541 - House or Wife

On today’s episode, Karen covers the Pandora’s Box murder and Georgia talks about levee tampering and 1993’s Great Mississippi Flood.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Hello, and welcome.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
My favorite murder.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
That is Georgia hard Star.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
That's Karen killed Gara.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
And we're here to podcast at you.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
We do it every day of our lives.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
How are you good?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
How are you?

Speaker 1 (00:28):
I'm good. It's like a lovely summer day. I just
kind of wanted to sit outside all day long. Yeah,
and uh, oak cigarettes smoke, you know, when it's hot
and you just want to smoke a big long Virginia slim.
You know, the kids are starting to smoke again, like
real cigarettes. Yeah, not vabes, I mean hopefully. Yeah, vapes
are just immediately killing children. Yeah, that is allegedly.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Also cigarettes aren't great either, But.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Cigarettes won't get you healthier. They won't. They won't. There's
so many things now that it's like remember the story
we did where it's like the green wallpaper or the
green dresses that were poisoning people in the Victorian era
or whatever. It's like that's vapes.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
Yeah, and you're like you know that, so you're essentially
licking the wallpaper.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
You're not even like I didn't know. It's like you know,
you're like the doctor was here, Yeah, told you to
stay away from the wallpaper and look at you go,
look at you put that tongue, Mummy.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
I love the wallpaper a taste like death.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
I have a kind of an update, okay about remember
when I covered the bodies on Mount Everest in episode
one seventy four called rough Ones in high Water then there, Yes, Well,
I had mentioned the body of a climber that was
called green Boots because of his distinctive boots, and he
was like, what's it called when you're like hiking and

(01:44):
he's like a spot that everyone knows.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Along the trail. Landmark, landmark, thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
They could never see his face, and so he had
been identified as possibly being one of two men, both
from India, but the Indian government has now identified him.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
They did DNA testing.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
They can't move him right now.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Because it's impossible to survive and move a body, but
they are sure now that his name is door Jay
Malrup and there are plans to recover his body later
this summer.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Do you know how long he's been there?

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Thirty years? Thirty years?

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Well, it's chilling to the photo of him is just oh,
I mean, I just it can't get over those It's tough.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
It's like it's such an extreme decision when people, I mean,
that's why they do it right, and that's why when
they come back they can say they did it. But
the danger is.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
I'll never understand the like I'll never understand a lot
of things. Agree and climbing Mount Everest is one of
the top ones.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
I mean, I've told you this multiple times, but there's
times where I order like dinner, and the doorbell rings
and nine just can't get off the couch to answer
the door to get the food.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
You can't even climb your own stairs.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
My personal Everest in the living room, right, which is
I couldn't bother. I think what I'm always looking for
is that get up and go that people who are
like rock climber and extreme athletes and all those things,
like they have an engine in there. Yeah, is it
always on? I don't know.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
And is it because they like cut everything else out
of their lives that give them dovamine?

Speaker 2 (03:20):
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yeah, they have to run for seven miles straight to
get that three beer feeling. Exactly, Yeah, exactly. And when
we know better, when we know the way.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
We do, when you never when you haven't had those
deep conversations after three beers at a bar that like
suddenly everything makes sense.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Of course you're going to want to go fucking climb a.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
Mountain, right. No one comes and talks to you at
mile seven. No, No, they think that guy's intense and
I can't really have a conversation right now. He's into
his thing.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
They don't ever say that at the bar.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
No, they don't.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Quite the opposite truly. I was going to just tell
the listener that I told you right before we started
that I driving over here today. I have a brown
long seatshirt on listener watcher, Welcome to Netflix. Netflix. That's up.
It's boiling hot outside, but I'm playing against the weather. Yeah,
And I was thinking, everyone's well, me and Georgia match
accidentally or psychically interesting to see what she'll be wearing today,

(04:14):
and it's literally the extreme opposite of what I'm wearing.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
I am wearing like a nineteen seventies like disco dress
that's in rainbow colors.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, I'm dressed like Gordon Lightfoot's Roady, and you're dressed
like Donna Summer herself with podcasts. Do you have that
Maide or something?

Speaker 2 (04:34):
No, it's from Unique Vintage's online company.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
I love Hay girl, are you going roller skating after this?

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah? That's it is a roller skating outfit, it really is.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Yeah, or a birthday party?

Speaker 3 (04:45):
And look at the ring I found at a vintage
wedding store in Altadina.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
A vintage wedding store. Does that say Carol?

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Nope, it says kind.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
How amazing is that among all the beautiful vintage person
and shoes and jewelry and like little head pieces. I
said the same thing. Does that say cunt? And then
I was like, I'm wrong, but I'm embarrassed.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
And did she say it's current or that it's a
seventies cunt?

Speaker 3 (05:14):
I don't think it's I think it's current, but you
could tell she was like just kind of cheeky and
wanted to throw it in and she loves it. And
I was like, it's going to a good home.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Should we get started, do anything else?

Speaker 1 (05:25):
Let's do it. We have a podcast network. It's called
Exactly Right Media, and these are some highlights from what's
going on on that network. This week on Buried Bones,
Kate and Paul continue their investigation into the Axe Man
of New Orleans, one of the most compelling and fascinating
old timey cases As the bodies continue to pile up,

(05:46):
they ask whether the murders are truly connected or the
work of copycat killers.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Did you see they're making a Dorothya Puente biopic with
who I think, Gena Davis? How great is that?

Speaker 1 (05:58):
Unbelievable? Yeah, to dig her at trench because she's so
much taller than everybody, right that I always think of
with her.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
But you know what's creepy is that, like she probably
is the same age as Dorothea Puente. It's just that
we don't look like old ladies anymore when we get older.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
And also Dorothia Puente was dressed up as an old
lady on purpose. She she doesn't remember that she wasn't
as old as she dressed and acted like.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
Because you get away with so much.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
She was like in her mid to late seventies, but
she was kind of like, yeah, I'm a the little
old lady. Yeah. And then she's picking up bodies and
bringing them upstairs and stuff.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Like a little old lady. Okay.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Then, also over on Disgraceland, Jake tells the unbelievable story
of the band Happy Mondays Legends love them from thieves
and drug dealers to attempted kidnappings and the fall of
Manchester's music scene.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
This one is almost.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
Too wild to be true, to be alive. Then in
Manchester incredible. I mean so many drugs, so many drugs
all day long. Jake is so good at breaking stuff down.
But then after that you can go watch the movie
twenty four Hour Party People, which is truly one of
my favorite It's incredib Then over on Dear Movies, I
Love You a million, Casey celebrate the Criterion release of
John Waters Desperate Living from nineteen seventy seven, and writer

(07:09):
and actor Lloyd Kaufman joins them to talk DIY filmmaking,
My Dinner with Andre and the movies he's watching now.
And for the biggest news of the summer, we've teamed
up with Blanchard House once again we love them for
our newest true crime limited series called Royal Swindle. Listen
to the trailer now before the premiere on July twenty third.
Follow the show on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts or wherever you

(07:31):
get your podcasts please.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
It's a scammer limited series with crazy people scamming British
horse people. Yeah, insane. It's going to be epic because
we've been talking about from the last rewind, we've been
talking about the word proclensity. I did claim it to
be the best title we have ever titled any episode. Yeah,
I kind of went way out on a limb there.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
I don't think you were wrong.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
I think the people have responded. And because Proclensity is
such a popular I guess title and made up board
of Georgia US, we're now going to make some Proclensity
merch and it's so good. It's really good.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
We just laughed our asses off when we picked it out.
We've given some options and we were like, this has
to be it.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yeah. It looks like the cover of a drug the box.
It looks like a drug container.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
Like someone made up a drug, a drug logo, a
drug logo, and you went to a convention for drugs
and this place gave you a Proclensity shirt, yep or
a tote. So please check it out. You can pre
order it now. Go to my favorite murder dot com
and click on shop.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
And get in there and look for that pre order.
It very fun for Clensity and listen to the rewind
as well. If you don't know what we're talking about,
it doesn't really matter Okay. My story today starts in Portland,
Oregon in late July of nineteen forty six. Okay, it's
right after the end of World War Two. It's summertime.

(08:49):
It has been particularly hot, especially for Portland, Oregon. This
July Loon has several days with temperatures that go over
one hundred degrees.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
It's July and forty six or now forty six.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
Ok wow, who cares about now? Yeah, I'm back in
forty six. Very unusual. Yeah, And in this relentless heat,
there's a mix of a sort of postwar malaise, and
it has Portlanders on edge. As the summer passes, the
violent crime rate begins to tick upward. On any given
day this summer, you can pick up an Oregon newspaper

(09:21):
and see disturbing and grizzly articles from the crime bee.
There's the Oak Grove Jane Doe case, where an unidentified
female victims torso is found in the Willamette River. There's
also the case of the twenty two year old veteran
William Killpack, who was randomly attacked outside of a theater
with a hatchet. Jesus. He barely survived, and he later

(09:42):
told a reporter quote, war is safer than standing in
a Portland street.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
But those are not the cases I'm talking about today.
Today's case is arguably the most notorious from Portland summer
of forty six, and it starts around eight forty five
on the night of Saturday, July twenty seventh, as police
rushed to a home on Southeast Yamhill Street. Inside, they
find a chaotic scene. An explosion has turned the house

(10:08):
upside down, and tragically, the forty four year old wife
and mother who lives in this home, Fern Boden, is dead.
But whether or not this is a murder scene is unclear,
and in some ways it remains unclear to this day.
I'm in your area. Okay, this is the story of
what the Portland Press calls the Pandora's Box murder ooh

(10:29):
cold case for Karen right. This is actually a story
that we were thinking about doing for the Portland Show
on the tour. So the main sources used today are
articles from the Oregonian and Oregon Journal archives and the
writing and research of JD. Chandler, and the rest of
the sources are in our show notes. So here's what
we know about the Boden family. On the night of

(10:50):
the explosion, Fern Boden is home alone. Her thirteen year
old daughter Doris is out roller skating with friends. So
nineteen forty six and thank god, right yeah, because also
her seventeen year old daughter Shirley is away visiting family,
and her husband, Jim is one hundred and thirty miles
away on the Oregon coast on a fishing trip. The

(11:10):
Bowdens have been married for decades. Jim is a steam fitter.
That means he installs and repairs pipes for heating systems
in buildings. Sometimes his job takes him out of state
for high paying gigs because not everybody can do that sure,
and over the last few years he has worked months
long stints in places like Alaska and Toledo, Ohio. But
Fern herself is also employed, not out of financial necessity,

(11:34):
because Jim of course makes enough money alone to support
the family as a pipe fitter. Because there were unions
back then, working was a personal choice for Fern. She
reportedly quote thought it her patriotic duty to help out
end quote during the war. She joins the Union Pacific
Railroad Workforce. We don't know what capacity, but the odds

(11:54):
are that it's clerical. She likes the job enough to
keep it after the war ends. So back to the
night of the explosion. Of course, the police rushed to
the scene, and officers determined that this explosion took place
in the basement and that it was very powerful. It
actually pushed the kitchen, so the kitchen was directly above
and it pushed the kitchen floor up one inch. Oh

(12:17):
my god, so huge. And of course furniture, dishware, and
windows throughout the house are destroyed. If any other members
of the Bowden family had been home, they would have
been killed too. And at first investigators wonder if someone
was keeping a military grade explosive in the basement, like
a keepsake for war, and then it just accidentally went off.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Where was she? She just immediately died from the explosion.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
She did, okay. But then when they go into the
basement they find a small box in the corner of
the room, and the box has been described to look
like a trunk, an apple box, a suitcase, and or
a foot locker. But footlocker seems to be the most
common description across all reporting, so we'll call it a
foot locker. It's about three feet long, three feet deep,

(13:01):
ten inches wide. It's kind of small. Investigators can tell
that normally this foot locker is padlocked. They can tell
stuff like that it's already exploded. Is that crazy? And
back then? But of course now the lock is no
longer attached and the lid is missing. But somehow the
base of this foot locker is largely intact exploded upwards.

(13:22):
Police even find a few random items inside, including a
journal with handwritten notes.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
It's so weird that explosion. This is like doesn't explode everything.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
Doesn't explode every single thing. Yeah, but it moves the
floor above it by a full inch. There's also a
bunch of wires running through this box, which immediately leads
investigators to believe this was a deliberate bombing. Officers are
dispatched to track down all members of the Bowden family
to tell them what's happened. They find Shirley and Doris
first because they're close by, but it takes longer to

(13:54):
reach Jim over on the Organ coast, And when they
finally do find him out on his fishing trip, they
don't tell him Fern is dead. They just say there's
been an accident at the house and ask if he
knows anything about explosives being stored there. He says no,
but the police believe there's something off about the way
he's answering their questions. According to police, Jim seems very

(14:16):
agitated as he's responding. So now the investigation moves back
to Portland and his detectives dive deeper into the personal
lives of this family. A picture of a failing marriage
comes into focus. They find out that notebook that they
found in the foot locker appears to log Fern's whereabouts
across several dates, as if someone was quietly documenting her movements.

(14:40):
They have a good idea of who was doing this,
the husband. Yeah, I thought you'd say it was the husband.
Then they find out that on June twentieth, about a
month before her death, Fern filed for divorce citing Jim's
cruel behavior, and after that, on June twenty seventh, Jim
submitted a response to that filing, and in it he
denied acting cruelly and accused Fern of being unfaithful. So

(15:05):
investigators determined that the notebook in the foot locker was
Jim tracking his wife's whereabouts, probably to record evidence and
prove his theory that she was cheating on him. So
news spreads quickly about Fern's death, and within a day
or so, a local contractor named William Buele reaches out
to the police and identifies himself as an old buddy
of Jim's, and William says the Jim recently came to

(15:28):
him with an odd request. He wanted to get his
hands on explosives strong enough to quote blow the fish
out of the ocean. Cool. Great, just go ask your buddy. Yeah,
William has access to dynamite through his job, so he
gives us friend six sticks of TNT. Ask a couple questions.
William says he saw Jim put the explosives into a

(15:49):
foot locker, ostensibly the same one found by investigators, and
he never seemed to ask any questions. Burrows before host
Okay Diyna mie Bros. When police speak to the boat
and daughters, they say their dad had recently taken on
a very secretive project. They would watch him disappear down

(16:10):
into the basement over and over, and he was usually
wearing thick gloves when he did it, and he seemed
intentionally invasive about what he was doing down there.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Evasive.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
Evasive, sorry, invasive.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
It's like getting in their faces, their teenage daughter faces.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
He's looking through their diaries. What am I doing? But
do you think I'm doing? Guess what I'm doing? Well,
But here's what's weird. That is what he does. So
he basically will go down into the basement and mess
around with his big gloves on and come up and
be like, nobody go into the basement, and certainly don't
look into that foot locker, okay, And then he's like,

(16:47):
it's padlocked and my notes are inside, do not go
look at it. Great, so he's just warning people don't
go near it. My journal's in there, it's padlocked. Anyway,
stay away you're diary. Yeah now, and her daughters really
want to know what's going on, what their dad is
up to, and what is in that foot locker. They

(17:07):
do contemplate going downstairs to snoop around because of these
weird warnings. Investigators go question Jim again when they find
this out from the family, and at first he sticks
to his original story. He even denies that his friend
William gave him that dynamite and that he asked for it,
but eventually Jim will crack and admit that he did

(17:27):
in fact create a bomb and keep it in his basement.
He sketches a diagram of it even for the police,
showing exactly how he had rigged this circuit connecting the
dynamite sticks to some batteries, so if someone lifted the
lid of the locker, it would trigger an explosion.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
With your two daughter, I mean your wife, of course,
put your two daughters in the house, and you're like
basically egging them on to open the fucking locker.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
It's like he's a cowardly family annihilator. Yeah, he can't
do it directly, but he's yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
True.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
So Fern obviously fell for this terrible ruise. But Jim
maintains two investigators. Oh do they think she opened it?
She opened it? Oh that's how she died.

Speaker 3 (18:08):
I thought it just blew up on its own. So
they think she went down there. Finally, when the girls are.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
Out, because the girls basically told the investigators like we
actually were talking about maybe going and looking because he
was being so weird about it. Fuck, I know. So
right now I'm about to show you a picture of
Jim Bowden, but you better get ready, Cay.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
I'm so scared.

Speaker 1 (18:29):
Oh Jesus Christ, God Almighty. Can you imagine if this
man was waiting around the corner for you on a
dark and stormy night.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
It looks like the bomb just blew up in his face.

Speaker 1 (18:40):
I mean, he doesn't love flossing. That's something I can
guarantee you.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
It looks shell shocked.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
Okay, he looks absolutely like if he had a knife
in his hand and he was dragging it behind him,
you would run.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
Yeah, definitely a hatchet outside the theater. Do we know
he didn't do that one.

Speaker 1 (18:55):
Due that's so true, right, he switched it up when
not didn't work out. It was like a bummer. We
have Fern as well, Okay, poor Fern. And then I
think we have a picture of the foot locker. Oh
and that headline says explosion damages home husband question.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
I don't know why. When I think of an explosion,
I think of it destroying everything.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
But there's so much left over.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yes, interesting.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
I wonder also if it's like he kills his wife
and then he can just still go live and he's
the victim my insurance.

Speaker 3 (19:27):
I'm sure there's insurance somewhere in the story, somewhere house
or wife, But the thinking is so beyond bad.

Speaker 1 (19:35):
Yeah, so Jim maintains to investigators the bomb was not
meant for Fern. He claims that it was built with
a different person in mind, a local man named George
Hawkenyos love when a brand new character comes into the investigation.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
I love the story because it sounds like we all
know what's happening, but you've already told me something.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Weird is happening. So I'm like, what's it gonna be?
Everyone is a suspect.

Speaker 1 (20:01):
Okay, So, according to Jim, your favorite TV show of
all time, I wrote that down about a year earlier,
he'd become suspicious that his wife was having an affair
with this man, George. He was working in Toledo at
the time, and he claims he began receiving anonymous letters
to imply that Fern was cheating on him. Okay. The
letters said cryptic things like quote, Saturday afternoon tea parties

(20:26):
and luncheons can obviously become Saturday night dinners and breakfasts.
Love the word luncheon, luncheon, sex luncheon.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
Welcome to my sex luncheon.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
Do you want any crab cakes? So gross? Gross sex
crab cakes, So that'll mix. Are you trying to do
a title right now? Hell?

Speaker 3 (20:48):
No, we're not calling us sex and crab cakes.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
Okay. So of course Jim reads these letters. He's overcome
with jealousy, but he wants definitive proof of his wife's infidelity.
So every time he talks to her on the phone
and Fern tells him what she's doing and what her
plans are, he takes careful notes and then secretly fact
checks what she's saying by calling up the people in
places that she mentions to him. Vince, does that to you, right?

Speaker 3 (21:17):
I mean, like Dale, Also take notes on your partner's whereabouts, right,
and like write them in a journal and look them up, Kara,
take a picture where you're at right now and show
show it, right.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
So Jim does this for months, according to the journal
the police find in the foot locker, and he claims
to have at least on one occasion, caught his wife lying.
Fern told him that she was going to a tea party,
as was mentioned in the letter, but when Jim calls
around to confirm it, he can't. He concludes that she
made it up. When he returns to Portland, he notices

(21:51):
that his wife is spending a lot of time with
her coworker, George. We don't know too much about George.
He was a private person. Record suggests he was a
solid member of the community. He held his post at
Union Pacific for more than four decades, and he's heavily
involved in Portland civic organizations. We also know that in

(22:11):
the twenties he was married to a woman named Thelma,
but she's not listed in.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
George and Thelma or my grandparents name Ooh, like that's
why I'm named Georgia, because is that right? And my
grandma's name is Thelma.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
The conbo Yeah, no, door close, don't match? Like what
we're gonna do it? Let's do it?

Speaker 2 (22:31):
Wait what I don't understand that?

Speaker 1 (22:32):
Oh, just like weird psychic connections of like this your
grandparents are here. That was just like a connection you
knew was going to happen. Get ready to get ready.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
You're looking weird, though, George and Thelma, like super weird.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
George, Mary's Thelma? Okay, this is where we are.

Speaker 2 (22:47):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
But because she's not listed in his future obituary, nor
do they seem to have children together, it seems likely
this marriage was over by the time, George and Fern
worked together at Union Pacific. But he's a little older.
She like it seems like he's a little older. So
they meet at Union Pacific in the forties. Basically after that,

(23:09):
she starts driving him to work. Now, at the time,
I was kind of surprised to learn this, but carpooling
with coworkers got very common during the war because there
was all these gas rations. Sure makes sense. It was
strongly encouraged, and it seems Fern also drove other work colleagues.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah, I feel like that was kind of a normal
thing as carpools of multiple people.

Speaker 3 (23:31):
Yeah, like up until probably the eighties, right, and then
we're all like, everybody's on their own.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
We take up as much room as possible.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
We hate THEO zone. Get me a mixed separated or
whatever those things were called. Rememberless nick dlt.

Speaker 3 (23:48):
That is the name of the episode Hot Side's Hot,
The Cool Side's Cool.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
David Letterman talked about the nick dlts so much when
that thing came out.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
I don't know what we're talking about.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
They don't, but please look it up.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Look up.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
You'll have a good time. So over time, George and
Fern do become close. While Jim is out of town,
George helps her around the house with handiwork. Sometimes he
stays for dinner with the family, and those dinners continue
when Jim comes back to Portland. So it doesn't seem
like Fern's acting like she has anything to hide, right, Still,

(24:21):
Jim is consumed by jealousy.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
Do we think George was gay? Maybe?

Speaker 1 (24:24):
And like, I mean, yeah, there's so many possibilities, are
like you just you're the kind of woman that in
the forties is like, no, I want to work and
I want to be outside of the house. So like,
I bet she was great and the kind of person
that had a bunch of friends. Maybe boys and girls
can be friends, can't they. So even though he has
no proof, he's consumed with jealousy. So he starts accusing

(24:45):
Fern of having this affair. So basically, he works out
of town and he's having affairs, probably right, and then
coming back and being like how dare you? So both
Fern and George consistently and adamantly deny any affair between
the They insist they're just good friends. So he could
have been a yeah. Even after Ferne's death, George will

(25:06):
continue to stress that their relationship was purely platonic, although
he does say that they had a strong bond, and
he did admit he kept Fern's checkbook for safe keeping
when her marriage started to fall apart. Oh this now
it sounds weird, but back then, women weren't even supposed
to have check books, right, Like, so I wonder if

(25:28):
it was, like, can you make sure that the budget's balanced, because.

Speaker 3 (25:32):
I don't know how he's keeping it, as in balancing it,
that's what it sounds like.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah interesting, yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:38):
Yeah, not like here it's in a drawer when you
need it, I thought.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
No.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
I think it's like she turned it over to him,
which makes me go, I wonder what he did at
Union Pacific.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
It could have been an accountant or something.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
Jim can't shake his feeling that George is a threat
to his family. That's called paranoia, and the Bowdens start
fighting constantly for an eventually reaches a breaking point and
that's when she files for divorce. And that's also when
Jim comes up with this plan to get rid of
his competition, or so he claims, But before he could

(26:09):
plant it somewhere where George would be the one that
would open the foot locker. Jim claims that he got
cold feet, that he wasn't sure how to get rid
of this bomb that he had built, so he locked
it up and left it in his basement until he
could think of a better plan.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
With his daughter's just sleeping above just right upstairs.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
So Jim Bowden is arrested in charge with his wife
Fern's murder. The trial begins in December of nineteen forty six,
and it seems like Jim's legal strategy is to double
down on the claim that George was his intended victim,
not Fern. Per reporting, Jim's lawyers seem interested in exploring
the castle doctrine, which is the idea that you can

(26:48):
defend your home with deadly force if need be. Okay,
so if Jim saw George is a threat to his
home vis a vis his marriage, then a jury might
be convinced to convict him of a like a lesser
charge like manslaughter. Fine, but prosecutors jump on this logic immediately.
If that was the case, why did Jim go through

(27:09):
the elaborate process of learning how to create a deadly
bomb only to leave it in his basement in a
place that was accessible to his family. Right, you said
that already, like twenty minutes ago. Not only that, but
the prosecution reveals that the locked gym used to secure
the foot locker was one they had used before, So
Fern knew the combination. Okay, standing out in the kitchen going,

(27:32):
do not go near the locked foot locker.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
You rest your case. That's it.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
Guilty, No, you're honor.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
No.

Speaker 1 (27:41):
Prosecutors push back also on the idea that Jim didn't
know how to dismantle or dispose of the bomb when
obviously he fucking built the bomb.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
It doesn't say that I'm the labor that you're fucking fishing.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
Fin don't build it in the first place. That too, Okay,
he knew exactly what wires to cut, right, he could
disarm that bomb anytime he didn't do it.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
He could throw it in the lake he was fishing
that weekend.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
Right, Yes, that's right. It could have never threatened anybody
because you go snip snip, like every great Canner Reeves
movie we've ever seen, and it's over in the end.
The District Attorney John R. Collier's case rests on the
idea that Fern just as likely could have been the
intended target, which suggests premeditated murder. Even the judge tells

(28:24):
the jury quote, we have only the defendant's own statement
that he intended the bomb for George Hakenjos rather than
his wife. It's a question of fact for the jury
to decide, end quote. So it took that jury five
hours to deliberate and come back with a murder conviction
for Jim Bowden. He is sentenced to life in prison

(28:44):
for the murder of his wife. And it seems like
he actually did spend the rest of his life in prison, right,
the rare story where that's he didn't get out on
good behavior. Jim passes away sometime in the fifties. We
don't know why. So whether the target of Jim's homemade
bomb was Fern or George is something that we kind
of can't ever know. Are you as frustrated right now

(29:06):
as I usually am at this.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
Point because I think it's her. I think she was
the target. Yeah, it's kind of logical, it's kind of clear. Yeah,
And we only have his claims to go on. The
indisputable fact is that he was the only genuine threat
in the Bowden home, and as DA John Collier said,
during Jim's trial. Quote did you ever once hear this

(29:28):
defendant say I'm sorry, I wish I had my wife back.
His silence resounds louder than his words.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
All he did was defend himself, not a moment of.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yep, it's not me and I wanted to kill him.
It's like still a killer. His wife's death was premeditated, intentional,
and deliberate. This man is a good poker player. End quote. Wow,
and that's the story of Portland's so called Pandora's Box murder.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
Wow. I didn't understand in the beginning, And it's so
much more chilling that he wanted someone to open it
and she did.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
I thought it just accidentally blew off at some point.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
It was like the thing of him standing around being
like do not he thought he was using reverse psychology, right,
But that's what's creepy about it to me is his
daughters easily could have They all talked about maybe going
down and little sleeping. So was he like a half
family annihilator?

Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah? I wonder what the daughters thought.

Speaker 1 (30:23):
This poor girl so sad.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
Yeah, Wow, well, great job, I've you never heard of
that one.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Yeah, it was hard to not pick that one for Portland.

Speaker 3 (30:31):
Yeah, but the one you did in Portland is incredible.
I think we're putting up the live episode soon. It's
the one of the high school, the high school scam.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
The high school bank robbers.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
Yes, that'll be out a couple episodes, so make sure
you check out that live episode from Portland.

Speaker 1 (30:46):
That's right. Okay.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
My story is a little wild too in that a
what actually happened kind of a thing perfect, which I
think we're gonna solve it. As I always say, although
I know we know what happened and it sucks.

Speaker 1 (31:01):
Can I just say this really quick? Yeah, in terms
of cold cases, I was getting ready to come here
today and I was like, they caught the Gilgo Beach killer.
That's a reality anymore. Yeah, as hard as things are
these days, we must focus on things that are true progress.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
Right.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
That thing was like he's he's behind bars.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
He can't kill another person.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 3 (31:22):
So this one you see sometimes as headlines like clickbaity headlines.
I saw this one on an Instagram account called history
Feels with the headline that was kind of makes you
laugh at first. It's along the lines of man in
Illinois sentenced to prison for causing the nineteen ninety three
Great Flood to keep partying. That's like the idea behind

(31:43):
it is a skuy.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Whatever whatever you're about to tell me, I'm so here
for yes you are.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
And the local story goes that this catastrophic flood was
almost entirely preventable were it not for the town ne'er
do well, who basically wanted to strand his wife on
one side of the flood plane so he keep drinking
and partying and fishing on the other side of it,
so he purposely caused the levee to break.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
That's the story, that's the headline, okay.

Speaker 3 (32:09):
But of course, as truths so often tend to be,
the real story is a little darker and much more
complex than the folklore and clickbait headlines would lead you
to believe. This is the story of James Scott, the
man who authorities claim caused a massive natural disaster so
he could strand his wife on one side of the
river while he partied on the other.

Speaker 1 (32:28):
Everybody can relate to that, right, I just want to
party a little bit more and someone's gonna stop stop
me from doing that, so I'll flood the zone.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
Right, So you see that headline and you're like, I
know that guy. Yeah, I used to party with him
in high.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
School, and I am that guy. I get it.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
The main sources for the story are a Vice documentary
and a twenty seventeen episode of Criminal, a podcast Criminal
called Catastrophe. Also, the Dallup covered this one as well.
It's just such a perfect dollib story that I'm going
to now cover, And the rest of the sources can
be found in the show notes.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
So let's talk about the flood.

Speaker 3 (33:01):
It's July sixteenth, nineteen ninety three, exactly thirty three years
before this story airs.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
On the day, Oh to the day. God, that's upsetting
the right, It's like, where was I? And then it's
just like, you mean, it's a hold that person ago, Yeah,
thirty three years ago.

Speaker 3 (33:17):
When I realized what high school reunion I would be
coming up on recently, I kind of disassociated.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
From my life.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
Did you go like this backwards? Who?

Speaker 2 (33:26):
So thirty three years and we're on the banks of
the Mississippi River.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Sold, how did I make it this far? We did it.
We've done it. We've done it. High five.

Speaker 3 (33:35):
So we're on the banks of the Mississippi River. We're
in two towns on opposite sides of the Mississippi River.
One side is Quincy, which is in Illinois, and the
other side is West Quincy, which is actually in Missouri.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
They love to do that back there, Kansas City, Kansas.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
Then you touch either side. Right.

Speaker 3 (33:52):
We're only about twenty miles upstream from Hannibal, Missouri, which,
as you know, is where Mark Twain was born and
is the basis for the setting of Tom Sawyer and
the Ventures of Huckleberry Finn. Just to give you and
your brain an idea where.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
We are, I've always got to go literary like that. Yeah,
I thought you were going to say birthplace of Hannibal
birth hilarious comedian Hannibal Burs.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
So this summer, the Mississippi is looking particularly mighty. The
previous winder had been very snowy. Of course, there's you know,
climate change even in ninety three guys, imagine that. And
it's also been a very rainy spring and early summer.
So the river is worryingly high. In the days leading
up to July sixteenth, it's been raining buckets that summer

(34:32):
rain all up and down the Mississippi. The river has
been breaking through its levees, washing out houses, neighborhoods, towns,
and wiping out harvests on thousands of acres of farmland.
And I read that during this great flood of nineteen
ninety three, more than a thousand levees were basically breached
along the Mississippi and the area.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
So a thousand levees. Yeah, so that's all fucking a
town that looks like a river, but town a bunch
of people's livelihoods and houses underwater.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Not supposed to be there. We may do it before
and after.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
I love it before and now I love Oh my god,
I just click click click click over.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
Okay, especially when it's a haircut. But the river's good.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
Talking about like natural disaster.

Speaker 3 (35:16):
Oh same though, right, Sometimes can be a natural don't
be a natural disaster. If you do it yourself, it's
a natural disaster. So for the week preceding July sixteenth,
there's been an all hands on deck effort to come
down to the levees and help sandbag. It's kind of
this like feel good, get the community together to help.
Pretty much everyone in town is there. They use bulldozers

(35:38):
to try to scrape the dirt upward to make the
levee taller and then put sandbags on the top of
that just to make the make it taller.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
That's how the water you know, you get it.

Speaker 3 (35:49):
And so by the afternom of the sixteenth the river
is at thirty one point nine feet high and the
levee is supposed to keep out water up to thirty
two feet. Oh so we're not how close enough? Okay,
at this point it's not really safe for most volunteers
to be out working on the levees, but there are
a few up and down the river keeping watch for breaks,

(36:10):
along with a National Guard. At two pm, from a
quarter mile away, guardsmen and volunteers on a bridge here
trees cracking and realized the levee has broken in an
area that wasn't being directly watched because it had thought
to be one of the strongest points. Instantly, rushing water
creates a hundred foot gap in the levee and water

(36:30):
comes pouring through, washing out roads and bridges, flooding farmland
and essentially cutting off access to West Quincy. And we
have a photo of that levee breach just to give
you an idea. So that is the point of where
it breached. It just opened up and all this water
that have been held back just flowed in and took
everything out. Yep, it's pretty fucked up. A barge gets

(36:52):
sucked through the hole like a fucking ship, Oh my god,
the long ship.

Speaker 1 (36:56):
The long flat ones that they like to have on
those rivers.

Speaker 3 (36:58):
And crashes into a gas station, causing an explosion and
a fire that burns into the night.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
It's just mayhem.

Speaker 3 (37:04):
But miraculously no one is killed in an accident or
hurt or in this instance of flooding at all.

Speaker 2 (37:09):
So no one's hurt, just a lot of damage.

Speaker 1 (37:12):
That evening, on.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
The local news and interview airs from just after the
levee had broke, they show up and they're just trying
to interview whoever's there, and they find this twenty three
year old man who is a volunteer who's trying to
help you put.

Speaker 2 (37:25):
Those sandbags up and stuff. His name is James Scott.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
He said he had seen the weak spot where the
levee wound up breaking and he had tried to patch
it up. Everyone else had left. In the interview, he says,
quote everybody else left. Sorry, I decided I'd stick around
till the next crew came end quote. He says that
he had seen a spot where the water was seeping in,
and he had moved some sandbags to that spot and

(37:49):
then had gone to get help, and while he was
doing that, the levee had broken. So James, who most
people call jim or Jimmy, we're gonna call him Jimmy,
is from Quincy on the higher up Illin side, so
his town is fine, but his wife, Susie, works at
a restaurant on the Missouri side where it just flooded,
and so he, like many other Quincy presidents, had been

(38:10):
out helping to prevent a flood for his neighbors across
the river. When that interview with him airs, it catches
the attention of a lot of people in Quincy who
know who he is, but particularly a police detective. And
this is because the detective knows Jimmy very well. The
thing is, Jimmy and his brothers, but especially Jimmy, are
a bit notorious around Quincy for various crimes, but particularly

(38:33):
for arson. So I'm going to show you a screen
grab from that news report that's from the Vice documentary
because I want to show you he's got that he
listens to Slayer probably, Yeah, for sure, right and Motley Crue.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
Maybe, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
That's what all the boys who are seniors when I
was a freshman, that's what they look like in the eighties.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Totally.

Speaker 1 (38:52):
I mean, now, this is the nineties, but there was
an adultness to young men back then.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
With their little mustaches and stuff.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
Absolutely, Yeah, I don't dated a guy I looked like
that from rehab.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
Like, it's just he looks, you know, he looks like
a bad guy. But I would think that he would
have a pack of cigarettes rolled in one of those leaves.

Speaker 3 (39:10):
Definitely, right, Definitely smokes and drinks a lot of beer.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
Yeah, and wants to go to the lake.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
Right, but tried to help, tried to help his neighbors.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
So we thought. Also, that was my hair from the
in the nineties. It just kind of needs some hair
oil and weird wavy. We're on TV, yet we don't
seem to care. Just kidding. It was tough back then.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
There was no products, no just like harsh ones.

Speaker 3 (39:34):
Basically, in nineteen eighty two, when Jimmy is twelve, he
and his two brothers, who are eleven and thirteen, they
sneak into their old elementary school at night and the
elementary school, I think at this point isn't in use anymore.
But they sneak in and they're already known as local troublemakers.
But that night in school is when they cement their reputation.
They wind up in the auditorium smoking cigarettes. Basically, the

(39:58):
youngest brother ends up with a lighter and Jimmy dares
him to set one of the curtains on fire.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
They're just fucking I can't judge.

Speaker 3 (40:08):
If I were judged based on shit that I lit
on fire when I was.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
That, ah, I would be in prison. But I'm just guessing.
Did you light things on fire indoors?

Speaker 2 (40:18):
Yeah? Oh, we were bad fucking kids, But did you light.

Speaker 1 (40:22):
Things like curtains on fucking fire where it's like this
is the second step to every Christmas tree fire you've
ever seen.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
We didn't know that. There was definitely vandalism.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
I refuse to implicate myself, yes, for my family, but
there was some. But there was some vandalism, are you banksy,
I'll be amazing.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
I wish I told you how as a I think
I was in fourth grade. With my fingernail, I carved
the word fuck into the back of a chair. Yes,
because I had seen it. It was spray painted out
our school wall, and everyone's like, right, look, I did that.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
I spray painted it.

Speaker 1 (40:57):
That was when I was six, and then I processed
it in a borrowed car.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
But just to say, like, they targeted him because he
had done bad stuff in the past, and it's like,
so have I.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
So let's not we can't do that.

Speaker 1 (41:09):
Many kids do, right. But then if you're getting older
and you look like you're thirty nine, right, how about
you don't light the fucking curtains on fire.

Speaker 3 (41:18):
Yes, but he was twelve when that happened, Okay, So
he's still not a good He still did some crimes, Yes,
he's still.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
Also the fact that the crime is arson as opposed
to vandalism, those are wildly fire apart in terms of
the what's going on with the twelve year old?

Speaker 3 (41:33):
Total, Totally, that's a totally it's your bug, okay. So
he lights the curtain on fire and it immediately ignites,
as curtains do when you light them on fire, especially
old ones at grammar school. Totally, this is an old
fucking school too.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
The boys try for a few seconds to put it out,
but they realize the fire is spreading to the whole curtain.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
So they try to get out of the school through
the window that they climbed through. On their way out,
Jimmy realizes his brother is holding a stolen grade book. Oh,
he's worried about fingerprints. So Jimmy takes the grade books,
lights it on fire, and throws it back into the
classroom and they get out of there.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
Oh so they like basically they're getting f's and they
went and took the book that said that.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
I don't know from what I've read, the school has
already closed, so maybe they were just like closed down.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
Oh, just I don't know.

Speaker 1 (42:18):
Stuff to burn.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
Yeah, Okay.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
By two in the morning, the whole town smells like smoke.
The fire keeps burning into the morning as firefired has
worked to put out the blaze, but the one hundred
k square foot school is ultimately burned to the ground.
My God, like, this old brick, beautiful building.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
And it was a couple fifth graders that did it, right,
fifth sixth seventh.

Speaker 3 (42:38):
Investigators immediately suspect that kids had been involved and ask
local teachers to keep an eye out for any kids
who are behaving strangely, which is smart. Doesn't take long
for teachers to hone in on the Scott boys, who
are behaving very weirdly and who have made a few cryptic,
you know, allusions to their friends about having started.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
The fire, okay, because they want that credit.

Speaker 3 (42:59):
They want the credit and their children. And juvenile court
a judge determines that Jimmy was the ringleader and sends
him to a Juvenmoule detention center for the rest of
the school year, which is about four months. The youngest
brother is sent to live with a foster family, and
the oldest.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
Brother gets probation.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
By the summer, the whole family is reunited, but the
Scott boys, especially Jimmy, get a reputation around town that
they can't seem to shake or don't want to, and
they don't do much to shake it, because Jimmy does
set a few other fires, mainly abandoned cars and dumpsters.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
This time Jimmy's got something to say, yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
In his late teens, and he also gets arrested a
few times for petty theft. I mean, he's not you know,
are perfected as a victim. He does set a fire
one occasion, according to police, to an occupied apartment of
a girl who turns him down for a date.

Speaker 1 (43:44):
So it's not good that he's he's it's not good. Good,
it's not good. Yeah, it's a he's a he's.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
A troublemaker, Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (43:55):
But fire's next level.

Speaker 2 (43:57):
Yes, fire is not good.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
It's not good, not good.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
When Jimmy's eighteen, he is charged for several arsons at once,
and he is sentenced to seven years in prison. He
serves three, and he's released when he's twenty one, and
he gets a job at Burger King, And of course,
because this always seems to happen, he marries a woman
who wants to marry him.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
Yes, you know, I mean coming in hot off of
like a jail stint. Yes, and a boy there's a McConaughey.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
Vibe to him is yeah, he's always got cigarettes rolled
up in his ear, up on the cash register at
Burger King.

Speaker 1 (44:32):
This guy comes rolling in, always got Schlitz, cold Schlitz
as cold the breath.

Speaker 3 (44:37):
So he marries a woman named Susie, and he's known
to party a lot at his friend's house. But it
does seem like he's calmed down with the arsons and
mostly with the thefts too. Two years past and that
brings us to those rainy days in July leading up
to the levee breaking on the sixteenth.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
So we met him as like a concerned citizen, yes,
But when the cops find out and see him, they're like, uh, oh,
our boys, our.

Speaker 2 (45:01):
Boy was at the scene of what was it a crime?
That's the thing.

Speaker 1 (45:05):
It was a natural event.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
Right or was it a crime?

Speaker 1 (45:08):
That's what they was.

Speaker 3 (45:09):
So on October first, James is arrested on unrelated burglary charges,
but once in the station, it turns out the police
have warns for five different crimes, most prominent of which
is intentionally breaking the levee that caused the July sixteenth flood.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
So they immediately are like, you did this.

Speaker 1 (45:25):
It wasn't it, did it?

Speaker 3 (45:27):
Jimmy vehemently denies this. He denies all the charges. He
says he did pass a bad check, that's the only
thing he did. And he stole a back back out
of a truck. He admits to those two things.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
What if he did both of those things while he
was piling up those sandbags, he just got it done.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yeah, But he says he had nothing to do with
this flood. He is ultimately convicted under an obscure Missouri
law that makes it a felony to quote knowingly cause
a catastrophe. A catastrophe is defined as an explosion, fire, flood,
collapse of a building, or the release of poison, radioactive material, Bacteria,
viruses are other difficult to confine forces.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
My story is it a catastrophe story as well?

Speaker 3 (46:07):
Yeah, so this event must result in the death or
physical injury to ten or more people, so now, or
substantial damage to five or more buildings.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
No, but that's what he gets. Fucking that's the law.
It's like an old obscure lot that they're like, great.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
Let's use this, which sounds like there's like a sheriff
that knows that boy, and I'm going to get him
this time. Like, Okay, it does, doesn't it?

Speaker 3 (46:29):
It does? But again, no one was killed in the flood,
but of course many buildings were substantially damaged.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
But here's the thing. We have discussed.

Speaker 3 (46:38):
All the evidence the police have that show that Jimmy
broke the levee.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
That's it. It's like a hunch and he was there. Oh,
that's it.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
There are case is basically that he was there and
that he has a history of setting fires and thefts
and there this is water.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, he controls water.

Speaker 1 (46:55):
He can't.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
I didn't tell you that he gave up fire for water.

Speaker 1 (46:58):
But it's water. Not That is a really good point.
It's like even caught fire. Sure, maybe maybe, but he's
taken it in a totally different direction.

Speaker 3 (47:06):
Now, there's only one other piece of evidence, and it's this.
In the days leading up to the levee break, when
everyone had been helping to stand bank, Jimmy included he
had said or a teenager he knew that he was
playing basketball.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
With said that. He said, quote, if that levee breaks,
I hope it strands Susie over and Taylor so I
can party here without her end quote.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
Doesn't sound like a teenager talking.

Speaker 3 (47:31):
It doesn't look like a teenager talking, and it also
doesn't sound like a threat.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
Right as much as it is a hope a fun
husband's concept about getting away from how you know a.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Divorce is coming.

Speaker 3 (47:44):
And this is pretty much the only basis for the
motive of wanting to cause a flood in order to
party that the prosecution uses like they didn't.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
Have a motive.

Speaker 3 (47:51):
This guy who who knows if he got anything out
of saying that as they tend to do.

Speaker 1 (47:57):
Yeah, so that's it.

Speaker 3 (47:58):
The only other real evidence the prosecutor has is a
federal expert saying that the levee had failed at one
of its strongest points and had been inspected two hours earlier,
like it should not have failed where it did, right,
But at the same time, two soil experts who testify
for the defense said that the levee was very likely
to break, and that the spot where it did was
where they would have predicted it would have broken.

Speaker 1 (48:19):
But those are soil experts.

Speaker 3 (48:22):
Yeah, because here's the thing to go, because it's a
very narrow point in the river, which creates a bottleneck.
So the river's flowing, it goes to here, and then
suddenly there's a ton of pressure on the levee, and
the effort to build the levees taller by pushing the
dirt up with bulldozers actually may have undermined the levees

(48:44):
by thinning them out. And it was like really soft sand,
so they pushed it and made the wall thinner. Oh
and also it went It was thirty one point nine
inches and the water was thirty.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
Two Yeah, that's like an inch too much?

Speaker 2 (48:58):
Did I say inch? Do I mean something else.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
I think you mean feet and I mean feet, and
I mean and when I say inches feet kick, you
should know.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
So basically, the experts testify that.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
They also say that it's highly unlikely that anyone would
be able to intentionally break a levee holding back a
raging river without being swept away themselves.

Speaker 1 (49:16):
What if they're a bad kid? Could they do it?

Speaker 3 (49:19):
They can then hold on tight and remember most people
had left the levees by that point because they were
basically at their maximum level at the time they failed.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
They were dangerous.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
Yeah, why didn't he? He was hanging out to the
next people got there.

Speaker 3 (49:30):
I think he later says something about feeling like, you know,
this is my way to prove myself and I'm going
to be you know, a see me and know that.
I'm like, you know, I'm going to get the accolades
I've always wanted kind of a thing.

Speaker 1 (49:43):
But in truth, he's just down there with the lighter
trying to light the levee on fire. I was trying
to light the river on fire. Bro over and over.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
Okay, there's also evidence about we're not going to get
into levees, not actually doing anything in the first place
but exacerbating flooding. I don't want to argue with you
today about.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
We will go back into our Katrina argument.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
Oh yeah, So here's the thing.

Speaker 3 (50:04):
Jimmy is found guilty and he's given a life sentence.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
What no one dies a life sentence. There's a griff
behind all of this or someone and that's mad.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
And when the judge convicts him, he says to Jimmy like, basically,
you did this because you get a sense of quote
excitement or power or sexual arousal or all of the
above end quote from his alleged crimes, So basically saying
like he's a pyro destroyer and he gets like gets
off on all of this, which isn't even wasn't even
part of the prosecution's argument.

Speaker 1 (50:38):
He just kind of And also it makes sense for
fire because that's like a psychologically studied right thing, Right,
How would the opposite thing give him?

Speaker 2 (50:49):
Yeah, no, totally.

Speaker 1 (50:50):
And also that would he would have had to do
it before to know that that turns him on, right,
it's such a weird gigantic it's not it doesn't make
any sense. It makes no sense.

Speaker 3 (50:59):
Missouri law enforcement officials themselves speak on the record and
say that the sentence feels out of step with the
severity of the crime. So everyone's like, wait a second,
get in here, hurry up. Assuming there was a crime,
child predators routinely get much shorter sentences for murder, and
fucking pedophiles and rapists get shorter sentences than this.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
So this trace is the question.

Speaker 3 (51:22):
Why are the authorities so keen to charge anyone for
breaking the levee if it's not even clear.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
That it was broken?

Speaker 3 (51:28):
Oh, scapegoating, Like I said, the levees had been breaking
over a thousand times up and down the river all
throughout the early summer of ninety three. It had been happening.
This isn't the only one, And I was like, oh no,
this is the one. It must be someone who did it.
And no one had been criminally charged for those breaking
of levies.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
They couldn't get them.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
There's a contingent of people, yes, I said, a contingent
of people led by a journalist named Adam Pittluck who's
the guy who did the Vice documentary who believed that
Jimmy was a convenience scapegoat.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
Okay, this is just going to flow you with.

Speaker 3 (51:59):
Okay, the local farmers do not have federal flood insurance
that covers flooding.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
They don't have insurance for that.

Speaker 3 (52:07):
They do have homeowners policies that cover damage due to
criminal vandalism.

Speaker 1 (52:13):
Oh no, So.

Speaker 3 (52:15):
In every other instance of flooding on the Mississippi River
in the summer of nineteen ninety three, there are no
insurance payouts because of that. But in West Quincy, Missouri,
most farmers and business owners are made whole again after
Jimmy is convicted for causing the flood. So out of
the people who get that insurance payout because it was

(52:35):
vandalism includes the civilian chair of the levee District Commission.
He's the largest landowner in the area, and he is
one of the people who had testified in Jimmy's trial
that the levee had broken at its strongest point. Oh,
she testified against Jimmy and got the biggest payout of
anyone he lied. And even he's in this documentary for

(52:58):
a minute being all like sheepish, and he's like, well,
I think he served his time.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
You could tell.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
He's like, oh, I did not think he would get
back in prison a life sentence, so that, oh, he
does not disclose his financial stake in the outcome of
the trial when he testifies, so that immediately is.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
This smells like making a murderer.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
It does, But nobody died.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
So Jimmy's granted a new trial when it comes to
light that the prosecution had not shared all of their
witnesses with the defense in advance. But Jimmy's conviction and
sentence are both upheld at the new trial. I think
the town and the people in the surrounding area were
so angry and so upset that they wanted to blame someone. Yes,
they found him. Yeah, he's a scapegoat.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
And I mean, even if no one died, the amount
of oh of damage, I'm a station, it's so devastating.

Speaker 3 (53:44):
Yeah, personally, I don't think he did anything to cause
a huge levey to collapse. Has to be more than
one person could do.

Speaker 1 (53:53):
I mean, I just tried to picture it where I'm like, so,
if he has like a box cutter and he's slicing
open the sandbags, he single handedly do it.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
Totally. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:02):
So, while he's in prison, his two biggest advocates are
his mother and the journalist Adam Pittlock that I mentioned.
He writes a book laying out the case for Jimmy's
innocence and appears in the Vice documentary. And also the
other one is his mother Sharon. On the Criminal episode,
she says, quote, there's only two that know what happened
that night, and nobody's going to change my mind. That

(54:23):
is God Almighty and jim Everything happens for a reason
that me and the river don't get along. As far
away from the river I can stay, I'm happy end quote.
And she just talks to him every day and it's
just like on his side, trying to get him.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
Back, trying to get him.

Speaker 1 (54:39):
I'm still in jail. U h.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
He's fifty six years old now, when he's twenty three,
and he's been in prison since nineteen ninety three. He's
taken every class available to him and train service dogs.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
Oh come on.

Speaker 3 (54:54):
After a few delays, he's finally scheduled to have his
first parole hearing at the end of this month.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
Oh Wow.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
July twenty twenty six good. As of the Vice.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
Documentary, which was made in twenty nineteen, he did not
plan to apologize for causing the flood at his hearing,
which would he takes responsibility and they'd be more likely
to parole him, especially because nobody was hurt.

Speaker 2 (55:14):
But he refuses to do it because.

Speaker 3 (55:17):
He's adamant that he didn't do anything wrong and he
will not take blame for something that he didn't do right.

Speaker 2 (55:22):
I have a pass that I am not proud of.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
But when it comes to the West, Quincy Levey, I'm
sorry for what people lost, I'm sorry for what we
went through as a community. But for me to go
in there and say I'm sorry for something I've never done,
I can't do it.

Speaker 2 (55:35):
End quote.

Speaker 3 (55:36):
Jimmy's biggest advocate, his mother, Sharon, passes away in twenty
nineteen without getting to see her son free. And that
is the story of Jimmy Scott and the Great nineteen
ninety three Mississippi River Flood. So clickbait, wow, behind the.

Speaker 1 (55:52):
Clickbait, behind the clickbait, and the real story. Yeah yeah,
because what the fuck is the partying thing? He did
it to part and so he goes to jail for life.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
The whole argument, too, is like, Okay, if he did it,
which a lot of people and including me, don't think
he did, that's too long of a sentence. That doesn't
make any sense, right, but I really don't think he
had any to do. You know, there's no proof that
he did. They couldn't prove he did anyways, Right, so
he shouldn't even have been sentenced.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
I mean, it's that If it is what you're saying,
it's like corruption at the highest and most kind of
evil level. Totally just let that guy go and be
in jail forever. Right, good one. That's not a good one.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
I was excited to do that one.

Speaker 1 (56:36):
Yeah, are you great?

Speaker 2 (56:39):
Thank you?

Speaker 1 (56:39):
This is I would say in our top seven thousand episodes,
wouldn't you.

Speaker 3 (56:45):
I hope I have an update for you at the
end of the month that he like, oh my god,
it's out or something.

Speaker 1 (56:49):
Oh yeah, I can't wait to hear. Yeah, that's very exciting.

Speaker 2 (56:53):
Well, thank you for listening to that.

Speaker 1 (56:56):
Yes, listener and watcher, thank you for listening. We genuinely
have gratitude.

Speaker 3 (57:02):
You're like a levy and unbreakable Levey to us, to
us in our hearts and souls.

Speaker 1 (57:08):
That's right, Stay sexy and don't get murdered. A goodbye, Elvis.
Do you want a cookie? This has been an exactly
right production.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
Our senior producer is Molly Smith, and our Associate producer
is Tessa Hughes.

Speaker 1 (57:29):
Our editor is Aristotle Ascevedo. This episode was mixed by
Leona Squalacci. Our researchers are Mayor McGlashan and Ali Elkin.
Email your hometowns to My Favorite Murder at gmail dot
com and follow the show on Instagram at my Favorite Murder.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
And now you can watch My Favorite Murder on Netflix.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
And when you're there, hit the double thumbs up and
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Speaker 1 (57:54):
Goodbye,