October 13, 2022 • 42 mins
There’s a lot that can go wrong when your identity is at question. Charged with abandoning a baby? Check. Years in prison? That too. Accused of assassinating the head of Hamas? Why not. Learn about the travails of some unlucky saps in this episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's Josh, and Chuck is here in spirit too,
and we just wanted to drop a casual reminder that
we are going to have a swinging Pacific Northwest Swing
this coming February, and tickets are now on sale. February
one will be at the More Theater in Seattle, February
two will be at Revolution Hall in Portland, and on
(00:22):
February three, for s F Sketch Fest, will be at
the Sydney Goldstein Theater. Go check out all of our
social media's for more information and links to tickets, and
we'll see you in February. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to
(00:45):
the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's hanging
out too, so that makes us a good old fashioned
Stuff you Should Know, Episode Old School Top ten of Dish. Yeah.
Do you think we'll actually make it through ten of these?
I'm not. Maybe you'll you'll do all tend keep going
after you log off, how about that? Yeah, we could
(01:06):
probably get through all ten. And these they're they're pretty uh,
it's we'll see. Let's just start at the beginning. I
just want to make sure that we hit the last one,
number one for sure. Okay, let's do it. Then, all right,
what are we talking about? Even well, we're talking today
about cases of mistaken identity, as anyone who read the
title of this episode or maybe even the synopsis could
(01:28):
tell you. And we talked a lot Chuck in our
Doppelganger episode, which hopefully came out before this episode or
else people won't know what we're talking about. We talked
a lot about some of this stuff, which is like,
you know, terrible things can happen if somebody mistakes you
for somebody else. Um. And that even in in the
age of facial recognition technology and genetic testing, UM, that
(01:51):
stuff can still happen. And because of our faith and
things like facial recognition programs and DNA testing, if if
you you come up with a mistaken identity case, it
makes it much harder to be believed when you're like,
I swear to God, it wasn't me, because people say
we've got your d N a man, and it's a match.
It was you. You're just fibbing, yeah, And I think
(02:14):
it gets a lot more interesting when you're talking about
mistaken identity for a crime that has been committed. Yeah, totally,
So I already want to skip this first one, can
we sure, let's do it and we'll go instead to
uh grand Old Israel, where there was a an Australian
ex pat named Nicole McCabe who'd been living there for years,
(02:35):
was married. She was six months pregnant at the time.
That has happened in two thousand and yes, and apparently
she um was watching the news, the local news in Israel,
and Um I saw that there was an assassination of
one of the Hamas chiefs, Mahmoud. I'll mab Mabou, That's
what I'm going with. Mabu, Yeah, Mabu m ab h
(02:59):
o u A how else you going to say that?
That's how I would say it. So Um he was
assassinated in Dubai and the Dubai authorities were looking for
twenty six people, and one of them was Nicole McCabe
and she knew they were looking for because they showed
her passport on television. That's right, So she was like,
what is going on? W t F. So it turns
(03:22):
out that if you are in Israeli intelligence agency and
it's called Massad, you can say, hey, I want to
use real identities as a cover. So instead of like
making up a false identity as a cover for their agents,
they use real identities and they basically use the identities
(03:45):
of of foreigners living in Israel, and all twenty six
of these Westerners evidently, and this is why they were suspected,
is because they were real identities used by Massad as
cover that we're real people, and they just basically lifted
their information from government databases. It's not like she lost
her her license in her passport and stuff like that.
(04:08):
They just took it basically sorry, except they didn't say sorry.
I didn't even say sorry. They just did it. And
that's so like insidious that apparently the one some of
the ex pats living in Israel were Brits, and the
UK expelled the highest ranking MASSAD agent from the Israeli
embassy as a result of this. It's just like you
(04:29):
don't do that. And apparently that was like standard procedure
for the MASSAD. So Nicole McKay, being an Australian, was
expecting that Australia would help her out of like this
legal jam that she had been gotten into, and they
were like, how about we just give you another passport,
and she said, is that in And they said, yeah,
that's it, but you should probably take it because you're
going to be on every single watch list in the
(04:50):
world now using your old passport. Just go with a
new one. Do the smart thing, McCabe and she said,
cry key, let's go Now, this isn't twenty in. I
wonder if they've stopped using real identities because that just
seems like a recipe for trouble. It definitely does. It's
one of those things that was like super reported on,
and they never reported on the rain so I didn't
see any follow up stuff, but it was widely reported
(05:12):
on in different outlets about it, and it wasn't just
the same story over and over again. It was. It
was investigated, but there wasn't a lot of follow up. Yeah, alright,
moving on to the next one. Number eight or number two,
depending on how you want to number these. This was
a case of a mistaken identity. That also was the
(05:33):
case of someone else having that same name as well,
which is we talked a little bit about this someone
else I think in the Oh no, I don't think
that anyone had the same name in the Doppelganger episode.
Did they No, No, I don't think so. But that
was the case with Will West in New York about
(05:54):
the turn of the twentieth century. Yeah, he was brought
up on charges of manslaughter and taken to Level and
Worth prison. Um to be um, what's it called when
they induct you. It's not inducted? UM identify you? I
guess when they book you. Yes, you procedurally check you in. Sure,
that's what we'll go with as better than induction. I'll
(06:16):
tell you that, UM. And he said, I've never been
here before. I've never been in trouble with the law before.
H And as part of standard procedure, they followed the
um uh bertillion um process of measuring your head, your face,
the distance between your eyes, the length of your nose,
the width from ear to ear, all this different stuff.
(06:37):
It's a form of what's called anthropometry and throw and throw. No,
I'm going with anthropometry. And we've talked about before, I
think in the forensics episode, probably the fingerprinting episode. It
was the way that you distinguished one person from another,
usually criminals. Before we relied on fingerprints, and apparently it
worked really well because it was so granular and so
(06:59):
detailed and so they took will West's measurements and they said,
you know what, we found somebody with the exact same
measurements as you. Right, so you have the same name,
you have nearly identical measurements. According to this French uh
police procedure of of identifying people. Um, you look like
(07:19):
him in the photograph. It's not just that your head
measures out the same. And so we think we've got you, buddy,
and he's like, it's not me, I promise you. And
as it turns out, the real William West was already
in Leavenworth, already serving a life sentence for murder. And
even though fingerprinting wasn't widespread, they were able to use
(07:40):
in the early days of fingerprinting, um, their fingerprints to
to right this wrong. Yeah. Um. And some people have
speculated that these guys were actually like related somehow, maybe
even twins that were pulling a scam um. But as
far as anyone officially knows, they were essentially doppelgangers. That
how upen to have the same name, and they looked
(08:02):
so much alike if you look at pictures of them, like,
they were clearly doppelgangers. Um that will will West when
he was being booked. They showed him the pictures from
the past booking and he said, yeah, that's me, but
I don't know where you got that photo. Like that's
how much it looked like him. He thought it was
a photo of himself. So they ended up um moving
(08:23):
to fingerprints. I think the Warden of Leavenworth stopped using
the barche ln Um process like the next day, essentially
the fingerprints instead, because yeah, because everyone thought the bear
chelon Um process was like unassailable, and then it showed no,
there's a problem, and fingerprints got got us out of
this jam. So let's just all move to fingerprints. From
(08:44):
that point one, the headtime headline the next day said
bird alone process assailable. Exclamation point. Clark says fingerprints rule.
Uh oh, yeah, you're Clark. I got that. Now it
sounds like he was Clark, all right, And now we
can move on to the case of uh, well, three gentlemen.
(09:09):
Uh there was a bad guy who committed crimes under
the names John Smith and a much more fancy pants
and name Lord Wilton to Willoughby. Uh And it seemed
like this guy and for about uh geez, for almost
twenty years, was bilking women out of their jewelry by uh,
I guess writing bad checks. He was a con man
(09:32):
and a thief, and I made a man named Adolph
Beck was mistaken for this man. And it wasn't just
the case of oh you look like him, we booked you,
but hey, we cleared it up. This guy did hard time,
seven years in prison. Yeah. So um. Apparently Lord Wilton
to Willoughby's scam was he would find a woman say
(09:54):
that he was looking for a mistress, and I think
he'll do you just find you like me? I like you, um,
And hey, that jewelry you're wearing is kind of shabby.
Why don't you give it to me? And I will
take it and use it for size to get some
very nice jewelry. Um. And then he just wouldn't return
the jewelry. And it was such a petty crime. This
wasn't nice jewelry. Like he must have taken tens of
(10:14):
dollars worth of jewelry, but he did it very frequently.
He was convicted and put in prison in eighteen seventy seven.
The exact same crime was carried out in eighteen nine
by him. But it just so happened that Adolph Beck
was fingered for that crime, and they were like you
and you were the same man who was convicted in
(10:35):
eighteen seventy seven, and we know it. And he said, no,
it wasn't me. It wasn't me, and they didn't listen
to him like you said. He did hard time, like
for years, yeah, for seven years, and he had a
lot of evidence to prove that it wasn't him. He
was like, hey, I was in Peru during this initial crime,
and I can prove that. And he said, also, I'm
(10:56):
not circumcised. Take a look at this, and everyone went hey, no, no, no,
no no. He said this is important to stop being childish. Well,
but that's true. He was not circumcised apparently. I mean,
who was the real name. I think maybe Frederick Meyer.
I saw that, I saw William Thomas, William Wyatt. I'm
not sure. Most people just referred to him as John Smith,
(11:20):
John old circumcised Smith. So, uh, fifteen convictions, seven years
in prison, and it gets worse. He finally gets out
of prison for a crime he didn't commit. He's in
his I think he's sixty at this point, and old
Lord Willoughby was still going to work and this guy
got convicted again for the same guy's crime. Yeah. So somebody,
(11:42):
luckily and journalists that the Daily Mail had taken an
interest in this, was like, this is a gross miscarriage
of justice, Like it's been documented, this is not the
same guy for years, and they're going after him again.
So he turned public um opinion against the Crown and
basically pointed to the to the prosecutor and said this
point his penis right. He said, this man is not
(12:04):
not not only incompetent, he's almost a fraud. He's such
a bad lawyer, um, and we should release this guy.
So not only did they release him, the Crown gave
him a five thousand dollar compensation I'm sorry, five thousand
pound compensation, I chuck. Not only did I do the
inflation calculator for pounds, I converted it to dollars. All right,
(12:25):
let's hear it. So in nine, five thousand pounds was
worth about six hundred and eighty three thousand pounds today,
And if you convert that to dollars today, he got
seven hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars. That's about a
hundred grand a year in prison. I get the impression
he wasn't a bad guy from what I saw, but
he Um was not a magnet for money. Apparently he
(12:48):
did not die Um with any money. I'm gonna just
say it. I know how much you hate it. He
died penniless. But one of the upshots of this is
a direct result of the miscarriage of justice from just
mistaken identity Um. The British Court of Appeals was established
like three years after he was convicted the last time. Well,
(13:10):
and it became sort of a hey, eyewitness because I
think sixteen people identified him, and it sort of became
a hey, this reliability of eyewitnesses is not something we
could really lean into all the time. Sixteen people, he
really did look a lot like him. But I mean,
come on, there's got to be something like, like, you
can't read a genuine protestation from an innocent person. Let's
(13:32):
let's open our eyes a little bit here, people, Okay, yeah,
and open your pants and just check out the penis.
That would have solved that once and for all right.
They were just so prude. I guess they wouldn't even
look at that very clear evidence. I mean they were
Victorian Chuck, all right, Should we take a break. Yeah,
I gotta say I'm having a lot of fun here,
but I do think we should take a break at
this point. Okay, let's do it all right. Uh this
(14:18):
one is a little uh sad on a lot of levels. Um.
This was a medical identity theft. And by the way,
this we want to thank our old If we're doing
a top ten, chances are it's from our old friends
at house stuffworks dot com because to write a lot
of those. This one specifically is by Nicholas Jervis or
gerbas So. I don't know how you pronounce the thing,
(14:39):
but I think he did a bang up job on
this one. Bang up job. Uh. So. This is a
case of Anne Dorree Sacks, who lived in Salt Lake City, Utah,
was a mom at four kids, and um, all of
a sudden was reported that her newborn child under her
name tested positive for legal drugs, which is a problem
(15:02):
for that mom. She's like, hey, listen, I got four kids,
but I don't have a newborn and I certainly don't
have a newborn that tested positive for drugs. Myth no
less um. So, not only was the newborn tested positive
for meth, the newborn had been abandoned by the mother,
who had also split with a ten thousand dollar medical bill,
(15:24):
Dick's her baby to meth abandons. The baby doesn't pay
a ten bill, So of course the hospitals like, you're
a crook and we're not gonna listen anything you said.
The woman's like, no, I swear to God it was
not me. And finally turned out that drug addicted um
uh woman had broken into and Dory Sacks's car, got
(15:45):
her I D which is a lesson, never leave your
life your license in your car. That's just a bad
idea all around, got her medical records and then went
and gave birth as and Dorry Sacks and ultimately apparently
amended and Dorr Sachs medical history. Um with with this
this information that may or may not have been purged. Yeah,
(16:08):
so you know, who knows what uh this impostor reported
about their medical history? But Sacks can't find out because
there are laws, privacy laws that prevent the records from
being shown even to her. So basically she has uh
she has to always sort of be on the lookout
for this. She has in real life a clotting disorder
(16:30):
in her blood and if she's given the wrong blood
type she could die. So she doesn't really even know
what's in there for what kind of blood type she
has on her medical records. So now Andrey Sachs has
to be just really careful and I guess proactive anytime
she goes to the hospital or doctor. Yeah, the whole
thing is called medical identity theft. This happened and I
(16:52):
think two thousand tennis and it was like a super
scary two thousand ten things to happen, But apparently it
was happening at the time early frequently enough that they
interviewed a couple other people and they were like, man,
if this happens to you, you are on your own,
because not only is the hospital not helping you, they
sick um basically billing investigators to find out what's going on.
(17:15):
And they interviewed and Dory Sex's like children to find
out had mommy been pregnant recently. Um. They would not
believe her. They just they did not take her word
for it. And it wasn't until she um took a
DNA test to prove like, this is not my child
they finally off. I wonder if you could like demand
that first rather than putting your family through all that,
(17:37):
you know, I think, so you just show up with
a zip block bag of blood at the investigator's office
and be like test this. You just plunk it down
on the desk in front of them, or just spit
at them and say collect this. Oh boy, check. That
turned dark pretty fast. But I liked it. Well, that
whole story was dark. It's very just a heartbreaking situation
(17:57):
all the way around. I've got a little positive spin
for you. Then at the end of the article I read,
you know, this is a different article. Apparently the mother um,
the actual like biological mom who had abandon her kid,
got let out of jail because she played guilty to
some other stuff and did some time, and like did
her time. But and Dory Sachs was interviewed and when
(18:19):
asked how she felt about it, and she said, if
the use of my ideas would allowed that baby a
chance to survive, then it's worth it to me. Wow,
I thought you were gonna say that, you know, the
biological momb turned her life around and reclaimed the baby.
And don't be naives. Oh that's a good one. How
(18:39):
about this number five? Or we skipped one, so number four, six, six?
How can we be that's this bad? At this? I
don't know math, Uh in two thousand three, the cops
in Britain said, we would very much like to arrestue
Peter hamm Can and that's how we do things over
(19:01):
here for cops. Because we think you've murdered someone. We're
not gonna pull a gun on you, or we're just
gonna ask you very kindly to come with us. We
think you murdered murdered a woman in Italy last year
in two thousand two. You match the description of the person,
and you're coming with me. But this bartender was like,
I've never been to Italy and they're like, you sound
(19:23):
like you have it. As a matter of fact, you
sound like you're from Italy, friend, he said, but it's
not a true. So this bartender, what was his name,
Peter Hampkin, I believe he was like, what do you
guys have never been to Italy. I certainly wasn't there
when this this murder happened. They said, okay, not only
do you look just like the description of the guy
(19:44):
that we're looking for, we're gonna take your blood and
oh yeah, you're a match, my friend, you're a match
to this. Uh. I guess the evidence that had been
found on the scene and um, Peter Hampkin was suddenly
in a lot of trouble despite the fact that it
was not himp And this is where we were just
kind of like the beginnings of the true dystopian um
(20:04):
mistaken identity stuff. Yeah, this one I don't. I mean,
I understand it in a way. But here's how it works.
If you are using DNA databases to match someone, it
is going to compare um subsites on the strand that
are called locusts or together they're called loki. And that's
(20:25):
just like I've seen it described as showing like the
genes neighborhood is the physical location of the geneo a chromosome,
And depending on where you are and what lab you
are and where you are in the world, you might
use a different a certain amount of these low key
as identifiers. In the States, I think the FBI uses thirteen.
In the UK it is ten. And apparently that you
(20:51):
can like make mistakes, like I thought DNA was the
gold standard, and reading this, it seems like if you're
just looking at as low as six low ki for
a match, then that's can be a real problem. It
certainly can. I think they thought before that nine gave
you a one and a hundred and thirteen billion chance
of a false positive. But apparently people looked into and
(21:14):
they're like, where did you get that evidence? FBI, and
they're like, we don't have to tell you'd be quiet. Um,
So no one's entirely certain what m the actual chances.
But the basis you said d NA was the gold standard,
it totally is for forensics, and the chances are really
really small that there would be a false match using
(21:34):
standard search procedures. Because they're looking at I think you
said thirteen. I believe they've up to ten. Yeah, they've
uped it to twenty. There's twenty sites that they say
these loki. These loki are going to be the ones
that we check. And you can have a minimum when
you like, if you arrest somebody and you take their blood,
you work up a DNA profile of that person, you
(21:57):
have to have at least a minimum of those twenty
cover preferably up to twenty for your for your profile.
And then the more you have and the more you
match the twenty loca, the less of a chance you
have of a false positive. But it can happen. And
I think the point of the people who are saying like, um,
we need to talk about this. That there can be
(22:18):
false positive is because if you are on a jury,
especially if you watch a lot of C s I
or Law and Order, you're like, you got DNA evidence,
it's over for you. Pal The idea that it could
be wrong is just out the window. And they're like,
we need to train the public injuries better than this
because they think it's it's again unassailable, right, But the
idea is you can always get way more granular with
(22:43):
your DNA uh peek alou and and and really find
out the truth though, right, Well, that's how Peter Hampkin
finally got off that bartender that kicked this whole thing off.
He they did a further DNA profile of them, and
they're like, Okay, it's not you. Because the chances of
somebody having those same mutations. They look at short tandem
(23:04):
repeating um snippets, which are non protein coding sequences, which
means like, it doesn't matter if they mutate a lot,
So they mutate a lot. So the chances of you
having the same mutation in all twenty of those is
vanishing lee small, and even in all eight of them
is pretty small enough. That it is still the gold standard.
It's just if you get caught and you have money
(23:26):
for a good lawyer, you can be like, you need
to do a better profile, and then they'll find that
it's not actually you. And of course I use peak alou,
that's not the official language they use for looking at DNA.
That's peekaboo. I used the slang. Okay, all right, I
think we do one more then we take our other break.
(23:46):
How about that? Okay, I'm still having a lot of
fun here, chuck um. Alright, so I guess we're on
either number four or number three and number five or
number uh. There was a interesting case of mistaken identity
in UM which turned out to be a sibling. In Alaska,
(24:08):
police had a sexual assault case and it was they
had a semen sample, they had usable DNA, they had
a DNA match. This guy was already in the system,
so they thought like, all right, this is an open
and shut case. Except one problem. This guy is was
in jail already when the crime was committed, So what
(24:30):
are we gonna do? Yeah, this one was incredibly fascinating.
I think this Alaskan um UH. DNA analysts or forensic
analysts like like went around the country giving talks on
this case and really opened people's eyes because it turned
out that the guy who was in prison whose DNA
matched the semen on the crime scene. I guess um
(24:54):
had gotten a bone marrow transplant from his brother, and
because of that, he was carrying around his brother's DNA
in his blood. Because when you get a bow marrow transplant,
you're getting uh like a red blood cell um stem
cell transplant, and those things turned into red blood cells
and they test your blood, So whatever DNA your blood
(25:14):
has is what they come back with on the DNA profile.
I wonder if the other brother immediately was like, you're
looking for my brother, because like maybe it sounds like
the brother. You know, the other brother was not a
good guy obviously, I mean, clearly if he committed sexual assault,
but if he was already in jail for something else,
(25:34):
then it sounds like good good brother, bad brother. They
were both sexual assaulters. The one was already in jail
for it. The one who actually did it had not
been caught yet. They thought that the guy who was
in jail already was the purp for the outside one,
and it turned out knows the whole family of sexual
assaulters makes a lot more sense now, Yeah, I get it, Okay,
(25:58):
all right, I mean it made sense before, but this,
this makes such glorious sense. The like the blinders are off,
so um, this really is like enough of a thing
that that forensic analysts from Alaska who discovered this, because
at first they were like, well the lab obviously made
as up and they looked in there like what is
going on here? They started looking into it more and
(26:19):
they're like, this could be a thing. Actually we need
to let the law enforcement know, Like there's a thing
that happens when you get a bowemarrow transplant. Your DNA changes.
And they there was a guy named Chris Long on
a um I read about an I f L Science
article UM and they tested him four years after he'd
gotten a um A transplant from a donor in Germany
(26:42):
who we never met, I don't believe, and his DNA
in different parts of his body were entirely the donors.
Including get this, chuck, his semen had had nothing but
his donor's DNA. So if he fathered a child, whose
kid would that be? Because the kid would have the
same DNA as the donor, not him. His dad, Um, well,
(27:05):
it would be his kids. Still, legally it would be
his kid, but biologically wouldn't it be the German Donors child.
I don't know. I think there's an old saying about that,
like whoever smelt it delta? But I can't quite work
it out. Uh, there's a couple of rhymes. I'm trying
not right now. Two bad brothers, man. I just that
(27:28):
was sitting there right in front of my face. Yeah,
well so they both went to jail, right, Yeah, I
believe the Alaska forensic analysts got them, nabbed their person. Sweet,
is it time for that break now? You promised? Yeah,
I'm gonna go ruminate on that justice served and we'll
be right back and things. So I guess we should say, chuck,
(28:10):
if you're out there in podcast land listening to us
and you didn't actually have to hear an ad, give
us a double twot. Dude, dude. You know there was
an email er I think he bothered me several times
with Emil that trying to convince us that we were
in podcast land. Because we used to say that out
there in podcast land and this guy ruined it. We
(28:31):
just quit saying it because he was like you in
fact or in podcast land. I kind of get where
that guy's coming from. Was that you nabe? That's weird?
He signed your name is Jehan Jehan Paul Dusseldorf three
seven at hotmail. What I don't get that one? That
(28:54):
was who who sent it in? John John Paul seven
at hotmail dot com. I gotta check that was their email.
Can we talk about these twins? Sure? Um, because apparently
in real life, Chuck twins actually get out of criminal
prosecution because they say, no, it wasn't me, it was
(29:14):
my identical twins. Yeah. I don't see how this is.
I mean, can't they do more work to arrest somebody
for a crime when they know it's one of the two.
All right, Well this happened in Germany. A big department
store in UH in Europe is the calf House uh
dis Weston's. And in January two thousand nine, Um, there
(29:38):
were three people who broke into one of these department stores.
They were smart, they were masks, they were Latex gloves.
They sold close to seven million dollars in jewelry. But
one of them left one of their gloves behind and
they did a DNA test on the sweat inside the
glove gross. And they had two matches of these two
identical twins uh psalm and a boss uh. And Germany
(30:02):
doesn't give last name, so the last initials oh and
yeah a Samo Riley And they basically did what you said.
These twenty seven year old twins were like, um, whatn't me?
And the other one said what didn't me? And they
let them go. They did. And I just wanted to
give a shout out to this group whom I'm not
(30:24):
like a um an admirer of criminals or anything like that,
but I read Chuck. They did like real great Muppet
caper stuff and like slid down ropes coming from the
skylights to do this robbery. It wasn't like a smash
and grab. They had finace at least, okay movie style
robber robbery. So so yeah, exactly so in Germany, UM,
(30:47):
they like, you can't just lock up both people because
one of them might be innocent. And if you have
to make that decision under German law, and the same
thing in America, UM, you can't lock up innocent people.
It's better to let criminal go free until lock up
an innocent person. That's the trade off. That we have.
And it's not just happened in Germany with the O'Reilly brothers. Um,
(31:10):
It's happened around the world in other places too. Yeah.
I think in Malaysia in two thousand nine there were
identical twins who, um, we're narcotics traffickers, and they had
a death sentence, but they couldn't prove who was who. Um.
Here's my thing, and I agree with due process, but
(31:30):
I think if you strong arm them a little bit, no,
nothing like that, but like, hey, one of you is
going to go to prison, and we'll flip a coin,
We'll flip a Deutsche Mark. I still got one in
my pocket from the old days. Uh, and and one
of you is going to go to jail. I think
they could pressure them into one of them, like they
(31:53):
got to really be in unison, you know, one of
them would eventually crack the person who didn't do it
or did do it. So the thing is is, I
mean we're talking about twin siblings here. I mean if
they've got resolved and not rap the other one out,
they've got it. Yeah, exactly. So I'm sure if both
of them know hack, both of them might have been there.
It was three three robbers, so two of them might
(32:14):
have been the twins. They just could not say which
one they that was definitely there, so they said no.
And yeah, I mean, if you have no other evidence,
what can you do? What can you do hot shot?
Smack them around with I guess so you'd be like
by Dousldorf, you will crack all right. So I think
(32:36):
we got a couple of more. We just had a
brief This is how the sausage is made, a brief
off Mike convo. We're going to circle back to the
original one that I wanted to skip at the end
because Josh is in love with it. I love it,
he wants to marry it. He's in love. I'm already married.
We're skipping. Uh. I wonder if anyone ever goes to
(32:57):
see what we skipped. I don't care. But there's some
army members they're like, uh, listen up, everybody all time.
I got the dirt on the one, all right, So
we're gonna finish or do you want to finish with
the one I didn't like? And then because you really
wanted to do number one? Yeah, we have to. Man,
it's the most astounding case of mistaken identity. And recent memory.
(33:21):
All right, so let's do it right the second Okay,
go now, So this was a case uh jeez, it's
both sad and uplifting, kind of depending on whose family
you're in. But it was a very tragic day in
two thousand six. I kind of remember this happening. Um.
There was a semi truck driver who in April of
(33:44):
that year, like I said, fell asleep at the wheel,
crossed the median and crashed into a university van from
Taylor University that had nine people uh in the in
the van. And it was a very bad crash. It
killed five uh I think all students, but five people.
And it was just you know, people were flung all
over the place there. Stuff was flung all over the place. Uh.
(34:08):
And it was obviously a mess of a scene of
an accident scene and two young women got mistaken for
one another in a very tragic way. Yeah. So I
guess um uh Whitney saranac Um had her. She was
basically bundled up onto a stretcher and um met of
act out by helicopter. But the first responder who put
(34:31):
her on the stretcher had grabbed an I d of
another girl who was in the van that looked a
lot like her, especially I'm sure at night under a
crazy circumstances like that, And the I D went to
Laura van Wrinn and while Whitney Sarak was alive, Laura
van Wren was dead. But people now thought that this
person who was bloodied, beat up um, whose face was
(34:54):
swollen and would suit be bandaged for weeks was Laura
van Wrin, when in fact it was Whitney's Iraq. Yeah.
So boy, this one is um. Like I said, very
very bad news for one family and very good news
for another. And that one family thought their daughter was
alive and she had passed and the other way around. So, uh,
(35:17):
it's just this, this one's a tough one to even
think about how someone gets through something like this in
true movie fashion, Um and inconsistencies sorted to kind of
pile up as she recovered, and people were sort of
suspicious of what was going on, and finally someone asked
her to write her name, and she wrote down Whitney. Uh,
(35:40):
it's just it's a moment, like you know, it's a
pretty chilling moment. It's a movie moment for goodness, sick.
It's crazy because I mean in the meantime, like Laura's
family were the ones who were at Whitney's bedside as
she recovered for weeks in the hospital. Um and like
they had had a funeral service for Whitney. So her
(36:03):
family was just now coming to terms with her with
the fact that she was dead when they found out that, no,
she's alive. And Laura's family, who had been like hoping
that their child was recovering, now found out that their
child was dead. Like it's just mind boggling that this
actually happened somewhere in Michigan. No less. Yeah, very very
(36:24):
sad case. But we don't want to leave you with
the said case, right, No, that's why we're going looping
back to do number one, which is actually number nine,
number sin which is number nine. Boy. This is about
Peter Sellers, who uh somehow was mistaken for Woody Allen
(36:44):
early in his career. A couple of key times. They're
famously doppel gangers. I know, they don't look much alike.
A couple of things I'll attribute it to is Woody
Allen looked um when he was younger. He you know,
he looked different than you might think of him now. First, Hall.
Uh And Peter Sellers was was a sort of man
of a thousand faces. As an actor, he was well
(37:06):
known for doing disguises, doing accents. No one ever knew
who the real Peter Sellers was. Um. Fascinating dude, very troubled,
not too great guy in real life. But I'm a
huge Peter Sellers fan and like read biographies on him.
Uh And, but that's what he was known for, is
is looking like other people. So it's no surprise that
(37:28):
maybe he would get confused with someone else. I'm a
David Niven guy, by the way, I love David Niven.
So apparently on the set of Casino Royal, um Leo Jaffee,
who's the head of Columbia Pictures, the studio making the
movie at the time, which is I think nineteen sixty
seven is when that movie was made. Yeah, it sounds right,
(37:48):
And it was based on the Ian Fleming novel Casino Royal.
It was a James Bond movie, but it was a
horror show. It was so poorly conceived and made that
they had five directors um each shooting different parts of
the movie, each working with different James Bonds, David Niven,
(38:09):
Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, I don't know who else was there. Um,
and then each of the directors didn't know what the
other one was doing. And then they put it together
and thought it was going to be a good idea.
But even before then, um, they had bigger problems on
their hands because Leo Jaffey was talking to who he
thought was Woody Allen, when in turn it was actually
Peter Sellers, and um, he started complaining about Peter Sellers
(38:31):
to Woody Allen, who was in fact actually Peter Sellers.
That's right. And I'm just now looking at a picture
of Peter Sellers from the late sixties and with the
horn room glasses he and Woody Allen, I can see
it a little bit, I guess, especially if you're a
studio exactly, who couldn't like all the actors are just
like cattle to you with or cash registers as well.
(38:51):
You know. Uh. This happened again on the set of
What's New Pussycat? Uh, And at this point Sellers was
pretty annoyed that this kept happening and that he was,
you know, he was a big star at that time,
and what Allen was kind of just getting started, so
uh and he had quite an ego, so he wasn't
none too pleased. Yeah, so, if you read um write
ups on UM Casino Royal the nineteen sixty seven version,
(39:15):
people are just like this was a legendary catastrophe, which
are some of the most fun movies to read about.
Those in Stanley Kubrick films are in large. Von Tarier
films are the most enjoyable to read about because people
are just agog for one reason or another, about what
their their subject is. Mm hmm, great word. I think
(39:37):
so too, man, I've been peppering really great words throughout
this episode. If you ask me, I've noticed you got
anything else? You want to talk about some more stolen
identity or mistaken identity stuff? Nah? All right, let's not then. Um.
If you want to know more about mistaken identities, you
can check out this article on how stuff works. And
since Chuck said nah, it's time for listener mail, I'm
(40:03):
just gonna read the first thing I saw because it
didn't have one prepared, and this is called Chuck's rope Trauma.
Oh yeah, hey, guys, I'm imagining we're gonna play this
out for years. Hey guys, I'm imagining Chuck at a
rough go at practicing shabari on himself. I'm sure hoping
this is true so we can get a future topic
on the art of shabarim thing. I don't know here
(40:28):
it is. Yeah, I think it's rope binding for sexual
pleasure Japanese bondage. You well, I just I just know that,
like in the back of my head. Apparently those pictures
are Yeah, these pictures are interesting. So Chuck answer the question,
is that where you got your rope trauma? No, it
wasn't shabari. Unfortunately, that seems like a lot more fun
(40:49):
than what happened to me. Um. But this is from
Ryan Loves the Show. Listen to every episode and Ryan
works in a diesel shop. Diesel like the clothing wine
No for over the road trucks, which I don't even
know what that means. Is that like a long haul trucker?
Probably over No, I think it's like a flying truck. Okay, right,
(41:12):
you should leave that in there. A momo. Yeah, I
just parked, everybody. Uh, it's nice to keep my mind
active while I'm mindlessly wrenching on bolts all day. And
that is from Ryan Schmidt and Waterloo. I A uh,
Waterloo Idaho. I A, where is that? That's Iowa? Yeah,
I just wanted to rip the Iowans and the idaho WANs. Uh.
(41:33):
And that was Ryan. That's Ryan. Thanks a lot, Ryan.
That was a good question. So, Chuck, do you want
to share now what the rope trauma was? No? I
think I literally think we should play this up for years.
And so I was talking to one of my one
of my friends and neighbors, Wesley, and he had just
heard the episode about Mallory today and was like, so, so,
what was it what happened to Chuck? I was like,
(41:54):
he won't tell me. He could not believe that you
didn't actually tell me. I was like, I don't know
any more than any one else. So, oh, we've got
a genuine internet mystery. Then I love it. It's a
genuine one. If you want to send us a guess
at what happened to Chuck with the rope, you can
already cross Shabari off of the list. You can send
it in an email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio
(42:14):
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows
Hey, everybody, it's Josh, and Chuck is here in spirit too,
and we just wanted to drop a casual reminder that
we are going to have a swinging Pacific Northwest Swing
this coming February, and tickets are now on sale. February
one will be at the More Theater in Seattle, February
two will be at Revolution Hall in Portland, and on
(00:22):
February three, for s F Sketch Fest, will be at
the Sydney Goldstein Theater. Go check out all of our
social media's for more information and links to tickets, and
we'll see you in February. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to
(00:45):
the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's hanging
out too, so that makes us a good old fashioned
Stuff you Should Know, Episode Old School Top ten of Dish. Yeah.
Do you think we'll actually make it through ten of these?
I'm not. Maybe you'll you'll do all tend keep going
after you log off, how about that? Yeah, we could
(01:06):
probably get through all ten. And these they're they're pretty uh,
it's we'll see. Let's just start at the beginning. I
just want to make sure that we hit the last one,
number one for sure. Okay, let's do it. Then, all right,
what are we talking about? Even well, we're talking today
about cases of mistaken identity, as anyone who read the
title of this episode or maybe even the synopsis could
(01:28):
tell you. And we talked a lot Chuck in our
Doppelganger episode, which hopefully came out before this episode or
else people won't know what we're talking about. We talked
a lot about some of this stuff, which is like,
you know, terrible things can happen if somebody mistakes you
for somebody else. Um. And that even in in the
age of facial recognition technology and genetic testing, UM, that
(01:51):
stuff can still happen. And because of our faith and
things like facial recognition programs and DNA testing, if if
you you come up with a mistaken identity case, it
makes it much harder to be believed when you're like,
I swear to God, it wasn't me, because people say
we've got your d N a man, and it's a match.
It was you. You're just fibbing, yeah, And I think
(02:14):
it gets a lot more interesting when you're talking about
mistaken identity for a crime that has been committed. Yeah, totally,
So I already want to skip this first one, can
we sure, let's do it and we'll go instead to
uh grand Old Israel, where there was a an Australian
ex pat named Nicole McCabe who'd been living there for years,
(02:35):
was married. She was six months pregnant at the time.
That has happened in two thousand and yes, and apparently
she um was watching the news, the local news in Israel,
and Um I saw that there was an assassination of
one of the Hamas chiefs, Mahmoud. I'll mab Mabou, That's
what I'm going with. Mabu, Yeah, Mabu m ab h
(02:59):
o u A how else you going to say that?
That's how I would say it. So Um he was
assassinated in Dubai and the Dubai authorities were looking for
twenty six people, and one of them was Nicole McCabe
and she knew they were looking for because they showed
her passport on television. That's right, So she was like,
what is going on? W t F. So it turns
(03:22):
out that if you are in Israeli intelligence agency and
it's called Massad, you can say, hey, I want to
use real identities as a cover. So instead of like
making up a false identity as a cover for their agents,
they use real identities and they basically use the identities
(03:45):
of of foreigners living in Israel, and all twenty six
of these Westerners evidently, and this is why they were suspected,
is because they were real identities used by Massad as
cover that we're real people, and they just basically lifted
their information from government databases. It's not like she lost
her her license in her passport and stuff like that.
(04:08):
They just took it basically sorry, except they didn't say sorry.
I didn't even say sorry. They just did it. And
that's so like insidious that apparently the one some of
the ex pats living in Israel were Brits, and the
UK expelled the highest ranking MASSAD agent from the Israeli
embassy as a result of this. It's just like you
(04:29):
don't do that. And apparently that was like standard procedure
for the MASSAD. So Nicole McKay, being an Australian, was
expecting that Australia would help her out of like this
legal jam that she had been gotten into, and they
were like, how about we just give you another passport,
and she said, is that in And they said, yeah,
that's it, but you should probably take it because you're
going to be on every single watch list in the
(04:50):
world now using your old passport. Just go with a
new one. Do the smart thing, McCabe and she said,
cry key, let's go Now, this isn't twenty in. I
wonder if they've stopped using real identities because that just
seems like a recipe for trouble. It definitely does. It's
one of those things that was like super reported on,
and they never reported on the rain so I didn't
see any follow up stuff, but it was widely reported
(05:12):
on in different outlets about it, and it wasn't just
the same story over and over again. It was. It
was investigated, but there wasn't a lot of follow up. Yeah, alright,
moving on to the next one. Number eight or number two,
depending on how you want to number these. This was
a case of a mistaken identity. That also was the
(05:33):
case of someone else having that same name as well,
which is we talked a little bit about this someone
else I think in the Oh no, I don't think
that anyone had the same name in the Doppelganger episode.
Did they No, No, I don't think so. But that
was the case with Will West in New York about
(05:54):
the turn of the twentieth century. Yeah, he was brought
up on charges of manslaughter and taken to Level and
Worth prison. Um to be um, what's it called when
they induct you. It's not inducted? UM identify you? I
guess when they book you. Yes, you procedurally check you in. Sure,
that's what we'll go with as better than induction. I'll
(06:16):
tell you that, UM. And he said, I've never been
here before. I've never been in trouble with the law before.
H And as part of standard procedure, they followed the
um uh bertillion um process of measuring your head, your face,
the distance between your eyes, the length of your nose,
the width from ear to ear, all this different stuff.
(06:37):
It's a form of what's called anthropometry and throw and throw. No,
I'm going with anthropometry. And we've talked about before, I
think in the forensics episode, probably the fingerprinting episode. It
was the way that you distinguished one person from another,
usually criminals. Before we relied on fingerprints, and apparently it
worked really well because it was so granular and so
(06:59):
detailed and so they took will West's measurements and they said,
you know what, we found somebody with the exact same
measurements as you. Right, so you have the same name,
you have nearly identical measurements. According to this French uh
police procedure of of identifying people. Um, you look like
(07:19):
him in the photograph. It's not just that your head
measures out the same. And so we think we've got you, buddy,
and he's like, it's not me, I promise you. And
as it turns out, the real William West was already
in Leavenworth, already serving a life sentence for murder. And
even though fingerprinting wasn't widespread, they were able to use
(07:40):
in the early days of fingerprinting, um, their fingerprints to
to right this wrong. Yeah. Um. And some people have
speculated that these guys were actually like related somehow, maybe
even twins that were pulling a scam um. But as
far as anyone officially knows, they were essentially doppelgangers. That
how upen to have the same name, and they looked
(08:02):
so much alike if you look at pictures of them, like,
they were clearly doppelgangers. Um that will will West when
he was being booked. They showed him the pictures from
the past booking and he said, yeah, that's me, but
I don't know where you got that photo. Like that's
how much it looked like him. He thought it was
a photo of himself. So they ended up um moving
(08:23):
to fingerprints. I think the Warden of Leavenworth stopped using
the barche ln Um process like the next day, essentially
the fingerprints instead, because yeah, because everyone thought the bear
chelon Um process was like unassailable, and then it showed no,
there's a problem, and fingerprints got got us out of
this jam. So let's just all move to fingerprints. From
(08:44):
that point one, the headtime headline the next day said
bird alone process assailable. Exclamation point. Clark says fingerprints rule.
Uh oh, yeah, you're Clark. I got that. Now it
sounds like he was Clark, all right, And now we
can move on to the case of uh, well, three gentlemen.
(09:09):
Uh there was a bad guy who committed crimes under
the names John Smith and a much more fancy pants
and name Lord Wilton to Willoughby. Uh And it seemed
like this guy and for about uh geez, for almost
twenty years, was bilking women out of their jewelry by uh,
I guess writing bad checks. He was a con man
(09:32):
and a thief, and I made a man named Adolph
Beck was mistaken for this man. And it wasn't just
the case of oh you look like him, we booked you,
but hey, we cleared it up. This guy did hard time,
seven years in prison. Yeah. So um. Apparently Lord Wilton
to Willoughby's scam was he would find a woman say
(09:54):
that he was looking for a mistress, and I think
he'll do you just find you like me? I like you, um,
And hey, that jewelry you're wearing is kind of shabby.
Why don't you give it to me? And I will
take it and use it for size to get some
very nice jewelry. Um. And then he just wouldn't return
the jewelry. And it was such a petty crime. This
wasn't nice jewelry. Like he must have taken tens of
(10:14):
dollars worth of jewelry, but he did it very frequently.
He was convicted and put in prison in eighteen seventy seven.
The exact same crime was carried out in eighteen nine
by him. But it just so happened that Adolph Beck
was fingered for that crime, and they were like you
and you were the same man who was convicted in
(10:35):
eighteen seventy seven, and we know it. And he said, no,
it wasn't me. It wasn't me, and they didn't listen
to him like you said. He did hard time, like
for years, yeah, for seven years, and he had a
lot of evidence to prove that it wasn't him. He
was like, hey, I was in Peru during this initial crime,
and I can prove that. And he said, also, I'm
(10:56):
not circumcised. Take a look at this, and everyone went hey, no, no, no,
no no. He said this is important to stop being childish. Well,
but that's true. He was not circumcised apparently. I mean,
who was the real name. I think maybe Frederick Meyer.
I saw that, I saw William Thomas, William Wyatt. I'm
not sure. Most people just referred to him as John Smith,
(11:20):
John old circumcised Smith. So, uh, fifteen convictions, seven years
in prison, and it gets worse. He finally gets out
of prison for a crime he didn't commit. He's in
his I think he's sixty at this point, and old
Lord Willoughby was still going to work and this guy
got convicted again for the same guy's crime. Yeah. So somebody,
(11:42):
luckily and journalists that the Daily Mail had taken an
interest in this, was like, this is a gross miscarriage
of justice, Like it's been documented, this is not the
same guy for years, and they're going after him again.
So he turned public um opinion against the Crown and
basically pointed to the to the prosecutor and said this
point his penis right. He said, this man is not
(12:04):
not not only incompetent, he's almost a fraud. He's such
a bad lawyer, um, and we should release this guy.
So not only did they release him, the Crown gave
him a five thousand dollar compensation I'm sorry, five thousand
pound compensation, I chuck. Not only did I do the
inflation calculator for pounds, I converted it to dollars. All right,
(12:25):
let's hear it. So in nine, five thousand pounds was
worth about six hundred and eighty three thousand pounds today,
And if you convert that to dollars today, he got
seven hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars. That's about a
hundred grand a year in prison. I get the impression
he wasn't a bad guy from what I saw, but
he Um was not a magnet for money. Apparently he
(12:48):
did not die Um with any money. I'm gonna just
say it. I know how much you hate it. He
died penniless. But one of the upshots of this is
a direct result of the miscarriage of justice from just
mistaken identity Um. The British Court of Appeals was established
like three years after he was convicted the last time. Well,
(13:10):
and it became sort of a hey, eyewitness because I
think sixteen people identified him, and it sort of became
a hey, this reliability of eyewitnesses is not something we
could really lean into all the time. Sixteen people, he
really did look a lot like him. But I mean,
come on, there's got to be something like, like, you
can't read a genuine protestation from an innocent person. Let's
(13:32):
let's open our eyes a little bit here, people, Okay, yeah,
and open your pants and just check out the penis.
That would have solved that once and for all right.
They were just so prude. I guess they wouldn't even
look at that very clear evidence. I mean they were
Victorian Chuck, all right, Should we take a break. Yeah,
I gotta say I'm having a lot of fun here,
but I do think we should take a break at
this point. Okay, let's do it all right. Uh this
(14:18):
one is a little uh sad on a lot of levels. Um.
This was a medical identity theft. And by the way,
this we want to thank our old If we're doing
a top ten, chances are it's from our old friends
at house stuffworks dot com because to write a lot
of those. This one specifically is by Nicholas Jervis or
gerbas So. I don't know how you pronounce the thing,
(14:39):
but I think he did a bang up job on
this one. Bang up job. Uh. So. This is a
case of Anne Dorree Sacks, who lived in Salt Lake City, Utah,
was a mom at four kids, and um, all of
a sudden was reported that her newborn child under her
name tested positive for legal drugs, which is a problem
(15:02):
for that mom. She's like, hey, listen, I got four kids,
but I don't have a newborn and I certainly don't
have a newborn that tested positive for drugs. Myth no
less um. So, not only was the newborn tested positive
for meth, the newborn had been abandoned by the mother,
who had also split with a ten thousand dollar medical bill,
(15:24):
Dick's her baby to meth abandons. The baby doesn't pay
a ten bill, So of course the hospitals like, you're
a crook and we're not gonna listen anything you said.
The woman's like, no, I swear to God it was
not me. And finally turned out that drug addicted um
uh woman had broken into and Dory Sacks's car, got
(15:45):
her I D which is a lesson, never leave your
life your license in your car. That's just a bad
idea all around, got her medical records and then went
and gave birth as and Dorry Sacks and ultimately apparently
amended and Dorr Sachs medical history. Um with with this
this information that may or may not have been purged. Yeah,
(16:08):
so you know, who knows what uh this impostor reported
about their medical history? But Sacks can't find out because
there are laws, privacy laws that prevent the records from
being shown even to her. So basically she has uh
she has to always sort of be on the lookout
for this. She has in real life a clotting disorder
(16:30):
in her blood and if she's given the wrong blood
type she could die. So she doesn't really even know
what's in there for what kind of blood type she
has on her medical records. So now Andrey Sachs has
to be just really careful and I guess proactive anytime
she goes to the hospital or doctor. Yeah, the whole
thing is called medical identity theft. This happened and I
(16:52):
think two thousand tennis and it was like a super
scary two thousand ten things to happen, But apparently it
was happening at the time early frequently enough that they
interviewed a couple other people and they were like, man,
if this happens to you, you are on your own,
because not only is the hospital not helping you, they
sick um basically billing investigators to find out what's going on.
(17:15):
And they interviewed and Dory Sex's like children to find
out had mommy been pregnant recently. Um. They would not
believe her. They just they did not take her word
for it. And it wasn't until she um took a
DNA test to prove like, this is not my child
they finally off. I wonder if you could like demand
that first rather than putting your family through all that,
(17:37):
you know, I think, so you just show up with
a zip block bag of blood at the investigator's office
and be like test this. You just plunk it down
on the desk in front of them, or just spit
at them and say collect this. Oh boy, check. That
turned dark pretty fast. But I liked it. Well, that
whole story was dark. It's very just a heartbreaking situation
(17:57):
all the way around. I've got a little positive spin
for you. Then at the end of the article I read,
you know, this is a different article. Apparently the mother um,
the actual like biological mom who had abandon her kid,
got let out of jail because she played guilty to
some other stuff and did some time, and like did
her time. But and Dory Sachs was interviewed and when
(18:19):
asked how she felt about it, and she said, if
the use of my ideas would allowed that baby a
chance to survive, then it's worth it to me. Wow,
I thought you were gonna say that, you know, the
biological momb turned her life around and reclaimed the baby.
And don't be naives. Oh that's a good one. How
(18:39):
about this number five? Or we skipped one, so number four, six, six?
How can we be that's this bad? At this? I
don't know math, Uh in two thousand three, the cops
in Britain said, we would very much like to arrestue
Peter hamm Can and that's how we do things over
(19:01):
here for cops. Because we think you've murdered someone. We're
not gonna pull a gun on you, or we're just
gonna ask you very kindly to come with us. We
think you murdered murdered a woman in Italy last year
in two thousand two. You match the description of the person,
and you're coming with me. But this bartender was like,
I've never been to Italy and they're like, you sound
(19:23):
like you have it. As a matter of fact, you
sound like you're from Italy, friend, he said, but it's
not a true. So this bartender, what was his name,
Peter Hampkin, I believe he was like, what do you
guys have never been to Italy. I certainly wasn't there
when this this murder happened. They said, okay, not only
do you look just like the description of the guy
(19:44):
that we're looking for, we're gonna take your blood and
oh yeah, you're a match, my friend, you're a match
to this. Uh. I guess the evidence that had been
found on the scene and um, Peter Hampkin was suddenly
in a lot of trouble despite the fact that it
was not himp And this is where we were just
kind of like the beginnings of the true dystopian um
(20:04):
mistaken identity stuff. Yeah, this one I don't. I mean,
I understand it in a way. But here's how it works.
If you are using DNA databases to match someone, it
is going to compare um subsites on the strand that
are called locusts or together they're called loki. And that's
(20:25):
just like I've seen it described as showing like the
genes neighborhood is the physical location of the geneo a chromosome,
And depending on where you are and what lab you
are and where you are in the world, you might
use a different a certain amount of these low key
as identifiers. In the States, I think the FBI uses thirteen.
In the UK it is ten. And apparently that you
(20:51):
can like make mistakes, like I thought DNA was the
gold standard, and reading this, it seems like if you're
just looking at as low as six low ki for
a match, then that's can be a real problem. It
certainly can. I think they thought before that nine gave
you a one and a hundred and thirteen billion chance
of a false positive. But apparently people looked into and
(21:14):
they're like, where did you get that evidence? FBI, and
they're like, we don't have to tell you'd be quiet. Um,
So no one's entirely certain what m the actual chances.
But the basis you said d NA was the gold standard,
it totally is for forensics, and the chances are really
really small that there would be a false match using
(21:34):
standard search procedures. Because they're looking at I think you
said thirteen. I believe they've up to ten. Yeah, they've
uped it to twenty. There's twenty sites that they say
these loki. These loki are going to be the ones
that we check. And you can have a minimum when
you like, if you arrest somebody and you take their blood,
you work up a DNA profile of that person, you
(21:57):
have to have at least a minimum of those twenty
cover preferably up to twenty for your for your profile.
And then the more you have and the more you
match the twenty loca, the less of a chance you
have of a false positive. But it can happen. And
I think the point of the people who are saying like, um,
we need to talk about this. That there can be
(22:18):
false positive is because if you are on a jury,
especially if you watch a lot of C s I
or Law and Order, you're like, you got DNA evidence,
it's over for you. Pal The idea that it could
be wrong is just out the window. And they're like,
we need to train the public injuries better than this
because they think it's it's again unassailable, right, But the
idea is you can always get way more granular with
(22:43):
your DNA uh peek alou and and and really find
out the truth though, right, Well, that's how Peter Hampkin
finally got off that bartender that kicked this whole thing off.
He they did a further DNA profile of them, and
they're like, Okay, it's not you. Because the chances of
somebody having those same mutations. They look at short tandem
(23:04):
repeating um snippets, which are non protein coding sequences, which
means like, it doesn't matter if they mutate a lot,
So they mutate a lot. So the chances of you
having the same mutation in all twenty of those is
vanishing lee small, and even in all eight of them
is pretty small enough. That it is still the gold standard.
It's just if you get caught and you have money
(23:26):
for a good lawyer, you can be like, you need
to do a better profile, and then they'll find that
it's not actually you. And of course I use peak alou,
that's not the official language they use for looking at DNA.
That's peekaboo. I used the slang. Okay, all right, I
think we do one more then we take our other break.
(23:46):
How about that? Okay, I'm still having a lot of
fun here, chuck um. Alright, so I guess we're on
either number four or number three and number five or
number uh. There was a interesting case of mistaken identity
in UM which turned out to be a sibling. In Alaska,
(24:08):
police had a sexual assault case and it was they
had a semen sample, they had usable DNA, they had
a DNA match. This guy was already in the system,
so they thought like, all right, this is an open
and shut case. Except one problem. This guy is was
in jail already when the crime was committed, So what
(24:30):
are we gonna do? Yeah, this one was incredibly fascinating.
I think this Alaskan um UH. DNA analysts or forensic
analysts like like went around the country giving talks on
this case and really opened people's eyes because it turned
out that the guy who was in prison whose DNA
matched the semen on the crime scene. I guess um
(24:54):
had gotten a bone marrow transplant from his brother, and
because of that, he was carrying around his brother's DNA
in his blood. Because when you get a bow marrow transplant,
you're getting uh like a red blood cell um stem
cell transplant, and those things turned into red blood cells
and they test your blood, So whatever DNA your blood
(25:14):
has is what they come back with on the DNA profile.
I wonder if the other brother immediately was like, you're
looking for my brother, because like maybe it sounds like
the brother. You know, the other brother was not a
good guy obviously, I mean, clearly if he committed sexual assault,
but if he was already in jail for something else,
(25:34):
then it sounds like good good brother, bad brother. They
were both sexual assaulters. The one was already in jail
for it. The one who actually did it had not
been caught yet. They thought that the guy who was
in jail already was the purp for the outside one,
and it turned out knows the whole family of sexual
assaulters makes a lot more sense now, Yeah, I get it, Okay,
(25:58):
all right, I mean it made sense before, but this,
this makes such glorious sense. The like the blinders are off,
so um, this really is like enough of a thing
that that forensic analysts from Alaska who discovered this, because
at first they were like, well the lab obviously made
as up and they looked in there like what is
going on here? They started looking into it more and
(26:19):
they're like, this could be a thing. Actually we need
to let the law enforcement know, Like there's a thing
that happens when you get a bowemarrow transplant. Your DNA changes.
And they there was a guy named Chris Long on
a um I read about an I f L Science
article UM and they tested him four years after he'd
gotten a um A transplant from a donor in Germany
(26:42):
who we never met, I don't believe, and his DNA
in different parts of his body were entirely the donors.
Including get this, chuck, his semen had had nothing but
his donor's DNA. So if he fathered a child, whose
kid would that be? Because the kid would have the
same DNA as the donor, not him. His dad, Um, well,
(27:05):
it would be his kids. Still, legally it would be
his kid, but biologically wouldn't it be the German Donors child.
I don't know. I think there's an old saying about that,
like whoever smelt it delta? But I can't quite work
it out. Uh, there's a couple of rhymes. I'm trying
not right now. Two bad brothers, man. I just that
(27:28):
was sitting there right in front of my face. Yeah,
well so they both went to jail, right, Yeah, I
believe the Alaska forensic analysts got them, nabbed their person. Sweet,
is it time for that break now? You promised? Yeah,
I'm gonna go ruminate on that justice served and we'll
be right back and things. So I guess we should say, chuck,
(28:10):
if you're out there in podcast land listening to us
and you didn't actually have to hear an ad, give
us a double twot. Dude, dude. You know there was
an email er I think he bothered me several times
with Emil that trying to convince us that we were
in podcast land. Because we used to say that out
there in podcast land and this guy ruined it. We
(28:31):
just quit saying it because he was like you in
fact or in podcast land. I kind of get where
that guy's coming from. Was that you nabe? That's weird?
He signed your name is Jehan Jehan Paul Dusseldorf three
seven at hotmail. What I don't get that one? That
(28:54):
was who who sent it in? John John Paul seven
at hotmail dot com. I gotta check that was their email.
Can we talk about these twins? Sure? Um, because apparently
in real life, Chuck twins actually get out of criminal
prosecution because they say, no, it wasn't me, it was
(29:14):
my identical twins. Yeah. I don't see how this is.
I mean, can't they do more work to arrest somebody
for a crime when they know it's one of the two.
All right, Well this happened in Germany. A big department
store in UH in Europe is the calf House uh
dis Weston's. And in January two thousand nine, Um, there
(29:38):
were three people who broke into one of these department stores.
They were smart, they were masks, they were Latex gloves.
They sold close to seven million dollars in jewelry. But
one of them left one of their gloves behind and
they did a DNA test on the sweat inside the
glove gross. And they had two matches of these two
identical twins uh psalm and a boss uh. And Germany
(30:02):
doesn't give last name, so the last initials oh and
yeah a Samo Riley And they basically did what you said.
These twenty seven year old twins were like, um, whatn't me?
And the other one said what didn't me? And they
let them go. They did. And I just wanted to
give a shout out to this group whom I'm not
(30:24):
like a um an admirer of criminals or anything like that,
but I read Chuck. They did like real great Muppet
caper stuff and like slid down ropes coming from the
skylights to do this robbery. It wasn't like a smash
and grab. They had finace at least, okay movie style
robber robbery. So so yeah, exactly so in Germany, UM,
(30:47):
they like, you can't just lock up both people because
one of them might be innocent. And if you have
to make that decision under German law, and the same
thing in America, UM, you can't lock up innocent people.
It's better to let criminal go free until lock up
an innocent person. That's the trade off. That we have.
And it's not just happened in Germany with the O'Reilly brothers. Um,
(31:10):
It's happened around the world in other places too. Yeah.
I think in Malaysia in two thousand nine there were
identical twins who, um, we're narcotics traffickers, and they had
a death sentence, but they couldn't prove who was who. Um.
Here's my thing, and I agree with due process, but
(31:30):
I think if you strong arm them a little bit, no,
nothing like that, but like, hey, one of you is
going to go to prison, and we'll flip a coin,
We'll flip a Deutsche Mark. I still got one in
my pocket from the old days. Uh, and and one
of you is going to go to jail. I think
they could pressure them into one of them, like they
(31:53):
got to really be in unison, you know, one of
them would eventually crack the person who didn't do it
or did do it. So the thing is is, I
mean we're talking about twin siblings here. I mean if
they've got resolved and not rap the other one out,
they've got it. Yeah, exactly. So I'm sure if both
of them know hack, both of them might have been there.
It was three three robbers, so two of them might
(32:14):
have been the twins. They just could not say which
one they that was definitely there, so they said no.
And yeah, I mean, if you have no other evidence,
what can you do? What can you do hot shot?
Smack them around with I guess so you'd be like
by Dousldorf, you will crack all right. So I think
(32:36):
we got a couple of more. We just had a
brief This is how the sausage is made, a brief
off Mike convo. We're going to circle back to the
original one that I wanted to skip at the end
because Josh is in love with it. I love it,
he wants to marry it. He's in love. I'm already married.
We're skipping. Uh. I wonder if anyone ever goes to
(32:57):
see what we skipped. I don't care. But there's some
army members they're like, uh, listen up, everybody all time.
I got the dirt on the one, all right, So
we're gonna finish or do you want to finish with
the one I didn't like? And then because you really
wanted to do number one? Yeah, we have to. Man,
it's the most astounding case of mistaken identity. And recent memory.
(33:21):
All right, so let's do it right the second Okay,
go now, So this was a case uh jeez, it's
both sad and uplifting, kind of depending on whose family
you're in. But it was a very tragic day in
two thousand six. I kind of remember this happening. Um.
There was a semi truck driver who in April of
(33:44):
that year, like I said, fell asleep at the wheel,
crossed the median and crashed into a university van from
Taylor University that had nine people uh in the in
the van. And it was a very bad crash. It
killed five uh I think all students, but five people.
And it was just you know, people were flung all
over the place there. Stuff was flung all over the place. Uh.
(34:08):
And it was obviously a mess of a scene of
an accident scene and two young women got mistaken for
one another in a very tragic way. Yeah. So I
guess um uh Whitney saranac Um had her. She was
basically bundled up onto a stretcher and um met of
act out by helicopter. But the first responder who put
(34:31):
her on the stretcher had grabbed an I d of
another girl who was in the van that looked a
lot like her, especially I'm sure at night under a
crazy circumstances like that, And the I D went to
Laura van Wrinn and while Whitney Sarak was alive, Laura
van Wren was dead. But people now thought that this
person who was bloodied, beat up um, whose face was
(34:54):
swollen and would suit be bandaged for weeks was Laura
van Wrin, when in fact it was Whitney's Iraq. Yeah.
So boy, this one is um. Like I said, very
very bad news for one family and very good news
for another. And that one family thought their daughter was
alive and she had passed and the other way around. So, uh,
(35:17):
it's just this, this one's a tough one to even
think about how someone gets through something like this in
true movie fashion, Um and inconsistencies sorted to kind of
pile up as she recovered, and people were sort of
suspicious of what was going on, and finally someone asked
her to write her name, and she wrote down Whitney. Uh,
(35:40):
it's just it's a moment, like you know, it's a
pretty chilling moment. It's a movie moment for goodness, sick.
It's crazy because I mean in the meantime, like Laura's
family were the ones who were at Whitney's bedside as
she recovered for weeks in the hospital. Um and like
they had had a funeral service for Whitney. So her
(36:03):
family was just now coming to terms with her with
the fact that she was dead when they found out that, no,
she's alive. And Laura's family, who had been like hoping
that their child was recovering, now found out that their
child was dead. Like it's just mind boggling that this
actually happened somewhere in Michigan. No less. Yeah, very very
(36:24):
sad case. But we don't want to leave you with
the said case, right, No, that's why we're going looping
back to do number one, which is actually number nine,
number sin which is number nine. Boy. This is about
Peter Sellers, who uh somehow was mistaken for Woody Allen
(36:44):
early in his career. A couple of key times. They're
famously doppel gangers. I know, they don't look much alike.
A couple of things I'll attribute it to is Woody
Allen looked um when he was younger. He you know,
he looked different than you might think of him now. First, Hall.
Uh And Peter Sellers was was a sort of man
of a thousand faces. As an actor, he was well
(37:06):
known for doing disguises, doing accents. No one ever knew
who the real Peter Sellers was. Um. Fascinating dude, very troubled,
not too great guy in real life. But I'm a
huge Peter Sellers fan and like read biographies on him.
Uh And, but that's what he was known for, is
is looking like other people. So it's no surprise that
(37:28):
maybe he would get confused with someone else. I'm a
David Niven guy, by the way, I love David Niven.
So apparently on the set of Casino Royal, um Leo Jaffee,
who's the head of Columbia Pictures, the studio making the
movie at the time, which is I think nineteen sixty
seven is when that movie was made. Yeah, it sounds right,
(37:48):
And it was based on the Ian Fleming novel Casino Royal.
It was a James Bond movie, but it was a
horror show. It was so poorly conceived and made that
they had five directors um each shooting different parts of
the movie, each working with different James Bonds, David Niven,
(38:09):
Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, I don't know who else was there. Um,
and then each of the directors didn't know what the
other one was doing. And then they put it together
and thought it was going to be a good idea.
But even before then, um, they had bigger problems on
their hands because Leo Jaffey was talking to who he
thought was Woody Allen, when in turn it was actually
Peter Sellers, and um, he started complaining about Peter Sellers
(38:31):
to Woody Allen, who was in fact actually Peter Sellers.
That's right. And I'm just now looking at a picture
of Peter Sellers from the late sixties and with the
horn room glasses he and Woody Allen, I can see
it a little bit, I guess, especially if you're a
studio exactly, who couldn't like all the actors are just
like cattle to you with or cash registers as well.
(38:51):
You know. Uh. This happened again on the set of
What's New Pussycat? Uh, And at this point Sellers was
pretty annoyed that this kept happening and that he was,
you know, he was a big star at that time,
and what Allen was kind of just getting started, so
uh and he had quite an ego, so he wasn't
none too pleased. Yeah, so, if you read um write
ups on UM Casino Royal the nineteen sixty seven version,
(39:15):
people are just like this was a legendary catastrophe, which
are some of the most fun movies to read about.
Those in Stanley Kubrick films are in large. Von Tarier
films are the most enjoyable to read about because people
are just agog for one reason or another, about what
their their subject is. Mm hmm, great word. I think
(39:37):
so too, man, I've been peppering really great words throughout
this episode. If you ask me, I've noticed you got
anything else? You want to talk about some more stolen
identity or mistaken identity stuff? Nah? All right, let's not then. Um.
If you want to know more about mistaken identities, you
can check out this article on how stuff works. And
since Chuck said nah, it's time for listener mail, I'm
(40:03):
just gonna read the first thing I saw because it
didn't have one prepared, and this is called Chuck's rope Trauma.
Oh yeah, hey, guys, I'm imagining we're gonna play this
out for years. Hey guys, I'm imagining Chuck at a
rough go at practicing shabari on himself. I'm sure hoping
this is true so we can get a future topic
on the art of shabarim thing. I don't know here
(40:28):
it is. Yeah, I think it's rope binding for sexual
pleasure Japanese bondage. You well, I just I just know that,
like in the back of my head. Apparently those pictures
are Yeah, these pictures are interesting. So Chuck answer the question,
is that where you got your rope trauma? No, it
wasn't shabari. Unfortunately, that seems like a lot more fun
(40:49):
than what happened to me. Um. But this is from
Ryan Loves the Show. Listen to every episode and Ryan
works in a diesel shop. Diesel like the clothing wine
No for over the road trucks, which I don't even
know what that means. Is that like a long haul trucker?
Probably over No, I think it's like a flying truck. Okay, right,
(41:12):
you should leave that in there. A momo. Yeah, I
just parked, everybody. Uh, it's nice to keep my mind
active while I'm mindlessly wrenching on bolts all day. And
that is from Ryan Schmidt and Waterloo. I A uh,
Waterloo Idaho. I A, where is that? That's Iowa? Yeah,
I just wanted to rip the Iowans and the idaho WANs. Uh.
(41:33):
And that was Ryan. That's Ryan. Thanks a lot, Ryan.
That was a good question. So, Chuck, do you want
to share now what the rope trauma was? No? I
think I literally think we should play this up for years.
And so I was talking to one of my one
of my friends and neighbors, Wesley, and he had just
heard the episode about Mallory today and was like, so, so,
what was it what happened to Chuck? I was like,
(41:54):
he won't tell me. He could not believe that you
didn't actually tell me. I was like, I don't know
any more than any one else. So, oh, we've got
a genuine internet mystery. Then I love it. It's a
genuine one. If you want to send us a guess
at what happened to Chuck with the rope, you can
already cross Shabari off of the list. You can send
it in an email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio
(42:14):
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
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Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.