370 - Necessary Yelling

This week, Georgia covers "The Bandit Queen" Pearl Hart and Karen tells the Mount St. Helens eruption survival story of Dave Crockett.

For our sources and show notes, visit www.myfavoritemurder.com/episodes.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Hell, Hello, and welcome to my favorite murder.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
That's Georgia Hartstar, that's Karen kil Gareth, and we're here
to report the news breaking today. Yeah, you're right, break
that's fifty's news today. Actually, what's funny is right before
we got on, my sister called me and was like,
did you hear Gavin Newsom just made a move where

(00:45):
California will not have contracts with Walgreens Drugs anymore because
they're not selling the abortion pill. Amazing, amazing, people are
making big, big, big moves against.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Thee Nothing will fucking tell them what's up except their
bottom line being fucked with.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
So we've got to fuck with bottom lines.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
We got to be consumers at places that don't treat
humans like humans.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
And that are trying to kill women, Like we cannot this,
this idea that someone else's moral judgment is somehow going
to dictate medical terms for women in this country is
absolutely ridiculous. And if you are a woman, you got
to fight it. And if you're a man who gets
women pregnant, you got to fight it. And if you're

(01:31):
the kind of man who's not interested in women, could
you please help us fight it because it's absolutely dire
to this point. Yep, where over in South Carolina they're
trying to actually execute women for not only having abortions,
but for miscarrying a thing that you cannot control, a
thing that happens in your body, and they're trying to
execute women for it.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
Just the suggestion of it is so craven and disgusting.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
It's the pure ignorance too, of thinking that somehow we're
responsible for what our bodies automatically do, but also these
like and somehow men aren't fucking responsible as well for
the predicaments that these women who need abortions get themselves into.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
How is it? How are you that fucking stupid?

Speaker 2 (02:15):
That's this very convenient editing that has always happened in
this conversation. It's women's health, women's bodies, women's this, women's that,
pregnancy is a it takes two to tango in that situation.
Men are involved, they're responsible, They need to fucking stand up.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
Fuck what a time. It just feels like the crunch, Yeah,
is the crunch is on.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
But at least you know, in California they're actually taking steps.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
I really that makes me feel really good. I can't
imagine living in one of these states where I am
being targeted, you know, by my own government. I can't
imagine how fucking scary that must be those poor women
in South Carolina. Although, so if we're gonna you know,
that's a tough thing to start this podcast off with.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
But let's actually talk about good news and true crime,
which at this point, everybody, not just people who listen
to true crime, not just not just not just us,
but like people that I've like, wait, what are you
talking about?

Speaker 3 (03:16):
Everyone now knows Alex Murdau.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
He's going to fucking jail for the murder of his
wife and his son.

Speaker 3 (03:24):
So crazy, And yeah, hey, what's.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Up, Mandy Mattney, I bet it feels pretty fucking good
to be you right now.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
And Liz Ferrell.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Congratulations to Mandy Mattney and Liz Ferrell who had been
reporting on this and trying to break the story and
breaking the story since day one.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
That's right, their podcast is The Murdock Murders, right, and
I'm sure they have a lot to say about it.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
So go listen to that, check that out.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Check it out, and in gigantic high fives to them,
because oh, oh my god, like they must be elated
and thrilled and they they had a piece of that.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
Yeah, there are reason a reason it happened.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
That's so fucking cool. Oh, I have a book recommendation
real quick if we're Yeah. So, I'm listening to this
book and I can't put it down. It's called A
Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, and it
takes place in Jamaica in the seventies, so all this
crazy turmoil is going on, and it's it's written from
a bunch of perspectives, including like a ghost and like

(04:26):
Bob Marley and people who are trying to kill Bob
Marley and like in the CIA maybe and all this
like the stuff that I had not I didn't know
about because there's a lot of factual stuff and it's
really fascinating. Oh good, I'm listening to it. I highly
recommended A History of Seven Killings. Great who wrote it,
Marlon James. Awesome, that's a good recommendation. Yeah, that's nice.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
Are you first? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (04:48):
Are we ready? Oh, we have to do exactly right corner.
So I was like, that was so fast. Hey, over on,
I saw what you did. They recently released their one
hundredth episode and this week They're double feature includes Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, incredible movie and all that jazz.
So check out I Saw What You Did, and see
what the connection is between those two movies.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
I've seen both of these these and I would love
to know what the connection is between both of them.
And then this week over on I Said No, Giz
Bridger's guest is comedian and actor Ginger Gonzaga, who's currently
part of the She Hulk Attorney at Law television show
over on Disney Plus, written by friend of the show,
Jessica Gao. Very talented, wonderful woman who it's just exciting

(05:35):
when someone gets her gets to run her own show.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
So rad and over in the MFM store, we have
restocked the fuck You I'm Married joggers that.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
Are just a fan favorite. I have a pair.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
They're really comfortable and they make you laugh every time
you put them on. So go to my favorite murder
dot com to get yourself a pair of those if
you want, or you can get my fuck you, I'm single,
fuck you, I'm blank, and you can SHARPI in whatever
you want.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
We have all those you can do. Fuck you, I'm
on the fence.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Fuck you, I'm in a situationship, situationship.

Speaker 3 (06:08):
Did you pick that up just now?

Speaker 2 (06:10):
No? Oh god, no, no, no, oh, I've never heard
that and I love it. No, that's me copying the
children's TikTok lns. Ah got it? Well, they're so smart.
Oh so good, good, all right, I yes, I am first.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
That is correct. Okay, So sit back, hold on to
your breeches. Here we go today. I'm going to tell
you the story of a very unique woman who stands
alone in the history of the American West. This is
the story of one of the last stagecoach robbers of
the Old West, Pearl Heart.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
The lady banned it, thank you, you know her. No,
this is just what This is what I wanted to
hear right now. This is going to do it for
Sit back, like I said. If you got breeches, hold
on to them, like I said. The main source used
in today's episode is the book Wildcat by John Boa Snecker.
This book seems to be the most comprehensive and factual

(07:04):
biography of Pearl Heart that's out there, because there's a
lot of misinformation that she herself spread, so even her
Wikipedia isn't completely true. So this book Wild God is
the best the other sources are in the show notes,
so little background on Pearl Heart. Pearl Heart is born
actually as Lily Naomi Davy on April nineteenth, eighteen seventy one,

(07:26):
your favorite year. Oh that's when all the great sasparillas
were being brued.

Speaker 1 (07:33):
She was born in Lindsay, Ontario, in Canada, so she's
a Canadian.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
For the sake of our story, I will refer to
her as Pearl Thruout, but she doesn't start using that
alias until adulthood.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
She's one of.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
Nine children, and her childhood is chaotic and traumatizing. Her
father is an abuse of alcoholic and is in and
out of prison repeatedly.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
For violent crimes.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
Her mother is, by all accounts, a very kind and
loving parent who cares a lot about our kids. But
when you have them and you're raising them on your own,
there's not a lot you can get to, you know.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
You know, Yeah, it's hard to get to each one
every single day.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
You know. My dad is one of nine. Wow, home
Gym had eight brothers and sisters. Yeah, pretty legendary. Yeah,
that's why the volume level is so high above normal people's.

Speaker 3 (08:19):
It's necessary yelling all day long.

Speaker 1 (08:21):
Right, It's like you have to go one up every
time you want to, like get louder than someone else,
and you have eight of them to speak above Jesus.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah, you have a din of eight all the time, naturally. Yeah,
So you just have to get it.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
You have to really expand your diaphragm and really get
your voice ert Wow.

Speaker 1 (08:36):
Okay, So Pearl and her siblings quickly figure out how
to take care of themselves. They learn that petty theft
means more food on the table. First of all, Pearl
is arrested for the first time when she is just
eleven years old, for this crime. Listen to this, it's brilliant.
She steals a cow, sells that cow for nine dollars,
steals the cow again from the first buyer, and then

(08:59):
sells it to another buyer for thirty dollars.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
So you know, it's just profit. That's how bitcoin works,
just profit over profit. You know, stack those.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
Dollars og pyramid schemes. Hell, yeah, this one more point
in Pearl's column.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
But she's only caught because her brother, who helped her
pull off this scheme, is discovered stealing a watch a
few days later and identified she doesn't get in a
major trouble yet, but the scene is set. Pearl is clever, confident,
and not too bothered by a life of crime.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Wait, are you saying her brother snitched on her to
get out of his thing.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
Maybe or he got he got recognized as one of
the two kids who did this, and they made the
connection that it was also his sister.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
Oh got it, you know what I mean? Yes, got it.
We're not going to call him a snitch automatically.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
But I just really do adore the idea of stealing
a cow, selling it, and then stealing it.

Speaker 3 (09:56):
It's really funny.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
During one of the wars my family on my hard
stark side in Poland, one of the brothers would steal
a horse and sell it.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
To the other side.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
The other army steal it back and sell it back
to the other like the exact same thing. Yes, that's
how you got to get food into your siblings' mouths.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
You do what you gotta do, You do what we
gotta do. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
So, as Pearl grows up, the family bounces south into
the US, eventually landing in Rochester, New York. When Pearl
is a teenager and life's super hard, still for the large,
impoverished family in the eighteen eighties, and the girls and
women especially can't catch a break. Almost every woman in
the family is subjected to sexual abuse at some point,
including Pearl. There's so much trauma baked into the fabric

(10:43):
of this family. But for the siblings, especially the sisters,
these hard, hard starks no sorry, terrible, these hardships bond
them together, of course, you know, sure, yeah, yeah. Pearl's
relationship with her siblings are some of the most important
in her life. In fact, when she's thirteen, she and

(11:05):
her younger sister decide they want to run away to Buffalo,
New York for better job opportunities, since child labor was
common at the time, so like a fucking eleven and
thirteen year old can get a job. Let's say this
is when Pearl first figures out that passing as a
boy can keep her safe from unwanted attention and sexual advances.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
She cuts her hair, steals her brother's.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Clothes, and sneaks onto a boat dressed convincingly as a boy.
Pearl and her sister immediately find work at a factory
and they work their on their own for two months. Wow,
And then their mom tracks them down and drags them
on home. But this story shows us how quickly Pearl
figures out that gender norms at the time are not
only restrictive but a liability, and how easily she can

(11:47):
slip between the worlds to get what she wants.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
These are some of my favorite stories of women basically
making the best of bad circumstances and being like, fine,
I will go fight in the right or I will
go do all these things just dressed as a man,
because it's going to be that much easy.

Speaker 3 (12:05):
Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
By age sixteen, Pearl's married to her first of many husbands.
By all accounts, everyone who meets her is obsessed with her.
She's very attractive, a great dancer, and very funny. My
researcher Sarah Blair Jenkins pointed out that she in the
photos she kind of has an Aubrey Plaza vibe. Oh
of just like that look in her eye. She kind
of looks like her. She's very pretty, that like vibe.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
You know, She's like, she's pretty, but she's staring at
you like I dare you to.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Fuck with yeah exactly. You're like, oh, yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
Can see her robbing a fucking stage coach. That makes sense,
but she also falls in love really easily. Doesn't have
great tastes in men. Hello, Hi, Hi, I'm the problem.
It's me hi, Hello, what's up. She seems to have
a thing for drinkers, gamblers, and criminals.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
What's up?

Speaker 1 (12:51):
They're hot, I mean, and often gets cut up in
their schemes or suffers from abuse at their hands. But again,
at the end of the day, Pearl is a woman
who is determined to be in control of her own life,
so she continues to fall for losers. She always, though
eventually leaves them, typically to reconnect with her siblings.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
I mean, speaking of TikTok, I just saw a video
on that of when we find those people if we
had rough childhood, what we're finding is familiarity and affirmation
of things like it almost makes us feel normal again.
So it's not your fault when you do stuff like
that imprinted into you of like, this is standard, this
is what normal feels like, this is love.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
I have to earn love and this is the only
way through these negative things when it's just not it's
just been imprinted on your very young mind.

Speaker 3 (13:39):
Yeah, it really sucks.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
In eighteen eighty seven, Pearl and her sister head west
for the first time to Chicago on a train cart dressed.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
In men's clothing.

Speaker 1 (13:48):
They get in trouble with a lot basically the whole time,
getting caught for petty theft, but also getting a lot
of attention for their whole pretty girls dressed as boys thing.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
Because people figure them out.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
They eventually end up back in the New and from
this moment forward, Pearl is always trying her best to
head west.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
That's her goal.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
In the eighteen nineties, Pearl officially takes on the alias
Pearl Heart. At this point, she's doing sex work in Buffalo,
New York, in part because there are so few jobs
for women at the time, and the jobs that are
available are usually meant for women that are more educated
than Pearl. At the turn of the century, according to
a quote pulled from the main source that I used
Wildcat the book Wildcat, Buffalo is considered quote one of

(14:29):
the roughest and most dangerous towns in America. It is
sewn with saloons and the Irish longshoremen love nothing more
than a fight, and the quote prostitutes numbered in the hundreds.

Speaker 2 (14:41):
Sure, I mean everyone's doing what they need to do. Yeah,
fight or fue ma'am. Yeah, that's right, it works.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
Everyone is drunk, everyone is smoking cigarettes now because they're
a new thing, which I didn't know, and some people
are starting to use opiates regularly.

Speaker 3 (14:59):
These people are called morphine eaters.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
Pearl Heart was the name of a popular madam who
ran a brothel in Buffalo at the time, and it's
possible that our Pearl aka Lily Davey might have been
working for her and just liked the sound of the
name and took it on herself.

Speaker 3 (15:15):
But eventually she's just too well.

Speaker 1 (15:16):
Known by police to continue living freely in the way
she wants, so she finally starts her journey west via
Ohio and Illinois. And she's not even twenty years old
at this point. Oh wow, So a life of adventure
sounds like Pearl Mary's again in eighteen ninety one, another
fucking abusive alcoholic, and then she's finally able to leave

(15:38):
him for good, and so in eighteen ninety three she
saves her money for a train ticket to Colorado and
at twenty two years old, finally takes off west.

Speaker 3 (15:46):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
So the Wild West is happening currently in this moment,
and it's pretty fucking wild, so territories are turned into states.
There's a real boom or bust mentality, and areas that
are being settled often people are poor, hustling and moving
around a lot to hitch their wagon too the next
you know, big thing or town that's being built. Infrastructure

(16:08):
can't keep up. Roads between cities and towns which see
a lot of traffic are poorly maintained. They're dangerous, and
at the same time, the US is still waging an
unofficial war on indigenous people living in these areas, so
there's not much comprehensive law enforcements, so bands about laws
are basically running the show. And remember almost everyone is

(16:29):
fucking drunk because the alcohol is probably better than the water.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
You know, I mean it's safer, safer, and more fun
than the water.

Speaker 3 (16:36):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
So everyone's drinking, smoking and getting high all the time
during this period.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
I mean you'd kind of have to because like literally
your feet are in three inches of mud all the time.
It's just making me think of Deadwood, where it's it's
pretty nasty.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
No, things aren't pretty. This isn't Back to the Future volume.

Speaker 3 (16:55):
Three, No, this is Deadwood season two.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
So violence, of course worse goes with the territory. It's
a way of life in the Old West, including with
Pearl Heart. She ultimately ends up in Arizona working as
a sex worker again. After one of her x's husbands
comes out to Arizona looking for her, Pearl winds up
falling back in love with him, so he introduces Pearl
to cigarettes and opiates, which will from then on become

(17:20):
a constant in her life. She also has two children
with this man. They're raised by one of her sisters
back east. She never reveals the names of her two
children publicly, and her identities are still unconfirmed, which, like,
what a fucking twenty three and meter DNA test reveal
has that got to be?

Speaker 3 (17:36):
Could you imagine? Right?

Speaker 2 (17:39):
You're just like some people are, like I'm Dutch Irish
and it's like I'm fucking related to the biggest badass
of all time.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
Seriously, so crazy.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
But one thing we know for sure, Pearl is still
extremely close with her family despite her rough and tuble
life out West, and is in regular correspondence with them.
Due to a crackdown on sex work and some other
urban areas of Arizona and a desire to get away
from her abusive husband again.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
Pearl heads to Mammoth, Arizona in.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
Late eighteen ninety eight, and it's here in this small
mining town where she gets really really good at target shooting.
Mammoth is also where she meets a man, another man
called Joe Boot in January safeteen ninety nine.

Speaker 3 (18:20):
I know, I knew that would be a Joe Boot
in the wild West time.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
Yeah, it's got to be a fake name, I know, right,
or like they just called him not because yet the
biggest boots, this son of the fucking missus Evy.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
Or what was his feet were super tiny? Oh, Joe
Boots here? Hey, what's up?

Speaker 1 (18:39):
Hey, what's up the booty? Oh and it says Joe
Boot is not his real name.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
Oh, we guessed it.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
To this day, his true identity is not known, and
there's really not a lot known about him, but we
do know that he's twenty eight years old when he
meets Pearl, who's also twenty eight, and he and Pearl
quickly become a couple. Joe Boots seems to have been
the only man in girl's life who treats her really well.
He's a little submissive and just does what she tells him.
To do, which is like, yeah, man, just fucking come on,

(19:07):
there's not a problem.

Speaker 3 (19:08):
Yeah, go along with the plan. Yeah, can we have
a moment?

Speaker 1 (19:12):
And they seem happy together for a time, So Pearl
and Joe stick together. They bounce around mining towns in
Arizona looking for odd jobs, eventually landing in a place
called Globe. Here in the spring of eighteen ninety nine,
Pearl gets a letter from her family back. He's telling
her that her mom is really sick and Nati dying
and that if Pearl ever wants to see her again,

(19:33):
she'd better get home right away. And Pearl's own words,
she wrote quote that letter drove me crazy. No matter
what I had been, My mother had been my dearest,
truest friend, and I longed to see her again before
she died. I had no money, I could get no money.
From what I know now, I believe I became temporarily insane.
And it sums that what she meant by temporarily insane

(19:53):
is that she is about to make some really reckless
choices to get quick cash. Yeah, so Pearl comes up
with an idea to that quick cash.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
It's not a check cashing place, is it trading? A
stolen cow. Twise, it's not that.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
Okay, three hundred stoling cows. Ooh, it's not it. In
May of eighteen ninety nine, the couple leave on horseback
for Caine Spring Canyon, between the towns of Globe and Riverside, Arizona.
And here Pearl makes a consequential decision. She's going to
rob a stage coach, and Joe Boot is gonna fucking
help her.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
Yeah, Joe Boot, Joe Yeah. So let's talk a little bit.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
Why don't we about stage coach robberies, everyone's favorite pastime
in Arizona. There at least one hundred and twenty nine
stage coach robberies between eighteen seventy five and nineteen oh three,
and in most of these cases that thieves are never caught.
A stage coach is probably what you're imagining when you
imagine people traveling in the Old West. They're kind of

(20:51):
a wagon.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
But if you've ever seen a Wells Fargo checkbook, there's
a picture of a stage coach on it.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Yes, please, it's that thing. I don't have to explain
this to you. You guys are smart.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
Branding has taught you this already.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
It's right, you guys are bankers, and you're smart and
you know things. So that's what it is. But here's
the other thing about it. So the driver of the
stage coach, he sits up to the top and you know,
makes the horses go. There's someone sitting next to him
called a shotgun messenger. He carries a gun in order
to guard any particularly like a valuable cargo. And that's
why we call sitting in the passenger seat sitting shotgun.

Speaker 3 (21:27):
Yeah, can you believe I can? That's the best.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
That's I love it from the Old West, riding shotgun.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
Fucking I love origins. What is it called? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (21:39):
You know? Org?

Speaker 2 (21:40):
Oh isn't there a special fancy language word for it?
I bet yeah, language arenas would know.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
It's all right, damn it.

Speaker 1 (21:50):
I know.

Speaker 3 (21:51):
I want to say syntax, but it's not.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
Yeah, I know, it's like, yeah, I know what you mean,
anra do you know?

Speaker 3 (21:57):
Do you know? I wish I did?

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Okay makes me feel better that you don't know either.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
But I'm gonna keep thinking. Now, I'm gonna ruminate while
you go.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
I'm gonna google it.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
I'm gonna go, okay, yes, thank you, but don't say
it before I want to pure guest before you give us.

Speaker 3 (22:13):
The answer nomenclature. No, it's like that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
So if you're a band at trying to rob a
stage coach, you're gonna want to target stage coach that
doesn't have a Shota messenger so you don't get shot
and killed. So Pearl and Joe stake out. The stage
coach is traveling through Cain's Spring Canyon, and most of them.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
Don't have a guard on board, so they're in luck.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
The road they've chosen to stake out is described by
a journalist of the day as quote one of the
worst in the Southwest. It follows a creek bed, It's
really steep, and there's high cliffs around. On one cliff side,
someone even painted the words are you ready to meet
your God?

Speaker 3 (22:46):
Oh? Jesus, cool dude, very chill, very chill.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
Hey, I'm just trying to go to Tempe Jesus.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
Needless to say, this is a scary road, But on
May twenty ninth, eighteen ninety nine, it becomes even more
frightening to a single stage coach when two seemingly male
bandits step out from the roadside brush with their guns drawn.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
And with handlebar mustaches that are flapping in the wind because.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
They're not real. Oh, it just has to be so obvious, right,
I hope.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
So obviously it's Joe and Pearl, and she's dressed in
her distinctive men's clothing. The robbery happens quickly, the driver stops.
The three passengers climb out of the carriage when they're told.
Joe does most of the talking, probably because Pearl's voice
would give her away. One of the passengers later describes
Pearl as wearing quote rough shirt and blue overalls, the

(23:37):
latter tucked into coarse boots that were plainly too large.
Under the dirty cowboy hat, there showed a curl or
two of dark hair, and the hands that definitely turned
the pockets inside out were small and white, so they
or maybe were onto her.

Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah, she needs some gloves, some work gloves. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (23:56):
Pearl only says one thing throughout the robbery. When one
of the men is slow to turn over his cash,
she points for a gun at him and says, cough up, partner,
or I'll plug you. I'm sure she said it a
lot better than that.

Speaker 3 (24:09):
She said it like this, like raising her shoulder. The
whole time.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
Pro collects the money, while Joe keeps his gun ready
to shoot. She gets roughly four hundred and thirty one
dollars in total from the passengers, which in today's money,
can I guess please?

Speaker 2 (24:26):
Four hundred and thirty one dollars in the late eighteen hundreds,
or as I like to call it, the turn of
the century, four hundred and thirty one dollars today's money
fifty thousand now fourteen thousand.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
Oh and, being greedy.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
After she robs them, she gives everyone back one dollar
so they can get something to eat at their next destination.
Oh is that sweeter? Is that condescending? Here's one dollar back?

Speaker 2 (24:54):
Well, but one dollar back then was ninety nine dollars,
that's right.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
And then Pearl and Joe right off into the hills
and make their escape. They're caught almost immediately, sorry to burst.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
Right over the right over the hill. Yeah, just people
standing up. Oh dang. The local sheriffs on the hunt
for the bandits.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
As soon as the rob stage coach makes it back
to town, they follow their hoof prints. He sneaks up
on them and catches them while they're asleep. Joe goes quietly,
but Pearl puts up a fight and uh then they
they're taken to jail. Pearl is furious about being captured,
but she also quickly becomes famous.

Speaker 3 (25:37):
News of her arrest spreads and all over.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
The country people are enamored with this quote Lady Bandit.
Journalists flock to the jail where she's kept, writing article
after article about her, taking pictures of her, particularly of
her dressed in men's clothes, and we'll put some in
the in the photos on the social media post of this.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
Episode of this podcast here.

Speaker 1 (25:58):
On this podcast episode, Pearl's unapologetic. She seems to love
the attention. This is where she starts telling lies about
her life and especially her childhood, and spreading misinformation that
lasts on her Wikipedia to this day.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
Etymology, etymology, etymology.

Speaker 3 (26:17):
Oh my god, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
I was trying to simultaneously actively listen and get that
fucking word before all of Wait, Alejandro, was I right?

Speaker 3 (26:27):
I thought it was something else? What did you think
it was? I thought, oh?

Speaker 2 (26:33):
Oh, an idiom is a is basically like slang for something.
So that's like saying, don't put the car before the horse.
What the history of us saying? The history of it is?
The is the etymology of it.

Speaker 3 (26:44):
Yes, etymology is the starting of the history of the
former words.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah, but it's also an idiom. Sitting shotgun is an idiom.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
Got it?

Speaker 2 (26:51):
So basically the etymology of sitting shotgun is the story
you told.

Speaker 3 (26:55):
Us, got it? We all wait, got it? You go
and did it? Figured it out, just three smart people,
and we completely stopped your story. Cool. Sorry about that, Okay,
I don't care. So America loves the Lady Bandit. The
Lady Bandit. They love her. In fact, someone loves her
so much.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
A local admirer brings Pearl Heart a Bobcat cub as
a gift, and she must be really charming because the
jailers let her keep it in her cell. Oh I know,
and they I know. There's a photo of her with
her Bobcat in her jail cell. It's pretty fucking unbelievable.
She gets away with almost everything. She's also starting to
share some feminist views with the press, notably sharing in

(27:36):
a famous interview with Cosmopolitan quote, I shall never submit
to be tried under the law that neither I nor
my sex had a voice in making.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
Oh a fucking men.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
Excuse me, I think we've got a quote that everybody
needs to That's might be our new shirt for real,
because seriously, like, no fucking way, no way.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
One day, jailor enters her cell to bring Pearl her
morning dose of morphine, which I guess was a thing
that they brought you back then.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
You got that in jail.

Speaker 1 (28:07):
I don't know, maybe she was like addicted and I
don't think that it was an issue.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Then it wasn't a Yeah, that makes sense. It wasn't
that bad a deal.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
When he walks in, he sees a giant hole in
the wall and the letter on the cot. Pearl's gone,
aided by a fellow prisoner who had escaped the day before.
Authorities are embarrassed, but also kind of amused. There's more
media sensation. The public just loves Pearl heart. People even
start to really consider the statements Pearl has said about feminism.

(28:35):
Why should women be indicted? Try it, convicted and sentenced
bace on laws? They didn't help, right, But almost immediately
she's caught again while trying to hop a train and
is returned to jail to prepare for her upcoming trial.
The media continues to report on her extensively, and soon
everyone has an opinion. There's a few hiccups with the court,
but in the end, the trial itself takes less than

(28:55):
a day. Pearl has the jury eating out of the
palm of her hand. She plays into their sympathies and
says that she only robbed the stage coach because she
needed money to visit her poor, sick and dying mom,
which is true.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
But saying it like that makes it sound like a lie.
It's it's like something she came up with after the fact.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
Yeah right.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
It ends up that while Joe Boot gets sentenced to
thirty years in prison, Pearl, which in today's years, is life.
It is probably life. Actually, if you're like thirty, yes,
you're not going to live to sixty.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
That's right. Not if you're on all that opium, that's right.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
Pearl gets five years, he gets thirty, and she hits die.

Speaker 3 (29:33):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
They're both sent to Yuma Prison, which is perhaps the
most notorious prison in the West until it was shut
down in nineteen oh nine. When she arrives in November
of eighteen ninety nine, Pearl's the only woman convict at
the prison.

Speaker 3 (29:48):
Oh shit, uh huh.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
During her time at Yuma, Pearl starts to write poetry
and read from the books in the prison library. She's
not thriving, but she's doing okay. The guards stowed on her,
and before long there are other women that are InCor
that are incarcerated at EMA, and she bonds with some
of them, and during their prison sentence, Joe Boot actually
manages to escape and vanishes into obscurity and has never

(30:11):
seen or heard from again. So another check your twenty
three and me DNA tests.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
People, Joe Boots my granddaddy. There's some grandpa.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
There's some boring grandpa out there, you know in the
nineteen whatevers who his grandkids that were just the most
boring man in the world. And it's fucking Joe Boot, who,
like Rob a stage coach with pearl heart and real
never told anyone.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
He was keeping it, mom, and he's keeping his tiny,
tiny little feet hidden in those slippers.

Speaker 1 (30:39):
And that's why we do hometown episodes, and so you
can tell us the story about your wild great grandfather.

Speaker 3 (30:44):
And so's Pearl.

Speaker 1 (30:46):
No, she got caught again and tried and oh oh,
everything right, right, right right. So there are also stories
of Pearl trying to escape by seducing guards or other
inmates to help her, but they're unverified, but of course
add to the public mystique. And there's even a rumored
that her sex appeal is what leads to her early release.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
And pardoned by the governor.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
But it actually assumes that there was a smallpox scare
in the prison, so they released several prisoners on good behavior.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
Yeah, so she got out.

Speaker 1 (31:11):
So three years after her famous crime, Pearl Heart is
released from prison and starts new life.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
On December fifteenth, nineteen oh two, she.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
Heads back to Kansas City to be with her mother
and family, and it turns out that even though her
mother's illness prompted this whole crime in the first place,
her mom completely recovers and lives a long life. Oh
so that could have been maybe a bit of a fib.
It doesn't seem like that was a fib. But it
just like didn't happen that way. It wasn't as bad
as the letter. Yeah, or she survived. I mean, she

(31:41):
just survived and thrived.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
She beat it because she was the mother of nine
and nothing would kill her.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
Yea.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
She took enough opium and she was fine. At this point,
Pearls story becomes a little Hazy. Some accounts say she
becomes an actress, some say she runs a cigar store,
and some say she continues the life of and it
seems that she quickly drops the Pearl Heart alias, so
it's hard to track her for sure. But we do
know is that roughly twenty years after pearls released from prison,

(32:09):
and middle aged woman visiting Tucson, Arizona, walks into Pima
County Jail, the county jail, and she asks to take
a look around. And this request is unusual, so the
guards ask her why, and she replies, quote, I'm Pearl
Heart and spent some time here about twenty five years ago,
and I would like to see my old cell. So
she just randomly shows up twenty years later. Ooh, huh, I.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
Just wrote a little story that she hid something like
she had muney she hid it in the wall or
something like, No, it's not your cell. You were just
held there like there's nothing. Yeah, isn't a jail cella
thing you never want to see again?

Speaker 3 (32:47):
So why would she think can I just look around?
Maybe she was showing her kids or something.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
This is where mommy spent some time with the bobcat.

Speaker 3 (32:57):
You no oh, Pearl, as.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
You do well, Pearl, They let her look around. She leaves,
and this is the last time that Pearl Heart publicly
admits that she is Pearl Heart. She spends the rest
of her life in complete obscurity. Most accounts suggest that
she suffers from heart and lung complications, obviously due to
her heavy cigarette and opioit use throughout her young life.

(33:19):
She dies in nineteen thirty five surrounded by family, and
is buried in Rose Hills Memorial Park near Los Angeles
under her real name Lily Naomi Myers. She did end
up getting to the West.

Speaker 3 (33:31):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (33:32):
Yeah. Her biographer John Boisnecker describes Pearl like this quote.
The vast majority of women in the nineteenth century did
not have sexual relations outside of marriage. They did not smoke,
and they certainly did not use opium and morphine. They
did not wear men's clothing, ride a straddle or carrie
six shooters. Pearl Heart broke all these taboos and then some.

(33:53):
She swore, smoked, drank, robed, rode hard, broke jail, and
used men with abandon. The Old West never saw another
woman like her, and that is the story of the
Old West feminist icon. In stagecoach, Robert Pearl Heart, the
bandit queen. Fuck.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
Yes, I needed that story today.

Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:15):
Are we gonna wish I had gone second? Or is
your story?

Speaker 2 (34:18):
No?

Speaker 3 (34:18):
I got a pretty good one for you.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
Oh all right, but I just won't say hell yes
to Pearl Heart and all those doing that Pearl Heart
thing out there.

Speaker 3 (34:26):
That's right, let's all try to be a little more
like Pearl Heart.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
We're gonna have to be a little more like Pearl
Heart minus the opioids.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
Please.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Well, the opioids are just gonna get y'all murky on
what the plan is.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
We need to stick to the plan. That's true. They
just muddle.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Drugs just muddle, especially if you did watch Deadwood and
see how hard. But the lead woman who was so
good in that show it wasn't Carrie Coon.

Speaker 1 (34:51):
I never watched the show. Oh it's I don't know,
I know so good.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
Who's the lead in it? Is it Timothy Oliphant, Yes
it is. I don't like him.

Speaker 1 (35:01):
What he reminds me of an Orange County bro in
every fucking role he's in.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Well he's played a lot of Orange Catty bros. No,
you're right, but I can't get past it. Will you
just sample on like HBO plus, just go sample the
first episode because you see he in this role. He
is like the the unwilling sheriff of Deadwood and he
has this kind of look in his eye. He is

(35:26):
just he's hotness Old West hotness personified. And then it's
just a really good, great show with some more swearing
than this podcast. If you can believe it, that's wild.
We better try to beat that. You gotta ramp it up. Yeah,
that's that's what we've been secretly competing with Deadwood for
the most swear.

Speaker 3 (35:44):
It's our goal for year seven is the fuck You're
gonna do it? I believe in us. That was great.
That was Thank you killing Yeah, I loved it. That
was fun. Thanks Sarah for your research. Yeah, great job, Sarah.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
The only story that you could follow up that story with,
and you might agree, is the story of the nineteen
eighty eruption of Mount Saint Helen's.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
Yes right, Yes, the perfect match. Wow.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah, I don't know a lot about this because that's
here I was born, so I was really smart yet.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
I was ten years old, so I think that's the
smartest I've ever been.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
It's where I see you were fascinated, probably by right.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
So nineteen eighty it was that time where truly we
had four channels on our television. It was pre cable.
I think it may have been pre atari. There was
so little going on in the world that when this happened,
it was the thing that was happening, especially on the
West Coast, I should say, insane, just a disaster beyond scope,
and it was what was on the news constantly, and

(36:50):
it was in the conversation for a very long time.
So the main sources used in today's story or the
nineteen ninety documentary Up from the Ashes, which was produced
by the Seattle news station Como TV, which is a
big part of this story. That news station, also the
twenty ten Como News report titled Relive Como Photographer's daring
story of Survival, and a Seattle Post Intelligencer article by

(37:14):
Natalie Gavera and Alex Halverson titled forty two years Ago,
Mount Saint Helen's woke up and blew her top. And
you can find the rest of the sources in our
show notes. It's the week of March sixteenth, nineteen eighty,
and we're about fifty miles north east of Portland, Oregon,
just kind of just over the Wargon, Washington state line

(37:36):
and something bizarre is happening. In that week alone, one
hundred small earthquakes are clocked in the area, and then
by March twentieth, twenty earthquakes are recorded every hour.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
Oh dear.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, So geologists and volcanologists are flocking to this area
because they think they know what it means. Mount Saint Helen,
the dormant volcano is wake up and they're excited for
the chance to study it as it comes back from dormancy.
The last time the mountain acted like a volcano was
in eighteen fifty seven. Mount Saint Helen's what they call

(38:12):
eruptive history dates back nearly forty thousand years, and long
before it was given its current name by white explorers
in the late seventeen hundreds, it was known as Lawa Lacla,
which is click atat for what basically translates to smoking mountain.
So the native tribes in the area knew that it

(38:33):
was an active volcano and talked about it. So for
everybody else that lives near the mountain, life just continues
on as normal. And then on March twenty first, a
four point one magnitude earthquake is recorded near the mountain.
This one's bigger, obviously than the previous earthquakes, and at
this time residents nearby can feel it, but it's not

(38:53):
big enough or scary enough to make the front page.
In fact, the next day's Seattle Post Intelligencer reports on it.
The story's three paragraphs long and it is on page eight.

Speaker 3 (39:04):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
Wow, So they could warn people, like get the hell
out of Dodge or something.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
But they yeah, but like, it just didn't seem like
they were at that point yet.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Six days later, on March twenty seventh, the mountain burps
up a cloud of steam and ash. This eruption leaves
behind a huge fissure on the top of the mountain,
and even though this does garner more interest, there's still
not a ton of concern. A scientist named Eric Wagner
recently told the Oregon Public Broadcasting that quote, people just

(39:33):
didn't take it seriously in the run up. They thought
it would just be this interesting and funny thing. So
while all this geologic activity starts happening, a twenty eight
year old Seattle News photographer named Dave Crockett is paying
close attention. Dave and the rest of the team at
Seattle's Como TV believe that this has the potential to
be a really big story. Dave would later say, quote,

(39:54):
I really wanted to be there to cover what I
felt was probably going to be the biggest story of
the decade. So Dave's put on a three person news
team with reporter Ken Shram and sound operator Joe Wren,
and the three guys travel down to Mount Saint Helens
to cover the story. Of course, not even the best
scientists can predict exactly what will happen next or when

(40:17):
it will happen, So the days pass and the suspense
just keeps building. Dave and his news crew try to
provide the public with as much information as they can,
and then on April third, Washington's then Governor Dixie Lee
Ray declares the state of emergency. So she sends a
very direct message to the public saying, quote, don't go
to Mount Saint Helens. Don't try to get as close

(40:38):
as to the mountain as possible.

Speaker 3 (40:41):
Man, people are so dumb. We have to be.

Speaker 1 (40:44):
I'm saying we as a people, Yes, don't go near
the active volcano.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
It's like in the message to the public. She's saying,
don't and then filling the rest in with what basically
a suggestion of what you could do, don't go super
close up to it and take a bunch of So
this doesn't seem like the kind of thing that needs
to be said. This volcano is literally spitting up ash clouds,
but it's reported that hundreds of sightseers continue to visit

(41:11):
the mountain each week, even as tremors continue.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
To shake the area.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
Could you imagine, first of all, like in Hawaii, they
have beautiful volcanoes that go off all the time. I
truly would not even fly over it in a helicopter.
I would be so scared. Yeah, it's so powerful. Why
would you mess around?

Speaker 3 (41:32):
Do you think you're better than the volcano?

Speaker 2 (41:34):
If you're not, you think you're better than her, You're not.
Some people wind up in como news segments, including one
man who says, quote, I want to see it blow.
That'd be great something you'd only get one chance in
a lifetime to see.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
Yeah, because you're dead.

Speaker 2 (41:50):
And also, sir, you can see it from literally hundreds
of miles away, Like if it happens further away is
a better view? Actually, he's like I want again under it,
So of course they don't talk like that up there,
So of course the majority of locals are normal and
they recognize the situation is becoming increasingly threatening and dangerous.
On April twenty second, the mountain spits up another plume

(42:13):
of ash and steam thirteen thousand feet into the sky
that's taller than the Eiffel Tower. Around the same time,
a huge bulge appears on the side of the mountain.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
That's when I would move very very far away, very far.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
That bulge grows larger every single day, and by the
end of April it's balloon to nearly three hundred feet tall,
the length of a football field. It's been created by
magma pushing up towards the Earth's surface. And if that's
not horrifying enough, those earthquakes just keep coming. Como News
reports that throughout April the mountain is quote rocked by

(42:52):
more big quakes than California gets in ten years. WHOA yeah, So,
needless to say, there's a real sun urgency around this.
Many people living near Mount Saint Helens have left their homes,
but not all of them, so to get the remaining
residents out of harm's Way Governor Ray signs an order
on April thirtieth designating certain areas to be what they

(43:15):
call a danger zone, and the people in this danger
zone are forced to evacuate. But as soon as this
announcement's made, scientists come in ringing alarm bells. They basically
say this designated danger zone is way too small and
it leaves out big swaths of land that are very
close to the volcano. The scientists believe that if Mount

(43:36):
Saint Helens does erupt, many people outside of this danger
zone will also be at risk. It's widely reported that
the evacuation zone is that small because Washington's leadership is
trying to appease local logging companies. Ah So, these companies
have a ton of influence in the region and they
don't want their operations interrupted by a mere volcano. So

(43:59):
as in April turns to may our Como reporting team,
the Intrepid Team, photographer Dave Crockett, reporter Ken Shram, sound
guy Joe Wren, they continue showing up to cover the
activity at Mount Saint Helens. At this point, they've been
on this assignment for weeks. They've been there for every
single shake, boom and blast coming from the mountain, and

(44:19):
they've also heard every update from both public officials and
the scientists. Joe Ran, the sound guy, later says that quote,
every time it puffed, we thought that the next one
would be the big one. So in May, certain measures
are put in place to ensure evacuation orders are being followed,
and this includes roadblocks which are set up in certain
spots around the danger zone. But overall enforcement isn't super aggressive.

(44:43):
As scientist Eric Wagner points out, quote, the government response
was kind of muddled.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
How scary just to be one of those residents just
like waiting, yeah, and where are you going to go
if you're like have to be evacuated for weeks?

Speaker 3 (44:56):
How scary to.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
Have your government be like kind moved by people who
are like yees, I decided it's not dangerous, so I
won't wear a mask. Well, yeah, I'm talking about a
different thing now. So in some cases eviction orders are
completely ignored with no consequence, and at the same time,
public officials are dealing with a ton of pushback from

(45:18):
some residents accusing them of overreach.

Speaker 3 (45:21):
We've heard it all before. People love danger.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
So on May seventeenth, officers operating those roadblocks cave under
public pressure and let people go back and visit their
cabins on the mountain as long as they sign a
liability waiver. These residents are required to leave their homes
by a designated time that evening, so it's like one
last run back up the mountain on that same date,

(45:48):
which is May seventeenth. Como News decides to hand its
coverage of Mount Saint Helens over to its sister station
in Portland, and that makes sense because Seattle's two and
a half hours north of this area. Portland is literally
right over the state line. It's like right over a bridge.
If you've ever been there, it's like Portland is on
this side at the very top of Oregon, and then

(46:09):
you go over a bridge and now you're in essentially Vancouver, Washington,
and it's very close fifty miles from there. Cool. So
Seattle's so much further north that they're basically like, we
don't need our own team when the Portland team is there.
Our three man team of Joe, Dave, and Ken are
taken off the story, but they've been so focused on

(46:30):
this whole story for weeks straight. They're told to go
home and get some rest, and it's really anti climactic
for them. Dave is absolutely gutted. He believes the situation
on Mount Saint Helens is building to an inevitable conclusion
and he really wants to be there when that happens. Yeah,
but he does go home as instructed because their boss

(46:51):
is right ultimately and the team does really need some
rest Eventually. When he gets home that day, he manages
to doze off, but instead of sleeping through the night,
his eyes pop open at three am. He is wide
awake and he's feeling this pull toward the mountain. It's
very intense. Basically, he believes he has to get to
the mountain.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
Now. He knows it's silly.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Obviously, it's a volcano, notoriously unpredictable. Why should he think
he's special enough to somehow know intuitively what's going to happen.
So he tries to kind of put it out of
his mind and shut his eyes and go back to sleep.
When that doesn't work, he picks up the phone and
he calls reporter Ken Shram, but Ken tells Dave just
let it go. It's not only is it the weekend,

(47:35):
it's the middle of the night. We were all just
taken off the story. Ken tells Dave, quote, don't go
to Mount Saint Helens. That's an amazing quote, such a
good quote. So Dave hangs up, but he just can't
shake this feeling. And even though his rational side is
saying listen to Ken, he's made up his mind. So
he gets dressed, he grabs his gear, and without asking permission,

(47:58):
he hops into the station owned new car. It says
Como TV along the side, and it basically looks like
one of those big late seventies sedans, like yeah, real
long and boxy sedan. He cranks the ignition, flicks the
headlights on, and then he drives in the dark in
the middle of the night the two and a half
hours back down to Mount Saint Helen's So By sunrise,

(48:21):
Dave is set up in a clearing near some woods,
eight miles west of the mountain summit. It's a quiet,
clear morning. He has a stunning view of the mountain
and many people say they remember this morning as being
distinctly peaceful and calm. The sky is bright blue, of course,
the trees are gorgeous.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
Deep green.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
Have you ever seen any of the beautiful nature up
in the Pacific Northwest. It's insanely green and verdant because
it fucking never stops raining up there, so it is
when you do go out into nature, it's absolutely magical.
And also in the middle of all that, Mount Saint
Helen has this snowy white cap that looks like something
from a postcard. So it's really beautiful and it's possible

(49:03):
that at some point Dave may have second guess his intuition.
But then just after eight thirty am on May eighteenth,
nineteen eighty, Dave feels the earth violently shaking beneath him. Yeah,
he was fucking right.

Speaker 3 (49:17):
Yeah, Oh my god, in.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
The weirdest way. He was right where he It's like,
what was it? Was it because he spent so much
time there that he somehow was like in tune or
he just knew there were so many indicators something was
going to happen.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
Yeah, He's just like, I got to get back for
this story. It's like a fluke, but it's crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:37):
So it's basically now, it's a five point one magnitude earthquake.
It shakes the earth so violently that the bulge on
the side of Mount Saint Helen's slides off the mountain.
Oh no, and as it goes it pulls a mile
wide chunk of land along with it, causing a gigantic landslide. So,
according to a later University of Washington write up, it's

(49:58):
quote the largest pree avalanche ever recorded.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
And people that are like locals and live there, live
near there will tell you it's just like the top
of the.

Speaker 3 (50:08):
Mountain blew off with what it is, what it ends
up looking like.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
But that thing on the side, which was basically the
indicator that things are happening, that thing blew and so
like some of the ash went up, but then these
huge landslides came down.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
Yeah, god, how fascinating.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
Yeah, hot rock and debris shoot out of Mount Saint
Helen's at speeds of three hundred miles an hour. According
to the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service, quote,
the eruption produced a force equal to ten to fifty
megatons of TNT, which is the equivalent of twenty five
thousand atomic bombs.

Speaker 3 (50:47):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
So then for good measure, Mount Saint Helens shoots a
dense plume of ash sixteen miles into the sky, and
they say they could see it from South Dakota.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
It's weird.

Speaker 1 (51:00):
I just started watching Chernobyl over the weekend. Yeah, and
it's like mirroring all this shit that I that I
was watching in that. But it's not nuclear energy, that's crept,
that's not deadly.

Speaker 3 (51:14):
It's Mother Gaya's energy.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
And she's even more serious.

Speaker 3 (51:19):
Praise me to her. So now Dave's wishes come true.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
He's watching history unfold right before his eyes, and he's
watching it from up close. And as he is starting
to absorb all this o bleique, reality begins to hit him.
He very well could die here. Yeah, And because once
Mount Saint Helen's irrupts, it begins to trigger these landslides
of mudflow, melted ice, and snow all rushing down the

(51:45):
mountain toward him at one time. All around him, trees
are being smashed to the ground. So, without any time
to think, Dave runs to the car, jumps in, starts
the engine, steps on the gas, and with tires squealing,
he pulls into the road and basically enters a life
and death race down this mountain. So as he's going,

(52:05):
Dave's eyes flicked from the road in front of him
to his rear view mirror and even though he can't
really see anything behind him, he has this feeling he's
being chased, so he steps harder on the gas, checks
the rear view mirror, then checks ahead of him on
the road, then back into the rear view, back onto
the road, and in his next glance into the rear
view mirror, he sees something absolutely terrifying. He would later say,

(52:28):
quote it was just a wall of debris, mud, steam rocks, boulders,
and full sized trees just rolling along the entire valley's
disappearing behind me.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
Oh my god. So he basically stands on the gas.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
Later, a Como news report would describe this moment as
quote a wild race through the valley the man in
his news car versus a thirty foot wall of death.
There's a three story building of landslide coming beyond behind him.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
I mean, you're dead immediately. That's just like a media death.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
If you even stop to think about how horrifying the
situation is that you're in, you're dead.

Speaker 3 (53:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
So that wall, that thirty foot wall of landslide is
directly behind him. One mistake and he's a goner. He
ungloses his gaze from the rear view mirror, and when
he looks back onto the road in front of him,
he has to slam on the brakes as he watches
a huge wave of debris completely overtake the road in
front of him. So it's coming from all angles, or

(53:30):
both angles, i should say. With just milliseconds to spare,
Dave swerves the news car onto an old logging road
and he basically narrowly avoids a head on collision with
another wall of debris.

Speaker 3 (53:42):
So just truly by.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
A miracle, like the odds of which you couldn't calculate.
There's a logging road right there, and he just like
takes a right and gets out.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
Of the way.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
God, as he pulls to a stop, his heart's racing.
It's a complete miracle. He's managed to land on what
might be the only patch of roadway untouched by these
huge flows of debris. Everything around him is complete chaos.
Trees are toppling, mud rocks and ash are flying everywhere.
The roadways are now gone. But Dave's still alive and

(54:14):
he's not sure what to do next. He knows driving
out isn't going to be an option. Annie knows he
can't just sit there thinking about it or trying to
figure it out. So the first thing he does is
he pulls a pen and paper out of his news
bag and he starts to write a note, and he figures,
if he's going to die here, he hopes search crews
will somehow find this message and they'll be able to
piece together his last moments of what he was doing.

(54:35):
So he leaves that on the hood of the news car,
and he realizes this sky that was just bright blue
minutes ago is now blocked out by heavy ash and
completely black. It's not even nine o'clock in the morning.
It looks like it's the middle of the night. And
here's what's amazing. You can go on YouTube and you
can watch his footage from Yes from the mountain, really scary,

(55:01):
and you click on it and you know that's what
you're about to look at. But it's complete pitch blackness
with a tinge of like red, and it's insane. It's
like it's he's on the side of a mountain, but
it looks like he's in a closet or something like.

Speaker 3 (55:16):
It's completely black.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
So all that lush terrain is suddenly just black and
completely alien, and long streaks of blue and purple lightning
are striking all around cool. He tries to hold it together.
Of course, he's incredibly frightened. He's also filled with adrenaline,
and he's trying to process, like what's just happened.

Speaker 3 (55:37):
So he does what he knows how to do.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
He takes his news camera from the bag and he
starts rolling, and that's the footage that you can find
on YouTube. As he shoots, he speaks to whoever might
one day find his camera when he's gone, and he says, quote,
dear God, whoever finds this, you can't see this. I'm
sure it's too dark, but I left the car behind
and you can't see anything.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
Oh my god. I wouldn't get out of the car.

Speaker 2 (56:02):
I'd be too scary, right, It's just like, what would
you fucking do? But I think hearing this story, with
a situation like this, it's good to be out of
the car.

Speaker 3 (56:11):
Uh huh, right, it's so well?

Speaker 2 (56:14):
I mean yeah, maybe who knows, Maybe this is just
like this insane, his insane medical experience and LACA.

Speaker 3 (56:23):
So he starts walking.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Under his feet, he can feel the ground is still shaking,
the car alarm's blaring. He feels a wind that's being
sucked back up to the mountaintop, and he can hear
the mountain itself making, as he describes quote constant rumbling,
grinding and growling, sounds very scary. There's ash in the
air that's so thick that it's blacking out. He can

(56:46):
barely see. He's also struggling to breathe. A few times
on camera, you can hear him coughing violently as he
tries to narrate the footage, saying, I can tell you
one thing, this stuff is not made for humans to breathe.
Even sitting down and resting, I just can't breathe. And
it's hard to tell how much time is passing on
the video, but what's clear is that this situation he's

(57:07):
in is incredibly dire. And then off in the distance,
he sees a little patch of light. It's the only
light in like three point sixty so he starts walking
toward it, and as he does, he narrates, and as
he narrates, the patch is like getting thinner and thinner,
and he's coughing as he speaks, saying, I can feel
the ash now in my eyes.

Speaker 3 (57:28):
It's getting very hard to breathe.

Speaker 2 (57:30):
I'm having trouble talking then as that last patch of
light in the distance is closed in by the darkness,
Dave says, this is hell on earth.

Speaker 3 (57:39):
I'm walking through. My god, this is hell. I just
can't describe it. It's pitch black.

Speaker 2 (57:45):
So not only he can only feel, he literally can't
see anything around him, but he can feel heavy ash
falling on his shoulders. And he's in a disaster zone,
just wandering blindly. Yeah, and he's also confused. He doesn't
know what he's going to run into or off of,
like he just yeah, he has no idea. At one point,

(58:07):
Dave talks through the possibility that he's lost his vision
an injury from the blast, and then later he questions
whether or not he's even alive. At one point, he says,
at this moment, I, honest to God, believe I'm dead.

Speaker 3 (58:22):
Oh my god. So here's what Dave.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
So, now we pull all the way out, zoom out
right to the wide, and we see what Dave has
just lived through. The volcanic eruption instantaneously blasts thirteen hundred
feet off the mountain's peak, lowering the elevation from nine thousand,
seven hundred to around eighty three hundred feet.

Speaker 3 (58:45):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (58:46):
So the top comes off, around twelve percent of the
mountain is entirely obliterated in a matter of seconds. The
beautiful bucolic scenery is a gray, cratered wasteland. In fact,
after President Jimmy Carter surveys the damage in a helicopter
and says, quote, someone said it was like a moonscape,

(59:08):
but it's so much worse than anything I've ever seen
in pictures in the moon's surface.

Speaker 3 (59:14):
End quote. So which was a hoax? He says, which
san Ley Kruber directly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
So the landslides up followed the eruption that Dave out
Ran pushed nearly fifty billion gallons of debris filled sludge
down the mountain side. Because you have to remember there
was snow up there and like ice and snow and
things that when they got moved like they were rolling,
they were melting. It all became like mud. You know,

(59:42):
you've seen Dante's Peak, you know, not talking about I
know what you're going about. The landslides level everything in
their paths, including vegetation, animals, roads, buildings. The nearby Tootle
River fills with tons of dangerous debris. According to Oregon
State University Nearly one hundred and fifty thousand acres of
public and private lands are destroyed, as well as two

(01:00:05):
hundred homes, one hundred miles of streams, sixty three miles
of road, and thirteen bridges.

Speaker 3 (01:00:13):
Two hundred homes, two hundred homes and thirteen bridges Holy Shita.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
Meanwhile, in the skies above, all of that ash has
inundated the Earth's atmosphere and is moving around nearby. Visibility
is so low that nearly five thousand cars are abandoned
where they are on roads and highways. The roads remain
unpassable until cleanup crews can come in and physically haul

(01:00:39):
the ash away. It's reported that cities over two hundred
and fifty miles away from Mount Saint Helen's experienced local
ash fall, but it ends up traveling even further than that.
The ash created by this eruption spends the next fifteen
days circling the entire planet. No, yeah, big, it's a
global event.

Speaker 3 (01:01:00):
It's a global event.

Speaker 2 (01:01:01):
All in all, everything within a six to eight mile
radius of Mount Saint Helen's summit is totally obliterated in
this disaster. Now, remember Dave was eight miles away from
the summit. If he had been any closer at all,
he would have almost certainly been killed. So back on
the mountain, Dave just continues wandering with his camera rolling

(01:01:22):
in the dark. You can hear the fear in his
voice as he narrates over a blacked out screen. At
one point, he even addresses his colleague Ken Shram, saying, quote,
you know, Shram, you were right when I saw that
mountain go. I turned the car around, and I could
see in the rear of your mirror. I could see
the stuff coming. There was no way I was going
to outrun that. I just parked the car and I

(01:01:42):
started running for high ground. That mudflow came down. It
came within three feet of the car, with trees, trees
and boulders and things five times as big as that
news car, Shram, all but fifty feet from me.

Speaker 3 (01:01:57):
My god, you were right. I never should have gone.
I'm up here.

Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
It's like, on one hand, yeah, he was the only
witnesses incredible thing, and he followed his intuition and it happened.
But on the other hand, it's like, yeah, but you
might fucking die from it there and survive it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
The risk is like, it's beyond it's ninety nine point
nine percent a death trap. Like yeah, So incredibly, Dave
ends his message to Ken with renewed optimism, saying quote,
I'm going to live to tell my grandchildren about this,
with God's help. So he's still struggling to breathe, and
he sits himself down on what he later describes as

(01:02:35):
a cliff. He gives into this surreal situation. When he
later looks back on this moment, he says, quote, I
had a ringside seat for the rest of the day.
I watched a mountain erupt right in front of me.
The word awesome is overused, but it was awesome. It
was just beautiful.

Speaker 3 (01:02:53):
End quote.

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
I was going to add my own thing in the
middle of that quote, which is it was nineteen eighty
so the word awesome.

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
Was seriously overused.

Speaker 2 (01:03:00):
So as time passes, a breeze picks up and it
begins to break up the thick ash that's literally been
suffocating and blinding him. So with every minute his visibility improves.
It's not great, everything is washed in this greenish yellowy globe,
but Dave can now see a few feet in front
of him, and this feels like a small victory. So
he celebrates by attaching his wide angle lens and he

(01:03:23):
snaps himself a selfie on the mountain.

Speaker 3 (01:03:27):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
This image has since become iconic. When Dave describes it later,
he says, quote, I had a smile on my face.
I was covered in ash and my hair was sticking out.
But I think you can tell from the expression on
my face that I thought I was going to get out.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
Wow, And he was.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
Right that night, a rescue helicopter scouring the area spots Dave.
This is a very heavy moment for him, and he
becomes emotional. After everything he's been through, one near death
experience after another, he realizes he's actually going to live.
Dave says, quote, I just started laughing and screaming out
loud and yelling at the mountain.

Speaker 1 (01:04:04):
Because I thought he was going to freeze to death too,
act like that night right right?

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
And if he's covered in this ash, which is every
single thing is gray, how the fuck are those rescue
helicopters supposed to find people up there? Yeah, it's just crazy.
And also he has no right to yell at that mountain.
The mountain's like, you know what, I didn't invite you here.
I showed you I was bulging.

Speaker 3 (01:04:26):
Yeah, yeah, I like, woke you up. Bro, Try to
tell you. Shram tried to tell you, yeah, what if.

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
The the intuition was just actually, you know, the universe
saying it's about to explode.

Speaker 3 (01:04:39):
Don't go there, don't go there.

Speaker 1 (01:04:41):
He thought it was back to explode, go there, and
then mountains Like dude, what the fuck?

Speaker 3 (01:04:46):
Dude?

Speaker 2 (01:04:47):
Listen closer. Dave incredibly escapes this disaster with his life.
Many people were not that fortunate. In fact, as many
as sixty people died in the Mount Saint Helen's eruption
or in the aftermath, some due to asphyxiation, thermal injuries,
or trauma from the debris. There was a fatal car
accident due to poor visibility.

Speaker 3 (01:05:09):
Two people had.

Speaker 2 (01:05:10):
Heart attacks while they were shoveling ash Oh no, yeah,
And that's not necessarily about their personal health. It could
have been because they were inhaling, so they were trying
to shovel it and inhale it all at the same time.
The exact number of deaths is disputed. It's usually put
between fifty seven and sixty people. So here is this

(01:05:32):
crazy story. I was asking Marin about a specific story
that I read in the sources, and then she found this.
So there was a crop dust or plane that flew
into power lines. And there are some people that attribute
that to the ash fall and that he had no

(01:05:52):
visibility and basically flew into power lines, but that actually
happened before the volcanic eruption. Here's the craziest thing that
Marin found. She said, there were these college guys floating
the Yakima River that day and they witnessed the crop
duster accident. So they watched this crop duster fly into

(01:06:13):
power lines. They got out of the river, they tried
to help the pilot, they saw he was dead. They
stuck around at the scene until help arrived to rescue,
like to get the plane out of the power lines
and basically say what happened. They got back into the river,
they keep on floating down the river and then Mount

(01:06:34):
Saint Helen's erupt. Guys, guys, can you fuck it? It's
like put the beer down?

Speaker 3 (01:06:40):
How many? How many of those dudes were like, I'm
never gonna drink again. Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:45):
So almost immediately, Governor Lee announces most people died inside
the danger zone, suggesting these victims had defied eviction orders
and the roadblocks. It's unclear whether she said this deliberately
or if she was you know, an incorrect information, or
she was just mistaken, but this fact is quickly debunked.

(01:07:06):
In fact, only three of the sixty victims were even
in the danger zone three Wow, And just as scientists
had feared, most people were killed in those areas deemed
safe by public officials. In the years since, many people
have discussed how much higher the loss of life would
have been if Mount Saint Helen's had erupted a day later,

(01:07:28):
which would have been a Monday, which would have meant
those nearby logging sites would have been fully staffed with workers. Fuck,
but it was the weekend, wow, so much many less
people were up there. So in the days and weeks
after the eruption, Washington State leadership receives a huge amount
of backlash for how they handled the situation, and Governor

(01:07:50):
Lee would later lose her bid for reelection. Meanwhile, Dave
Crockett's unlikely survival story turns him into an overnight celebrity.
According to a by Como News Seattle quote, religious fanatics
hounded him, so did psychics and wackos. There were random

(01:08:10):
marriage proposals. They all wanted a piece of Dave. They
thought he was touched by God, which I'm sorry, I
think he was such by somebody.

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
Oh yeah, whatever, whatever God do you want to believe
in knocked on his door.

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:26):
Even his abandoned news car became a tourist attraction.

Speaker 3 (01:08:30):
Now, yeah, so they left it there. Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:08:33):
Yeah, Dave did not want this attention. Obviously. He's understandably
traumatized after surviving such a gigantic disaster, and he suffers
from nightmares for years. Whoa, He tells reporters, quote, I
had dreams where I'd come back up here with rescue people,
and I'd go through the trees and the ash and
we'd find bodies, and the rescuers would ask me, looking

(01:08:55):
at these bodies, why didn't you do something to help
these people?

Speaker 3 (01:08:58):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
I knew it wasn't my fault, but I think emotionally
I couldn't quite shake it.

Speaker 3 (01:09:04):
What a fucking nightmare, I mean, just horrible. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):
Of course Dave isn't the only person emotionally affected by
this disaster. Many people living near Mount Saint Helens experience
PTSD depression, feelings of hopelessness, and insomnia after the disaster.
Dave has since come to terms with the experience. On
the thirtieth anniversary of the Mount Saint Helens eruption in
twenty ten, he says, quote to oversimplify it, I feel

(01:09:31):
comfortable with the whole thing now. I feel very privileged
to have been there that day, believe it or not.

Speaker 3 (01:09:36):
End quote.

Speaker 2 (01:09:37):
After being rescued, Dave goes on to have a long
career in photography. He now lives in Montana, and he's
received multiple accolades.

Speaker 3 (01:09:45):
For his work over the years.

Speaker 2 (01:09:47):
Since the nineteen eighty eruption, life has returned to Mount
Saint Helens. There's a sense of rebirth in the area.
There are new ponds, new lakes, and new meadows. But
as peaceful as the area seems on most days, it
is also still an active volcano, and it woke back
up in September two thousand and four and was active
for a few years, and then quieted back down in

(01:10:10):
two thousand and eight. Scientists say they fully expect the
volcano to erupt again, but it's unclear when. For now,
Mount Saint Helens continues to give volcanologists, geologists, and even
layman an important fascinating and extremely humbling look into our
physical world. As a Como News report once pointed out, quote,
Mount Saint Helens is beyond our control, and perhaps that's

(01:10:33):
why we find ourselves drawn to it, to see the
result of the awesome power on display here and a
portion of our earth being recreated. And yet, as the
lava dome rebuilds what was once Mount Saint Helen's perfect peak,
we're reminded that the nineteen eighty eruption is only one
of dozens and dozens of eruptions in the mountains forty
thousand year history, and it will almost certainly happen again.

(01:10:56):
So we wonder will we live to see the volcano's
awesome power again and what story will come up from
those ashes? And that is the story of the nineteen
eighty eruption of Mount Saint Helen's and the incredible better
than Dante's Peak survival story of photographer Dave Crockett.

Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
I can't wait to see his video and pictures, and
I want to watch all of it now.

Speaker 2 (01:11:21):
The video's rough, because it's fucking scary. It's that thing
where you know, what's scarier than like monsters and blood
and stuff like that pitch blackness and like light going out.

Speaker 3 (01:11:33):
The fact that he.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
Could have just walked off of a cliff, to me,
it is the scariest thing I've ever heard.

Speaker 2 (01:11:38):
He he just had to do something. He was like desperate.
But then that selfie that he took is so funny
and so kind of like, yeah, best case scenario for
a story like that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:52):
Yeah, he got so freaking lucky. It's a survivor story too. Yeah,
and I survived, it isn't I survived. Dave survived, Yeah,
Dave did survive. Well, we're going to survive too. We're
all going to survive.

Speaker 3 (01:12:06):
That's right. God survive this episode. Yeah, we did. We
did it. High five on the survival. Hell yeah, Well
thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 (01:12:16):
We really appreciate you get out there and protect your
rights in any way that you can. Definitely, should we
do a donation? Yes, definitely, Okay, should we do what's
the abortion.

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
To walgreensan parenthu? There's the Narrow Oh yeah, to Walgreens.

Speaker 3 (01:12:37):
And we want to donate. We're very concerned about Walgreens.
They're all pro choice America.

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):
All right, Well, then let's give ten thousand dollars to
Narrow pro Choice America and basically start fighting with our
money because that's what we can do today.

Speaker 1 (01:12:54):
That's right, and do what you can, anything you can,
Let's fight for our rights.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
Website is pro Choice America dot org. Of course there's
also Planned Parenthood if you live in South Carolina. I'm
sure there at they're action steps that you guys can take.
You know, the information's all out there. I think it's
just people. These bells need to start getting wrong because
things are getting so dire, yeah, terrifying, But guess what

(01:13:21):
we have each other. And I don't think women have
ever been as empowered and as connected as they are
right now. So don't forget that, and you're not alone,
stay sexy and don't get murdered. Give it.

Speaker 1 (01:13:38):
Elvis, Do you want a cookie?

Speaker 2 (01:13:46):
This has been an exactly right production.

Speaker 3 (01:13:48):
Our senior producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton. Our producer is
a Lejandra Khek.

Speaker 1 (01:13:52):
This episode was engineered and mixed by Stephen Ray Morris.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
Our researchers are Maren mcclashan and Sarah Blair Jenkins.

Speaker 1 (01:13:59):
Email your hometowns and fucking horays to My Favorite Murder
at gmail dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at my Favorite
Murder and Twitter at my favor Murder Gydbye,