506 - New York Favorites - My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Hello and welcome.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm my favorite Murder. This weekend, we're heading to New
York City to perform live at the Kings Theater in Brooklyn.
It's our last live show of this freakin tour, that's right.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
So because of that, we're going to bring you a
quilt episode today where we combine two of our favorite
New York stories. So the first up will be Georgia
telling the story of the New York Zodiac Killer.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
And then Karen will tell you about the fearless investigative
reporter Nellie bly.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
I love the story, So please enjoy our New York
Quilt episode.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
And don't forget to check out new merch in the
Exactly Right Store. Everything from skeletons, Santa ornaments to new
zip up hoodies. We got some good merch.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
Get ahead of your holiday shopping, or just buy something
for yourself at Exactly rightstore dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Goodbye, I'm first right.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Okay, so it's two in the morning on Thursday, May thirty, first,
nineteen ninety. We're in Queens, New York. In the early nineties. Okay,
look at it. This is the year in New York
City's homicide rate peaked with two thousand, six hundred and
five killings nineteen ninety uh huh. And for context, in
twenty twenty three, New York had three hundred and eighty

(01:28):
six homicides compared to twenty to twenty six hundred. Oh
my god. And it hasn't had more than five hundred
since twenty eleven. So that is a big.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Old number that's important to know.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
Right The early seventies through the early nineties are what
people called the battle days. And while there's currently a
lot of fear mongering about crime in New York going
back to those levels, it's nowhere close right now.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
So, in the wee Hours of Queens in nineteen ninety,
when an elderly man is shot in the back, a
special police unit devoted to violent robberies against the elderly
is dispatched to the scene. The seventy nine year old
man named Joseph Prochey is alive when the first responders
arrive and he's rushed to the hospital. Joe is a
World War Two veteran and a retired ice truck driver,

(02:15):
and the assumption is that this was an attempted mugging.
That is until Detective Michael Cirovolo from the Senior Citizen's
Robbery Unit. They had to have a whole unit on
secret ships and robbery. He examines the crime scene a
little more closely. There are no fingerprints, but police do
recover a lead bullet, and the sides of the bullet
are smooth, without the grooves that a barrel of a

(02:36):
traditional gun would make, and this tells police that the
weapon was a homemade zip gun they're called, which is
something that wouldn't be particularly accurate and would have to
be fired at a very close range. A zip gun
can be made from materials as simple as a length
of pipe, a nail, and a rubber band. It's like
an elaborate sling shop, but you got to be close up.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
On Joe's front steps, there's a piece of paper held
down by three rocks, and at the top of the
paper of the first paper, there is a circle with
three wedges drawn in the lower left corner, almost like
a pie chart, with three little areas in each area.
In each little slice there's a symbol. They're crudely drawn

(03:16):
astrological signs. Scorpio, Gemini, and Taurus stand.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
For them, right, Gemini, that's me that's me.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
Oh my, get ready. At the bottom of the piece
of paper is a familiar image, a circle with crosshairs
drawn through it. Oh, I know what that's frout yep.
In between the two pictures the two drawings is the sentence,
this is the Zodiac. The twelfth sign will die when
the belts in the heaven are seen.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Elp.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
I don't know. It doesn't make any sense. This is
the story of the New York Zodiac. What. Yeah, I've
never heard of this, I know.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
So.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
The main sources are an episode of the Netflix show
Catching Killers and reporting from the New York Times. The
rest of the sources can be found in the show notes.
Detective cy Ravello sends a copy of the note to
California to be compared with the notes from the known
Zodiac killer. The Zodia killer hadn't been active as far
as anyone knows, in about twenty years, so this is
a surprise to everyone. And from the hospital where he's

(04:14):
fighting for his life, Joe Proachy tells the police that
the man who had shot him had asked for a
glass of water and possibly money. Joe had tried to
brush him off and walk into his apartment when the
man shot him from behind, but he can't tell them
anything about what the guy looked like. The police basically
move on. It's the precinct is Queens and Brooklyn border. Obviously,

(04:35):
it's overwhelmed with new homicide cases that keep coming in,
so they don't linger on this case. Then, almost three
weeks after this shooting, another note materializes. This one had
been sent to the New York Post, and a similar
one is sent to sixty Minutes. The notes are a
lot like that first one and have the same picture
with the three zodiac signs, and this letter also includes

(04:56):
a list of victims. Like the first one, it contained
some spelling medical errors, and it kind of just explains
and gives dates and times of when the New York
Zodiac attacked other people. It turns out that all three
of the shootings in the note correspond with real shootings.
Oh yeah, he had already done them. So there was
two that happened in March. They had not been on

(05:17):
the police's radars being connected at all, But in each shooting,
the victim had actually survived, and each shooting had taken
place in pretty much the same area of Brooklyn, in
a neighborhood called East New York, with Joe's shooting being
just over the border in Queens, so all in the
same area and now they're all connected. Every time the
men who were shot had been vulnerable in some way.

(05:38):
The first shooting victim on March eighth was a fifty
year old man who used a cane named Mario o'rosco.
Mario had been walking at night and was shot in
the back as well. He had told police that the
shooter had worn a mask, and the shooter then held
a gun to his head after he fell, but he
didn't pull the trigger. The second victim, on March twenty ninth,

(05:58):
had been a thirty four year old man named Jermaine Montenestro.
Jermaine had been out with friends that night, he had
been drinking. He was walking back to his father's house
in the same area of Brooklyn, and couldn't really give
a description of the shooter. So it just seems like
the shooter had been prowling around for people who seem
vulnerable until the police make one additional discovery. Each victim's

(06:21):
birthday coincides with the astrological signs that were drawn on
the note. Oh whoa so yeah what yeah, isn't that creepy?

Speaker 1 (06:32):
That is, so it's not random and it's not like
just somebody wandering around.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
In case unless it's a huge coincidence. But he's saying it's,
you know, not okay. Mario's a Scorpio, Jermaine is a Gemini,
and Joe is a Taurus. And it seems to Felice
that this shooter's plan is to try and kill one
person from each of the twelve signs of the zodiac.
But they have no idea how the shooter would have
known his victims. None of them, recall a stranger, were

(07:00):
asking for their birthday, and all of them were conscious
when the shooter fled, so they would he didn't take
how they're will in and look at their birthday, I mean,
which would have been a crazy coincidence. Still, right after
the police make these realizations, authorities from San Francisco get
in contact and they analyze the letters and they are
not from the original zodiot killer obviously, ear I mean
thought would have been huge.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, we would have known about that for sure.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
Exactly each of the three shootings is twenty one days apart.
The New York PD brings in an astronomer and an
astrologer to analyze the patterns between the shootings. They did. Huh.
The astronomer notes that each of the three shootings took
place on days and times when three specific constellations were
visible in the night sky Oriyan, seven Sisters, and Taurus

(07:45):
your favorites. The astronomer says that the next time the
stars will all be visible will be the very early
hours of June twenty first, which is only a few
days away from that point. So there's a fucking pattern
with astrology.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
That can basically anticip what's going to happen next. That's
like straight out of a nineties movie.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, it's very what was the movie? Seven? No? What's
someone with? What's in the box?

Speaker 1 (08:08):
That is? Seven?

Speaker 2 (08:08):
Seven? Yeah? Got those vibes. The police have been begging
the press, particularly the New York Post, not to run
any big stories on the case and the theory of
the zodiac links between the shootings. They don't care. They
run a huge story and publish all the notes and
all the details. So people start to freak out. Obviously.
The police chief gets on TV and tells New Yorkers

(08:31):
to just be cautious if anyone approaches them and ask
them for their birthday, and then also on that specific
night when it's predicted he'll strike again. Yeah, So on
that evening on June twentieth into the morning of June
twenty first, police flood into East New York hoping to
catch the shooter. And the story here, it could be
its own story. It's a lot about the discriminatory stop

(08:54):
in frisk policing that becomes a huge part of New
York City for the next thirty years or so. That
happens a lot that night, and they kind of just
stop anyone who looks suspicious, you know, which, of course
ends up being a lot of people of color. Yeah,
you know, right, So the sun rises on East New
York and a lot of men have been stopped and frisked,
but the shooter hasn't been found, and no one has

(09:15):
been shot in a way that matches the New York
Zodiac's m It's like people have been shot, that's for sure. Absolutely.
That is until later that morning when Detective c Ravello
gets a call from a detective in Manhattan who tells
him that somebody in Central Park had been shot. The
most recent victim is an unhoused man who had been

(09:36):
sleeping on a bench in Central Park named Larry param
he had been shot in the torso. And there is
another note at the crime scene, much like the others,
but this one has extra lines insisting that he is
in fact the San Francisco Zodiac. He's like, no, no, no,
I swear I am.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
Oh he's communicating now directly with like the media, yeah,
and the cops going like you're wrong, Yeah, you have
the theory wrong.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Right. So then there's another slice of that you know,
pie chart, and in it is a cancer symbol. And
it turns out Larry, the unhouse man who had been
shot on the twenty first, just like they predicted, just
in a different area because he probably knew they were
going to be there was a cancer how I don't
know he survives the shooting. I can't tell the police anything.

(10:21):
He had been asleep. He does, however, remember a stranger
asking him his birthday in the days or weeks leading
up to being shot. Ooh, yeah, which I don't know.
Would you notice that? Yeah, if someone asked you your birthday,
for sure, Hey win your birthday like a random person
on the.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
Street, because truly, if you moved to a city, Yeah,
this is the thing it just being from a farm
down just anyone says anything to you, who needs to know?
It's the first thing back, what do you need my
birthday for?

Speaker 2 (10:49):
Absolutely? But there also the thing of like you're in
a big city, there's all kinds of you know, personalities
going on, and you're interacting with the city and some
guy on the street it's like, hey, when's your birthday?
I can tell you like about you know what I mean?
But then you.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
Remember, like yes, almost like they've gotten smart enough so
that they're doing it in a way that's hidden in
something that's normalized.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yes, but what would be normalized?

Speaker 1 (11:12):
Does it people guessing your birthday or asking your birthday
besides like a nurse or something like.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
Pick a card, any card, Okay, what's your birthday? Okay,
put it back in the deck and then they run away.
But you'd remember that, you would, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Well this guy did, yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
But it's still not a lot to go on. Even
though he does remember this person, he doesn't remember any
details about him. Right after Larry's shot, Joe Prochy, the
elderly man who had been shot in the back and
the beginning of our story, dies in the hospital succumbing
to his internal injuries. So in one of the recent shootings,
the letter that appeared has some additional drawings in it,

(11:48):
occult stuff, some sketches, sixty six six is written on them.
It's kind of hard to see what the shooter is
getting out with all these additional occult references. But one
of the letters does bring a break a partial fingerprint,
and there had been no prints on any of the
previous letters or scenes. So New Yorkers obviously are freaked out.
It's only thirteen years after David Berkowitz was arrested for

(12:10):
the Sun of Sam murders, so it kind of has
that mo as well, which freaks everyone out.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yeah, just the wandering shooter, the night wandering night.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
Shooter with maybe like who's maybe got some premonition about
birthdays too, Yeah, which makes it seem supernatural and even
more scary.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Right that there's some kind of theory behind it that
we couldn't understand.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
But you know, yeah, a smart criminal, you know that's scary.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
An astrological criminal, Yeah, such a virgo.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
So at the end of the next twenty one day
cycle in July, people hold their breath. Police again ramp
up their presence across the city and because now they
know this that they could strike anywhere. But no shooting comes.
It doesn't come the next month either, and the shooter
just disappears. Police officers know he hasn't been arrested for
another crime because they have a print on file. Now

(13:02):
they would have found him. So both of the main
detectives on the case, Mike Ciravallo and Larry Milanesy, retire,
feeling like they let the shooter get away. They wonder,
you know, did he die? Where did he go? And
then in August of nineteen ninety four, so we're being
fast forwarded like four years or so, the New York
Post gets another letter and sends it to the police.

(13:25):
So the detectives originally on the case have retired. The
new lead detective in the East New York precinct is
named Joe Herbert. The new letter takes credit for five
additional attacks that had already happened, starting in August of
nineteen ninety two, so two years after their original spree.
None of the people in the letter I'm mentioned by name,

(13:46):
but just by physical details and time and place they
were killed, and a brief description of the crime. So
the detection have to go back and identify those exact
crimes and do they match them? Don't follow the twenty
one day schedule the previous ones had. They're kind of random. Now.
The letter does not include any mention of the victims signs,

(14:07):
although among them there will only be one repeat sign
uh huh oh, a second Taurus. In addition to Joe
pro sheet, Karen is pumped because she stores it.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
Is a silent fist pump for some reason.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
That's u yeah. So the first attack on the list
is from August of nineteen ninety two. It's the most
brutal one and it's immediately recognizable to police as one
of their unsolved murders. A thirty nine year old woman
named Patricia Fonte had been killed while walking late at
night in Highland Park, which is near that same part
of the Brooklyn Queen's Border where the first shootings happened.

(14:43):
Patricia had been stabbed more than a hundred times. Oh
my god, I know. And at the time her murder
was investigated, no one found a gunshot wound and no
one found a bullet. But in this letter they're saying
I shot and stabbed this woman.

Speaker 1 (14:57):
I mean a hundred times.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
Oh, I know, and Patricia had been a Leo. Her
neighbors remember her as a lovely person, and at this
point the NYPD is overwhelmed with summer around five homicides
every day, so Patricia's murder had tragically just been added
to a growing pile of open investigations. In addition to
Patricia's murderer, the letter takes credit for four other shootings,
all a year later in nineteen ninety three, an all

(15:22):
in or near the same area, Highland Park. In June
of ninety three, a forty year old man named Jim Weber,
a Libra, was shot in the leg while he was walking.
He survived. In July of that year, a forty seven
year old man named Joseph dia Cone was shot in
the neck at point blank range on a pedestrian walkway
and he died. He was a Virgo. So they're all

(15:43):
different except for the it's just like then. In October
of ninety three, a forty year old woman named Diane
Ballard was shot in the neck. She survived but was paralyzed,
and Diane is the only repeat that she was a
Taurus as well, so the letter reference is a fifth
victim also shot in Highland Park in June of ninety four.
All the other victims had been easily matched to the

(16:03):
police reports, but this one doesn't match anything the police
have on file. They search Highland Park extensively with like
dogs and helicopters, and they never find any trace of
this last unknown victim, which is so eerie. So at
the time, there's no computer database to match fingerprints, so
investigators go through manually comparing prints to the print from

(16:25):
the letter recover in Central Park. Can you imagine.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
It's just it's just wild to think about that that
anyone got anything done at all.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Totally horrifying, totally, They don't find anything. The case is
tabled yet again, and Detective Joe Herbert, who is the
now the lead on the case, he moves on in
his career and he becomes a hostage negotiator. Oh wow,
and because of this one decision, this isn't a cold case. Wow,
it's wild. So a year later after that letter, in

(16:55):
the summer of ninety five, it's time for Joe Herbert
to do his very first hostage negotiation. He had been trained,
this was his first on the job, actual thing. What
a day, I know, he's Carrie, right. It's big yeah, yeah,
And it's the summer and it's like in New York
and everyone's.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
You know, everyone's in a bad man.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
It's humid. Yeah. A twenty year old man named Riberto
Sada has shot his seventeen year old sister, Gladys and
is holding her boyfriend hostage in an apartment in East
New York. Hundreds of police officers swarm the area, and
after basically several hours of back and forth exchanging some gunfire,
Joe urging Sata to come out of the apartment and

(17:34):
let his sister get medical attention. Roberto finally surrenders and
comes out, so Joe, of course, is thrilled his first
hostage negotiation was a success. No one has gotten additionally hurt.
The sister's taken to the hospital for surgery. She's expected
to survive. The bomb squad goes into the apartment, removes
two pipe bombs, and Sada writes out a confession saying

(17:57):
he shot his sister and held her boyfriend hostage. Story right,
except when Joe takes a look at the confession, his
blood pressure drops. At the bottom, there's a little cross,
there's no circle around it. But it does look like crosshairs.
Then he reads the confession again and it's written in
handwriting that he's looked at a thousand times before. No way. Yeah.

(18:20):
He shows it to one of his colleagues who had
also worked on the New York Zodiac shootings since the beginning,
and that colleague says, quote, it looked like my wife's
shopping list. That's how familiar that lettering was. End quote. Wow,
they just looked at the paper and knew it was
his handwriting. Yeah, that's good detective work.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
Well, also, it's a predator who is trying to brand
himself with that writing. So why would you ever like,
why wouldn't you as that then uncaught serial killer just
use some cursive Well, because.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
He wouldn't think that this random people would connect him.
Why would they? It's such a different I mean, he's
a shooting, but it's like a different crime altogether.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Why not type I'm just saying curious. He could have
made an effort. He deserves everything he's getting.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
Yes, maybe he wanted to get caught. Who knows, Maybe
he didn't, you know. Sata's fingerprint is quickly determined to
be a match to the fingerprint from the Central Park letter,
but under questioning, he denies being the Zodiac Killer. And
it's only when detective show him pictures from Patricia Fonte's murder,
the woman who had been stabbed, that he finally confesses
to her murder, and then he confesses to all the
other shootings in order, and authorities find at least thirteen

(19:31):
homemade guns in his apartment. Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (19:33):
Also the two pipe bombs that were just thrown in there,
Like did they know that was in there? I wonder
if he'd like threatened people about it?

Speaker 2 (19:40):
Right, But good god. Yeah. Over the course of the investigation,
several other frustrating details emerged. For one thing, Sata had
sent his very first haunting letter to the police in
way back in nineteen eighty nine, before he had shot anybody,
and the police had dismissed it as a hoax, which
I mean, being so bogged down, I bet they get
you like that all the time. You got to look

(20:01):
into it. But what would they have found? Nothing?

Speaker 1 (20:03):
I mean, there's a lot of that kind of stuff
where it's just like and then they threw it into
the pile, and it's just like I wish they had n't. Yeah,
I wish it mattered. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
Secondly, he was known to police officers in his neighborhood
not as a criminal, but as a sort of vigilante.
He tipped them off about local drug dealers, and he
was known to recite Bible verses to them sometimes. But
that's the thing where these killers sometimes want to involve
themselves in the police department's actions, or you know, want
to be part of it. He had been expelled from

(20:32):
school and had tried to join the Green Berets, but
failed the entrance exam and moved back home with his
mom in New York as an angry loaner. He says
he saw a documentary on PBS about the Zodiac Killer,
and he said, quote, holy smokes, this guy terrorized a
whole city and never got caught. I got nothing to
live for. I don't got no job. I already got

(20:52):
those skills. I could be famous. I could do that.
End quote. Oh and the weird thing about him asking
for people's birthdays that I didn't want to say is
that he's conventionally attractive. He's a young man, he looks
clean cut. If he had come up to someone on
the street, I don't they wouldn't have equated him with
a murderer, you.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
Know, yeah, especially if he was being charming.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
Yeah, good looking people get away with a lot.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
They fucking do.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
It's very true. Yeah, I mean I told you that story.
But at the time, I was like, how much we
talk about like lock your fucking door and everything on
this podcast. I was walking the dogs one day and
this guy walked up and he was like he I
think he said one thing about the dogs that was complimentary,
and then I was like, I live up there, and
I gave the whole game away and then walked away,
going what is wrong to you?

Speaker 2 (21:37):
It's so easy.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
It's very like there's a lot of human psychology involved
in that. I mean, still, yeah. He could have also
said what sign are you? Which was like part of
the day in the seventies.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
It didn't have to be birthday, it didn't have to
be exact, Yeah, what's your sign? Yeah? And then in
March of ninety four, Saeda had been arrested for possession
of a homemade gun and was fingerprinted, like two of
the things that could have connected him, yeh, but the
charges were dismissed before the fingerprints had been filed. Why
I don't fucking know, and that had been after all

(22:12):
of the attacks except the last one, which is the
unknown male victim in Highland Park that they never found.
So Sata's trial is an Intel nineteen ninety eight, and
over the course of the six week trial he acts erratically,
yelling at the judge multiple times. The prosecution connects him
to the crimes with DNA evidence from one of the
stamps on one of the letters he sent. They also

(22:34):
present evidence from the tools down in his home, linking
them to the guns and bullets use in the shootings.
Sata is convicted of three murders and six attempted murders
and is currently serving multiple life sentences in the Clinton
Correctional Facility in Dana Mora in upstate New York. He
has since said that he really doesn't know anything about astrology, just.

Speaker 1 (22:54):
A construct for the the character of this killer.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, exactly. No one has ever figured out if he
asked all of the victims their birthdays at some point,
or if almost all of them having different signs with
just a coincidence. I doubt it, right, especially when he's
calling himself the Zodiac killer, right right right, That doesn't
make any sense anyways, that's the story of the New
York Zodiac, who tragically killed three people, possibly one more,
and wounded six others. Wow, New York Zodiac.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
New York. Well, I gotta say, first of all, that
was really good. And I do love when there's a
serial killer that's just like brand new. Yeah, especially one
that's like a copycat like that. But it is actually
kind of great that I've never heard of him, because
that's what he did it for exactly, that's what he wanted.
That's why we know. Yeah, we know.

Speaker 2 (23:41):
Now, don't chanel light on these fuckers, right.

Speaker 1 (23:44):
All right, great job, thank you. I'm very excited. I've
been waiting to tell this one for a while. Today
I'm going to tell you about a pioneering investigative reporter
with no formal training who overcame incredible odds to report
and break one of the most important stories on the

(24:05):
infiltration of a notorious what they called back then insane
asylum in the eighteen eighties of New York City. This
is the story of Nelly Bly.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
This is amazing. I'm so excited. I thought you were
going to say Haralda Rivera.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
No, oh my god, that one though, You mean the
one yeah, the one, oh yeah, one of the most
So basically this is the turn of the century version
of that same exact story. Yeah, and which is if
you haven't seen that, Heraldo did basically the same thing
about Willowbrook. The patients were being treated so terribly. The

(24:40):
video is a nightmare, like please be careful. I think
there are horror movie directors that watch that original video
and then based some of their ideas off of that.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
I mean a legend of cropsy came from that.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Right, yeah, well that's where it took place.

Speaker 2 (24:54):
But Nellie blythe that is incredible, great idea. I can't
wait to hear that.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
So the main sources used for this story today that
Marin used are the book Ten Days in a Madhouse,
which is a collection of articles that Nelly Bly wrote
and that first ran in the New York World newspaper
in eighteen eighty seven. Also a nineteen ninety seven episode
of PBS's American Experience called Around the World in seventy
two Days. The book Damnation Island, Poor, Sick, Mad and

(25:23):
Criminal in nineteenth century New York by writer Stacy Horn,
and the rest of the sources are in our show notes.

Speaker 2 (25:30):
We're writing the Jack the Ripper territory right now.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
Yes, we are. That is where this whole thing takes place,
which I always notice when stories are Turn of the
century or Victorian or whatever. If anything is near eighteen
eighty eight, I'm like, check the Ripper is about to happen,
or Jack the Ripper started.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Now, I know I didn't fucking know that shit. I mean,
now you're in it with me. Maybe you were right.
Maybe these seven and a half years when you've been
telling me to fucking read they all love Jack and
talking about Jack the Ripper. Maybe, Or.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
But wait, didn't I do the exact same thing to
you where you recommended something twice and then I was like, okay,
you have to read this book. And it was like
five years after.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
And I want to double down for you because I
just finished the book I told you about last week,
Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knowle. It's basically historical fiction
about some of Ted Bundy's victims. I finished it. I cried,
it is incredible. I'm doubling down on it. You need
to listen to it, Okay, I will, but sorry, yes,
I'm going to stop interrupting you.

Speaker 1 (26:29):
I might you no, no, if you stop interrupting me,
I'll be all alone.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
This podcast won't exist. Yeah for real.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
So in May of eighteen sixty four, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane
is born in the suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania called Cochrane's Mill,
which was founded by her dad and named for his business,
the Town Mill. He also served as a county judge.
So growing up, Elizabeth lives a charmed life in the
upper class with all the luxuries that come with wealth

(26:59):
and prominence, and from a young age it's clear that
she's a true individual with a big personality. She loves
wearing fancy outfits and bright colors, which at the time
most children wore brown and black, and her favorite color
was pink, so her friends and family nicknamed her Pinky.
That's how weird it was for children to wear color,

(27:20):
because they were so depressed from their factory jobs that
they were just like, forget it.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
It's funny that nowadays I'm always like, I can't find
black shirts to get my nephews ever, but back then
it was like, no, that's required. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
When Elizabeth is just six years old, her father dies
unexpectedly and worse than that, without an updated will, So
the majority of his large estate goes to his ex
wife and his many children from his previous marriage. So
suddenly Elizabeth's mother, Mary Jane, is a widow who's struggling
to keep food on the table, and soon the family

(27:56):
loses everything, including the large house that they lived in.
So eventually Mary Jane remarries, but her new husband is
a violent and abusive alcoholic. How many stories start like this? Truly,
then and now. She eventually takes steps to end this marriage,
which in the mid to late eighteen hundreds is a
highly stigmatized and extremely difficult process for women to undertake.

(28:20):
When Elizabeth is fourteen years old, she has to testify
at her mom's divorce trial. So all of that leaves
a huge impression on Elizabeth. Obviously, she becomes determined to
be self reliant so that she never has to depend
on anyone else, especially a man. Ever, again, of course,
it's the Victorian era and there are strict social rules

(28:43):
involving the sexes, so women are forced to live private
lives in their home. They're not supposed to have ambition
for anything beyond getting married and raising children. Elizabeth can't
worry about that, though, because her struggling family needs her
financial help, and she wants to work, and she wants
to pitch in. But the problem is she can't find

(29:04):
a job that pays well. Unlike her brothers who land
decent paying jobs despite having no formal education, Elizabeth is
mostly offered low paying factory jobs, and at fifteen years old,
she decides that she'll go to school to become a teacher.
But after one semester, she runs out of money and
she has to drop out of school, so she has
to go back to Pittsburgh and help her mother run

(29:27):
a boarding house. By eighteen eighty four, Elizabeth is twenty
years old. She is unhappy and unfulfilled, which, by the way,
we've said this a million times on this podcast, But
you're supposed to be unhappy and unfulfilled when you're twenty
and when you're twenty five, and when you're thirty, and
it continues on until you go through a bunch of

(29:49):
different versions of your life until it starts working. Anybody
that's acting like they stuck the landing on the first
try is fucking lying. Don't fall for.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, that's what life is is constantly striving. When you
stop having that striving feeling, like what do you do?

Speaker 1 (30:07):
What do you do? It's not bad luck. You're supposed
to always want more and better for yourself, right because
you deserve it. Yep. And in between, you can have
a twix. Okay, one day, I don't know. One day
it's because here's a hilarious I have Halloween candy in
this cookie jar that's on my counter. I bought it

(30:30):
like when my family came to visit a month a day,
so I keep thinking Halloween's over because the candy's almost gone.
And usually I buy it closer to Halloween and they
eat it for a month after. So I had a
little tiny Twigs earlier. I was so excited there was
still one in there.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
And that's your joy of the week. That really a Monday?

Speaker 1 (30:50):
Is it?

Speaker 2 (30:50):
Tiny Twigs?

Speaker 1 (30:51):
That's how I get through the day. I guess your
fifties are also quite difficult, but look, who gives a shit.
One day, Elizabeth picks up a copy of the Pittsburgh
Dispatch newspaper, her local newspaper which she read every day,
and she sees a column entitled quote what Girls Are
Good For, and in it, the columnist argues that women

(31:13):
should be kept out of the workforce confined to the
house where they should practice the domestic arts and raise children.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
God fuck yourself.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Right. By the time she's done reading, Elizabeth's blood is boiling.
It's not just that the writer is a chauvinist and
basically just saying like, why would you even need to
be stating this, but he's completely overlooked the women who
have no choice, the ones in her exact situation, who
have to work outside the home to make ends meet.
So Elizabeth pulls out a pen and paper and writes

(31:44):
a scathing rebuttal, and she signs it Little Orphan Girl
and mails.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
It to the dispatch office.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
Her grammar and spelling aren't perfect, of course, she has
no formal education, but her voice is clear, it's passionate,
and it is captivating. The dispatcher's editor, George Madden, reads
the rebuttal letter and is so blown away that he
commits himself to finding this little orphan girl.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
You know what she did. I think what they used
to call clapped back.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
That's right, the old clapback.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
The old clapback.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
So George Madden places an ad in the next day's
newspaper asking the Little Orphan Girl writer to come forward
Elizabeth sees the ad it's easy to assume. She hauled
her ass down to the Dispatch's office to say, yes,
it's me. Hey. George Madden asks her if she'd be
interested in writing a piece on quote the women's sphere

(32:39):
for the newspaper, and she happily accepts. It's all very faithful.
It's so cool, very cool.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
And what did she do there?

Speaker 1 (32:47):
She took pen to paper and she said what she
actually felt and meant and was authentic and passionate, and
then she got rewarded for it.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
She was an original blogger. I feel good for her.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
Good for her and for all bloggers. Elizabeth's first article
pulls no punches. Her headline reads quote the girl Puzzle,
and it addresses the discrimination and sense of hopelessness that
poor women regularly experience. She calls out the wealthy residence
of Pittsburgh, fucking listen to this show, saying quote women
in poverty, read of what your last pug dog cost,

(33:24):
and think of what that vast sum would have done
for them. Paid father's doctor bill, bought mother a new dress,
shoes for the little ones, and imagine how nice it
would be. Could baby have the beef tea that is
made for your favorite pub or the care and kindness
that is bestowed upon it.

Speaker 2 (33:41):
Oh my god. And she's fucking telling it like it is.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
She is, and she also has this huge advantage of
having grown up among rich people, so she knows what
she's talking about.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
And she's also like, adopt, don't shop, Like, there's so
many things in this story. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, sorry,
I does it?

Speaker 1 (33:59):
If she could own in a spade new to your pets,
what an article that could have been. Okay, So in
the nineteenth century, most female journalists are writing under pen names.
Elizabeth is no exception. She publishes The Girl Puzzle as
the Little Orphan Girl, and her column makes a big splash.
George Madden decides to keep giving Elizabeth assignments at the

(34:21):
rate of five dollars a week, which is worth around
one hundred and sixty dollars a week.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
Now that's a lot, though, I feel like we're back then,
right for a woman to earn.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
Yeah, because that's when like a cup of coffee was
three cents and shit.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:35):
And also it was definitely more than she would make
as a factory worker, a little more than she would
make as a factory worker, but she's also doing what
she's supposed to be doing totally, So she starts churning
out more and more articles that become increasingly popular, so
people like her writing. Before long, a group of men
at the newspaper decide she needs to catch your pen name,

(34:56):
and they pick Nelly Bly, which is a reference to
a popular song of the time, and it sticks. By
the way, I just have to say, George is barking
because there's coyotes outside and he can't be calmed down,
so there's background noise for this. As she gets more famous,
Elizabeth starts going by Nellie Bly, and so that's what
will refer to her as for the rest of this story.

(35:18):
So of course, she takes her new job very seriously,
even though she's limited to covering items for the women's page,
which is a dedicated section of the newspaper that covers
things like fashion and the arts and homemaking. But Nellie
makes no secret of the fact that she is not
satisfied with this kind of reporting. She wants to do
the same hard hitting pieces that her male co workers

(35:39):
are covering, so she starts pitching stories that deal with
the politics of being a nineteenth century woman pieces about
divorce laws that harm women and sexism in the workforce,
two things that she has had firsthand experience with. Wow,
and it doesn't take long before Nellie Bly is a hit.
She develops a real following, and she manages to parlay

(36:00):
her name recognition into a gig as the Dispatch's foreign
correspondent to Mexico.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
She spends several months in Mexico, and then she even
draws the ire of the Mexican government after reporting on
official corruption. But when she comes back to Pittsburgh, her
editors are, for the most part, still assigning her fluff
pieces for the Woman's Page. By eighteen eighty seven, Nelly's
a self made twenty three year old and she is

(36:27):
getting very sick of her constant battle to be taken
seriously at the Dispatch. So she does what ballers do.
She sets her sights on a much bigger playing field,
New York City, and she does it so geniusly. She
pitches a story to her editor that she wants to
do on how tough it is to get a job
as a female reporter in New York City, and he says, yeah,

(36:50):
go do that story. So Basically, she's going to get
paid to go interview and figure out how she can
get a job in New York. So Nellie sets up
interviews with editors all over New York City and she
asks them all what chance does a woman have in journalism?
And these editors, who are of course all men, tell
Nelly that women have no chance at all.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
Nelly is not.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
Discouraged by this. She writes her piece for the Dispatch
and then she cuts ties with them soon after. So
she does the story, she puts it in, and she's like, bye, Spicy.
She moves her entire life to New York City before
she's even gotten a job. And then one afternoon she
goes to the downtown office of legendary publisher Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper,

(37:33):
The New York World, and somehow talks her way into
a meeting with its managing editor, a man named John Cockrel.
So Nellie asks him for work, and surprisingly he offers
her an assignment. But, as writer Maureen Corrigan puts it, quote,
it was something of a dare. If you really want
to be a reporter, let's see what you've got. So

(37:54):
John Cockrell wants Nelly to write an expose on the
infamous New York City asylum.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
On black Book Island. Holy shit.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
So today New Yorkers know Blackwell's Island as Roosevelt Island,
which is a skinny, two mile long island that sits
in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. It has
apartment buildings, parks, and iconic tramway and scenic views of
the city. But in the late eighteen eighties, Blackwell's Island
is not a place where people go willingly. Instead, it

(38:25):
hosts some notorious facilities operated by the city. There's a prison,
a house for the poor, and a so called workhouse
where people convicted of minor crimes are sense as punishment.
There's also a public mental hospital with separate women's and
men's facilities. At the time, this was named the New

(38:45):
York City Lunatic Asylum. In this story, we'll just call
it the asylum or Blackwells Island, because you know, it
was a different time, and as it turns out, the
people in this asylum did not always have mental illness issues,
which is the scariest part of the story.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
The asylum on Blackwell's Island opened in eighteen thirty nine,
about fifty years before Nelly's arrival in New York, and
it was meant to provide compassionate care for people who
couldn't care for themselves, regardless of whether they had the
money to pay for it. It was supposed to be
guided by Victorian ideals around moral character, charity, and public health.

(39:25):
But unfortunately, this city blows through its budget and the
facility winds up actually being built way smaller than it
was originally planned to be, but that is not taken
into account. When they open the doors and start admitting people,
it becomes immediately overcrowded. It gets worse and worse as
the years pass, and orders from families, physicians, police judges,

(39:50):
as well as voluntary admissions, send more and more people
to the island. Soon hundreds of patients at this asylum
are regularly sleeping on the floor because there aren't enough beds,
and at this period in time, mental health is not
well understood, so people are actually sent there for a
huge range of psychiatric symptoms, some without any discernible mental

(40:12):
illness whatsoever. And this includes new US immigrants ordered to
Blackwell's Island by city officials who just don't know where
else to house them.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
Nivey.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
Yeah, as if having an overpacked, underbuilt healthcare facility isn't
bad enough. For decades, the asylum on Blackwell's Island is
underfunded and as a result, it struggles to retain talented,
compassionate doctors and nurses, let alone basic necessities like healthy
food or good blankets, and naturally, the situation inside the

(40:43):
asylum spirals into chaos. Now, none of this is new information.
The asylum at Blackwell's Island has long been on the
radar of writers and journalists, and actually, in the eighteen forties,
Charles Dickens visited there while he was on a tour
of the United States and reportedly he quote left in
a hurry because of the facility's hopeless atmosphere. So the

(41:07):
asylum also hosted many journalists from respected outlets like The
New York Times and Harper's who were given open access
to patients, but instead of using the story to advocate
for change, journalists would just pen salacious stories that mocked
the people in the throes of severe mental illness and distress.
So it was not a great time, not caring sensitive time,

(41:31):
just kind of you know, it was what it was.
But Nellie's not interested in entertaining the asylum as an
outside observer like Charles Dickens did. She wants to capture
an authentic depiction of what life is like inside, and
the only way to get that story will be for
Nelly to arrive on Blackwell's Island as a patient, not
a journalist.

Speaker 2 (41:51):
I mean that idea alone, it seems like such a
what's the word I'm looking for? Total nightmare revolutionary? Oh yeah,
like what a great idea. It's terrifying. But that's like
a real journalist, a real investigative journalist, Like that's what
your brain has to be like, is someone who wants

(42:12):
to get in there and see what's actually happening, not
just like write a fluff piece about it. It's so
fucking awesome.

Speaker 1 (42:20):
It's so inspiring.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
And also, I don't think and I mean this is
just my opinion, but I don't think she would have
been at that point where she would have been up
for this. I mean, we know she was pinky and
she was kind of the og right from birth, but
at the same time, years and years of being told
to write about house coats and ironing and trying to

(42:41):
compete and not being allowed to compete gets her to
the point where she's like, Hell, yes, I'm gonna do this.
Just back to that thing we were talking about before,
where it's like kind of being like turned down, being
held down. Whatever. It's not always a bad thing if
it leads to something big and brave and great. Yea,
So Nellie assumes a new identity. She checks herself into

(43:04):
a woman's boarding house under the name Nellie Brown. Knowing
that immigrants are often the targets of discrimination and suspicion,
she tells the landlady she's recently moved here from Cuba.
Throughout the evening, Nellie starts acting confused and paranoid around
the other lodgers. She isn't doing anything aggressive, but her
behavior alone frightens everybody, and soon the landlady calls the police.

(43:28):
So she's taken down to a downtown courthouse, where the
judge takes one look at the white, pretty young woman
in his courtroom, takes pity on her, and says, quote,
I would stake everything on her being a good girl.
I am positive she is somebody's darling, poor girl. I
will be good to her, for she looks like my
sister who is dead. Oh end quote. So then reporters

(43:53):
are called to the courthouse to write stories on this
mysterious woman from Cuba who's basically being thrown to the
mercy of the court, and the Times Prince a headline
that says, quote the mysterious waif with the wild haunted
look in her eyes.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
And meanwhile The Sun runs a story that the headline
is quote who is this insane girl? So now, of
course Nellie's freaking out that someone like will recognize her
and blow her cover, or that another journalist is going
to sniff out her real identity and basically bust her.
So fortunately for Nellie's plan, that doesn't happen. And when

(44:32):
no one comes forward to claim her, she's taken to
Bellevue Hospital and they're a team of doctors determined that
she suffers from quote dementia with delusions of persecution. So
she's just pretending there's actually a part. After she accepted
this assignment, she went home and practiced like wildly staring.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (44:52):
But the whole thing is an act, so it's kind
of disturbing that it's that easy for her to be
diagnosed that way. It's decided that there's a only one
place fit for an anonymous immigrant woman who's experiencing a
mental health crisis, Blackwell's Island. Nellie's taken to the asylum
by boat. When she steps on land, she's greeted by

(45:12):
two nurses spitting tobacco on the ground. Nellie asks them
where she is, and someone responds, quote Blackwell's Island and
insane place where you'll never get out of.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
Horrifying.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
So now Nellie drops her act completely. She starts talking
and acting as herself, but the asylum staff either don't
notice or they don't care. By dinner time, Nellie realizes
these patients' most basic needs are not being met. The
women are drastically underfed, and what little food they are
served is basically inedible, so she does a whole write

(45:45):
up on this. That the food isn't salted, and they
can tell some of it is clearly spoiled, so they
try to make it tastes decent by dousing it with
things like mustard and vinegar, which usually makes it taste worse.
But the problem is if they don't eat their food,
they're threatened with punishment, and if they do eat it

(46:07):
and get sick, then the staff makes fun of them
and basically just ignores them. So, as Nellie will eventually write, quote,
in our short walks, we passed the kitchen where food
was prepared for the nurses and doctors. There we got
glimpses of melons and grapes and all kinds of fruits,
beautiful white bread and nice meats, and the hungry feeling

(46:28):
would be increased tenfold.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
So there's definitely an argument for corruption here where the
city is giving this hospital money and the money is
not going to take care of the people that need
to be at the hospital. They're just keeping it all
up at the top. And this is just a tip
of the iceberg. Nelly will later write about being forced
to take freezing cold baths once a week, where the

(46:51):
women are stripped naked plunged into a large tin tub
filled with bathwater that's already been used by a bunch
of patients.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
I've written about that in the book about Oh, just
like everyone uses the same bathwater, they're using.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
The same bathwater to the degree where eventually it becomes
a sort of sludge, which is so disgusting my god.
Nelly reports, quote, they said, if I did not want
to bathe, that they would use force and that it
would not be very gentle. I shivered. They began to
undress me as one by one they pulled off my clothes.
The water was ice cold, and I began to protest.

(47:28):
I begged, at least that the patients being made to
go away, but I was ordered to shut up. My
teeth chattered and my limbs were goose fleshed and blue
with cold. Suddenly I got one after the other three
buckets of water over my head, ice cold water too
into my eyes, my nose, and my mouth. I think
I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person
as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking from the tub.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Oh my god. At that point she's like, oh shit.

Speaker 1 (47:55):
Yeah, She's like I just got here and this is
already what it's like. So after being washed, Nelly's wiped
down with a sopping wet communal towel, sent away with
wet hair, given a wet slip, sent to bed in
a freezing cold room where the only thing she has
to cover herself is a scratchy blanket that's too short
to cover her body. That idea like stopped me as

(48:19):
I was writing where I'm like, I'm right now furious
at that how little it would take to just have
the basic comforts. It just needs to be a blanket
long enough to fit the whole bed so that people
can just have a decent rest.

Speaker 2 (48:35):
And that's people like we're thinking about ourselves, like we're
of sound mind. Let's say, to be like suffering from
a mental illness that is so bad that you had
to get sent to this island and then to be
treated that way, I mean, right, it's abhorrent.

Speaker 1 (48:49):
Yeah, it's like they're doing anything they can to make
everything that much worse for you. There's no comfort or
care or quiet or anything. Yeah, horrible. She writes about
the other women that she's seen being bathed who are
visibly sick and worries about what the cold night might
do to their health. In one heartbreaking example, Nelly says

(49:10):
that quote nearly all night long, I listened to a
woman cry about the cold and beg for God to
let her die. End quote. So Nellie sees that same
woman the next day, and she's elderly and blind, and
the nurses treat her absolutely terribly. She later reports, quote,
sometimes the attendants would jerk her around. They would let

(49:30):
her walk and heartlessly laughed when she bumped against the
table or the edge of benches.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
Oh oh god.

Speaker 1 (49:37):
End quote. So this also is this sort of kind
of institutional housing gone unchecked. If there's no funds, no
one's getting paid, they're having the bottom of the barrel
type of people working there. Then that invites people with
that personality.

Speaker 2 (49:54):
Right, cruelty cruelty.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
Maybe you're masochist, maybe you're a sociopath. They're so exposed
and so vulnerable. The cruelty that Nellie describes at the
hands of the asylum's nurses is unbelievably sadistic and terrible.
She sees or hears about women being taunted, hit, choked,
and psychologically tortured. Nellie experiences some of this herself. She

(50:16):
writes about how she and the other patients are forced
to sit on an uncomfortable bench for long stretches of
time and simply stare at a wall. The women are
punished if they don't maintain perfect posture, or if they
readjust to get more comfortable. Nellie says, quote, take a
perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up, and make
her sit from six am to eight pm on straight

(50:39):
back benches, do not allow her to talk or move
during these hours, Give her no reading and let her
know nothing of the world or its doings. Give her
bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it
will take to make her insane.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
Holy shit end quote.

Speaker 1 (50:57):
Yeah, these are columns being delivered just in people's regular newspapers.
They suddenly have this access and insight to something that's
happening right there, right by it. Right It's hard to
imagine a more awful place for someone experiencing mental distress.
These patients are hungry, cold, and subjected to constant abuse
and humiliation. But there's another harrowing aspect to Nelly's reporting.

(51:21):
She realizes that many of the women in the asylum
aren't there for any justifiable medical reason. This includes a
young woman named Sarah Fishbaum, whose quote husband put her
in the asylum because she had a fondness for men
other than himself. Nellie also befriends a woman named Josephine
death Pro, who moved to New York from France, where

(51:42):
most of her family still lives. Josephine tells Nelly that
before being sent to Blackwell's Island, she'd contracted a severe
viral illness and nearly died. And while she was very sick,
she was taken to some sort of station and it's
unclear if it was a police station or a firehouse,
where she was unable to communicate with the staff because

(52:02):
of the language barrier, and for seemingly no other reason
than she didn't speak English, Josephine was sent to Blackwell's Island.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
Oh my god, nightmare.

Speaker 1 (52:11):
So she's like sick and like doesn't know what to do,
so she goes to like the first kind of place
she thinks is supposed to help her, and this is
the result. It's unclear how long Josephine has been at
the asylum at the time of Nelly's visit, but enough
time has passed that she now seems to be able
to speak decent English. Oly shit Sarah. Josephine and other

(52:35):
women in the asylum tell Nelly that they are quote
without hope of release, meaning that they believe they're stuck
there forever, and Nellie probably relates. She's been on Blackwell's
Island for an entire hellish week, has no way of
contacting anyone on the outside. She's exhausted, famished, and on
edge She'll later write that being in the asylum is

(52:55):
quote a human rat trap. It's easy to get in,
but once there, it's possible to get out.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
But thank god, Nelly has the one thing that no
other woman or person on black Weell's Island has, and
that's Joseph Pulitzer's legal team. On her tenth day in
the asylum, Pulitzer's attorney shows up and informs the staff
that he's there to pick up a New York World
reporter who has been admitted under the name Nellie Brown.

(53:23):
This is presumably a mortifying and horrifying moment for the
asylum's administrators. Nelly is rescued and now has a story
to tell, but leaving is difficult. It's very difficult, and
she would later write, quote sadly, I said farewell to
all I knew as I passed them on my way
to freedom and life, while they were left behind to

(53:44):
a fate worse than death. There was a certain pain
in leaving. For ten days, I had been one of them.
It seemed intensely selfish to leave them to their suffering.
Days later, The New York World publishes Nelly's first article
on Blackwell's island, and she becomes an overnight sensation.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
Damn.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
In the coming days, her reporting is reprinted in newspapers
across the country. And I'm about to read you part
of one of those columns, and all of them, all
these quotes I'm reading you from Nellie Bly. It all
gets turned into her book Ten Days in a Madhouse,
Got It? So this part, she says, I always made
a point of telling doctors I was sane and asking

(54:23):
to be released. But the more I endeavored to assure
them of my sanity, the more they doubted it. What
are you doctors here for? I asked one whose name
I cannot recall, to take care of the patients and
test their sanity. He replied very well, I said, there
are sixteen doctors on this island, and accepting two, I've
never seen them pay any attention to the patients. How

(54:44):
can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding
her good morning and refusing to hear her please for release?
Even the sick ones know it's useless to say anything,
for the answer will be that it is their imagination.
Try every test on me, I have urged others, and
tell me, am I sane? Or insane. Try my pulse,
my heart, my eyes, ask me to stretch out my

(55:06):
arm to work my fingers, as doctor Field did at Bellevue,
and then tell me if I am sane, they would
not heed me, for they thought I raved. Again, I
said to one, you have no right to keep sane
people here. I am sane, have always been so, and
I must insist on a thorough examination or be released.
Several of the women here are also sane. Why can't

(55:26):
they be free? They are insane, was the reply, and
suffering from delusions. After a long talk with doctor Ingram,
he said, I will transfer you to a quieter ward.
An hour later, Miss Grady called me into the hall,
and after calling me all the vile and profane names
a woman could ever remember, she told me that it
was a lucky thing for my hide that I was transferred.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
So as more and more people are reading Nelly's harrowing
first hand expose, the heat on the asylum administration starts
to get turned up. Eventually, she is called to testify
at a grand jury hearing about the abuses she witnessed
at Blackwell's Island. Her testimony includes returning to the asylum
with the jury to inspect the asylum and compare it

(56:14):
to how she described it in her columns. So here's
another part of her book. She says, the jurors then
visited the kitchen. It was very clean, and two barrels
of salt stood conspicuously near the open door. The bread
on exhibition was beautifully white and wholly unlike what was
given us to eat. We found the halls in the

(56:34):
finest order. The beds were improved, and in Hall seven
the buckets in which we were compelled to wash had
been replaced with bright new basins.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
Bullshit right.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
The institution was on exhibition, and no fault could be found.
But the women I had spoke of where were they?
Not one was to be found where I had left them.
If my assertions were not true in regard to these patients,
why should the latter be changed so to make me
unable to find them? Miss Neville complained before the jury

(57:06):
of being changed several times when we visited the hall.
Later she was returned to her old place. Mary Hughes,
of whom I had spoken as appearing sane, was not
to be found. Some relatives had taken her away.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
That's good.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
Where they knew not the fair woman I spoke of,
who had been sent there because she was poor, they said,
had been transferred to another island. They denied all knowledge
of the Mexican woman and said that there never had
been such a patient. Missus Cotter had been discharged, and
Bridget mcguinnis and Rebecca Ferrin had been transferred to other quarters.
The German girl Margaret was not to be found, and

(57:44):
Louise had been sent elsewhere from Hall six. The frenchwoman Josephine,
a great healthy woman, they said, was dying of paralysis,
and we could not see her. If I was wrong
in my judgment of these patients' sanity, why was all
this done? I saw Tilly mayerd and she had changed
so much for the worst that I shuddered when I

(58:04):
looked at her. I hardly expected the Grand Jury to
sustain me after they saw everything different from what it
had been while I was there. Yet they did, and
their report to the court advises all the changes made
that I had proposed. I have one consolation for my work.
On the strength of my story, the Committee of Appropriation
provides one million dollars more than ever was given before,

(58:28):
for the benefit of the insane.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
A million dollars. That's amazing.

Speaker 1 (58:32):
So the expose pays off. The court orders the asylum
to make significant changes in patient care. They increase the
asylum's funding by a million dollars, which is the equivalent
of thirty two million dollars in today's Holy shit. Unfortunately,
after a few years, things go back to the old
ways and Blackwell's Island Asylum is once again neglected by

(58:55):
the city. And within a decade of this reporting of
Nelly's reporting, not my reporting, I'm not a reporter, quick
reminder for everybody. Within a decade of Nelly's reporting, it
closes for good. So essentially they increase it. But where
does the money go. If the people in the administration
are corrupt or they're siphoning stuff, they have no problem

(59:18):
treating their patients like that.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
Totally.

Speaker 1 (59:21):
So Nellie bly becomes such a star after her expos
on Blackwell's Island. It actually starts a trend across the
country where publishers start hiring what they call stunt girls
to take on their own socially conscious undercover assignments.

Speaker 2 (59:37):
Wow. Right.

Speaker 1 (59:38):
They tackle everything from the importance of ambulances to abortion access.

Speaker 2 (59:42):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (59:43):
And some of these stories lead to meaningful reforms, laws,
and policy changes, which is like an amazing detail that
I never knew in basically like women journalists.

Speaker 2 (59:54):
That's incredible.

Speaker 1 (59:56):
Meanwhile, the New York World continues to send its star
reporter on assignment that involve increasingly elaborate setups and disguises.
Over the years, Nelly poses as everything from a chorus girl,
to a domestic worker to a quote unwed mother to
expose the baby buying trade.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Holy shit.

Speaker 1 (01:00:17):
But amazingly, Nelly doesn't reach the height of her fame
until eighteen eighty nine, at the age of twenty five.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
Twenty five old lady at that point.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
This is when she sets out to beat Phileas Fogg's
record and travel around the world in less than eighty days.
What so that novel Around the World in Eighty Days
had come out about fifteen years prior, and a play
based on the book ran in front of sold out
audiences in New York City, and no one had ever
tried to actually circle the globe in such a short

(01:00:50):
amount of time. PBS estimates that even the most adventurous
nineteenth century person might be able to pull it off
in around a year and a historian named Mitchell Stevens says, quote,
when Nellie BLI actually decided to go all around the world,
I mean that was like going up in the space shuttle.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Holy shit. Right.

Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
She is armed with just one small bag and what
will become her signature checkered overcoat, and Nellie sets off
on her adventure from New York. She takes trains, ships, horses, rickshaws,
anything she can find to complete her journey. In addition
to sending regular dispatches back to the New York world,
she also talks with reporters along the way and continues

(01:01:34):
to wear her politics on her sleeve. When asked about
her ambitious journey, Nellie tells a San Francisco Chronicle reporter quote, Oh,
I don't know, it's not so very much for a
woman to do who has the pluck, energy and independence
which characterize many women in this day. Yes, so she's
just repping, repping, repping, wrapping.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:56):
Maren always includes stuff like this, which I adore her for.
But the Smithsonian writes, quote Nelly's observation during her trials
are astute and frequently humorous, though some of her characterizations
will seem racist. By today's standards.

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
Oh dear, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:13):
It's eighteen eighty nine. This is the way it is.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
Sure, it's all problematic. Life is problematic back then.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
We all see each other in very narrow, desperate ways. Yeah,
just being fair and balanced. Maarn put that in. So
The New York World promotes Nellie's travel stunt, and they
basically make it this huge event. The public cannot get enough.
According to PBS quote, Nellie Bly songs were being sung
in music halls and nelly bly housecoat was advertised. That's

(01:02:45):
kind of ironic. The World the newspaper, not afraid to
cash in on its star reporter, even marketed a parlor
game called Round the World with Nellie Bly. When they
announce a contest for fans to send in guesses on
how long it'll take Nelly's to complete her trip, nearly
a million people participate.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
Holy shit, I hope she got a cut of the earnings.

Speaker 1 (01:03:07):
I know, I hope she got a cut of that
house coat. So in the end, Nelly beat Phineas Fogg
by over a week. She makes the trip around the
world in seventy two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and
fourteen seconds, and with it becomes the most famous woman
in the world.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
Before long, Nellie's brand of stunt reporting is seen as
somewhat passe. That's how it is. Time passes, but she's
not ready to hang up her hat or shy away
from taboo subjects. PBS reports that quote. In eighteen ninety three,
she interviewed one of the most controversial political figures in
the country, anarchist Emma Goldman, when social unrest seemed to

(01:03:49):
be tearing the nation apart. BLI went to Chicago to
cover the Pullman Railroad strike, and she was the only
reporter to tell the story from the striker's point of view.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
Wow. End quote.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
So around this time, Nellie also gets a high profile
interview with a serial killer that you might remember because
I covered her at our twenty seventeen live show at
the Beacon Theater in New York City. It was Lizzie Halliday,
and Nelly was somehow able to compel Lizzie to share
information that she had previously never shared before about her

(01:04:24):
private life. So she was a great reporter. Yeah. And
then in eighteen ninety five, when she's thirty years old,
Nellie marries a seventy year old millionaire manufacturer and businessman
named Robert Seaman, and she becomes involved in his company's
plot twist. Wow, right, yeah, I mean look, look, listen, listen,

(01:04:51):
she nailed down a millionaire. Yeah, she took care of business.
She's a smart lady.

Speaker 2 (01:04:58):
Whatever, whatever her thing. Who are we to judge.

Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
I'm just trying to think of, like what actors are
seventy right now? Although I bet you in an eighteen
ninety five seventy year old is like one hundred and
forty year old in today's money.

Speaker 2 (01:05:10):
I think so, But yeah, who knows.

Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
Here's why Maren thinks. And then, of course I agree
with Maren because she's the researcher that it was a
positive and like it was actually a sincere relationship because
she becomes involved in his companies. She invents and patents
a milk can and a stackable garbage can under her
married name. Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
So maybe he's the only one who took her seriously
and like right, he wanted her in his business and
in his world and not just treated her.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
Like a you know, she certainly wasn't just sitting at
home like painting her nails and being like, yeah, I'm
a millionaire's wife. She's like, I got some ideas. I
dig it me too. She and Robert have a happy
marriage until his passing ten years later. Then after his death,
Nelly runs his factories and she sticks to her tried

(01:06:01):
and true principles. She provides employees with generous health care
benefits and access to recreational facilities, among other things. But
even though she's a good boss, she struggles to manage
the large company, and her biographer Brooke Kroger, reports that
she was quote hopeless at understanding the financial aspects of
her business and ultimately lost everything. But it's Nellie Bly.

(01:06:24):
So she's down, but she's not out. Instead, she throws
herself back into journalism, heads to Europe and reports from
the trenches of World War One. Oh why yeah, yeah,
I'll let you know how horrifying World War One is. Everybody,
it's mean, Nellie Bly. She also uses her byline to

(01:06:45):
help find homes for orphan children, and she profiles the
women's suffrage movement and Susan B. Anthony, and according to Kroger,
quote Anthony had been interviewed scores of times during a
half century in the suffrage movement, but never had she
revealed more information about herself than she did in her
exchange with Bly. Yes, so she is the shit.

Speaker 2 (01:07:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:10):
In January of nineteen twenty two, Nellie Bly dies of pneumonia.
She's just fifty seven years old.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
Wow. So young.

Speaker 1 (01:07:19):
To this day, Nellie's considered a pioneering investigative journalist and
early feminist icon. She's been the subject of countless books.
She's been depicted on a postage stamp. She's the namesake
of express trains, amusement parks, and even a species of tarantula.

Speaker 2 (01:07:35):
Hey.

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
Her story has been featured on multiple television shows. Today,
if you go to Roosevelt Island, you can visit a
monument built in Nellie Bly's honor. It's the same spot
where Blackwell's Island Asylum used to stand, and the monument
is called The Girl Puzzle, which was the title of
Nelly's first article for the Pittsburgh Dispatch that demanded women

(01:07:58):
and girls be given more opportunities to thrive in American society.
According to the monument's website quote, the Girl Puzzle honors
Nellie Bly by presenting on a monumental scale faces of
many women who have endured hardship but are stronger for it.
The monument gives visibility to Asian, Black, young, old, immigrant

(01:08:18):
and queer women. Their stories and lives are forever commemorated
alongside Nellie Bly, whose face is cast in silver bronze.
And that is the spectacular story of legendary reporter Elizabeth
Pinky Cochrane, who's better known as Nellie Bly, the woman
who caused a sensation by reporting on the world from

(01:08:39):
a woman's point of view. Damn, damn that one was
Maaron McGlashan. That was her idea. She found that story.
She's such a good researcher and such a good writer.
I mean, that just makes me happy. I didn't know
that woman existed. Why don't we know this woman exists?

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
I mean I knew that vaguely story. I mean I
thought it was Aldo Rivera of course at first, so
shave on me. But I didn't know she was such
a fucking force. That's amazing. It's amazing. Well, great job
you've killed that one. I really loved it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:13):
I guess that's the importance of getting an education and
learning history, which I never really understood before and wish
someone had pointed out, which is just like, there's lots
of people that have come before us, that have kicked
ass and then gone away as we all do.

Speaker 2 (01:09:27):
Yeah, it's those people that make like incremental movements forward
that as a whole, you put all the people together
and it's this big movement. But like each little story
and each life contributes so much to how you and
I are able to talk about ourselves and women and
how we're able to be these confident women who we

(01:09:49):
owe a lot to you, and I owe a lot
to this female investigative journalist who spoke the truth, you.

Speaker 1 (01:09:56):
Know, and when people are brave in the face of
like when everything else is telling them they shouldn't be brave,
and you read about that and it's not twenty twenty three,
it's eighty fucking eighty nine. Yeah, and she's twenty and
she's an orphan or you know, the orphan girl basically
where she's like, hey, how about you shut up? And

(01:10:17):
I tell you how it actually is, Like we think
people are just starting to do that now on social media,
but it's like, no, no, there's a long history of
very intelligent, smart women who have been doing this for
a long time and then having people either erase their
accomplishments or step in front of them and take credit
for it. And it's great to be able to highlight

(01:10:37):
somebody like that.

Speaker 2 (01:10:38):
I love that. Great job. Thank you to all of
you for listening and hanging out with us, being our friends.

Speaker 1 (01:10:45):
Yes, you are all future Nelly Blise in your own way.
Get out there, give them hell and stay sexy and
don't get murdered. Goat it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:56):
Yeah, Elvis, do you want a cookie?

Speaker 1 (01:11:06):
This has been an exactly right production.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
Our senior producer is Molly Smith and our associate producer
is Tessa Hughes.

Speaker 1 (01:11:11):
Our editor is Aristotle ass Vedo.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
This episode was mixed by Leona Squillacci.

Speaker 1 (01:11:16):
Our researchers are Mayor McGlashan and Ali Elkin.

Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
Email your hometowns to My Favorite Murder at gmail.

Speaker 1 (01:11:21):
Dot com and follow the show on Instagram at my
Favorite Murder.

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):
Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Podcasts or wherever you get your.

Speaker 1 (01:11:28):
Podcasts, or you can watch us on YouTube. Search for
My Favorite Murder, then like and subscribe. Goodbye,

All Episodes

506 - New York Favorites

Episode Transcript

Hosts And Creators

Georgia Hardstark

Karen Kilgariff

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Medal of Honor: Stories of Courage

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}506 - New York Favorites