket to money and love and happiness and normalcy. They
took author photos of each other, and they pooled their
welfare checks to self publish June's novel, which was called
Pepsi Cola Addict. Pepsi Cola Addict was the wild story
(27:08):
of a fourteen year old white American boy who was
addicted to pepsi and who eventually died after washing down
a bunch of pills with a can of the good stuff.
It was teenage writing, a bit moralistic, but overall the
girl's writing was good. It was vivid, surprising, unusual, self aware.
(27:30):
Not to make too fine a point of it, but
it was really the only way the twins could speak,
and their speech on the page was lovely. As the
(27:59):
girls from sixteen to seventeen and then eighteen, they were
forced to come face to face with the fact that
they were growing up. At first, they didn't like it.
They bound their breasts and they worried about their sexual urges,
thinking that they were total freaks for feeling turned on.
But by age seventeen and a half, they had gone
(28:20):
from resisting womanhood to craving it. As Jennifer wrote in
her diary, it was the most turbulent period of my youth.
Jay and I endlessly arguing, lost, bored, frustrated, angry. Ah,
we thought youth was passing us by. They became obsessed
(28:41):
with boys, and they would stalk local teenagers, spying on
them through a shared pair of binoculars. They bought books
on witchcraft and tried to cast spells to bring their
crushes to their house. They'd make prank calls to boys
giggling on the other line, and they slipped notes under
one boy's door that had things like, dearest Darren, we
(29:02):
adore you, we love you, We will have you for ourselves,
your secret admirers. Now remember how their father, Aubrey Gibbons,
was obsessed with England. The girls had their own country
that they were obsessed with, America. They loved America. They
set all their stories in America. They made their dolls American.
(29:25):
They even made up American slang to use in their novels,
like this great line from Pepsi Cole Addict, Listen, don't
get nifty with me. Actually, it wasn't just America that
they were obsessed with, but specifically Malibu. All their dolls
and protagonists seemed to live in Malibu. Not a sparkly,
celebrity driven Malibu, but a gritty, crime ridden Malibu, a
(29:50):
Malibu that their biographer described as being sort of like
clockwork Orange. Their characters were often white, high school age
and troubled. They slept with their tea teachers and robbed
convenience stores, and so perhaps it was no surprise that
the girls got their biggest crush on three white American
boys who lived nearby. June and Jennifer had had a
(30:14):
classmate at Eastgate named Lance Kennedy, a beautiful but troubled
American boy who'd been nice to them. They were never
able to talk to him, but they left him love notes,
and now several years later they managed to find his parents'
house and they began frankly stalking the family. They took
a taxi there, they walked through the unlocked door, and
(30:37):
they made themselves at home, eating peanut butter sandwiches, drinking
orange juice, and rifling through all of their stuff. The
parents came home and found the girls. The girls immediately
fell silent, and the parents took pity on them and
let them go. But the girls weren't done. Lance Kennedy
himself lived in America by then, but he had three
(30:59):
younger brothers who were handsome and toussled and rude and
very troubled. Their mother had killed herself when the three
of them were in the house, and now their father
and stepmother ignored them, so the boys spent all their
time drinking and smoking and huffing glue and running around
with local girls. June and Jennifer tried, with creepy persistence
(31:24):
and outrageous outfits to integrate themselves into the boys' lives.
They would spend hours getting ready, putting on long wigs, lipstick,
mini skirts, sunglasses, high heels. Then they'd take a taxi
to the boy's house, and then they'd kind of lurk around,
waiting for the boys to notice them and hoping that
(31:46):
this time they'd be able to talk. The boys introduced
them to whiskey and weed, and the girls discovered that
substances had the magical ability of loosening their tongues. What
luck without the whiskey, we didn't speak, said June. Later,
We reckon that God told us to buy drink and
(32:06):
it worked. We sniffed glue and lighter fluid. We were
different then, laughing and talking. We were so relaxed and
laid back. As the summer went on, the girls became
more and more obsessed with thoughts of sex. Once they
tried to seduce their taxi driver, jumping on him and
scratching at him with their long nails. But their hottest
(32:29):
dreams were reserved for the Kennedy boys. In the meantime,
the boys treated them like dirt. They ignored the girls,
they hit them once. They literally threw food into their mouths,
as though the girls were dogs. But to the girls,
who were starved for interaction with their peers and desperate
(32:53):
for boyfriends, everything the Kennedy boys did seemed like love.
The youngest brother was named Carl, and he was only fourteen,
but he was just as troubled and sexually active as
his older brothers. One night, he took the girls into
a church, and he told them both to strip. They
(33:14):
were all high and drunk and barely conscious. June watched
as Jennifer lost her virginity to Carl. It was the
ultimate inequality for the sisters. Jennifer was ecstatic she'd done it.
She was a woman now, she'd beaten her sister. It
was almost too much to process. Two days later, she
(33:37):
tried to strangle June, and then later that same day,
June tried to drown her in a river. A car
drove by and interrupted them, and the girls gasped for
air and spluttered, I love you, God help us, God
have mercy on us. Almost two weeks after Jennifer had
sex for the first time, it was June's turn. She
(34:00):
also lost her virginity to Carl in a barn, not
a church. Everyone was drunk and high again. The girls
felt sexy and mysterious and desirable, even though Carl was
frankly terrible to them. He would say things like, why
don't you goddamn bitches stop hassling us and get out
(34:21):
of here, and June would write in her diary, we
were very happy. When Carl ripped off Jennifer's wig and
set it on fire. She took it as a compliment,
telling herself that he found her prettier without it. The
twins would always look back on that summer as the
best time of their lives, the first time they had
(34:44):
truly lived. Everything that occurred was magic, wrote Jennifer. It
has brought a new awakening in me. It is like
God gave me a chance, a chance to prove who
I really am. June wrote about Carl, I thank you
for hurting me when you did. But like everything, the
(35:04):
summer came to an end. The boys moved back to America,
and the girls looked around for something else to do
with their boundless creativity and their stifled lives. At first,
(35:30):
June and Jennifer continued to focus on boys. They made
a little nest of hay at the edge of a park,
and they managed to lure a few local boys to it.
But it was the same old story. The boys used
them and were cruel to them. The girls thought that
they were in love. Before long, all the local teenagers
were tired of the sisters. As their biographer wrote, everywhere
(35:54):
they went they were teased, used and rejected, and though
they glimpsed the reasons, they never understood what they were
doing wrong. They made an odd sight, two skinny girls
slinking around town in their strange outfits. Sometimes they'd wear
multiple layers of clothing. Sometimes they'd wear huge jackets that
(36:14):
they'd bought from the Kennedy boys. They tried to look pretty,
but everyone just thought that they looked weird. June wrote
in her diary, what's wrong with us? Why is everyone
running from us? It hurt her feelings that none of
the boys wanted to be in a relationship with her,
even though they were happy to use her for sex.
(36:36):
Is it my color? She wrote? My bad luck. Slowly,
the twins formed a new identity for themselves. If they
couldn't be famous writers or beloved girlfriends, they'd become criminals
Instead famous criminals, they started committing small, odd crimes. They
(36:59):
smashed the window of a school, wriggled inside, and watched TV.
Why do this? Wrote June? Nothing else to do, no friends,
nothing to fill in the cold hour. Winter is here
and all the birds will fly back south. I wish
I could be with them. They broke in a few
more times and started stealing little things. I love being
(37:21):
a burglar, wrote Jennifer. Of course I feel guilty, but
that's the cost of being a perfect thief. I think
my ambition now is to be a thief, a real thief.
They scrawled graffiti on a school. They tried to cut
a phone cable and failed. They tried to cut the
tires of a motorcycle and failed. They looked through the
pockets of a stolen jacket and found nothing. They called
(37:44):
the police to confess their crimes. Desperate for excitement, for
something to make them special, they broke windows, prank, called
the fire station, and talked about making bombs. It was
notable that the girls often called the police. They really
seemed to want to get caught. They were always writing
(38:04):
down their dreams and recording their meaning using a little
book of dream Interpretations, and in that book, police represented
protection and prison represented security. The girls also often dreamed
of fire, and, as their biographer wrote, fire offered its
ancient symbolism of purification sacrifice in being born again. Only
(38:27):
through flames could a new June and Jennifer emerge as separate,
successful human beings. And so perhaps it's not surprising that
the twins' biggest crime, their only big crime, really was arson.
They burned down a tractor store, causing hundreds of thousands
of dollars worth of damage. The flames thrilled them even
(38:49):
more than the Kennedy boys had. It was the biggest
night of my life, wrote June. I know the Lord
will forgive me. It's been a long, painful, hard year.
Don't I deserve to express my distress. The twins were
finally caught on November eighth, nineteen eighty one, while trying
(39:09):
to start another fire. Their parents were shocked their daughters,
who were just a little shy, were arsonists. Gloria and
Aubrey had assumed the girls were upstairs the whole time,
working on their stories or playing with their dolls. They
had no idea that their girls had taken their fate
into their own hands and forced themselves to leave the house,
(39:33):
forced themselves to grow up. No one in the criminal
(39:54):
justice system knew what to do about the twins. They
were held in Puckle Church Prison for seven long months
as everyone tried to figure out how they should be
locked up and where They were arsonists. So they were
supposed to be a danger to society, and yet they
were teenagers children. Really they were undeniably weird. Some people
(40:16):
even found them straight up spooky with their synchronized movements
and their downcast eyes. But it didn't seem right to
sentence them to hard prison time. What to do with them?
Where should they go? At first, the girls hardly moved
in prison. One of the prison matrons had to put
them in bed, tuck them in, and then use her
(40:39):
own fingers to shut their eyelids. Then June and Jennifer
started moving and fighting over food, mostly alternatively starving and
gorging themselves. Each one wanted to be thinner than the other.
They thought that the thinner they were, the more their
cheekbones would stand out, and the more beautiful they'd be.
(41:00):
They fought so much that they were separated, and of
course this distressed them because they could never decide if
they needed to be together or separate. The prison staff
would spy on them when they were separated, fascinated by
the girls, and they found that even when the girls
were apart, they were almost always doing the same thing
and sitting in the same position. Despite their synchronicity. The
(41:25):
girls were fantasizing about killing each other again. Jennifer wrote
in her diary that she wanted to strangle her sister
saying it would be the best thing I would have
done in my life. June luxuriated in a similar fantasy,
writing one of us is plotting to kill one of us,
(41:45):
a thud on the head on a cool evening, dragging
the lifeless body, digging a secret grave. I'm in a
dangerous situation, a scheming, insidious plot. How will it end?
We have become fatal enemies in each other's eyes. We scheme,
we plot, and who will win? A deadly day is
(42:07):
getting closer each minute, coming to a point of imminent death.
Like hands creeping out against the night sky, intentions of evil, blood,
a knife, a mincer. I say to myself, how can
I get rid of my own shadow? Impossible or not impossible?
Without my shadow? Would I die without my shadow? Would
(42:32):
I gain life? Sometimes the girls would lay in their
beds mere feet from each other, sensing the other's presence, power,
and intentions as vividly as if they were each other.
Jennifer wrote about lying in her bed, refusing to move
because June wasn't moving either. I read her mind. I
(42:53):
knew all about her mood, my mood, her mood clash
like spilled blood, my perception, her perception, twisting and clashing, knowing, cunning,
sly and where will it all end? In death? In separation.
The day before their nineteenth birthday, the twins' parents came
(43:15):
to visit. The conversation was awkward. The twins barely spoke,
but in her diary, where her tongue always loosened, Jennifer wrote, heartbreakingly,
a most amazing and glorious thing has occurred. My parents
actually came to visit me. It means more to me
than anything. I always wanted something big to happen before
(43:38):
I was nineteen. Finally, the girls were tried in May
of nineteen eighty two. Their defense lawyer hired a psychiatrist
who diagnosed them as psychopaths and recommended that they be
sent to broad More, which was the notorious high security
psychiatric hospital that held gangsters, rapists, free killers, and serial killers.
(44:02):
The youngest person there at the time was twenty seven,
The twins were barely nineteen. They pled guilty to sixteen
joint counts of burglary, theft and arson, and their sentence
they would be sent to Broadmoor indefinitely. It was the
same sentence given to people like the Yorkshire Ripper the
(44:26):
girls were happy though. They had a beautiful vision of Broadmoor,
thinking that it was a place where kindly doctors and
nurses would save them from themselves. They pictured a hotel
like place with a gym and a swimming pool and
disco dances every night. They figured that they'd be there
for a year or two at MAX, and then they'd
(44:47):
be released back into the real world, where their lives
could finally begin. After arriving at Broadmoor, the twins quickly
(45:11):
realized that it wasn't the paradise they'd hoped for. It
was just another form of prison. It didn't take long
for them to break down. Jennifer attacked a nurse, June
tried to strangle herself to death. They were separated. They despaired,
Same old, same old. The girls had hoped that they'd
(45:33):
thrive in broad More and even make friends there, but
as usual, their packed trapped them even more than handcuffs.
Ever could. They fantasized about turning to their neighbors and
just making small talk, cracking an easy joke, but they couldn't.
Jennifer wrote, I really am getting fed up with my
(45:53):
lack of self confidence. Why can't I just say hello
and break the barrier. One year stretched into two and
then three, and still the girls weren't released. They were
put on medication that made their eyesight blurry. They lost
the urge to read and write. But something did happen
(46:15):
in Broadmoor that changed their story, if not their lives.
They befriended a reporter, a woman from the London Sunday Times.
She was a white woman named Marjorie Wallace, and she'd
become obsessed with the twins story. Marjorie had made friends
with the twin's parents at first and gained access to
a lot of their writing, and she was struck by
(46:36):
the girl's skill with words, and the difference between their
reputation as strange, silent, possibly stupid people and the personalities
that their writing revealed. These were intelligent girls with rich
inner lives, and almost nobody in the world knew that.
Slowly the girls actually started talking to Marjorie. She became
(46:59):
the friend an advocate they'd always longed for. They desperately
wanted to be recognized and famous through their writings, Marjorie
said later, to have them published and to have their
story told. And I thought that maybe one way of
freeing them Liberating them would be to unlock them from
that silence. But even as Marjorie advocated for their release
(47:22):
and tried to encourage them to write, the girls remained
in Broadmoor, locked up, their creativity slowly dripping away. Marjorie
was writing a book about them, their biography, and Jennifer quipped,
why don't you call it rag dolls? They really did
feel like rag dolls, floppy, useless, hopeless. Jennifer was starting
(47:48):
to grow paranoid, really paranoid, and she started to think
that people were spying on her and plotting to kill her.
June was trying to get out of there. She wrote
a letter to the Queen, asking the Queen to pardon
her and her sister. Sometimes they filled their time by
getting crushes on male inmates, many of whom were rapists
(48:09):
and murderers, or dressing up in elaborate costumes like they
used to do, old flashes of their creative inner lives,
but nothing really changed. The twins watched murderer after murderer
get released from Broadmoor, but no one came to release them.
(48:44):
When I read excerpts from June and Jennifer's diaries, here's
what strikes me the most. It's not their strange behavior
or the creepy packed between them, or their cane and
able type rivalry, or their crimes or their sentences. It's
how ordinary they are. June and Jennifer could never figure
(49:06):
out how to be normal girls in the world, but
on the page, they sound just like I did. As
a teenage girl. I too, wrote obsessively in my diary,
thinking that every guy who smiled at me was my soulmate,
stressing over socialization, dreaming of being a writer, worrying that
I was wasting my youth, wishing I could be nicer
(49:27):
to my parents. So many times, June and Jennifer sound
just like me. They sound just like you too, I'm
sure of it. They longed to be famous, but they
also longed to be normal, And while they achieved fame
for being abnormal, I don't think they ever realized just
(49:47):
how normal they were. In so many ways. Everything around
them told them that they were freaks. The white kids
who bullied them, the local boys who used them, the
teachers who up on them. But so much about them
was just teenage. They're weird inner lives, their imaginative play,
(50:08):
their obsession with dressing up, their painfully intense crushes, their
feelings as outsiders. If only someone could have told them,
you feel weird, you feel alone, you want a relationship,
you don't know how to make friends. Every other teenager
feels that way too. If only someone could have gone
(50:29):
up to the girls and opened the gates to the
bizarre and intense world of being a teenager and just said,
come on in. Everyone here is a weirdo too. But
by the time June and Jennifer were released from Broadmoor,
it was far too late to be normal. They weren't
(50:50):
teenagers anymore. They had been locked up for almost twelve years.
Finally they got word that they were going to be
released and sent to a new clinic and then on
into the outside world. This was what they had been
waiting for, right But it wasn't that simple for them anymore.
One more thing had to happen. The twins talked and
(51:13):
talked and thought about it. They had decided that in
order to be truly free, one of them would have
to die. The twins had always known there was something
unhealthy about their bond. Why do you think their diaries
were so full of murder fantasies? They knew that they
(51:35):
couldn't live forever like this. Nobody suffers the way I do,
June wrote, not with a sister with a husband, yes,
with a wife, yes, with a child, yes, But this
sister of mine, a dark shadow, robbing me of sunlight,
is my one and only torment. And so the twins
(51:56):
decided that in order for one of them to live
a normal life, the other one would have to go,
because there was no normal If both of them were around,
they wouldn't happen. Yet, they didn't want to die in Broadmoor.
It would have to happen. Once they were released. Marjorie
(52:17):
Wallace went to visit them one last time before they're
transferred to the new clinic. She brought her daughter. They
were all having tea, laughing, and then suddenly Jennifer said, Marjorie, Marjorie,
I'm going to have to die. Marjorie laughed nervously and responded,
don't be silly. You're thirty one years old, you're just
about to be freed from Broadmore. You're not ill. But
(52:40):
Jennifer said, we've decided, and Marjorie felt a stab of
real fear. The twins had argued and argued about which
one of them would have to die, but eventually they
decided that it would have to be Jennifer. As June
said later, Jennifer knew that she wouldn't be able to
(53:02):
live without her sister. Jennifer believed that June would have
a better chance at the life they longed for, with
a husband, a family, a job as a writer if
she wasn't around. She released me, June said later. The
day before the girls were going to be transferred out
(53:22):
of Broadmoor, Jennifer felt tired and she kept throwing up,
but she kept it secret from the staff so that
they wouldn't make her stay behind. The Next morning, a
pair of nurses accompanied the girls onto a little bus
that was going to drive them to the new clinic.
The twins sat down, Jennifer put her head on June's
(53:42):
shoulder and fell asleep with her eyes wide open. She
never woke up. She was taken to the clinic and
then rushed to the hospital, where she died less than
an hour after arriving. Technically, she died of viral myo carditis,
a rare heart condition known fittingly as a silent VIRIS,
(54:07):
but June says she died on purpose. Died to set
her sister free. When Marjorie heard the news, she felt
a chill. The girls hadn't been choking. June laid a
red rose on her sister's body and wrote in her diary,
I kissed her stone colored face. I went hysterical with grief.
(54:33):
June wasn't just sad, though, she was feeling another strong emotion, relief.
Jennifer had set her free, and now she was going
to live. She spent a year at the new clinic,
taking classes, and then she was released fully. She moved
(54:54):
into a halfway house and eventually into her own apartment
near to her parents. She tried to go by her
middle name Alison. A fresh start, she started talking more,
even giving interviews to journalists. She wrote less and less.
(55:15):
She used to be afraid to sleep too deeply because
she was sure that her twin was waiting there, down
in the depths of sleep, waiting to draw her into death.
But now June saw Jennifer in her dreams, and she
welcomed her. I used to miss her, she told a journalist.
(55:38):
Now I've accepted her. She's in me. She makes me stronger.
I accept the fact that she's gone. Now that took
me five years of grieving, crying all the time. Now
all my tears are gone, they all dried up inside
my eyes. I don't get lonely now I've got her,
(56:01):
haven't I? Well? Well, well everyone, those are the Gibbons Twins.
(56:36):
Are you like me standing stock still in shock, sort
of feeling in this fog of like what just happened?
They are so relatable and yet so mysterious and so
sisterly and so otherworldly? And are they just in your
heads now? Like their voices from their diaries? And they
(56:57):
are going to haunt you all day? Sorry, welcome to
my life. Please tell me all your thoughts and feelings
about the Gibbons Twins at criminal Broads at gmail dot com,
or go to Instagram dot com slash criminal brods to
see photos of them. Okay, a couple other Do you
need ninety things before I release you? Thank you all
(57:20):
for your kind kind kind kind kind kind kind responses
to the Lloyd Dean update of the last episode. Listen
to the last episode. If you don't know what I'm
talking about, I really appreciate it. None of you made
me feel like an idiot, which is really valuable to me.
Thank you, and just to clarify one thing because a
couple of people I don't think it was clear. Lloyd
(57:44):
Dean never lied to me. He never tried to trick me.
He was never He never withheld information from me. The information,
the information that I was wrong about was a combination
of seeing something in a newspaper article and my own
like not putting several pieces together. So Lloyd Dean was
not trying to con me, I promise you. Second of all,
(58:05):
I'd like to thank this week's patrons, which I'm gonna
call the J Squad, Jennifer W. And Juliene J. Thank
you so much for supporting the podcast. Everyone else, you
can go to patreon dot com slash Criminal Brods if
you too would like to join the J Squad. And
you know, I told you this was the last week
of Sister Month, and it is. It is, it is.
(58:27):
But I might have a small, teeny tiny surprise for you.
I might be popping back into your podcast feeds later
this week. I'm ninety percent sure I am, but I'm
still saying might just in case you know, something happens.
But I think you'll see me in a couple days. Okay.
Thank you always for being the best listeners ever. And
(58:47):
I love you all, and I hope you're doing well
and enjoying your summer. I'll see you later this week
and then again next week as we plunge back into
the wild world of should we say, criminal broads who
aren't necessarily sisters. Ex story I have for you is
a very unknown one and also a very intense one,
So get excited, love you, talk to you later. Bye.
(59:09):
Lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister,
And Lord help the sister who comes between me and
my man.
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