June 30, 2021 • 44 mins
When Blanche Wright was captured in 1980, police said they’d found a vicious killer. And for decades, no one dug any further to find out who the real Blanche was. Michael Wilson of the New York Times comes on the podcast to tell us her story.
Read Michael’s article on Blanche here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/nyregion/prince-charming-hit-man.html?searchResultPosition=1
Read more of Michael’s work here: https://www.nytimes.com/by/michael-wilson
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a sin? Is it a crime? Loving you
dear like I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
guilty of loving you.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hi everyone, Welcome to Criminal Broad's a true crime and
history podcast about wild women on the wrong side of
the law. Sister month is over. What are we doing
with all our free time? Personally, I am a gardening
I just put some basil and parsley on my fire escape,
along with some mint and a small oregano, a small
(00:43):
suffering struggling a regano. And I also have a hydroponic
garden in my kitchen. So basically I am Old McDonald
twenty twenty one millennial version, and I have a lot
of butter lettuce to share. What you guys have to
let me know Criminal broads at gmail dot com. All right,
(01:04):
today's story is a oh shocker one with lots of
twists and turns. I mean, aren't they all? This is
when I was very surprised I'd never heard of before,
but that at the same time, only one person has
written about this woman in the past like almost forty years.
And really there's only one big chunk of information available
(01:29):
about this woman, and it's an article in the New
York Times, and I thought to myself, Tory, Tory, Tory,
you could sit here and talk about the article from
the New York Times, or you could ask the author
to come on the podcast. So we're gonna hear from
Michael Wilson, an amazing New York Times journalist who wrote
about this woman. So today I'm going to introduce you
(01:51):
to Blanche Wright, who was framed in the media one way,
and the truth, as Michael Wilson reveals forty years later,
is quite different. So we're going to be traveling back
to New York in the eighties, which was, as you know,
if you've ever seen a single documentary about New York,
a very violent time, a very different time, you know,
(02:12):
chaos reigned in the streets, or so documentarians like to
make you think. And we are certainly going back to
a violent subculture in New York. So travel with me
there and you'll hear from Michael Wilson soon. Let's get going.
(02:43):
A couple of months ago, I was looking for stories.
I was clicking around the online newspaper archives that I
like to use, and I was waiting for something to
catch my eye. Suddenly I thought of Villainel the anti
heroine of killing Eve the TV show, and so I
typed in female assassin, hoping to find a real life
(03:05):
version of her. Most of the articles that popped up
were about movies, though, movies about female assassins. So I
tried another phrase, female hit man, which brought me no luck.
And then I tried hit woman, which only turned up
terrible sentences about hitting women. So then I tried the
(03:27):
improbable and wordy phrase female killer for hire. And there
she was the hit woman I'd been looking for. She'd
been arrested in nineteen eighty for a series of vicious murders.
The articles I was reading described someone who was clearly
a psychopath, a killer with ice in her veins. The
(03:50):
articles were full of phrases like double killing and accused
of murdering four men and a woman, and cocaine dealer
and luxury apartment and shootout, and even the sentence her
last contract killing for ten thousand dollars was last Friday.
I couldn't believe what I was reading. This was the
(04:14):
villainelle I'd been looking for, right, a menacing, Hollywood esque
figure who killed with a silencer on her gun. But
some of the articles ran next to a photo, and
the photo told a very different story than the text did.
The hit woman is sandwiched between two detectives. In the photo,
(04:36):
the detectives are looking very eighties. One has a fabulous
mustache and a cigarette dangling from his lip and a
plaid scarf over his jacket. It's a bold look for
a man of the law. But anyway, between these two detectives,
there she is the vicious woman, herself, Blanche Write, age
(04:56):
twenty one. She's a young black woman in an Adidas jacket.
But she doesn't look vicious in the photo. She's sobbing.
(05:26):
Michael Wilson of The New York Times knows all about
that photo. He came across the name Blanche Write when
he was working on another story about women and crime.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
I was researching a different story involving women in the
drug world in New York in the nineteen sixties, and
I came across this headline from the New York Times
about a hit man hit woman team. The hit woman
(05:59):
is arrested and her hitman partner was killed in a shootout,
and I said, wow, this bear is looking into So
I set it aside, and when I finished the original story,
I looked her up as much as I could online.
I found, to my satisfaction, a woman by the same
name and age living just outside New York City in
an apartment. There was no kind of social media presence.
(06:19):
There'd been nothing written about her at all in decades
after her arrest in nineteen eighty, and I realized the
only way to move on would be to get up
and go out and knock on her door. And I
proceeded to not do that for like a year. It
seemed like I had too much else going on to
(06:40):
give up a bit of a day. So I finally did,
and I went to this apartment building and I rang
a buzzer. She answered, and I introduced myself and said
I worked for the New York Times and if she
had a minute, I'd just like to talk to her
about a story idea that I have. And so she
buzzed me in. I took the elevator up too her apartment.
(07:01):
All I'd ever seen of her is a picture of
her being arrested, and she's got her head down, she's
sobbing in tears. She's a very young woman in a tracksuit,
and these two big beefy cops on each side of her,
kind of almost praying her in front of the cameras
as they did back then. This door opened to this apartment,
and here is this sixty year old version of that
(07:24):
same young woman. Really, I mean, she's changed remarkably little.
And she smiled and she let me in, and I
sort of made my case.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
When Blanche Write buzzed Michael up to her apartment, Michael
wasn't sure what to expect. After all, the headlines about
Blanche had depicted a stone cold killer who got ten
thousand dollars for every body she created. Michael didn't know
if he was going to be met with hostility or
maybe outright denial. You know, I didn't do any of it.
(07:53):
It's all lies. So he was surprised to find that
Blanche was gentle kind. He told her that he was
interested in writing about her, and she said she'd think
about it. He left her with her thoughts. A week later,
he called her.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
And she said, I've thought about it, and I've talked
to my friends and they think it might help other
women if i'd talked to you. So for that reason,
I will. I'll agree to talk to you. So I
returned after she agreed to see me. We set up
a time and it was a Monday morning, and I
got to her apartment. She sat down on a couch
and I sat down across from her in a chair
(08:34):
and just going to open up a notebook, and I
asked a couple of basic questions. But really she just
started at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
When Blanche started talking about her childhood, she painted a
portrait of abuse and pain that went from bad to worse.
She was born in nineteen fifty nine in New York
City to a sixteen year old mother who suffered from schizophrenia.
Her father was nowhere to be found. Her mom couldn't
take care of her. Instead, she'd lock a little Blanche
(09:02):
in a bedroom and leave to drift around the neighborhood,
lost in her own world. And so Blanche was raised
by a grandmother and a gaggle of uncles who beat her.
If they didn't want her to leave the house, they'd
tie her to the radiator like a dog. It wasn't
long before she ended up in foster care. Now. Her
(09:23):
foster father was in his sixties and she was eight
when he started coming into her bedroom at night to
abuse her. He told her he was teaching her what
not to do with boys. This went on for years.
Blanche would wrap herself in her bed sheet, hoping that
he'd leave her alone. Before long, she was completely disconnecting
(09:47):
from the situation. As a way to survive, she described
herself as a radio that had been turned off. Nothing
to see here, nothing on the sound waves. This isn't happening.
It got worse.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
After years of this. One night he's attacking her and
he collapses of an apparent heart attack, and his wife
rushes him to the hospital and he died. And the
wife came home and blamed Blanche for this and threw her.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Out, Convinced that she'd killed her foster father. Blanche stopped talking.
The state sent her into a group home. It was
full of older girls who harassed her, but there was
one very special woman there, Miss Richardson, the woman who
ran the home. Slowly, Miss Richardson brought Blanche out of
(10:40):
her shell and helped her to talk again. She helped
her to feel like she wasn't dirty and worthless and guilty,
but that she had worth, that she had potential. But
then it got worse again. At age sixteen, Blanche did
what so many other sixteen year olds loved to do.
(11:00):
She went to a party. It was a birthday party
for her friend, and her friend's brother was there. Blanche
had known him for ages, but there at the party,
her friend's brother raped her. And that was that she
felt herself giving up on the sense of safety and
(11:21):
potential that Miss Richardson had given her. She began dating
her rapist. After all, as some of the other women
in her life told her, men raped women because they
just loved them too much. Before long, Blanche was pregnant.
She tried to make this relationship work for the sake
(11:43):
of her baby boy. But this man, her friend's brother,
was a heroin addict, an abuser. At one point, he
fought with one of Blanche's uncles, violent man against a
violent man, and he was thrown into jail. Blanche used
that narrow window of time to escape, leaving their apartment
with just their baby and the clothes that she was wearing.
(12:07):
Before he was locked up, he had beaten her with
an ironing board. She had no idea what he'd do
when he came back.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
So while Blanche is telling me this, she's telling me
in this painstaking detail, and I'm just kind of overwhelmed
by it. A lot of people would skip over the
parts of their life that are really the hardest to
talk about, but she leaned into them and it caused
her great pains across the room from me, to the
point where I asked her to stop. Let's take a break.
(12:37):
Should we stop? She said, well, can I get your coffee?
And you know, we'd have like a cookie together, and
then we'd kind of resume. And it's like she needed
the whole story to be told, and the pain that
was causing her was not very important to her. It's
the best way I can explain it. So I returned
Tuesday for another full day of this, and Wednesday and Thursday.
(12:59):
It was back to back to back to back. By
the end of it, she was wrung out, and I
was too. I had this giant filled notebook and I
had this incredible story. I went back to write it.
My only fear was like screwing it up. It was
this kind of beauty to it amid all the darkness
and grim details in my notebook that I wanted to
(13:21):
make sure expressed itself.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Up until that point, Blanche had only known men to
be violent. Every man in her life had abused her
or abandoned her, so when she met the next man
in her life, she was stunned by how different he
seemed from all the men before him. And now let's
(14:00):
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(15:54):
Blanche turned twenty in nineteen seventy nine. It had been
an unhappy year for her. One night, she went to
visit her aunt, who was sick, or so she thought.
It turned out to be a trick. Her aunt had
thrown her a surprise birthday party, and there was a
man there. Here's Michael reading the opening section of his
(16:16):
New York Times profile of Blanche.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Even on a night of surprises for Blanche Wright, the
man in the suit stood out. She had headed across
the Bronx to visit her sick aunt, but when she
entered the apartment, she found a room full of people
waiting for her happy birthday. Then she was introduced to
a friend of her aunt's, an impeccably dressed lawyer from Philadelphia.
He seemed sophisticated, with a three piece suit and a briefcase.
(16:42):
His name was Willie Sanchez, and he wasn't like any
other men she knew. They talked and talked, and before
he left, he told her aunt, I'd like to talk
to her more. She turned twenty years old that day
in nineteen seventy nine, with little to celebrate. She was
struggling to stay afloat with a toddler son in her
(17:03):
own apartment nearby, hiding from the boy's father, a heroin addict,
and a thief who would be out of jail soon
and looking for her. But Willie Sanchez promised a new future.
Blanche found herself pampered for the first time in her life,
fitted for new clothes and nice stores, sampling expensive perfumes
(17:23):
and beauty salons. She was swept up by it all.
This captivation would lead as the months passed to literal captivity,
ending in a seventy one day blur of cocaine, guns, terror,
and finally an ambush assassination that put one of them
in prison and the other in the ground. The police
(17:45):
called them Bonnie and Clyde, a lazy tag that was
easier than the truth. Blanch Wrot went to prison a
broken human, so traumatized that she did not talk for months.
She had heard of Bonnie and Clyde, but she didn't
feel like Bonnie. It seemed to her that Bonnie had
been luckier. Bonnie died.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Willie Sanchez began to court Blanche with an oily skill
that disguised his ulterior motives. He seemed gentle and kind,
and at first there wasn't even anything sexual about their relationship.
He just seemed to want to take care of her.
He paid her electrical bill and her apartment went dark.
(18:27):
He stalked her kitchen with groceries. He treated her to
a fancy meal at a Japanese steakhouse for their first date,
and under the guise of taking care of her, he
was slowly subtly manipulating her look. He bought her clothes,
he bought her nice perfume. He took her to a
(18:49):
beauty parlor and he told the hairstylist exactly how to
do her hair. This was all grooming, but at the
time it just felt like the good kind of attention,
like the glimmerings of love. Now Blanche could tell that
Willy Sanchez knew some sketchy people. She saw them. They'd
(19:13):
be out at a restaurant and some shady looking man
would come up to them, and he and Willie would
walk away and talk in hushed tones. The same thing
happened in parking lots, sometimes whispered conversations, a sense of
transactions taking place. But hey, lawyers had sketchy clients, right,
Blanche figured this was all just part of his job.
(19:36):
She was right, It was all part of Willy Sanchez's job.
But he wasn't a lawyer, not at all. He was
a hit man. Willie Sanchez was also known as Robert Young.
(20:07):
In his line of work, you couldn't have too many aliases.
He was the hit man for the Council, which was
an organized crime collective run out of Harlem. The Council
was run by Nicky Barnes, a kingpin who cut deals
with the mafia, invested in automated car washes and travel agencies.
(20:28):
Was responsible for getting hundreds of thousands of black people
hooked on heroin and quoted King Lear and Moby Dick
Nicki might be most famous for having the nerve to
pose smugly on the cover of the New York Times
magazine in nineteen seventy seven, two years before Blanche met Willie.
That cover infuriated the President, Jimmy Carter so much that
(20:52):
he went to the FEDS and told them to prosecute
Nicky Barnes to the fullest extent of the law. Later
that year, Nicki got life without para. Anyway, Willi worked
for Nicki, and while Nicki got rich and famous and
eventually thrown in prison, Willi flew under the radar, like
any good contract killer. It's unclear when exactly he started
(21:15):
working for the Council, but he had plenty of run
ins with the law of his own accord. Two years
before he walked into Blanche's life, he was sawing through
bars at the Mattawan State Hospital for the criminally insane.
He was locked up there for a brutal murder where
he climbed through a young woman's window, shot her when
(21:35):
she tried to resist him, and then violated her dead body.
Authorities thought he was crazy, crazy and dangerous, and they
were right. In nineteen seventy seven, he and nine other
inmates at Mattawan, sliced through the bars of a window
in their ward, then crept through the exercise yard, then
(21:58):
sawed through another window that led them into the cellar,
then tiptoed across the cellar, cut through a third set
of bars, climbed a twenty foot fence with barbed wire
at the top, and ran into the night. The escape
from Mattawan wasn't even Willie's greatest escape, if you can
believe it. He was re arrested the next year, and
(22:19):
he was kept in jail as he waited for trial.
On the day he was taken to the courthouse, he
hid his jail bed sheets under his clothing, and then
at the courthouse, when no guards were watching him, he
tied the sheets into a rope and lowered himself out
of the fourth floor window. He climbed into an open
third floor window, which happened to be the empty office
(22:42):
of the prosecutor, and he just strolled through it like
he owned the place. Then he asked a secretary for
the best way to get out and just left. It's
hard not to compare this to Ted Bundy's infamous escape
from the courthouse in Aspen, Colorado. Just a year earlier,
Bundy jumped from a second story window and sprinted towards
(23:03):
the mountains. He gets a lot of credit for the
perceived gutsiness of that escape. But if we're comparing psychopathic
maniacs who jump out of courthouse windows, I think the
award for gutsiness goes to Willy Sanchez. So he sauntered
out of that courthouse, crazy and dangerous as ever, and
(23:24):
he walked into Blanchewrite's life. It took a gun to
(23:45):
make Blanche realize that Willy was a killer, not a lawyer.
She didn't hear the gun. Willy used a silencer. No
sound of a gunshot, just ash of air and then
the thud of body. She and Willie were driving around
in circles in the Bronx. Willie told her that he
(24:07):
was looking for a friend. After a while, he said, hey,
see that man there. Could you go up to him
and ask him for the time. So she did. She
walked up to the man, and as she asked him
for the time, she heard that sound the wsh The
man fell.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Willie Sanchez is standing there holding a pistol with a
silencer on it. That's why it made that sound. And
he grabs her and yanks her back to the car
and they speed off, and she's terrified. She said he
looked like a whole different human And she said, who
are you? And he said, I'm the man who's been
taking care of you. He was never the nice Willie
(24:47):
Sanchez anymore.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Now that Blanche knew what Willie really did for a living,
Willie wouldn't let her out of his sight. He forced
her to move in with two of his friends, Jean
and Rose, and if he left her alone, he'd lock
her in the bedroom. It was a sick echo of
her childhood when her schizophrenic mother would lock tiny Blanche
(25:09):
in her bedroom in order to wander the city. Rosie,
her new roommate, seemed to have a little sympathy for
Blanche because she offered Blanche a bit of self care
and the only way she knew how cocaine. It helps
me cope, said Rosie. Blanche tried it. It made her
(25:30):
feel better. It helped her cope too. In the meantime,
Willie wanted to make sure that Blanche wouldn't talk, and
so he devised a test.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
One day, he takes her to a holiday inn and
checks into her room and takes her into the bathroom
and handcuffs her to a pipe and says, don't make
a sound. He leaves, shuts the door behind him, and
the hotel room is empty. And then she hears the
hotel room door open and two women walk in, and
(26:04):
she hears them talking to each other. She doesn't make
a sound, and eventually the women leave. She hears the
door open again. Footsteps approached the bathroom door and it
opens and it's Willie Sanchez and he says, you didn't
say a word. I can trust you. And she realized
that this whole thing about a test. That he must
(26:25):
have sent the women in to see if she'd call
out to them, and apparently she passed this test.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
There was one point when Blanche tried to get help.
Remember Miss Richardson, the woman who ran the group home
where Blanche used to live. She was one of Blanche's
only allies, one of the only people who'd ever been
truly kind to her, and Blanche thought that maybe if
she could visit Miss Richardson and tell her what was
going on, miss Richardson could help her escape. The Only
(26:53):
problem was that Willie insisted on coming with Blanche to
the group home as they talked to Miss Richardson. Blanche
waited for a quiet minute, even a few seconds, where
she could whisper I need help, But Willie wouldn't leave.
He looked around the room as though he was concerned
(27:13):
about something. I don't see any security, he said. Anybody
could come in here and kill all twelve of these girls,
and you two. Blanche knew exactly what he was telling her.
He was threatening her, saying that if she said a
(27:34):
word to Miss Richardson, he'd kill them all. Later in
the car, he told her, you know, I'm god right,
I decide who lives and who dies. Blanche thought to herself,
I'm going to die with this guy, and so instead
(27:57):
of escaping, she went along with him. She had no
other choice. On January twenty first, nineteen eighty, she found
herself in the apartment of a Columbian cocaine trafficker holding
a pistol as the dealer writhed in terror on the floor.
Willie was in the bedroom with a dealer's woman. Blanche
(28:17):
heard the whosh of his pistol. He came out and
screamed at her for letting the dealer move. She didn't
know what to do. He put his hand around hers
and forced her to pull the trigger. When another man
knocked at the door of the apartment to see what
was going on, Willie wrenched open the door and shot
him too. The dealer himself ended up surviving, but the
(28:42):
whole thing had been a blood bath, and Blanche was
traumatized by it and feeling desperately guilty. Two weeks later,
Blanche and Willie waited in a car outside an apartment
building north of the Bronx. Willie handed her a gun.
They were going to need to kill two men. He
said he'd kill one and she would kill the other.
(29:05):
She said no, no, she wouldn't do it. They fought
all night in the car as Willie watched the apartment building,
and then at ten a m. The next morning, the
two men finally came outside. What happened next happened in
a blur. Blanche and Willie got out of the car,
and Blanche walked toward the men as Willie hung slightly back. Suddenly,
(29:27):
one of the men reached out and pushed Blanche to
the ground. He might have been trying to protect her.
The men had recognized Willie and knew he was sent
to kill them. Everyone started firing at once. As the
guns roared, Blanche spotted a nearby maintenance closet and crawled
into it. Then she poked her gun out of the
door and fired once. She had no idea if she'd
(29:50):
hit anyone or anything. She stayed there until everything fell silent.
When Blanche finally left the closet, there were two bodies
on the floor. One of them was one of the targets.
His name was Marshall Howell. He was a drug dealer
(30:10):
and apparently he'd wronged the council in some way. In
his apartment, he had a stash of guns and over
two hundred thousand dollars in cash. The other target had
been his assistant, Norman Banister, but Norman had escaped. The
second man bleeding out on the floor was Willie Sanchez,
(30:31):
Blanche's lover, her abuser, the fake lawyer, the contract killer.
Willie was still alive, but not for long. He told
Blanche to hide the guns in the car. She obeyed.
As she left the scene, police cars came squealing up,
(30:52):
but they didn't notice her. Four days later, the police
(31:14):
knew who Blanche was. They'd found out her identity when
one of Willy's relatives had tried to track down Willie's
body and had apparently talked about Blanche. The police showed
up at her apartment and brought her in. They questioned
her all night, and she signed a confession on Valentine's
Day nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
When the police arrested Blanche, and they referred to them
together as Bonnie and Clyde, they treated her like some
master criminal that they had gotten off the streets to
keep the world safer. That's exactly how she was portrayed.
There were police captains telling reporters she's the first female
(31:53):
hit woman I'm aware of, and treating her like, honestly,
like some kind of lifelong menace to society.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Her story made the papers, of course, she was an
unlikely anti heroin hit Man now hit Person, one headline read,
But New York was so violent back then that her
story didn't stay in the papers long.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
The media definitely ran with the Bonnie and Clyde portrayal.
It didn't seem to dig too deeply, too debunk that nickname.
I can't blame him. I mean, you're working on deadline.
You've got these police officers that you've known for years
telling you that they've uncovered this male female hit team.
It's a great story and it seems to line up
(32:39):
with the facts, so no one looked too hard. Certainly,
no one went scratching around trying to find out who
Blanche Wright was with any sort of gusto. It's crazy
the way the press worked in nineteen eighty and that's
no one's fault, per se. It's just a different world.
It's a very different city. The crime rate was so
high and so many people were murdered in New York
(32:59):
City compared to now nowadays, this story would have been huge,
Like we would have put a team of reporters on
it for a week to write what happened? Who are
these people? What's going on in the status like, oh,
you know, this happened, And then the next day it's
like she was a reigned in court and then nothing.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
But if New yorkmedia moved on quickly from Blanche's story,
Blanche herself was stuck in it. Willie was gone, but
Blanche discovered something shocking. She was pregnant, and so pregnant
and traumatized, Blanche pled guilty to second degree murder. She
(33:37):
actually had a great lawyer, She had a mysteriously great
lawyer who was paid for by the council. But despite
the lawyer, she didn't get much of a merciful sentence.
She was given eighteen years to life and was taken
to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Her
reputation preceded her. The inmates there had heard that she
(33:59):
was a bad ass as the hit woman, but she
didn't feel like a badass. For the second time in
her life, she stopped talking entirely.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Blance Wright went to prison feeling extremely guilty about these murders,
even though her role in them was so minimal and forced,
and she would think a lot about She would have
imagined the families of these people who had died, not
knowing anything about them. Really, she would come to learn
that some of them might have had children, or she
(34:31):
came to hear that. She came to fear it, and
to this day she worries about saying something that some
distant offspring of one of these murdered drug dealers from
forty years ago is going to read and come after her.
For she's not paranoid about it, and it doesn't keep
her awake at night, but it's a constant thought, just
(34:52):
a part of her life in a way that you
and I wouldn't understand. It's just a part of her thinking.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
At Bedford, she gave birth. She was shackled to her
bed just in case she got the idea to try
and plot an escape. In the middle of active labor.
She had her baby, a boy. He was taken out
of the hospital room and out of her life, and
(35:18):
she was returned to her cell. And then Blanche's story,
which had been so full of twists and turns, got
(35:38):
another plot twist, But this one was finally good. The
twist was this Blanche thrived in prison. It was the
first place since the group home where she started feeling
like a person again, a valuable person. She was surrounded
(35:59):
by women there, and many of them were just like her,
women who'd been abused and manipulated and led to crime
by men who said they were in love with them.
For the first time, Blanche realized that she wasn't alone.
She started going to group therapy. Even though she hated
(36:19):
thinking about herself, she found that she liked thinking about
other people's problems more. She liked thinking about how to
solve them. Here was one problem, the pre approved clothing list.
If Blanche or her fellow inmates wanted their relatives to
send them a piece of clothing, the relatives had to
buy the clothing off a pre approved list. And the
(36:39):
pre approved list was designed for men, so nothing fit.
It was a list of things like men's pants and
men's shoes, all baggy and uncomfortable and weird. There were
even things on the list like pipes and jockstraps. So
one day Blanche whispered her idea a fellow inmate. She said, hey,
(37:03):
they should all request jockstraps and pipes from their families.
Blanche didn't say that this was her idea. She didn't
want credit for it. She didn't want the attention. She
made it seem like the idea had come from someone
else and she was just passing it along. And so
the plans spread anonymously through the prison until the big
day came and all the jockstraps arrived and the women
(37:27):
took them out and put them on their heads like
they were wearing bandanas.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
And glance at one point turns around in some line
and there's a line behind her, and every woman in line,
like forty or fifty women are wearing a jock strap
on their head with a pipe smoking or nearby, and
it didn't take long for the corrections officers to look
around and say, uh, okay, what's going on. Okay, you
have our attention. What are you doing. This would lead to,
(37:54):
you know, women's pants in women's sizes becoming available women's sizes,
So it worked. I love it. It's like this kind
of normal ray moment. It's funny, it's a funny thing,
and she tells it with great pride and like, you know,
the smile on her face. It was just a classic
sort of a caper.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Blanche got more and more involved in prison life. She
sold makeup and put the profits towards recreation programs for inmates.
She trained guide dogs for blind people, and she worked
with domestic violence programs. She worked with a nun to
launch a program called Our Journey, which was a monthly
retreat for women who'd been incarcerated. In fact, Blanche's relationship
(38:39):
with this nun was very meaningful to her because one
of the things that this nun believed was that incarcerated
mothers should get a chance to be with their children,
to play with their children, to touch their children, not
just to talk to them behind glass. Because of this,
Blanche was able to play with one of her sons
on the weekends. It made all the difference in my life,
(39:01):
she said. He just turned forty, and I don't think
we'd have a true relationship now without those visits. Blanche
didn't talk much to Michael about her sons. She didn't
want them affected by the article. As the years stretched on,
Blanche was denied parole again and again. This never surprised her.
(39:23):
She barely even tried to get herself parole. Frankly, she
didn't think she deserved it. She saw herself as a monster.
But then she met another woman who helped her. This
woman was an advocate for victims of domestic violence named
Charlotte Watson. Charlotte wrote letters to person after person asking
(39:44):
them to write letters to the parole board in defense
of Blanche. The letters poured in from a former superintendent
of the prison, a retired lieutenant at the prison, even
a prosecutor, and it worked. Blanche was finally given parole
in two thousand and nine. When she walked free, her
(40:07):
fellow inmates were clapping screaming out of the windows, overjoyed
for the girl. Who'd come to prison silent, but who
had found her voice there. Today, Blanche lives a quiet
(40:42):
life just outside of New York City. She keeps plants
on her windowsill. About once a month she takes the
train into the city to work at a halfway house
where female inmates are finishing their sentences. The house is
full of young women who are just like she was
when she was young. She tells them all the things
she wishes someone had told her, like you have worth.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Towards the end of our four days together, she said,
I'm not sleeping well, just reliving all this with you.
I didn't sleep well last night and my neck is sore.
I'm just feeling really stressed out about this. So let's
keep going so that we can be done really generous. Actually,
in its way, Blanche's life changed very little because of
(41:28):
the article. As far as I could tell, We've stayed
in touch over the last two years. And the article
came out on Sunday, and she went to work on Monday.
She was working at Riker's Island at the time, dealing
with talking to inmates who are just arriving and inmates
who are about to be shipped out, and that led
to another job, which led to a different job, and
(41:48):
this was her focus, this work.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
When you look back at Blanchewrite's life, you see horror
and abuse, but you also see these bright spots, the
women in her life who really saw her as a
person who actually helped her guiding lights, strong women. And
now here's Blanche on the other side of all that horror.
(42:15):
She might not want to admit it, since she always
downplays her own importance, but she's one of those guiding
lights now, one of those strong women. That's all, folks.
(42:49):
Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Michael
for coming on the podcast. If you'd like to read
more of his journalism or follow him on Twitter or whatever,
I'm going to put his info in the show notes.
Realy wrote a crazy story about basically a detective who
befriended a serial killer who was already incarcerated to get
(43:10):
him to admit to more murders, and you'll have to
read the story to see what happens, but that'll all
be in the show notes. Thank you so much to
today's patron Bjarnieis for your support. If anyone else wants
to become a patron Patreon dot com, slash Criminal Brods.
That's always in the show notes, and as always, if
(43:32):
you haven't left review for the podcast, but you've been
listening for a while, maybe you like it, maybe you
just can't stop listening. Maybe you're thinking, in what way
can I bless Tory today? Go to the app on
your phone, especially if it's the Apple app whatever, it's
called podcasts, Apples, whatever, and leave a rating and or
(43:56):
a written review. That would be very helpful to me.
All Right, everyone, I hope you were having a lovely July,
and I will meet you here next week. Meet you
back here next week, same time, same place. Don't ask
me what the story is, because I'm not entirely sure,
but you'll hear all about it a week from now.
Love y'all.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I'm wrong loving you dear like
I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty
of loving you.
Is it a sin? Is it a crime? Loving you
dear like I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
guilty of loving you.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hi everyone, Welcome to Criminal Broad's a true crime and
history podcast about wild women on the wrong side of
the law. Sister month is over. What are we doing
with all our free time? Personally, I am a gardening
I just put some basil and parsley on my fire escape,
along with some mint and a small oregano, a small
(00:43):
suffering struggling a regano. And I also have a hydroponic
garden in my kitchen. So basically I am Old McDonald
twenty twenty one millennial version, and I have a lot
of butter lettuce to share. What you guys have to
let me know Criminal broads at gmail dot com. All right,
(01:04):
today's story is a oh shocker one with lots of
twists and turns. I mean, aren't they all? This is
when I was very surprised I'd never heard of before,
but that at the same time, only one person has
written about this woman in the past like almost forty years.
And really there's only one big chunk of information available
(01:29):
about this woman, and it's an article in the New
York Times, and I thought to myself, Tory, Tory, Tory,
you could sit here and talk about the article from
the New York Times, or you could ask the author
to come on the podcast. So we're gonna hear from
Michael Wilson, an amazing New York Times journalist who wrote
about this woman. So today I'm going to introduce you
(01:51):
to Blanche Wright, who was framed in the media one way,
and the truth, as Michael Wilson reveals forty years later,
is quite different. So we're going to be traveling back
to New York in the eighties, which was, as you know,
if you've ever seen a single documentary about New York,
a very violent time, a very different time, you know,
(02:12):
chaos reigned in the streets, or so documentarians like to
make you think. And we are certainly going back to
a violent subculture in New York. So travel with me
there and you'll hear from Michael Wilson soon. Let's get going.
(02:43):
A couple of months ago, I was looking for stories.
I was clicking around the online newspaper archives that I
like to use, and I was waiting for something to
catch my eye. Suddenly I thought of Villainel the anti
heroine of killing Eve the TV show, and so I
typed in female assassin, hoping to find a real life
(03:05):
version of her. Most of the articles that popped up
were about movies, though, movies about female assassins. So I
tried another phrase, female hit man, which brought me no luck.
And then I tried hit woman, which only turned up
terrible sentences about hitting women. So then I tried the
(03:27):
improbable and wordy phrase female killer for hire. And there
she was the hit woman I'd been looking for. She'd
been arrested in nineteen eighty for a series of vicious murders.
The articles I was reading described someone who was clearly
a psychopath, a killer with ice in her veins. The
(03:50):
articles were full of phrases like double killing and accused
of murdering four men and a woman, and cocaine dealer
and luxury apartment and shootout, and even the sentence her
last contract killing for ten thousand dollars was last Friday.
I couldn't believe what I was reading. This was the
(04:14):
villainelle I'd been looking for, right, a menacing, Hollywood esque
figure who killed with a silencer on her gun. But
some of the articles ran next to a photo, and
the photo told a very different story than the text did.
The hit woman is sandwiched between two detectives. In the photo,
(04:36):
the detectives are looking very eighties. One has a fabulous
mustache and a cigarette dangling from his lip and a
plaid scarf over his jacket. It's a bold look for
a man of the law. But anyway, between these two detectives,
there she is the vicious woman, herself, Blanche Write, age
(04:56):
twenty one. She's a young black woman in an Adidas jacket.
But she doesn't look vicious in the photo. She's sobbing.
(05:26):
Michael Wilson of The New York Times knows all about
that photo. He came across the name Blanche Write when
he was working on another story about women and crime.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
I was researching a different story involving women in the
drug world in New York in the nineteen sixties, and
I came across this headline from the New York Times
about a hit man hit woman team. The hit woman
(05:59):
is arrested and her hitman partner was killed in a shootout,
and I said, wow, this bear is looking into So
I set it aside, and when I finished the original story,
I looked her up as much as I could online.
I found, to my satisfaction, a woman by the same
name and age living just outside New York City in
an apartment. There was no kind of social media presence.
(06:19):
There'd been nothing written about her at all in decades
after her arrest in nineteen eighty, and I realized the
only way to move on would be to get up
and go out and knock on her door. And I
proceeded to not do that for like a year. It
seemed like I had too much else going on to
(06:40):
give up a bit of a day. So I finally did,
and I went to this apartment building and I rang
a buzzer. She answered, and I introduced myself and said
I worked for the New York Times and if she
had a minute, I'd just like to talk to her
about a story idea that I have. And so she
buzzed me in. I took the elevator up too her apartment.
(07:01):
All I'd ever seen of her is a picture of
her being arrested, and she's got her head down, she's
sobbing in tears. She's a very young woman in a tracksuit,
and these two big beefy cops on each side of her,
kind of almost praying her in front of the cameras
as they did back then. This door opened to this apartment,
and here is this sixty year old version of that
(07:24):
same young woman. Really, I mean, she's changed remarkably little.
And she smiled and she let me in, and I
sort of made my case.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
When Blanche Write buzzed Michael up to her apartment, Michael
wasn't sure what to expect. After all, the headlines about
Blanche had depicted a stone cold killer who got ten
thousand dollars for every body she created. Michael didn't know
if he was going to be met with hostility or
maybe outright denial. You know, I didn't do any of it.
(07:53):
It's all lies. So he was surprised to find that
Blanche was gentle kind. He told her that he was
interested in writing about her, and she said she'd think
about it. He left her with her thoughts. A week later,
he called her.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
And she said, I've thought about it, and I've talked
to my friends and they think it might help other
women if i'd talked to you. So for that reason,
I will. I'll agree to talk to you. So I
returned after she agreed to see me. We set up
a time and it was a Monday morning, and I
got to her apartment. She sat down on a couch
and I sat down across from her in a chair
(08:34):
and just going to open up a notebook, and I
asked a couple of basic questions. But really she just
started at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
When Blanche started talking about her childhood, she painted a
portrait of abuse and pain that went from bad to worse.
She was born in nineteen fifty nine in New York
City to a sixteen year old mother who suffered from schizophrenia.
Her father was nowhere to be found. Her mom couldn't
take care of her. Instead, she'd lock a little Blanche
(09:02):
in a bedroom and leave to drift around the neighborhood,
lost in her own world. And so Blanche was raised
by a grandmother and a gaggle of uncles who beat her.
If they didn't want her to leave the house, they'd
tie her to the radiator like a dog. It wasn't
long before she ended up in foster care. Now. Her
(09:23):
foster father was in his sixties and she was eight
when he started coming into her bedroom at night to
abuse her. He told her he was teaching her what
not to do with boys. This went on for years.
Blanche would wrap herself in her bed sheet, hoping that
he'd leave her alone. Before long, she was completely disconnecting
(09:47):
from the situation. As a way to survive, she described
herself as a radio that had been turned off. Nothing
to see here, nothing on the sound waves. This isn't happening.
It got worse.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
After years of this. One night he's attacking her and
he collapses of an apparent heart attack, and his wife
rushes him to the hospital and he died. And the
wife came home and blamed Blanche for this and threw her.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Out, Convinced that she'd killed her foster father. Blanche stopped talking.
The state sent her into a group home. It was
full of older girls who harassed her, but there was
one very special woman there, Miss Richardson, the woman who
ran the home. Slowly, Miss Richardson brought Blanche out of
(10:40):
her shell and helped her to talk again. She helped
her to feel like she wasn't dirty and worthless and guilty,
but that she had worth, that she had potential. But
then it got worse again. At age sixteen, Blanche did
what so many other sixteen year olds loved to do.
(11:00):
She went to a party. It was a birthday party
for her friend, and her friend's brother was there. Blanche
had known him for ages, but there at the party,
her friend's brother raped her. And that was that she
felt herself giving up on the sense of safety and
(11:21):
potential that Miss Richardson had given her. She began dating
her rapist. After all, as some of the other women
in her life told her, men raped women because they
just loved them too much. Before long, Blanche was pregnant.
She tried to make this relationship work for the sake
(11:43):
of her baby boy. But this man, her friend's brother,
was a heroin addict, an abuser. At one point, he
fought with one of Blanche's uncles, violent man against a
violent man, and he was thrown into jail. Blanche used
that narrow window of time to escape, leaving their apartment
with just their baby and the clothes that she was wearing.
(12:07):
Before he was locked up, he had beaten her with
an ironing board. She had no idea what he'd do
when he came back.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
So while Blanche is telling me this, she's telling me
in this painstaking detail, and I'm just kind of overwhelmed
by it. A lot of people would skip over the
parts of their life that are really the hardest to
talk about, but she leaned into them and it caused
her great pains across the room from me, to the
point where I asked her to stop. Let's take a break.
(12:37):
Should we stop? She said, well, can I get your coffee?
And you know, we'd have like a cookie together, and
then we'd kind of resume. And it's like she needed
the whole story to be told, and the pain that
was causing her was not very important to her. It's
the best way I can explain it. So I returned
Tuesday for another full day of this, and Wednesday and Thursday.
(12:59):
It was back to back to back to back. By
the end of it, she was wrung out, and I
was too. I had this giant filled notebook and I
had this incredible story. I went back to write it.
My only fear was like screwing it up. It was
this kind of beauty to it amid all the darkness
and grim details in my notebook that I wanted to
(13:21):
make sure expressed itself.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Up until that point, Blanche had only known men to
be violent. Every man in her life had abused her
or abandoned her, so when she met the next man
in her life, she was stunned by how different he
seemed from all the men before him. And now let's
(14:00):
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(15:54):
Blanche turned twenty in nineteen seventy nine. It had been
an unhappy year for her. One night, she went to
visit her aunt, who was sick, or so she thought.
It turned out to be a trick. Her aunt had
thrown her a surprise birthday party, and there was a
man there. Here's Michael reading the opening section of his
(16:16):
New York Times profile of Blanche.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Even on a night of surprises for Blanche Wright, the
man in the suit stood out. She had headed across
the Bronx to visit her sick aunt, but when she
entered the apartment, she found a room full of people
waiting for her happy birthday. Then she was introduced to
a friend of her aunt's, an impeccably dressed lawyer from Philadelphia.
He seemed sophisticated, with a three piece suit and a briefcase.
(16:42):
His name was Willie Sanchez, and he wasn't like any
other men she knew. They talked and talked, and before
he left, he told her aunt, I'd like to talk
to her more. She turned twenty years old that day
in nineteen seventy nine, with little to celebrate. She was
struggling to stay afloat with a toddler son in her
(17:03):
own apartment nearby, hiding from the boy's father, a heroin addict,
and a thief who would be out of jail soon
and looking for her. But Willie Sanchez promised a new future.
Blanche found herself pampered for the first time in her life,
fitted for new clothes and nice stores, sampling expensive perfumes
(17:23):
and beauty salons. She was swept up by it all.
This captivation would lead as the months passed to literal captivity,
ending in a seventy one day blur of cocaine, guns, terror,
and finally an ambush assassination that put one of them
in prison and the other in the ground. The police
(17:45):
called them Bonnie and Clyde, a lazy tag that was
easier than the truth. Blanch Wrot went to prison a
broken human, so traumatized that she did not talk for months.
She had heard of Bonnie and Clyde, but she didn't
feel like Bonnie. It seemed to her that Bonnie had
been luckier. Bonnie died.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Willie Sanchez began to court Blanche with an oily skill
that disguised his ulterior motives. He seemed gentle and kind,
and at first there wasn't even anything sexual about their relationship.
He just seemed to want to take care of her.
He paid her electrical bill and her apartment went dark.
(18:27):
He stalked her kitchen with groceries. He treated her to
a fancy meal at a Japanese steakhouse for their first date,
and under the guise of taking care of her, he
was slowly subtly manipulating her look. He bought her clothes,
he bought her nice perfume. He took her to a
(18:49):
beauty parlor and he told the hairstylist exactly how to
do her hair. This was all grooming, but at the
time it just felt like the good kind of attention,
like the glimmerings of love. Now Blanche could tell that
Willy Sanchez knew some sketchy people. She saw them. They'd
(19:13):
be out at a restaurant and some shady looking man
would come up to them, and he and Willie would
walk away and talk in hushed tones. The same thing
happened in parking lots, sometimes whispered conversations, a sense of
transactions taking place. But hey, lawyers had sketchy clients, right,
Blanche figured this was all just part of his job.
(19:36):
She was right, It was all part of Willy Sanchez's job.
But he wasn't a lawyer, not at all. He was
a hit man. Willie Sanchez was also known as Robert Young.
(20:07):
In his line of work, you couldn't have too many aliases.
He was the hit man for the Council, which was
an organized crime collective run out of Harlem. The Council
was run by Nicky Barnes, a kingpin who cut deals
with the mafia, invested in automated car washes and travel agencies.
(20:28):
Was responsible for getting hundreds of thousands of black people
hooked on heroin and quoted King Lear and Moby Dick
Nicki might be most famous for having the nerve to
pose smugly on the cover of the New York Times
magazine in nineteen seventy seven, two years before Blanche met Willie.
That cover infuriated the President, Jimmy Carter so much that
(20:52):
he went to the FEDS and told them to prosecute
Nicky Barnes to the fullest extent of the law. Later
that year, Nicki got life without para. Anyway, Willi worked
for Nicki, and while Nicki got rich and famous and
eventually thrown in prison, Willi flew under the radar, like
any good contract killer. It's unclear when exactly he started
(21:15):
working for the Council, but he had plenty of run
ins with the law of his own accord. Two years
before he walked into Blanche's life, he was sawing through
bars at the Mattawan State Hospital for the criminally insane.
He was locked up there for a brutal murder where
he climbed through a young woman's window, shot her when
(21:35):
she tried to resist him, and then violated her dead body.
Authorities thought he was crazy, crazy and dangerous, and they
were right. In nineteen seventy seven, he and nine other
inmates at Mattawan, sliced through the bars of a window
in their ward, then crept through the exercise yard, then
(21:58):
sawed through another window that led them into the cellar,
then tiptoed across the cellar, cut through a third set
of bars, climbed a twenty foot fence with barbed wire
at the top, and ran into the night. The escape
from Mattawan wasn't even Willie's greatest escape, if you can
believe it. He was re arrested the next year, and
(22:19):
he was kept in jail as he waited for trial.
On the day he was taken to the courthouse, he
hid his jail bed sheets under his clothing, and then
at the courthouse, when no guards were watching him, he
tied the sheets into a rope and lowered himself out
of the fourth floor window. He climbed into an open
third floor window, which happened to be the empty office
(22:42):
of the prosecutor, and he just strolled through it like
he owned the place. Then he asked a secretary for
the best way to get out and just left. It's
hard not to compare this to Ted Bundy's infamous escape
from the courthouse in Aspen, Colorado. Just a year earlier,
Bundy jumped from a second story window and sprinted towards
(23:03):
the mountains. He gets a lot of credit for the
perceived gutsiness of that escape. But if we're comparing psychopathic
maniacs who jump out of courthouse windows, I think the
award for gutsiness goes to Willy Sanchez. So he sauntered
out of that courthouse, crazy and dangerous as ever, and
(23:24):
he walked into Blanchewrite's life. It took a gun to
(23:45):
make Blanche realize that Willy was a killer, not a lawyer.
She didn't hear the gun. Willy used a silencer. No
sound of a gunshot, just ash of air and then
the thud of body. She and Willie were driving around
in circles in the Bronx. Willie told her that he
(24:07):
was looking for a friend. After a while, he said, hey,
see that man there. Could you go up to him
and ask him for the time. So she did. She
walked up to the man, and as she asked him
for the time, she heard that sound the wsh The
man fell.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Willie Sanchez is standing there holding a pistol with a
silencer on it. That's why it made that sound. And
he grabs her and yanks her back to the car
and they speed off, and she's terrified. She said he
looked like a whole different human And she said, who
are you? And he said, I'm the man who's been
taking care of you. He was never the nice Willie
(24:47):
Sanchez anymore.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Now that Blanche knew what Willie really did for a living,
Willie wouldn't let her out of his sight. He forced
her to move in with two of his friends, Jean
and Rose, and if he left her alone, he'd lock
her in the bedroom. It was a sick echo of
her childhood when her schizophrenic mother would lock tiny Blanche
(25:09):
in her bedroom in order to wander the city. Rosie,
her new roommate, seemed to have a little sympathy for
Blanche because she offered Blanche a bit of self care
and the only way she knew how cocaine. It helps
me cope, said Rosie. Blanche tried it. It made her
(25:30):
feel better. It helped her cope too. In the meantime,
Willie wanted to make sure that Blanche wouldn't talk, and
so he devised a test.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
One day, he takes her to a holiday inn and
checks into her room and takes her into the bathroom
and handcuffs her to a pipe and says, don't make
a sound. He leaves, shuts the door behind him, and
the hotel room is empty. And then she hears the
hotel room door open and two women walk in, and
(26:04):
she hears them talking to each other. She doesn't make
a sound, and eventually the women leave. She hears the
door open again. Footsteps approached the bathroom door and it
opens and it's Willie Sanchez and he says, you didn't
say a word. I can trust you. And she realized
that this whole thing about a test. That he must
(26:25):
have sent the women in to see if she'd call
out to them, and apparently she passed this test.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
There was one point when Blanche tried to get help.
Remember Miss Richardson, the woman who ran the group home
where Blanche used to live. She was one of Blanche's
only allies, one of the only people who'd ever been
truly kind to her, and Blanche thought that maybe if
she could visit Miss Richardson and tell her what was
going on, miss Richardson could help her escape. The Only
(26:53):
problem was that Willie insisted on coming with Blanche to
the group home as they talked to Miss Richardson. Blanche
waited for a quiet minute, even a few seconds, where
she could whisper I need help, But Willie wouldn't leave.
He looked around the room as though he was concerned
(27:13):
about something. I don't see any security, he said. Anybody
could come in here and kill all twelve of these girls,
and you two. Blanche knew exactly what he was telling her.
He was threatening her, saying that if she said a
(27:34):
word to Miss Richardson, he'd kill them all. Later in
the car, he told her, you know, I'm god right,
I decide who lives and who dies. Blanche thought to herself,
I'm going to die with this guy, and so instead
(27:57):
of escaping, she went along with him. She had no
other choice. On January twenty first, nineteen eighty, she found
herself in the apartment of a Columbian cocaine trafficker holding
a pistol as the dealer writhed in terror on the floor.
Willie was in the bedroom with a dealer's woman. Blanche
(28:17):
heard the whosh of his pistol. He came out and
screamed at her for letting the dealer move. She didn't
know what to do. He put his hand around hers
and forced her to pull the trigger. When another man
knocked at the door of the apartment to see what
was going on, Willie wrenched open the door and shot
him too. The dealer himself ended up surviving, but the
(28:42):
whole thing had been a blood bath, and Blanche was
traumatized by it and feeling desperately guilty. Two weeks later,
Blanche and Willie waited in a car outside an apartment
building north of the Bronx. Willie handed her a gun.
They were going to need to kill two men. He
said he'd kill one and she would kill the other.
(29:05):
She said no, no, she wouldn't do it. They fought
all night in the car as Willie watched the apartment building,
and then at ten a m. The next morning, the
two men finally came outside. What happened next happened in
a blur. Blanche and Willie got out of the car,
and Blanche walked toward the men as Willie hung slightly back. Suddenly,
(29:27):
one of the men reached out and pushed Blanche to
the ground. He might have been trying to protect her.
The men had recognized Willie and knew he was sent
to kill them. Everyone started firing at once. As the
guns roared, Blanche spotted a nearby maintenance closet and crawled
into it. Then she poked her gun out of the
door and fired once. She had no idea if she'd
(29:50):
hit anyone or anything. She stayed there until everything fell silent.
When Blanche finally left the closet, there were two bodies
on the floor. One of them was one of the targets.
His name was Marshall Howell. He was a drug dealer
(30:10):
and apparently he'd wronged the council in some way. In
his apartment, he had a stash of guns and over
two hundred thousand dollars in cash. The other target had
been his assistant, Norman Banister, but Norman had escaped. The
second man bleeding out on the floor was Willie Sanchez,
(30:31):
Blanche's lover, her abuser, the fake lawyer, the contract killer.
Willie was still alive, but not for long. He told
Blanche to hide the guns in the car. She obeyed.
As she left the scene, police cars came squealing up,
(30:52):
but they didn't notice her. Four days later, the police
(31:14):
knew who Blanche was. They'd found out her identity when
one of Willy's relatives had tried to track down Willie's
body and had apparently talked about Blanche. The police showed
up at her apartment and brought her in. They questioned
her all night, and she signed a confession on Valentine's
Day nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
When the police arrested Blanche, and they referred to them
together as Bonnie and Clyde, they treated her like some
master criminal that they had gotten off the streets to
keep the world safer. That's exactly how she was portrayed.
There were police captains telling reporters she's the first female
(31:53):
hit woman I'm aware of, and treating her like, honestly,
like some kind of lifelong menace to society.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Her story made the papers, of course, she was an
unlikely anti heroin hit Man now hit Person, one headline read,
But New York was so violent back then that her
story didn't stay in the papers long.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
The media definitely ran with the Bonnie and Clyde portrayal.
It didn't seem to dig too deeply, too debunk that nickname.
I can't blame him. I mean, you're working on deadline.
You've got these police officers that you've known for years
telling you that they've uncovered this male female hit team.
It's a great story and it seems to line up
(32:39):
with the facts, so no one looked too hard. Certainly,
no one went scratching around trying to find out who
Blanche Wright was with any sort of gusto. It's crazy
the way the press worked in nineteen eighty and that's
no one's fault, per se. It's just a different world.
It's a very different city. The crime rate was so
high and so many people were murdered in New York
(32:59):
City compared to now nowadays, this story would have been huge,
Like we would have put a team of reporters on
it for a week to write what happened? Who are
these people? What's going on in the status like, oh,
you know, this happened, And then the next day it's
like she was a reigned in court and then nothing.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
But if New yorkmedia moved on quickly from Blanche's story,
Blanche herself was stuck in it. Willie was gone, but
Blanche discovered something shocking. She was pregnant, and so pregnant
and traumatized, Blanche pled guilty to second degree murder. She
(33:37):
actually had a great lawyer, She had a mysteriously great
lawyer who was paid for by the council. But despite
the lawyer, she didn't get much of a merciful sentence.
She was given eighteen years to life and was taken
to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Her
reputation preceded her. The inmates there had heard that she
(33:59):
was a bad ass as the hit woman, but she
didn't feel like a badass. For the second time in
her life, she stopped talking entirely.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Blance Wright went to prison feeling extremely guilty about these murders,
even though her role in them was so minimal and forced,
and she would think a lot about She would have
imagined the families of these people who had died, not
knowing anything about them. Really, she would come to learn
that some of them might have had children, or she
(34:31):
came to hear that. She came to fear it, and
to this day she worries about saying something that some
distant offspring of one of these murdered drug dealers from
forty years ago is going to read and come after her.
For she's not paranoid about it, and it doesn't keep
her awake at night, but it's a constant thought, just
(34:52):
a part of her life in a way that you
and I wouldn't understand. It's just a part of her thinking.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
At Bedford, she gave birth. She was shackled to her
bed just in case she got the idea to try
and plot an escape. In the middle of active labor.
She had her baby, a boy. He was taken out
of the hospital room and out of her life, and
(35:18):
she was returned to her cell. And then Blanche's story,
which had been so full of twists and turns, got
(35:38):
another plot twist, But this one was finally good. The
twist was this Blanche thrived in prison. It was the
first place since the group home where she started feeling
like a person again, a valuable person. She was surrounded
(35:59):
by women there, and many of them were just like her,
women who'd been abused and manipulated and led to crime
by men who said they were in love with them.
For the first time, Blanche realized that she wasn't alone.
She started going to group therapy. Even though she hated
(36:19):
thinking about herself, she found that she liked thinking about
other people's problems more. She liked thinking about how to
solve them. Here was one problem, the pre approved clothing list.
If Blanche or her fellow inmates wanted their relatives to
send them a piece of clothing, the relatives had to
buy the clothing off a pre approved list. And the
(36:39):
pre approved list was designed for men, so nothing fit.
It was a list of things like men's pants and
men's shoes, all baggy and uncomfortable and weird. There were
even things on the list like pipes and jockstraps. So
one day Blanche whispered her idea a fellow inmate. She said, hey,
(37:03):
they should all request jockstraps and pipes from their families.
Blanche didn't say that this was her idea. She didn't
want credit for it. She didn't want the attention. She
made it seem like the idea had come from someone
else and she was just passing it along. And so
the plans spread anonymously through the prison until the big
day came and all the jockstraps arrived and the women
(37:27):
took them out and put them on their heads like
they were wearing bandanas.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
And glance at one point turns around in some line
and there's a line behind her, and every woman in line,
like forty or fifty women are wearing a jock strap
on their head with a pipe smoking or nearby, and
it didn't take long for the corrections officers to look
around and say, uh, okay, what's going on. Okay, you
have our attention. What are you doing. This would lead to,
(37:54):
you know, women's pants in women's sizes becoming available women's sizes,
So it worked. I love it. It's like this kind
of normal ray moment. It's funny, it's a funny thing,
and she tells it with great pride and like, you know,
the smile on her face. It was just a classic
sort of a caper.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Blanche got more and more involved in prison life. She
sold makeup and put the profits towards recreation programs for inmates.
She trained guide dogs for blind people, and she worked
with domestic violence programs. She worked with a nun to
launch a program called Our Journey, which was a monthly
retreat for women who'd been incarcerated. In fact, Blanche's relationship
(38:39):
with this nun was very meaningful to her because one
of the things that this nun believed was that incarcerated
mothers should get a chance to be with their children,
to play with their children, to touch their children, not
just to talk to them behind glass. Because of this,
Blanche was able to play with one of her sons
on the weekends. It made all the difference in my life,
(39:01):
she said. He just turned forty, and I don't think
we'd have a true relationship now without those visits. Blanche
didn't talk much to Michael about her sons. She didn't
want them affected by the article. As the years stretched on,
Blanche was denied parole again and again. This never surprised her.
(39:23):
She barely even tried to get herself parole. Frankly, she
didn't think she deserved it. She saw herself as a monster.
But then she met another woman who helped her. This
woman was an advocate for victims of domestic violence named
Charlotte Watson. Charlotte wrote letters to person after person asking
(39:44):
them to write letters to the parole board in defense
of Blanche. The letters poured in from a former superintendent
of the prison, a retired lieutenant at the prison, even
a prosecutor, and it worked. Blanche was finally given parole
in two thousand and nine. When she walked free, her
(40:07):
fellow inmates were clapping screaming out of the windows, overjoyed
for the girl. Who'd come to prison silent, but who
had found her voice there. Today, Blanche lives a quiet
(40:42):
life just outside of New York City. She keeps plants
on her windowsill. About once a month she takes the
train into the city to work at a halfway house
where female inmates are finishing their sentences. The house is
full of young women who are just like she was
when she was young. She tells them all the things
she wishes someone had told her, like you have worth.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
Towards the end of our four days together, she said,
I'm not sleeping well, just reliving all this with you.
I didn't sleep well last night and my neck is sore.
I'm just feeling really stressed out about this. So let's
keep going so that we can be done really generous. Actually,
in its way, Blanche's life changed very little because of
(41:28):
the article. As far as I could tell, We've stayed
in touch over the last two years. And the article
came out on Sunday, and she went to work on Monday.
She was working at Riker's Island at the time, dealing
with talking to inmates who are just arriving and inmates
who are about to be shipped out, and that led
to another job, which led to a different job, and
(41:48):
this was her focus, this work.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
When you look back at Blanchewrite's life, you see horror
and abuse, but you also see these bright spots, the
women in her life who really saw her as a
person who actually helped her guiding lights, strong women. And
now here's Blanche on the other side of all that horror.
(42:15):
She might not want to admit it, since she always
downplays her own importance, but she's one of those guiding
lights now, one of those strong women. That's all, folks.
(42:49):
Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Michael
for coming on the podcast. If you'd like to read
more of his journalism or follow him on Twitter or whatever,
I'm going to put his info in the show notes.
Realy wrote a crazy story about basically a detective who
befriended a serial killer who was already incarcerated to get
(43:10):
him to admit to more murders, and you'll have to
read the story to see what happens, but that'll all
be in the show notes. Thank you so much to
today's patron Bjarnieis for your support. If anyone else wants
to become a patron Patreon dot com, slash Criminal Brods.
That's always in the show notes, and as always, if
(43:32):
you haven't left review for the podcast, but you've been
listening for a while, maybe you like it, maybe you
just can't stop listening. Maybe you're thinking, in what way
can I bless Tory today? Go to the app on
your phone, especially if it's the Apple app whatever, it's
called podcasts, Apples, whatever, and leave a rating and or
(43:56):
a written review. That would be very helpful to me.
All Right, everyone, I hope you were having a lovely July,
and I will meet you here next week. Meet you
back here next week, same time, same place. Don't ask
me what the story is, because I'm not entirely sure,
but you'll hear all about it a week from now.
Love y'all.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I'm wrong loving you dear like
I do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty
of loving you.
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