August 18, 2020 • 32 mins
On Criminalia, hosts Holly Frey and Maria Trimarchi explroe the intersection of history and true crime. This season is all about lady poisoners. During the time that Chicago’s most visible criminal element was organized crime, Tillie Klimek was quietly becoming the city’s most prolific female serial killer. She allegedly killed between six and 20 people, all through arsenic poisoning.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to criminal Lea.
I'm Maria tram Marquis and I'm Holly Fry. We know
that humans have always managed to commit crimes, almost certainly
before there was even recorded history, so we decided that
(00:21):
we would start looking at those crimes and get our
hands dirty. We wanted to dig in and look at
some of histories, crimes and criminals to understand them better.
And in doing so, we're curious if we can find
commonality with our modern world and our modern problems, and
whether these crimes look different a little bit of distance
on the timeline, and whether any of these perpetrators emerge
(00:43):
as more sympathetic characters. This first season is going to
be all about poisoners, specifically women poisoners. Poison is often
called a woman's weapon, despite the fact that roughly two
thirds of the poisonings committed throughout time have been the
work of men. So let's start looking at these women
and their motivations and see if any patterns developed. This week,
we're looking into the life and crimes of Tilly Clinic,
(01:05):
a Polish immigrant who killed at least one and possibly
as many as twenty people and at least one dog
between the years nineteen fourteen and nine two. I will
confess that when you were telling me about the research
you were doing initially on this and you mentioned the dog,
I was like, well, I hate her. Um not that
it wasn't terrible that she killed people, just you know,
(01:25):
that was for me the worst thing that she could
have done as well. She was born Tiafila Burick to
Michelina and Michael Burick on October eighteen seventy seven, and
(01:50):
Tilly was probably right around four years old when her
family immigrated to the United States. They moved from Poland
to the Little Poland neighborhood of Chicago, and of the
seven children in the family, A Tilly, as she was called,
was the eldest. Chicago has a long history of Polish immigration,
and Polish Americans have lived in the area for well
over a century. In eighteen ninety, around the time Tilly
(02:13):
was born, there was a wave of immigration to the
United States. At that time, the number of Polish immigrants
in the city blossomed to more than twenty five thousand
By a few years before she died. That number had
grown two hundred and sixty five thousand. Most they lived
below the poverty line. Is the tale of immigration in
so many ways. So let's set the scene of the
(02:34):
actual situation we're talking about today. So this is Chicago
in the early twentieth centuries. You couldn't necessarily count on
your food and drinks to be clean. Upton Sinclair started
(02:55):
publishing the serialized version of his groundbreaking expose a of
the meat industry in the US, The Jungle, in nineteen
o five, and while that led to the creation of
the Meat Inspection Act in nineteen o six, food safety
legislation was still in its infancy. But if you were
at a restaurant or a club or a hotel around
the city, there were other dangers when it came to
(03:15):
what you consumed at the table. In particular, wait staff
were known to target patrons who didn't tip well. Not
like the content of the chatter in fight Club, although
honestly maybe a little of that. Uh. They usually chose
poisons and various other things you really don't want to
be in your food, So remember always tip well. But moreover,
it turns out that you couldn't really count on food
(03:37):
safety at home either, at least if you lived with
a Tilly Clinic. During the time that Chicago's most visible
criminal element was organized crime, Tilly was quietly becoming the
city's most prolific female serial killer. She had allegedly killed
between six and twenty people. Like we said, but it
was all through arsenic poisoning. So we're gonna talk first
(03:58):
just about what arsenic actually is. It is a naturally
occurring element in the Earth's crust and in its raw state.
As much as it has this instant conjuring of poison,
it's not actually harmful the way it naturally exists artually.
Only really becomes poisonous when it's converted into arsenic trioxide,
which is better known as white arsenic. White arsenic not
(04:20):
only is odorless, but it's tasteless um and it's white
or transparent in form, so it's easily confused with sugar
or flour. But it's highly toxic when it's inhaled into
your lungs or when you ingest it. And it might
surprise you that even white arsenic is actually fairly benign
in relatively small amounts, because it is very lethal at
higher doses. In fact, doctors have actually prescribed white arsenic
(04:44):
through the years in its low dosage as a treatment
for things like asthma, typhus, malaria, even menstrual cramps, and
it continues to be administered intravenously as a chemotherapy for
a specific type of leukemia. When arsenic is ingested, initially,
it causes symptoms such as abdominal pain, diarrhea, and that's
often being accompanied by bleeding and vomiting. It's terrible. As
(05:08):
the dose gets more and more lethal in the body, though,
the symptoms also begin to include convulsion, cardiovascular problems, hair loss,
liver and kidney problems, and even organ damage. So not
a peaceful way to go. Definitely not sugar no, and
despite its potency, it has been used in the production
of semiconductors. It's been used as wood preservative, and it's
(05:31):
also sometimes found in pesticides. Manufacturers in the nineteenth century
started using it for its green pigment in products like
paint and wallpaper, fabrics, beauty products, and as food coloring.
The list goes on because green is very beautiful color,
so sometimes those products would actually make people sick. But
(05:53):
at the time, no one was suspecting that the arsenic
in them was the problem that was causing their ailments.
In the early twenty century, when Tilly was busy murdering
people in her community, the average Americans medicine cabinet was
stocked with all sorts of toxic things like radioactive radium
for acne, and mercury is a topical antiseptic for cuts
and scrapes and burns. Morphine showed up in everyday products
(06:16):
and everything from teething medications two cures for heroin addiction.
From roughly the late eighteenth into the early twentieth century
is considered to be the Golden age of poisoners, and
during that time, arsenic specifically caught the nickname the inheritance powder.
And you can probably imagine why, hm. The police really
(06:39):
didn't have any of the tools to test the corpse
for poison. Arsenic wasn't only easy to acquire, it was
hard to detect as a cause of death, which was
win win for the Golden Age of poisoners. It was
common practice for doctors to treat suspected poisoning with leeches
bleeded out or try to identify the poison involved by
sniffing the content of the person's stomach. Remember how we
(07:02):
said arsenic was odorless though, Yeah, so you just sniff
those contents for nothing. But it was also just unusual
for a doctor or a coroner to suspect arsenic as
a cause of death, mainly because the symptoms of arsenic
poisoning that Maria just talked about, diarrhea and vomiting and
abdominal pain are so similar to a lot of other disorders.
(07:24):
It's also really hard to place the poisoner at the
scene of the murder. Dying can typically take hours or
longer if you administered the poison gradually, such as with
someone's meals, so the perpetrator could easily have a seemingly
airtight alibi for their whereabouts because the window of time
had such fuzzy edges. But it actually wouldn't be until
the late nineteenth century that a chemist named James marsh
(07:46):
would come up with a reliable chemical test for arsenic poisoning. Today,
arsenic poisoning is treated with chelation therapy, which uses special
drugs that bind to metal ions in your blood. So
rough on rats was the product that became popular in
the late eighteen hundreds. It was composed mainly of arsenic
(08:08):
and a little black coal for masking the poison, and
while I was advertised for use in killing rats, mice, bedbugs, flies, roaches,
it occasionally was used for the very off label purpose
of killing husbands. Believe it or not, the marketing slogan
for this poison rough On Rats was don't die in
(08:28):
the house, thinking, of course, being that the creature you
had poison would scurry away to die. It was also
really easily available at the local store until he actually
got her first bottle of rough On Rats from her cousin,
Nelly Kulik, and Nelly, it would turn out, was also
(08:48):
a fellow poisoner murder and husbands. According to her accounts
from her neighbors, Tilly was sent to have precognitive dreams,
meaning that she could predict the future in re of
life through sort of a sixth sens ish kind of way.
She began to predict the deaths of neighborhood dogs, and
she was surprisingly accurate, but it turns out she was
(09:12):
just scheduling their deaths. We're getting a little ahead of
ourselves though, in the progression of Tillie's activities with rough
On Rats, so we're gonna back up to Welcome back
to Criminalia. Tillie was married to John mckaywitz. His name
(09:36):
may have been Joseph not John. Records aren't entirely consistent,
but we're gonna go with John because that's what the
majority of records from the time referred to him as.
That is one of the delights word I'm using, ironically
of doing historical research, particularly when you are talking about
UH immigrants, because there was not a vested interest always
(09:57):
in the government in keeping a you're at records about them,
so you often have these these people's stories that get
really muddy because their names do shift around in the
historical record. Anyway, By all accounts this couple UH Tilly
and John were well liked in their community, and their
marriage appeared by all accounts to be happy. Tilly made
(10:19):
her life as a housekeeper, but it was also during
this time that Tilly started telling neighbors about some visions
that she was having. She was, as we mentioned before
the break, an alleged psychic who was skilled specifically at
predicting deaths. This included predicting the death of her own husband, John,
who had left her a thousand dollars when he died.
Into the Corners report listed his death as a result
(10:43):
of heart trouble, nothing suspicious. There was no reason at
the time to suspect that John had been poisoned by
his wife. The nickname black widow, which is often given
to women who kill their lovers in order to inherit
their wealth, would eventually be bestowed on Tilly, but not
just yet. Here's a little more in detail on John's
(11:03):
sudden end. Okay. In the beginning of nine fourteen, Tilly
began telling friends and those in the community that she
dreamed that John was ill. She expected he would be
on his deathbed in just a few weeks um, And
when he died in January that year, the cause of
death was listed as heart trouble and till he collected
a thousand dollars in life insurance. I guess after nineteen years,
(11:25):
she just didn't want to gun it to twenty um.
She's like enough. After receiving that payout on John's life
insurance policy, Tilly actually remarried pretty quickly. See, now, that's
the thing. She remarried quickly often, And I have to
I always sort of wonder like if she would follow
in love with someone new and be like, oh, I'll
kill my husband, and we'll start out fresh with like
(11:46):
this new thousand dollars. It's just my own personal theory. Yeah,
I think there's merit. But her new husband, Joseph Riskowski,
died just three months after they got married, and he
happened to leave his widow twelve hundred dollars in cash
and seven dollars in insurance money. Not only did Tilly
(12:08):
predict Joseph's death, she went on to predict the deaths
of her third husband, although they may or may not
have been married. It's a little sketchy, uh. And her
fourth husband, as well as children, she cared for a
few neighbors and possibly some other family members. And not
only did she joke with neighbors that her fourth husband, Frank,
had quote two inches to live, which is a really interesting,
(12:34):
fascinating turn of phrase, she allegedly taunted him on his
deathbed and said things like it won't be long now
and you'll be dying soon, which is in my own home,
Like you got two inches to live? I don't know, right,
(12:55):
It's like callous on a level that's hard to comprehend, right.
She also, in an act of both cruel and creative,
knitted herself a morning hat Um as she sat by
his bedside while he was dying. She even so far
as to purchase a thirty dollar bargain coffin to keep
(13:18):
in the basement of her house waiting for his death.
That store dreament was a little unsettling request made of
her landlord Um, who was began to be a little
suspicious of Tilly after that came in. Frank did die
on a and it is said that when it happened,
Tillie played dance music in the room. The coroner listed
(13:42):
Frank's cause of death as bronchial pneumonia. Tilly's poisonous predilections unnoticed.
She once again collected on his life insurance, this time
in the amount of six seventy five dollars, nearly as
much as the last two. I know she's downgrading the
in surance situation with each one. They're going faster now,
(14:02):
you know. It's just not enough time to like build
up to the thousand. That's another theory I have. Um.
It's interesting and grimly fun to note that Frank An
Tilly's home at Winchester it's a house in East Village
in Chicago, shows up on the old four square social
networking site as Old Lady Tilly Clinics haunted house even today,
(14:25):
Tilly was still not arrested, though that didn't happen until
after she botched an attempt at poisoning husband number five,
that was Joseph Clinic. She and Joseph had gotten married
in July of one, again, not long after Frank's demise,
and Clinic is said to have been a relatively wealthy man,
but Tilly did not like that. He also apparently had
(14:47):
a wandering eye, and by October of nineteen twenty two,
he was in the hospital experiencing arm numbness, leg paralysis,
and other symptoms consistent with severe arsenic poisoning. So while
he was in hospital, Tilly's husband recalled that his food
had tasted strangely lately. And here's one big red flag.
He remembered the dog dying after eating scraps of food
(15:09):
till he had cooked um. Her husband also stated he'd
planned to press charges against her and till he kissed him.
Such a strange dynamic at play, But uh, it was
not poisoning Joseph that she went on trial for. While
Tilly was arrested initially for the attempted murder of Joseph Clemic,
who would survive her poison his hand um after an
(15:30):
investigation into the deaths of her previous husbands. The crime
Tilly was eventually tried for was the murder of Frank,
her third husband, but even as she was taken in,
she appeared completely indifferent to the whole situation. It is
said that she told the arresting officer, who was Lieutenant
William Malone, the next one I want to cook dinner
(15:50):
for is you? You made all my trouble. After eighteen
hours of interrogation, Tilly confessed to her crimes, admitting to
mixing rat poison into her victims food and drink. Note
it's interesting, right, Like eighteen hours of interrogation is considered extreme,
it is, and she just gives it all up. Then
there's that whole thing of like is this a coerced
(16:13):
confession at that point, But her later behavior makes it
seem like she's she's pretty down with this information being
uh one true and part of public records. Yeah, she's
a badass. Just two grains of arsenic is enough to
kill almost anyone, uh and as much as eight grains
were found in Frank's organs. So enough to kill four people.
(16:37):
Authorities decided to exhume Tillie's other husbands and found their
stomachs each contained lethal doses of arsenic, and although evidence
existed to convict her of as many as twenty murders
by arsenic, only one charge resulted in a conviction. Although
she was not the only woman and wife in her
community to be arrested for suspicion of poisoning, she was
(16:58):
the only one of them who was sentenced. You remember
how we mentioned her cousin earlier. Authorities went on to
investigate a possible poison ring in the Little Poland neighborhood,
arresting other local women in what the assistant state attorney
at the time that was, a man named William McLaughlin
called quote the most astonishing wholesale poisoning plot uncovered. He
(17:22):
wanted the death penalty for Tilly, but without better evidence,
the other women who had been rounded up just had
to be released. As Tillie's story unfurls, it becomes apparent
that it wasn't just husbands that she poisoned. She played
fast and loose with rough on rats, poisoning people who
irritated her and dogs who barked too much in the neighborhood.
Life was especially risky if you were one of Chilly's cousins.
(17:45):
In nineteen twelve, Tilly's cousin, Stanley Zaczuski, died at the
age of sixteen. Tilly, who was in her mid thirties
at the time, tended on him while he was ill.
Another cousin, Stanley's sister, Still, died in nineteen thirteen. She
was twenty three at the time, and again Tilly played
the role of caregiver. After her husband Frank's death, Tillie
(18:08):
started seeing a man named Joseph Grantkowski, like lovers before him.
Joseph died in nineteen fourteen after jilting her and back
to cousins. In nineteen fifteen, Tilly's cousin Helen died at
age fifteen. Another cousin, Nick Micko, became sick from arsenic poisoning,
but he was lucky enough to actually recover. In nineteen nineteen,
(18:30):
Tilly's cousin Rose died after attending Tilly and Frank's wedding party.
In eighteen, Tilly may have been involved in the poisoning
of woe Jack Strummer, who was the husband of her
cousin Nellie, the same Nellie from she procured her rat poison.
It turns out that Tilly wasn't only cooking arsenic into meals,
she was also a confectioner. Twizzlers may make mouse happy,
(18:53):
but you definitely want to skip Tilly's streets. So uh.
Stella Gooskowski, sister of Tillie's former boy friend Joseph, got
sick after she ate a candy that was given to
her by Tilly after the two women had an argument.
Joseph died from tainted candy as well. Rose Split had
also stayed Untilie gave her arsenic infused candies after Joseph
(19:16):
clinic talked to her. So jealous, Tilly was willing to
go after innocent women who her husband even dared to
converse with. So let's keep going because we're only about
halfway through the body count. There was also a woman
named Bessie kop Sick's sister in law of Tilly's husband Frank,
who fell sick after eating Tillie's cooking, but Bessie recovered. Children,
(19:37):
primarily relatives, were also on Tillie's hit list. At least
four children in Tillie's Sphere were poisoned between nineteen seventeen
nineteen eighteen, Dorothy Spara died at age two. Twins Sophie
and Ben Strummer also died. John Strummer was the only
one to recover. Lillian Strumer, who was in her early teens,
lived at Tillie's home for a year when she became
(19:58):
deathly ill from the food and suffered heart trouble. So
skip ahead just a few years to March and a
man named Myers goes missing suspicious um. Maybe he might
have been one of Tilly's husbands, but he was more
likely just a boyfriend. Records from this time, as we've mentioned,
not always robust, and a lot of times people would
(20:20):
just claim to be spouses without going through the paperwork,
kind of like common law, but more like they were
just like, well, we lived together, and we live as
a married couple. Either way, the risk of dying was
obviously considerably high for any of Tilly's paramours, legally wed
or not. I don't think she cared about the paperwork,
just just the life insurance. At her trial, Tillie wore
(20:42):
the black hat that she had made when her third husband, Frank,
had been on his deathbed. She had also wounded to
his funeral as she had planned. Historically, in Chicago in
the early twentieth century, women who were brought to trial
for murder, which was usually murder of their husbands, were
almost always a quit did. If a woman was unlucky
(21:03):
enough to be convicted, she was generally going to be
given an amazingly light sentence in comparison to men who
had stood trial for murder, and it really helped your case.
If you were very feminine, weeping a bit and flirting
would always help. In the years leading up to Tilly's trial,
twenty eight women had been charged with murder in Cook County,
(21:23):
where Chicago is located. Twenty four were acquitted. It is
probably no coincidence that all twenty four of those women
were considered conventionally attractive. Up only four were found guilty,
Hilda Axeland, who is not considered a meaty, Verra Trepagnier,
who was middle aged, Emma Simpson, who was determined to
(21:44):
be insane, and Dora Waterman, who also was not known
for her looks. On the other hand, the well dressed,
well groomed Cora or Queen, who shot her boyfriend over
his cheating walked free. Tilly, though, did not have these advantages.
She was nothing like bilish Belva Gartner and beautiful Beulah Anum,
the killers who inspired the play Chicago. According to Genevieve Forbes,
(22:08):
a crime reporter who covered the trial for the Chicago Tribune,
Tilly was neither beautiful nor charming. She was described as
a middle aged woman forty five who was squat quote unclothed,
with a greasy complexion and a lumpy figure. Her dull
brown hair was pulled back into a nod at the
back of her head. Despite having lived in Chicago since
she was just a little kid, she spoke only broken English,
(22:30):
and it was recorded that she growled, I shudder to
think what Genevieve for Um. During the proceedings, prosecutors read
a list of twenty alleged victims of Tilly, pausing after
each name to ask her did you kill this person?
And each time she would reportedly shrug, responding to each
(22:52):
of the simple yeah, I wish I could have been
in this trial. The trial Jedge asked for something called
a psychopathic lab report. According to the examining doctor, Tilly
was a quote subnormal mentality with an intellect and I
quote again no higher than that of an eleven year
old child. As we just mentioned, she didn't really speak
English especially well, so let's take these results with a
(23:14):
grain of salt. And it was reported she was afflicted
with dementia precox, a diagnosis today that would be schizophrenia.
She was also described as a rattlesnake, as a heartless woman,
and due to the murders around her, she got the
nickname we mentioned earlier, Black Widow. Because of the evidence
beyond the single murder, investigators obtained permission to exhume the
(23:36):
corpses of Chili's dead husbands for arsenic toxicity testing. Newspaper
headlines covering the trial featured headlines like three more bodies
to be exhumed in clinic case, and bodies of other
relatives will be exhumed. All those cousins, all those cousins,
all the children, Yeah, the children and dogs thing. I
just obviously killing anybody is bad, but uh. Tilly, though,
(24:00):
stuck to a story that Frank had died of alcohol
poisoning and that she had absolutely not killed her spouses.
She said, quote, I loved them, they loved me. They
just died same as other people. She continued, I'm not
responsible for that. I could not help if they wanted
to die. Contrary to her statement during the trial, the
coroner accusingly asserted, quote, there is no question that Mrs
(24:24):
Clink poisoned everyone she wanted to get out of the way.
After the jury deliberated for just an hour and twenty minutes,
Tilly was found guilty of the murder of her third husband,
Frank kop Sick In nine. Judge Marcus Kavanaugh sentenced her
to life in prison without the possibility of parole. That
was the harshest sentence ever given to a woman in
(24:46):
Chicago at that time, for jurors thought she should be
given the death penalty. At the time, no woman had
ever been sentenced to death in the state of Illinois.
The Chicago Tribune reporter Forbes called her gruesomely cruel and
went on to say that Tilly is a spectator in
her own drama. While on all accounts, Tilly is considered
to have been friendly to the other prisoners once she
(25:09):
was incarcerated, she definitely did not want to talk about
the poisonings. It has said that she would yell quote,
I didn't rob nobody I didn't shoot nobody. I didn't
poison nobody. I didn't everybody picks on me. Everybody makes
eyes at me like they're going to eat me. Why
do they make eyes like that. I tell the truth.
Anything I did, I did to myself, nobody else. She
(25:33):
was incarcerated at the Illinois State Penitentiary at Juliet with
one stipulation. It said that while Tilly enjoyed the few
food served to her in prison, the judge declared that
she never be allowed to cook for her fellow inmates.
After thirteen years of incarceration, she died on November. So
Tilly clearly does seem to have had a certain detachment
(25:54):
and a callousness about the crime she was found guilty of,
and that cannot have helped her case. But we also
can't disregard another significant influence in the outcome of her trial,
which we briefly touched on. Now, you might hope something
like physical appearance wouldn't matter today in the courtroom as
it clearly did in Tillie's day. You might surprised to
hear that the judge and jury can still be swayed
(26:15):
by a pretty face. What we know from study upon
study is that most people, even without being conscious of it,
consider physically attractive adults to be healthier, more intelligent, and
to have better personalities than those who are not considered
as esthetically pleasing. In fact, in economics, there's a phenomenon
known as the beauty premium, and on the opposite side
(26:37):
of the spectrum there's what's called the ugliness penalty. UM.
But that's just not limited to economics, it's just how
humans work with each other. In recent years, studies have
also found that as humans, we generally consider attractive people
in our society to just be better people, whether that's
in the workplace, at school, in relationships, or in the
(26:58):
courtroom where you would hope and expect to find impartiality.
Studies in the last few decades have found that juries
tend to be biased in the favor of good looking defendants.
This can mean people considered to be attractive or not
only found guilty less often um, but that they also
received less severe sentences when they are found guilty unattractive
(27:18):
however you define it. Defendants, on the other hand, were
more likely to be served with longer and harsher sentences
and average of twenty two months longer in prison, and
that's even today. So while Tilly we could never paint
as a good guy in any of this, uh, she
definitely still was also a victim of this kind of
(27:41):
weird bias that people won't even acknowledge that they have. Right,
we feel that we're above it now, but we're not.
We're clearly not. No. And the thing is, it's one
of those things that's insidious, right, like we all have it.
We all have these biases. So you can't presume that,
in recogniz izing that they exist, that you have overcome
(28:02):
your own because it's hardwired almost in some ways, it's
not really hardwired. You can relearn it, but it takes
an awful lot of conscious effort, absolutely, and a constant
conscious effort probably for the rest of your life. You're
always practicing it. Yes, um, but in uh less downer talk, Hey, Maria,
(28:26):
it's my favorite time of the show, cocktail hour. Yes, indeed,
what's your Poison? Our our time where we'd come up
with a little something, something that will relate to the
show in a fun way. And since we've been talking
about Tilly, and since she was a Polish immigrant, I
wanted to do something in honor of her Polish heritage.
So I squirreled around on the internet for a while
(28:50):
because I couldn't come up with anything on my own. Um,
and I discovered this recipe. It's called a few different things.
The name that I enjoy is Polish Kiss. And what
this is is Zubrowka vodka, which is a bison grass
of vodka. Did you say bison grass vodka? I did.
(29:12):
That's interesting. Yeah, I don't know if it's the grass
that bison prefer, like five bison everywhere I swear by
this grass polish. I don't know. It has a blade
of grass in the bottle. I also came across this
drink called a Frisky Bison aka the Polish Kiss, so
(29:33):
clearly so the Polish Kiss is. The version that I
found was one point five ounces of this bison grass
vodka and then five ounces of apple juice. And the
way it was touted when I read about it was
(29:53):
that it tastes just like apple pie. And does it?
It does not, at least not the version I made. Now,
let me back up the truck for a minute, because
I don't want to blame the recipe maker. I but
it's delicious, It's just not like apple pie. I think
(30:16):
probably if you are making it with normal apple juice
from the store, it probably does start to taste like
apple pie. But I bought um organic unsweetened hippie apple
juice to go with the legs. So what happened is
that it tastes like you have just picked a fresh
(30:38):
apple off of a tree and taken a bite of it.
Because that vodka has that grassy flavor that makes it
feel like a fresh plant based item. And it's absolutely beautiful.
It's very crisp, sounds delicious. It's like it's a summer
day cocktail. For sure. It was very delightful. I could
(30:58):
see that she would probably drink while she was waiting
for her husband to die, like while she was knitting
her hat. She's like, Oh, I just something refreshing to
drink while I will say this. I will say this,
that cocktail vibes to me a little too fancy for her.
I picture her as like a bear drink. It does
seem a little fancy. And remember Chicago in the twenties,
probably not like I want fancy imported vodka. I doubt
(31:20):
I would like the imported Bison grass vodka from my
homeland Okay, probably didn't come up much. I guess and
I guess now, But that is this week's What's Your Poison?
And thank you for joining us again on Criminalia. If
you would like to subscribe to the podcast, we would
like you to do that as well, and you can
do that on the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcasts,
(31:42):
or wherever it is you listen. Criminalia is a production
of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. M hmm
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to criminal Lea.
I'm Maria tram Marquis and I'm Holly Fry. We know
that humans have always managed to commit crimes, almost certainly
before there was even recorded history, so we decided that
(00:21):
we would start looking at those crimes and get our
hands dirty. We wanted to dig in and look at
some of histories, crimes and criminals to understand them better.
And in doing so, we're curious if we can find
commonality with our modern world and our modern problems, and
whether these crimes look different a little bit of distance
on the timeline, and whether any of these perpetrators emerge
(00:43):
as more sympathetic characters. This first season is going to
be all about poisoners, specifically women poisoners. Poison is often
called a woman's weapon, despite the fact that roughly two
thirds of the poisonings committed throughout time have been the
work of men. So let's start looking at these women
and their motivations and see if any patterns developed. This week,
we're looking into the life and crimes of Tilly Clinic,
(01:05):
a Polish immigrant who killed at least one and possibly
as many as twenty people and at least one dog
between the years nineteen fourteen and nine two. I will
confess that when you were telling me about the research
you were doing initially on this and you mentioned the dog,
I was like, well, I hate her. Um not that
it wasn't terrible that she killed people, just you know,
(01:25):
that was for me the worst thing that she could
have done as well. She was born Tiafila Burick to
Michelina and Michael Burick on October eighteen seventy seven, and
(01:50):
Tilly was probably right around four years old when her
family immigrated to the United States. They moved from Poland
to the Little Poland neighborhood of Chicago, and of the
seven children in the family, A Tilly, as she was called,
was the eldest. Chicago has a long history of Polish immigration,
and Polish Americans have lived in the area for well
over a century. In eighteen ninety, around the time Tilly
(02:13):
was born, there was a wave of immigration to the
United States. At that time, the number of Polish immigrants
in the city blossomed to more than twenty five thousand
By a few years before she died. That number had
grown two hundred and sixty five thousand. Most they lived
below the poverty line. Is the tale of immigration in
so many ways. So let's set the scene of the
(02:34):
actual situation we're talking about today. So this is Chicago
in the early twentieth centuries. You couldn't necessarily count on
your food and drinks to be clean. Upton Sinclair started
(02:55):
publishing the serialized version of his groundbreaking expose a of
the meat industry in the US, The Jungle, in nineteen
o five, and while that led to the creation of
the Meat Inspection Act in nineteen o six, food safety
legislation was still in its infancy. But if you were
at a restaurant or a club or a hotel around
the city, there were other dangers when it came to
(03:15):
what you consumed at the table. In particular, wait staff
were known to target patrons who didn't tip well. Not
like the content of the chatter in fight Club, although
honestly maybe a little of that. Uh. They usually chose
poisons and various other things you really don't want to
be in your food, So remember always tip well. But moreover,
it turns out that you couldn't really count on food
(03:37):
safety at home either, at least if you lived with
a Tilly Clinic. During the time that Chicago's most visible
criminal element was organized crime, Tilly was quietly becoming the
city's most prolific female serial killer. She had allegedly killed
between six and twenty people. Like we said, but it
was all through arsenic poisoning. So we're gonna talk first
(03:58):
just about what arsenic actually is. It is a naturally
occurring element in the Earth's crust and in its raw state.
As much as it has this instant conjuring of poison,
it's not actually harmful the way it naturally exists artually.
Only really becomes poisonous when it's converted into arsenic trioxide,
which is better known as white arsenic. White arsenic not
(04:20):
only is odorless, but it's tasteless um and it's white
or transparent in form, so it's easily confused with sugar
or flour. But it's highly toxic when it's inhaled into
your lungs or when you ingest it. And it might
surprise you that even white arsenic is actually fairly benign
in relatively small amounts, because it is very lethal at
higher doses. In fact, doctors have actually prescribed white arsenic
(04:44):
through the years in its low dosage as a treatment
for things like asthma, typhus, malaria, even menstrual cramps, and
it continues to be administered intravenously as a chemotherapy for
a specific type of leukemia. When arsenic is ingested, initially,
it causes symptoms such as abdominal pain, diarrhea, and that's
often being accompanied by bleeding and vomiting. It's terrible. As
(05:08):
the dose gets more and more lethal in the body, though,
the symptoms also begin to include convulsion, cardiovascular problems, hair loss,
liver and kidney problems, and even organ damage. So not
a peaceful way to go. Definitely not sugar no, and
despite its potency, it has been used in the production
of semiconductors. It's been used as wood preservative, and it's
(05:31):
also sometimes found in pesticides. Manufacturers in the nineteenth century
started using it for its green pigment in products like
paint and wallpaper, fabrics, beauty products, and as food coloring.
The list goes on because green is very beautiful color,
so sometimes those products would actually make people sick. But
(05:53):
at the time, no one was suspecting that the arsenic
in them was the problem that was causing their ailments.
In the early twenty century, when Tilly was busy murdering
people in her community, the average Americans medicine cabinet was
stocked with all sorts of toxic things like radioactive radium
for acne, and mercury is a topical antiseptic for cuts
and scrapes and burns. Morphine showed up in everyday products
(06:16):
and everything from teething medications two cures for heroin addiction.
From roughly the late eighteenth into the early twentieth century
is considered to be the Golden age of poisoners, and
during that time, arsenic specifically caught the nickname the inheritance powder.
And you can probably imagine why, hm. The police really
(06:39):
didn't have any of the tools to test the corpse
for poison. Arsenic wasn't only easy to acquire, it was
hard to detect as a cause of death, which was
win win for the Golden Age of poisoners. It was
common practice for doctors to treat suspected poisoning with leeches
bleeded out or try to identify the poison involved by
sniffing the content of the person's stomach. Remember how we
(07:02):
said arsenic was odorless though, Yeah, so you just sniff
those contents for nothing. But it was also just unusual
for a doctor or a coroner to suspect arsenic as
a cause of death, mainly because the symptoms of arsenic
poisoning that Maria just talked about, diarrhea and vomiting and
abdominal pain are so similar to a lot of other disorders.
(07:24):
It's also really hard to place the poisoner at the
scene of the murder. Dying can typically take hours or
longer if you administered the poison gradually, such as with
someone's meals, so the perpetrator could easily have a seemingly
airtight alibi for their whereabouts because the window of time
had such fuzzy edges. But it actually wouldn't be until
the late nineteenth century that a chemist named James marsh
(07:46):
would come up with a reliable chemical test for arsenic poisoning. Today,
arsenic poisoning is treated with chelation therapy, which uses special
drugs that bind to metal ions in your blood. So
rough on rats was the product that became popular in
the late eighteen hundreds. It was composed mainly of arsenic
(08:08):
and a little black coal for masking the poison, and
while I was advertised for use in killing rats, mice, bedbugs, flies, roaches,
it occasionally was used for the very off label purpose
of killing husbands. Believe it or not, the marketing slogan
for this poison rough On Rats was don't die in
(08:28):
the house, thinking, of course, being that the creature you
had poison would scurry away to die. It was also
really easily available at the local store until he actually
got her first bottle of rough On Rats from her cousin,
Nelly Kulik, and Nelly, it would turn out, was also
(08:48):
a fellow poisoner murder and husbands. According to her accounts
from her neighbors, Tilly was sent to have precognitive dreams,
meaning that she could predict the future in re of
life through sort of a sixth sens ish kind of way.
She began to predict the deaths of neighborhood dogs, and
she was surprisingly accurate, but it turns out she was
(09:12):
just scheduling their deaths. We're getting a little ahead of
ourselves though, in the progression of Tillie's activities with rough
On Rats, so we're gonna back up to Welcome back
to Criminalia. Tillie was married to John mckaywitz. His name
(09:36):
may have been Joseph not John. Records aren't entirely consistent,
but we're gonna go with John because that's what the
majority of records from the time referred to him as.
That is one of the delights word I'm using, ironically
of doing historical research, particularly when you are talking about
UH immigrants, because there was not a vested interest always
(09:57):
in the government in keeping a you're at records about them,
so you often have these these people's stories that get
really muddy because their names do shift around in the
historical record. Anyway, By all accounts this couple UH Tilly
and John were well liked in their community, and their
marriage appeared by all accounts to be happy. Tilly made
(10:19):
her life as a housekeeper, but it was also during
this time that Tilly started telling neighbors about some visions
that she was having. She was, as we mentioned before
the break, an alleged psychic who was skilled specifically at
predicting deaths. This included predicting the death of her own husband, John,
who had left her a thousand dollars when he died.
Into the Corners report listed his death as a result
(10:43):
of heart trouble, nothing suspicious. There was no reason at
the time to suspect that John had been poisoned by
his wife. The nickname black widow, which is often given
to women who kill their lovers in order to inherit
their wealth, would eventually be bestowed on Tilly, but not
just yet. Here's a little more in detail on John's
(11:03):
sudden end. Okay. In the beginning of nine fourteen, Tilly
began telling friends and those in the community that she
dreamed that John was ill. She expected he would be
on his deathbed in just a few weeks um, And
when he died in January that year, the cause of
death was listed as heart trouble and till he collected
a thousand dollars in life insurance. I guess after nineteen years,
(11:25):
she just didn't want to gun it to twenty um.
She's like enough. After receiving that payout on John's life
insurance policy, Tilly actually remarried pretty quickly. See, now, that's
the thing. She remarried quickly often, And I have to
I always sort of wonder like if she would follow
in love with someone new and be like, oh, I'll
kill my husband, and we'll start out fresh with like
(11:46):
this new thousand dollars. It's just my own personal theory. Yeah,
I think there's merit. But her new husband, Joseph Riskowski,
died just three months after they got married, and he
happened to leave his widow twelve hundred dollars in cash
and seven dollars in insurance money. Not only did Tilly
(12:08):
predict Joseph's death, she went on to predict the deaths
of her third husband, although they may or may not
have been married. It's a little sketchy, uh. And her
fourth husband, as well as children, she cared for a
few neighbors and possibly some other family members. And not
only did she joke with neighbors that her fourth husband, Frank,
had quote two inches to live, which is a really interesting,
(12:34):
fascinating turn of phrase, she allegedly taunted him on his
deathbed and said things like it won't be long now
and you'll be dying soon, which is in my own home,
Like you got two inches to live? I don't know, right,
(12:55):
It's like callous on a level that's hard to comprehend, right.
She also, in an act of both cruel and creative,
knitted herself a morning hat Um as she sat by
his bedside while he was dying. She even so far
as to purchase a thirty dollar bargain coffin to keep
(13:18):
in the basement of her house waiting for his death.
That store dreament was a little unsettling request made of
her landlord Um, who was began to be a little
suspicious of Tilly after that came in. Frank did die
on a and it is said that when it happened,
Tillie played dance music in the room. The coroner listed
(13:42):
Frank's cause of death as bronchial pneumonia. Tilly's poisonous predilections unnoticed.
She once again collected on his life insurance, this time
in the amount of six seventy five dollars, nearly as
much as the last two. I know she's downgrading the
in surance situation with each one. They're going faster now,
(14:02):
you know. It's just not enough time to like build
up to the thousand. That's another theory I have. Um.
It's interesting and grimly fun to note that Frank An
Tilly's home at Winchester it's a house in East Village
in Chicago, shows up on the old four square social
networking site as Old Lady Tilly Clinics haunted house even today,
(14:25):
Tilly was still not arrested, though that didn't happen until
after she botched an attempt at poisoning husband number five,
that was Joseph Clinic. She and Joseph had gotten married
in July of one, again, not long after Frank's demise,
and Clinic is said to have been a relatively wealthy man,
but Tilly did not like that. He also apparently had
(14:47):
a wandering eye, and by October of nineteen twenty two,
he was in the hospital experiencing arm numbness, leg paralysis,
and other symptoms consistent with severe arsenic poisoning. So while
he was in hospital, Tilly's husband recalled that his food
had tasted strangely lately. And here's one big red flag.
He remembered the dog dying after eating scraps of food
(15:09):
till he had cooked um. Her husband also stated he'd
planned to press charges against her and till he kissed him.
Such a strange dynamic at play, But uh, it was
not poisoning Joseph that she went on trial for. While
Tilly was arrested initially for the attempted murder of Joseph Clemic,
who would survive her poison his hand um after an
(15:30):
investigation into the deaths of her previous husbands. The crime
Tilly was eventually tried for was the murder of Frank,
her third husband, but even as she was taken in,
she appeared completely indifferent to the whole situation. It is
said that she told the arresting officer, who was Lieutenant
William Malone, the next one I want to cook dinner
(15:50):
for is you? You made all my trouble. After eighteen
hours of interrogation, Tilly confessed to her crimes, admitting to
mixing rat poison into her victims food and drink. Note
it's interesting, right, Like eighteen hours of interrogation is considered extreme,
it is, and she just gives it all up. Then
there's that whole thing of like is this a coerced
(16:13):
confession at that point, But her later behavior makes it
seem like she's she's pretty down with this information being
uh one true and part of public records. Yeah, she's
a badass. Just two grains of arsenic is enough to
kill almost anyone, uh and as much as eight grains
were found in Frank's organs. So enough to kill four people.
(16:37):
Authorities decided to exhume Tillie's other husbands and found their
stomachs each contained lethal doses of arsenic, and although evidence
existed to convict her of as many as twenty murders
by arsenic, only one charge resulted in a conviction. Although
she was not the only woman and wife in her
community to be arrested for suspicion of poisoning, she was
(16:58):
the only one of them who was sentenced. You remember
how we mentioned her cousin earlier. Authorities went on to
investigate a possible poison ring in the Little Poland neighborhood,
arresting other local women in what the assistant state attorney
at the time that was, a man named William McLaughlin
called quote the most astonishing wholesale poisoning plot uncovered. He
(17:22):
wanted the death penalty for Tilly, but without better evidence,
the other women who had been rounded up just had
to be released. As Tillie's story unfurls, it becomes apparent
that it wasn't just husbands that she poisoned. She played
fast and loose with rough on rats, poisoning people who
irritated her and dogs who barked too much in the neighborhood.
Life was especially risky if you were one of Chilly's cousins.
(17:45):
In nineteen twelve, Tilly's cousin, Stanley Zaczuski, died at the
age of sixteen. Tilly, who was in her mid thirties
at the time, tended on him while he was ill.
Another cousin, Stanley's sister, Still, died in nineteen thirteen. She
was twenty three at the time, and again Tilly played
the role of caregiver. After her husband Frank's death, Tillie
(18:08):
started seeing a man named Joseph Grantkowski, like lovers before him.
Joseph died in nineteen fourteen after jilting her and back
to cousins. In nineteen fifteen, Tilly's cousin Helen died at
age fifteen. Another cousin, Nick Micko, became sick from arsenic poisoning,
but he was lucky enough to actually recover. In nineteen nineteen,
(18:30):
Tilly's cousin Rose died after attending Tilly and Frank's wedding party.
In eighteen, Tilly may have been involved in the poisoning
of woe Jack Strummer, who was the husband of her
cousin Nellie, the same Nellie from she procured her rat poison.
It turns out that Tilly wasn't only cooking arsenic into meals,
she was also a confectioner. Twizzlers may make mouse happy,
(18:53):
but you definitely want to skip Tilly's streets. So uh.
Stella Gooskowski, sister of Tillie's former boy friend Joseph, got
sick after she ate a candy that was given to
her by Tilly after the two women had an argument.
Joseph died from tainted candy as well. Rose Split had
also stayed Untilie gave her arsenic infused candies after Joseph
(19:16):
clinic talked to her. So jealous, Tilly was willing to
go after innocent women who her husband even dared to
converse with. So let's keep going because we're only about
halfway through the body count. There was also a woman
named Bessie kop Sick's sister in law of Tilly's husband Frank,
who fell sick after eating Tillie's cooking, but Bessie recovered. Children,
(19:37):
primarily relatives, were also on Tillie's hit list. At least
four children in Tillie's Sphere were poisoned between nineteen seventeen
nineteen eighteen, Dorothy Spara died at age two. Twins Sophie
and Ben Strummer also died. John Strummer was the only
one to recover. Lillian Strumer, who was in her early teens,
lived at Tillie's home for a year when she became
(19:58):
deathly ill from the food and suffered heart trouble. So
skip ahead just a few years to March and a
man named Myers goes missing suspicious um. Maybe he might
have been one of Tilly's husbands, but he was more
likely just a boyfriend. Records from this time, as we've mentioned,
not always robust, and a lot of times people would
(20:20):
just claim to be spouses without going through the paperwork,
kind of like common law, but more like they were
just like, well, we lived together, and we live as
a married couple. Either way, the risk of dying was
obviously considerably high for any of Tilly's paramours, legally wed
or not. I don't think she cared about the paperwork,
just just the life insurance. At her trial, Tillie wore
(20:42):
the black hat that she had made when her third husband, Frank,
had been on his deathbed. She had also wounded to
his funeral as she had planned. Historically, in Chicago in
the early twentieth century, women who were brought to trial
for murder, which was usually murder of their husbands, were
almost always a quit did. If a woman was unlucky
(21:03):
enough to be convicted, she was generally going to be
given an amazingly light sentence in comparison to men who
had stood trial for murder, and it really helped your case.
If you were very feminine, weeping a bit and flirting
would always help. In the years leading up to Tilly's trial,
twenty eight women had been charged with murder in Cook County,
(21:23):
where Chicago is located. Twenty four were acquitted. It is
probably no coincidence that all twenty four of those women
were considered conventionally attractive. Up only four were found guilty,
Hilda Axeland, who is not considered a meaty, Verra Trepagnier,
who was middle aged, Emma Simpson, who was determined to
(21:44):
be insane, and Dora Waterman, who also was not known
for her looks. On the other hand, the well dressed,
well groomed Cora or Queen, who shot her boyfriend over
his cheating walked free. Tilly, though, did not have these advantages.
She was nothing like bilish Belva Gartner and beautiful Beulah Anum,
the killers who inspired the play Chicago. According to Genevieve Forbes,
(22:08):
a crime reporter who covered the trial for the Chicago Tribune,
Tilly was neither beautiful nor charming. She was described as
a middle aged woman forty five who was squat quote unclothed,
with a greasy complexion and a lumpy figure. Her dull
brown hair was pulled back into a nod at the
back of her head. Despite having lived in Chicago since
she was just a little kid, she spoke only broken English,
(22:30):
and it was recorded that she growled, I shudder to
think what Genevieve for Um. During the proceedings, prosecutors read
a list of twenty alleged victims of Tilly, pausing after
each name to ask her did you kill this person?
And each time she would reportedly shrug, responding to each
(22:52):
of the simple yeah, I wish I could have been
in this trial. The trial Jedge asked for something called
a psychopathic lab report. According to the examining doctor, Tilly
was a quote subnormal mentality with an intellect and I
quote again no higher than that of an eleven year
old child. As we just mentioned, she didn't really speak
English especially well, so let's take these results with a
(23:14):
grain of salt. And it was reported she was afflicted
with dementia precox, a diagnosis today that would be schizophrenia.
She was also described as a rattlesnake, as a heartless woman,
and due to the murders around her, she got the
nickname we mentioned earlier, Black Widow. Because of the evidence
beyond the single murder, investigators obtained permission to exhume the
(23:36):
corpses of Chili's dead husbands for arsenic toxicity testing. Newspaper
headlines covering the trial featured headlines like three more bodies
to be exhumed in clinic case, and bodies of other
relatives will be exhumed. All those cousins, all those cousins,
all the children, Yeah, the children and dogs thing. I
just obviously killing anybody is bad, but uh. Tilly, though,
(24:00):
stuck to a story that Frank had died of alcohol
poisoning and that she had absolutely not killed her spouses.
She said, quote, I loved them, they loved me. They
just died same as other people. She continued, I'm not
responsible for that. I could not help if they wanted
to die. Contrary to her statement during the trial, the
coroner accusingly asserted, quote, there is no question that Mrs
(24:24):
Clink poisoned everyone she wanted to get out of the way.
After the jury deliberated for just an hour and twenty minutes,
Tilly was found guilty of the murder of her third husband,
Frank kop Sick In nine. Judge Marcus Kavanaugh sentenced her
to life in prison without the possibility of parole. That
was the harshest sentence ever given to a woman in
(24:46):
Chicago at that time, for jurors thought she should be
given the death penalty. At the time, no woman had
ever been sentenced to death in the state of Illinois.
The Chicago Tribune reporter Forbes called her gruesomely cruel and
went on to say that Tilly is a spectator in
her own drama. While on all accounts, Tilly is considered
to have been friendly to the other prisoners once she
(25:09):
was incarcerated, she definitely did not want to talk about
the poisonings. It has said that she would yell quote,
I didn't rob nobody I didn't shoot nobody. I didn't
poison nobody. I didn't everybody picks on me. Everybody makes
eyes at me like they're going to eat me. Why
do they make eyes like that. I tell the truth.
Anything I did, I did to myself, nobody else. She
(25:33):
was incarcerated at the Illinois State Penitentiary at Juliet with
one stipulation. It said that while Tilly enjoyed the few
food served to her in prison, the judge declared that
she never be allowed to cook for her fellow inmates.
After thirteen years of incarceration, she died on November. So
Tilly clearly does seem to have had a certain detachment
(25:54):
and a callousness about the crime she was found guilty of,
and that cannot have helped her case. But we also
can't disregard another significant influence in the outcome of her trial,
which we briefly touched on. Now, you might hope something
like physical appearance wouldn't matter today in the courtroom as
it clearly did in Tillie's day. You might surprised to
hear that the judge and jury can still be swayed
(26:15):
by a pretty face. What we know from study upon
study is that most people, even without being conscious of it,
consider physically attractive adults to be healthier, more intelligent, and
to have better personalities than those who are not considered
as esthetically pleasing. In fact, in economics, there's a phenomenon
known as the beauty premium, and on the opposite side
(26:37):
of the spectrum there's what's called the ugliness penalty. UM.
But that's just not limited to economics, it's just how
humans work with each other. In recent years, studies have
also found that as humans, we generally consider attractive people
in our society to just be better people, whether that's
in the workplace, at school, in relationships, or in the
(26:58):
courtroom where you would hope and expect to find impartiality.
Studies in the last few decades have found that juries
tend to be biased in the favor of good looking defendants.
This can mean people considered to be attractive or not
only found guilty less often um, but that they also
received less severe sentences when they are found guilty unattractive
(27:18):
however you define it. Defendants, on the other hand, were
more likely to be served with longer and harsher sentences
and average of twenty two months longer in prison, and
that's even today. So while Tilly we could never paint
as a good guy in any of this, uh, she
definitely still was also a victim of this kind of
(27:41):
weird bias that people won't even acknowledge that they have. Right,
we feel that we're above it now, but we're not.
We're clearly not. No. And the thing is, it's one
of those things that's insidious, right, like we all have it.
We all have these biases. So you can't presume that,
in recogniz izing that they exist, that you have overcome
(28:02):
your own because it's hardwired almost in some ways, it's
not really hardwired. You can relearn it, but it takes
an awful lot of conscious effort, absolutely, and a constant
conscious effort probably for the rest of your life. You're
always practicing it. Yes, um, but in uh less downer talk, Hey, Maria,
(28:26):
it's my favorite time of the show, cocktail hour. Yes, indeed,
what's your Poison? Our our time where we'd come up
with a little something, something that will relate to the
show in a fun way. And since we've been talking
about Tilly, and since she was a Polish immigrant, I
wanted to do something in honor of her Polish heritage.
So I squirreled around on the internet for a while
(28:50):
because I couldn't come up with anything on my own. Um,
and I discovered this recipe. It's called a few different things.
The name that I enjoy is Polish Kiss. And what
this is is Zubrowka vodka, which is a bison grass
of vodka. Did you say bison grass vodka? I did.
(29:12):
That's interesting. Yeah, I don't know if it's the grass
that bison prefer, like five bison everywhere I swear by
this grass polish. I don't know. It has a blade
of grass in the bottle. I also came across this
drink called a Frisky Bison aka the Polish Kiss, so
(29:33):
clearly so the Polish Kiss is. The version that I
found was one point five ounces of this bison grass
vodka and then five ounces of apple juice. And the
way it was touted when I read about it was
(29:53):
that it tastes just like apple pie. And does it?
It does not, at least not the version I made. Now,
let me back up the truck for a minute, because
I don't want to blame the recipe maker. I but
it's delicious, It's just not like apple pie. I think
(30:16):
probably if you are making it with normal apple juice
from the store, it probably does start to taste like
apple pie. But I bought um organic unsweetened hippie apple
juice to go with the legs. So what happened is
that it tastes like you have just picked a fresh
(30:38):
apple off of a tree and taken a bite of it.
Because that vodka has that grassy flavor that makes it
feel like a fresh plant based item. And it's absolutely beautiful.
It's very crisp, sounds delicious. It's like it's a summer
day cocktail. For sure. It was very delightful. I could
(30:58):
see that she would probably drink while she was waiting
for her husband to die, like while she was knitting
her hat. She's like, Oh, I just something refreshing to
drink while I will say this. I will say this,
that cocktail vibes to me a little too fancy for her.
I picture her as like a bear drink. It does
seem a little fancy. And remember Chicago in the twenties,
probably not like I want fancy imported vodka. I doubt
(31:20):
I would like the imported Bison grass vodka from my
homeland Okay, probably didn't come up much. I guess and
I guess now, But that is this week's What's Your Poison?
And thank you for joining us again on Criminalia. If
you would like to subscribe to the podcast, we would
like you to do that as well, and you can
do that on the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcasts,
(31:42):
or wherever it is you listen. Criminalia is a production
of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. M hmm
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Maria Trimarchi
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!