October 27, 2020 • 39 mins
Hey, Piketon Massacre listeners, check out this iHeartRadio & Shondaland Audio podcast – Criminalia.
On Criminalia, hosts Holly Frey and Maria Trimarchi explroe the intersection of history and true crime. This season is all about lady poisoners. During the time that Chicago’s most visible criminal element was organized crime, Tillie Klimek was quietly becoming the city’s most prolific female serial killer. She allegedly killed between six and 20 people, all through arsenic poisoning.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, this is Ali Wentworth, host of Go Ask Galley.
My listeners want more, so we are digging in. It's real.
It's honest, open and unexpected and sometimes amusing. He told
me you chased him with a butcher knife and tried
to cut off his penis. But that's his version, and
everybody has everybody has two two sides of every store exactly.
(00:20):
All new episodes of Go Ask Galley release every Thursday.
Listen to Go Ask Ally on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Laverne
Cox and on my podcast, The Laverne Cox Show, we're
ripping the band aid off. Trauma, resilience, dating, diet culture dating,
white supremacy dating. Okay, I'm not gonna get explicit, but
(00:44):
just because you're cute, like I'm not going you're gonna
say yes, girl, and honey. We have a lot of
fun along the way. You have a lot of lesbian
fans who love your femininity and glamour and they just
really really want you. I want us to talk openly
about the difficult things we all face as humans and
(01:04):
as humans in America. Racist white people in the United
States will sign their own death certificates. They will vote
for policies that crush them, no safety nets, no healthcare
because they feel too much like entitlements. And those are
folks of color, right. Listen to the Laverne Cox Show
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get
(01:26):
your podcast Make sure you subscribe and share. Hi, this
is Ali Wentworth, host of Go Ask Gali. Season two
will be back soon with more new episodes. As always,
Go ask Alli is there for binging and catching up,
purpose and meaning in life or how you figure out
what life is all about. And that requires unhappiness. So
(01:46):
here's the great paradox. To be happy, you also have
to be unhappy. Don't miss a single episode. Listen to
Go Ask Ally on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you
get your podcasts. Make sure you subscribe and share. Welcome
to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. Hello,
(02:12):
and welcome to Criminalia. I'm Mariach from Marquis, and I'm
Holly Fry. We know that humans have always managed to
commit crimes, almost certainly before there was even recorded history,
so we decided that we would start looking at those
crimes and get our hands dirty. We wanted to dig
in and look at some of history's crimes and criminals
to understand them better, and in doing so, we're curious
(02:33):
if we can find commonality with our modern world and
our modern problems, and whether these crimes look different a
little bit of distance on the timeline, and whether any
of these perpetrators emerge as more sympathetic characters. This first
season is going to be all about poisoners, specifically women poisoners.
Poison is often called a woman's weapon, despite the fact
(02:54):
that roughly two thirds of the poisonings committed throughout time
have been the work of men. So let's start looking
at these women and their motivations and see if any
patterns develop. This week, we're looking into the life and
crimes of Tilly Clinic, a Polish immigrant who killed at
least one and possibly as many as twenty people and
at least one dog between the years nineteen fourteen and
(03:14):
nineteen twenty two. I will confess that when you were
telling me about the research you were doing initially on
this and you mentioned the dog, I was like, well,
I hate her, Not that it wasn't terrible. It she
killed people, just you know, that was for me, the
worst thing that she could have done as well. She
(03:44):
was born Tiafila Burick to Michelina and Michael Burick on
October twenty second, eighteen seventy seven, and Tilly was probably
right around four years old when her family immigrated to
the United States. They moved from Poland to the Little
Poland neighborhood of Chicago, and of the seven children in
the family, at Tilly, as she was called, was the eldest.
(04:06):
Chicago has a long history of Polish immigration, and Polish
Americans have lived in the area for well over a century.
In eighteen ninety, around the time Tilly was born, there
was a wave of immigration to the United States. At
that time, the number of Polish immigrants in the city
blossomed to more than twenty five thousand. By nineteen thirty,
a few years before she died, that number had grown
to one hundred and sixty five thousand. Most they lived
(04:28):
below the poverty line. Is the tale of immigration in
so many ways. So let's set the scene of the
actual situation we're talking about today. So this is Chicago
in the early twentieth century. You couldn't necessarily count on
(04:52):
your food and drinks to be clean. Upton Sinclair started
publishing the serialized version of his groundbreaking X baz of
the meat industry in the US, The Jungle, in nineteen
oh five, and while that led to the creation of
the Meat Inspection Act in nineteen oh six, food safety
legislation was still in its infancy. But if you were
at a restaurant or a club or a hotel around
(05:14):
the city, there were other dangers when it came to
what you consumed at the table. In particular, wait staff
were known to target patrons who didn't tip well. Not
like the content of the chatter in Fight Club, although
honestly maybe a little of that. They usually chose poisons
and various other things you really don't want to be
in your food, So remember always tip well. But moreover,
(05:36):
it turns out that you couldn't really count on food
safety at home either, at least if you lived with
a Tilly Clinic. During the time that Chicago's most visible
criminal element was organized crime, Tilly was quietly becoming the
city's most prolific female serial killer. She'd allegedly killed between
six and twenty people. Like we said, but that was
(05:57):
all through arsenic poisoning. So we're gonna talk first just
about what arsenic actually is. It is a naturally occurring
element in the Earth's crust and in its raw state.
As much as it has this instant conjuring of poison,
it's not actually harmful the way it naturally exists. Arsenic
only really becomes poisonous when it's converted into arsenic trioxide,
(06:19):
which is better known as white arsenic. White arsenic not
only is odorless, but it's tasteless, and it's white or
transparent in form, so it's easily confused with sugar or flour.
But it's highly toxic when it's inhaled into your lungs
or when you ingest it. And it might surprise you
that even white arsenic is actually fairly benign in relatively
small amounts, because it is very lethal at higher doses.
(06:42):
In fact, doctors have actually prescribed white arsenic through the
years in its low dosage as a treatment for things
like asthma, typhus, malaria, even menstrual cramps, and it continues
to be administered intravenously as a chemotherapy for a specific
type of leukemia. When arsenic is ingested, initially it causes
symptoms such as abdominal pain, diarrhea that's often being accompanied
(07:06):
by bleeding and vomiting. It's terrible. As the dose gets
more and more lethal in the body, though, the symptoms
also begin to include convulsions, cardiovascular problems, hair loss, liver
and kidney problems, and even organ damage. So not a
peaceful way to go. Definitely not sugar. No, and despite
its potency, it has been used in the production of semiconductors.
(07:30):
It's been used as wood preservative, and it's also sometimes
found in pesticides. Manufacturers in the nineteenth century started using
it for it's a green pigment in products like paint
and wallpaper, fabrics, beauty products, and as food coloring. The
list goes on because green is very beautiful color, so
(07:50):
sometimes those products would actually make people sick, but at
the time, no one was suspecting that the arsenic in
them was the problem that was causing their ailment. In
the early twentieth century, when Tilly was busy murdering people
in her community, the average Americans medicine cabinet was stocked
with all sorts of toxic things like radioactive radium for
(08:10):
acne and mercury as a topical antiseptic for cuts and
scrapes and burns. Morphine showed up in everyday products and
everything from teething medications to cures for heroin addiction. From
roughly the late eighteenth into the early twentieth century is
considered to be the golden age of poisoners, and during
that time, arsenic specifically caught the nickname the inheritance powder.
(08:35):
And you can probably imagine why the police really didn't
have any of the tools to test the corpse for poison.
Arsenic wasn't only easy to acquire, it was hard to
detect as a cause of death, which was win win
for the Golden Age of poisoners. It was common practice
for doctors to treat suspected poisoning with leeches bleeded out
(08:57):
or try to identify the poisons by sniffing the contents
of the person's stomach. Remember how we said arsenic was
odorless though, Yeah, so you just sniff those contents for nothing.
But it was also just unusual for a doctor or
a coroner to suspect arsenic as a cause of death,
mainly because the symptoms of arsenic poisoning that Maria just
(09:18):
talked about diarrhea and vomiting and abdominal pain are so
similar to a lot of other disorders. It's also really
hard to place a poisoner at the scene of the murder.
Dying can typically take hours or longer if you administered
the poison gradually, such as with someone's meals, so the
perpetrator could easily have a seemingly airtight alibi for their
(09:40):
whereabouts because the window of time had such fuzzy edges.
But it actually wouldn't be until the late nineteenth century
that a chemist named James marsh would come up with
a reliable chemical test for arsenic poisoning. Today, arsenic poisoning
is treated with chelation therapy, which uses special drugs that
bind to metal ions in your blood. So rough on
(10:04):
Rats was the product that became popular in the late
eighteen hundreds. It was composed mainly of arsenic and a
little black coal for masking the poison, and while i
was advertised for use in killing rats, mice, bedbugs, flies, roaches,
it occasionally was used for the very off label purpose
of killing husbands. Believe it or not, the marketing slogan
(10:26):
for this poison rough on Rats was don't die in
the house, thinking, of course, being that the creature you
had poisoned would scurry away to die. It was also
really easily available at the local store, and Tillie actually
got her first bottle of rough On Rats from her
cousin Nellie Kulik, and Nellie, it would turn out, was
(10:49):
also a fellow poisoner murder and husbands. According to your
accounts from her neighbors, Tillie was sent to have precognitive dreams,
meaning that she could predict the future in real life
through sort of a sixth sensish kind of way. She
began to predict the depths of neighborhood dogs, and she
was surprisingly accurate, but it turns out she was just
(11:13):
scheduling their depths. We're getting a little ahead of ourselves though,
in the progression of Tilly's activities with rough On Rats.
So we're gonna back up to eighteen ninety five. Hi,
it's Laverne Cox and on my podcast, The Laverne Cox Show,
we're ripping the band aid off. Trauma, resilient dating, diet
culture dating, white supremacy dating. Okay, I'm not gonna get explicit,
(11:38):
but just because you're cute, like I'm not going, You're
gonna say yes, girl, and honey, we have a lot
of fun along the way. You have a lot of
lesbian fans who love your femininity and glamour and they
just really really want I want us to talk openly
about the difficult things we all face as humans and
(11:59):
as humans in America, racist white people in the United
States will sign their own death certificates. They will vote
for policies that crush them, no safety nets, no healthcare
because they feel too much like entitlements. And those are
folks of color, right. Listen to the Laverne Cox Show
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
(12:20):
your podcast. Make sure you subscribe and share. Hi. This
is Ali Wentworth, host of Go Ask Gali. Season two
will be back soon with more new episodes, but what
you can do is binge the first half of season
two or revisit our first spectacular season. Everyone has to
deal with money, and typically like people don't talk about it.
(12:41):
It's like this quiet thing that everyone wants to avoid.
But then everyone wants to live this life and doesn't
matter what how you define that life, but you need
money for it. Just a few of our fabulous guests
the season are former editor of People magazine Jess Cagel,
New York Times bestselling author Isabel Gillies, and writer and
Oprah's favorite life coach Martha Beck. And people come to
(13:02):
me now and they will say negative things, and I think,
I respectfully do not give a crap what you think,
because I'm a crazy old bat now and you can't
stop me. That's great. Our guests have so much to say.
One listen isn't enough Listen to go ask Ali on
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Make
(13:23):
sure you subscribe and share. Hey, I'm Gabrielle Collins, Period
drama nerd and you're behind the scenes guide to Bridgerton.
On Bridgerton, the official podcast. We're learning how this fantasy
world dipped in history came to life. Daphanie. Her costume
(13:43):
design really is about the elegance of simplicity. It's just
color and shape. We went old school and we got
two scene cartists in who painted the backings for us
by hand. These dukes are all like in their late
twenties early thirties. Almost all of them were unmarried, really
good looking, and none of them have syphilis. Can you
(14:06):
imagine when he looks into your eyes and then he
dicts you we just heard this sort of ripping sound. Yeah,
I think that's just been a wardrobe malfunction. Listen to
Bridgerton the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or anywhere you get your favorite shows. Welcome back to Criminalia.
(14:35):
By eighteen ninety five, Tillie was married to John mckaywitz.
His name may have been Joseph not John. Records aren't
entirely consistent, but we're gonna go with John because that's
what the majority of records from the time referred to
him as. That is one of the delights word I'm
using ironically of doing historical research, particularly when you are
(14:55):
talking about immigrants, because there was not a vested interest
always in the government in keeping accurate records about them,
So you often have these people's stories that get really
muddy because their names do shift around in the historical record. Anyway,
by all accounts this couple, Tilly and John were well
(15:17):
liked in their community, and their marriage appeared by all
accounts to be happy. Tilly made her life as a housekeeper,
but it was also during this time that Tilly started
telling neighbors about some visions that she was having. She was,
as we mentioned before the break, an alleged psychic who
was skilled specifically at predicting deaths. This included predicting the
(15:39):
death of her own husband, John, who had left her
a thousand dollars When he died in nineteen fourteen. The
coroner's report listed his death as a result of heart trouble,
nothing suspicious. There was no reason at the time to
suspect that John had been poisoned by his wife. The
nickname black widow, which is often given to women who
kill their lovers in order to inherit their wealth, would
(16:01):
eventually be bestowed upon Tilly, but not just yet. Here's
a little more in detail on John's sudden end. Okay.
In the beginning of nineteen fourteen, Tilly began telling friends
and those in the community that she dreamed that John
was ill. She expected he would be on his deathbed
in just a few weeks, and when he died in
January thirteenth that year, the cause of death was listed
(16:23):
as heart trouble, and Tilly collected a thousand dollars in
life insurance. I guess after nineteen years she just didn't
want to gun it to twenty. She's like enough. After
receiving that payout on John's life insurance policy, Tilly actually
remarried pretty quickly. See now that's the thing. She remarried
quickly often. And I always sort of wonder like if
(16:44):
she would follow in love with someone new and be like, oh,
I'll kill my husband and we'll start out fresh with
like this new thousand dollars. It's just my own personal theory. Yeah,
I think there's merit to it. But her new husband,
Joseph Raskowski, died just three months after they got married,
and he happened to leave his widow twelve hundred dollars
in cash and seven hundred twenty two dollars in insurance money.
(17:10):
Not only did Tilly predict Joseph's death, she went on
to predict the deaths of her third husband, although they
may or may not have been married, it's a little sketchy.
And her fourth husband, as well as children, she cared
for a few neighbors and possibly some other family members.
And not only did she joke with neighbors that her
fourth husband, Frank, had quote two inches to live, which
(17:34):
is a really interesting, fascinating turn of phrase. She allegedly
taunted him on his deathbed and said things like it
won't be long now, and you'll be dying soon, which
is in my own home. You got two inches to live.
(17:56):
I don't know, right, it's like callous on a level
that's hard to comprehend, right right. She also, in an
act of both cruel and creative, knitted herself a morning
hat as she sat by his bedside while he was dying.
(18:17):
She even so far as to purchase a thirty dollars
bargain coffin to keep in the basement of her house
waiting for his death. That storage areatment was a little
unsettling request made of her landlord, who began to be
a little suspicious of Tilly after that came in. Frank
did die on April twentieth, nineteen twenty one, and it
(18:39):
is said that when it happened, Tillie played dance music
in the room. The coroner listed Frank's cause of death
as bronchial pneumonia. Tillie's poisonous predilections unnoticed. She once again
collected on his life insurance, this time in the amount
of six hundred seventy five dollars nearly as much as
(19:00):
the last two. I know she's downgrading the insurance situation
with each one. They're going faster now, you know. There's
just not enough time to like build up to the thousand.
That's another theory I have. It's interesting and grimly fun
to note that Frank An Tillie's home at nine twenty
four Winchester. It's a house in East Dillige in Chicago,
(19:20):
shows up on the Old Fourth Square social networking site
as Old Lady Tilly Climic's Haunted House. Even today, Tilly
was still not arrested, though that didn't happen until after
she botched an attempt at poisoning husband number five, that
was Joseph Clemick. She and Joseph had gotten married in
July of nineteen twenty one, again not long after Frank's demise,
(19:42):
just a few and Clemmick is said to have been
a relatively wealthy man, but Tilly did not like that.
He also apparently had a wandering eye, and by October
of nineteen twenty two he was in the hospital experiencing
arm numbness, leg paralysis, and other symptoms consist with severe
arsenic poisoning. So while he was in the hospital, Tillie's
(20:04):
husband recalled that his food had tasted strangely lately, and
here's one big red flag. He remembered, the dog dying
after eating scraps of food till he had cooked. Her
husband also stated he'd planned to press charges against her
and till he kissed him. Such a strange dynamic at play.
But it was not poisoning Joseph that she went on
(20:25):
trial for. While Tilly was arrested initially for the attempted
murder of Joseph Klemick, who would survive her poison his
hand after an investigation into the deaths of her previous husbands,
the crime Tilly was eventually tried for was the murder
of Frank, her third husband, but even as she was
taken in, she appeared completely indifferent to the whole situation.
(20:46):
It is said that she told the arresting officer, who
was Lieutenant William Malone, the next one I want to
cook dinner for is you. You made all my trouble.
After eighteen hours of interrogation, Tilly confessed her crimes, admitting
to mixing rat poison into her victim's food and drink
note plural. It's interesting, right, Like eighteen hours of interrogation
(21:08):
is considered extreme, it is, and she just gives it
all up. Then there's that whole thing of like is
this a coerced confession at that point? But her later
behavior makes it seem like she she's pretty down with
this information being one true and part of public records. Yeah,
she's a badass. Just two grains of arsenic is enough
(21:31):
to kill almost anyone, and as much as eight grains
were found in Frank's organs, so enough to kill four people.
Authorities decided to exoom Tillie's other husbands and found their
stomachs each contained lethal doses of arsenic, and although evidence
existed to convict her of as many as twenty murders
(21:52):
by arsenic, only one charge resulted in a conviction. Although
she was not the only woman and wife in her
community to be arrested for suspicion of poisoning, she was
the only one of them who was sentenced. Yeah. Remember
how we mentioned her cousin earlier. Yeah. Authorities went on
to investigate a possible poison ring in the Little Poland neighborhood,
(22:13):
arresting other local women. In what the Assistant state Attorney
at the time. That was A man named William McLaughlin
called quote the most astonishing wholesale poisoning plot uncovered. He
wanted the death penalty for Tilly, but without better evidence,
the other women who had been rounded up just had
to be released. As Tilly's story unfurls, it becomes apparent
(22:36):
that it wasn't just husbands that she poisoned. She played
fast and loose with rough on rats, poisoning people who
irritated her and dogs who barked too much in the neighborhood.
Life was especially risky if you were one of Tillie's cousins.
In nineteen twelve, Tilly's cousin, Stanley Zaczuski, died at the
age of sixteen. Tilly, who was in her mid thirties
at the time, tended on him while he was ill.
(23:00):
Their cousin, Stanley's sister, Stell, died in nineteen thirteen. She
was twenty three at the time, and again Tillie played
the role of caregiver. After her husband Frank's death, Tillie
started seeing a man named Joseph Grandkowski, like lovers before him.
Joseph died in nineteen fourteen after jilting her and back
(23:20):
to cousins. In nineteen fifteen, Tillie's cousin Helen died at
age fifteen. Another cousin, Nick Micko, became sick from arsenic poisoning,
but he was lucky enough to actually recover. In nineteen nineteen,
Tillie's cousin Rose died after attending Tillie and Frank's wedding party.
In nineteen eighteen, Tillie may have been involved in the
(23:40):
poisoning of woejek Strummer, who was the husband of her
cousin Nellie, the same Nellie from she procured her rat poison.
It turns out that Tillie wasn't only cooking arsenic in
two meals, she was also a confectioner. Twizzlers may make
mouse happy, but you definitely want to skip Tillie's streets.
So Stella Guskowski, sister of Tillie's former boyfriend Joseph, got
(24:05):
sick after she ate a candy that was given to
her by Tillie after the two women had an argument.
Joseph died from tainted candy as well. Rose, split had
also stayed un Tillie gave her arsenic confused candies after
Joseph Klinik talked to her. So a jealous Tillie was
willing to go after innocent women who her husband even
dared to converse with. So let's keep going because we're
(24:28):
only about halfway through the body count. There was also
a woman named Bessie Kupzick's sister in law of Tilly's
husband Frank, who fell sick after eating Tillie's cooking, but
Bessie recovered. Children, primarily relatives, were also on Tillie's hit list.
At least four children in Tillie's sphere were poisoned between
nineteen seventeen nineteen eighteen. Dorothy Spara died at age two.
(24:51):
Twins Sophie and Ben Strummer also died. John Strummer was
the only one to recover. Lillian's drummer, who was in
her early teens, lived at Tillie's home for a year
when she became deathly ill from the food and suffered
heart trouble. So skip ahead just a few years to
March nineteen twenty three, and a man named Myers goes missing.
(25:12):
Suspicious Maybe he might have been one of Tilly's husbands,
but he was more likely just a boyfriend. Records from
this time, as we've mentioned, not always robust, and a
lot of times people would just claim to be spouses
without going through the paperwork, kind of like common law,
but more like they were just like, well, we lived
together and we live as a married couple. Either way,
(25:32):
the risk of dying was obviously considerably high for any
of Tilly's paramours, legally wed or not. I don't think
she cared about the paperwork, just the life insurance. At
her trial, Tillie wore the black hat that she had
made when her third husband, Frank, had been on his deathbed.
She had also warned it to his funeral as she
had planned. Historically, in Chicago in the early twentieth century,
(25:56):
women who were brought to trial for murder, which was
usually murder of their husbands, were almost always acquitted. If
a woman was unlucky enough to be convicted, she was
generally going to be given an amazingly light sentence in
comparison to men who had stood trial for murder, and
it really helped your case. If you were very feminine,
(26:19):
Weeping a bit and flirting would always help. In the
years leading up to Tillie's trial, twenty eight women had
been charged with murder in Cook County, where Chicago is located.
Twenty four were acquitted. It is probably no coincidence that
all twenty four of those women were considered conventionally attractive.
Up to twenty eight. Only four were found guilty Hilda Axeland,
(26:41):
who is not considered imady Vera trepagnier who was middle aged,
Emma Simpson, who was determined to be insane, and Dora Waterman,
who also was not known for her looks. On the
other hand, who well dressed, well groomed Cora Orthuin, who
shot her boyfriend over his cheating walked free. Tillie, though
did not have these advantages. She was nothing like skylish
(27:03):
Belva Gartner and beautiful Beulah Annam, the killers who inspired
the play Chicago. According to Genevieve Forbes, a prime reporter
who covered the trial for the Chicago Tribune, Tilly was
neither beautiful nor charming. She was described as a middle
aged woman forty five who was squat quote unquoted, with
a greasy complexion and a lumpy figure. Her dull brown
(27:26):
hair was pulled back into a nod at the back
of her head. Despite having lived in Chicago since she
was just a little kid. She spoke only broken English,
and it was recorded that she growled, I shudder to
think what genevieve for. During the proceedings, prosecutors read a
list of twenty alleged victims of Tilly, pausing after each
(27:49):
name to ask her did you kill this person? And
each time she would reportedly shrug, responding to each of
the simple yeah, I wish I could have bet. At
this trial, the trial judge asked for something called a
psychopathic lab report. According to the examining doctor, Tillie was
a quote subnormal mentality with an intellect and I quote
(28:09):
again no higher than that of an eleven year old child.
As we just mentioned, she didn't really speak English especially well,
so let's take these results with a grain of salt.
It was reported she was afflicted with dementia precox, a
diagnosis today that would be schizophrenia. She was also described
as a rattlesnake, as a heartless woman, and due to
(28:29):
the murders around her, she got the nickname we mentioned earlier,
Black Widow. Hi it's Ali Wentworth, a middle aged woman
with a lot of questions and a lot of answers
I pulled out of my tush as host of Go
ask Ali, my listeners want more, So we are digging in.
It's real, it's honest, open and unexpected and sometimes amusing.
(28:49):
Can you start with your infamous nineteen thousand dollars haircut? Yes,
and this is a great story I feel about mothers
and daughters with a dream and an empty bank account.
Just a few of our fabulous guests this season are
New York Times bestselling author Isabel Gillies, writer and Oprah's
Favorite Life coach Martha Beck, and former editor of People
(29:11):
magazine Jess Cagel. If we know intimate details about another person,
then that person is socially important to us. Okay, so
that's what you like to gossip about? Wait, what do
you gussip about? All new episodes of Go ask Alli
release every Thursday. Listen to Go ask Ally on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, guys,
(29:36):
Katie Lowe's here. You might know me as Quinn Perkins
on Scandal. I am also the host of Katie's Crib.
It's a podcast about all things parenthood. Katie's Crib is
back with new episodes every Thursday. We have got an
amazing lineup of guests. We have got the amazing Katerina Scorsone,
who you might also know as doctor Amelia Shephard from
(29:59):
Grey's Anatomy. She is talking about her three children. We've
also got kat McPhee Foster. She just became a mom
like two seconds ago. We just have a great hang
sessh talking about all things new Mama. We are going
to be covering everything from discipline to mom ring. Tune
in as I bring on celebrities, experts, and even more
(30:21):
guests to continue to help you get through parenthood one
step at a time. Listen to Katie's Crib on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Because
of the evidence beyond the single murder, investigators obtained permission
to exzoom the corpses of Tillie's dead husbands for arsenic
toxicity testing. Newspaper headlines covering the trial featured headlines like
(30:43):
three more bodies to be exoomed in clinic case and
bodies of other relatives will be exhoomed. All those cousins,
all those cousins, all the children, Yeah, the children and
dogs thing. I just obviously, killing anybody is bad. But Tillie, though,
stuck to a story that Frank had died of alcohol
poisoning and that she had absolutely not killed her spouses.
(31:06):
She said, quote, I loved them, they loved me. They
just died, same as other people. She continued, I'm not
responsible for that. I could not help if they wanted
to die. Contrary to her statement during the trial, the
coroner accusingly asserted, quote, there is no question that missus
Klak poisoned everyone she wanted to get out of the way.
(31:27):
After the jury deliberated for just an hour and twenty minutes,
Tilly was found guilty of the murder of her third husband,
Frank Kopsick. In nineteen twenty three, Judge Marcus Kavanaugh sentenced
her to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
That was the harshest sentence ever given to a woman
in Chicago at that time. Four jurors thought she should
(31:48):
be given the death penalty. At the time, no woman
had ever been sentenced to death in the state of Illinois.
The Chicago Tribune reporter Forbes called her gruesomely cruel and
went on to say that Tilly is a spectator in
her own drama. While on all accounts, Tilly is considered
to have been friendly to the other prisoners once she
was incarcerated, she definitely did not want to talk about
(32:11):
the poisonings. It has said that she would yell, quote,
I didn't rob nobody. I didn't shoot nobody. I didn't
poison nobody. I didn't everybody picks on me. Everybody makes
eyes at me like they're going to eat me. Why
do they make eyes like that. I tell the truth.
Anything I did, I did to myself, nobody else. She
(32:32):
was incarcerated at the Illinois State Penitentiary at Juliet, with
one stipulation. It said that while Tilly enjoyed the few
food served to her in prison, the judge declared that
she never be allowed to cook for her fellow inmates.
After thirteen years of incarceration, she died on November twentieth,
nineteen thirty six. So Tilly clearly does seem to have
had a certain detachment and a callousness about the crime
(32:55):
she was found guilty of, and that cannot have helped
her case. But we also can't regard another significant influence
in the outcome of her trial, which we briefly touched on. Now,
you might hope something like physical appearance wouldn't matter today
in the courtroom, as it clearly did in Tillie's day.
You might surprise to hear that the judge and jury
can still be swayed by a pretty face. What we
(33:17):
know from study upon study is that most people, even
without being conscious of it, consider physically attractive adults to
be healthier, more intelligent, and to have better personalities than
those who are not considered as esthetically pleasing. In fact,
in economics, there's a phenomenon known as the beauty premium,
and on the opposite side of the spectrum there's what's
(33:38):
called the ugliness penalty. But that's just not limited to economics,
it's just how humans work with each other. In recent years,
studies have also found that as humans, we generally consider
attractive people in our society to just be better people,
whether that's in the workplace, at school, in relationships, or
in the courtroom, where you would hope and expect to
(34:00):
find impartiality. Studies in the last few decades have found
that juries tend to be biased in the favor of
good looking defendants. This can mean people considered to be
attractive or not only found guilty less often, but that
they also received less severe sentences when they are found
guilty unattractive, however you define it. Defendants, on the other hand,
(34:20):
we're more likely to be served with longer and harsher sentences,
an average of twenty two months longer in prison, and
that's even today. So while Tilly we could never paint
as a good guy in any of this, she definitely
still was also a victim of this kind of weird
(34:41):
bias that people won't even acknowledge that they have. Right,
we feel that we're above it now, but we're not.
We're clearly not. No. And the thing is, it's one
of those things that's insidious, right like we all have it.
We all have these biases. So you can't presume that,
in recognizing that they exists, that you have overcome your
(35:01):
own because it's hardwired almost in some ways, it's not
really hardwired. You can relearn it, but it takes an
awful lot of conscious effort, absolutely, and a constant conscious
effort probably for the rest of your life. You're always
practicing it. Yes, But in less downer talk, Hey, Maria,
(35:25):
it's my favorite time of the show. Cocktail Hour. Yes, indeed,
What's Your Poison? Our time where we'd come up with
a little something, something that will relate to the show
in a fun way. And since we've been talking about Tilly,
and since she was a Polish immigrant, I wanted to
do something in honor of her Polish heritage. So I
(35:46):
squirreled around on the internet for a while because I
couldn't come up with anything on my own, and I
discovered this recipe. It's called a few different things. The
name that I enjoy is Polish and what this is
is Zubrowka vodka, which is a bison grass vodka. Did
(36:08):
you say bison grass vodka? I did. That's interesting. Yeah,
I don't know if it's the grass that bison prefer,
like five bison everywhere. I don't swear by this grass.
I don't know. It has a blade of grass in
the bottle. I also came across this drink called a
Frisky Bison aka the Polish Kiss. So clearly so the
(36:38):
Polish Kiss is the version that I found was one
point five ounces of this bison grass vodka and then
five ounces of apple juice. And the way it was
touted when I read about it was that it tastes
just like apple pie, and does it It does not,
(37:00):
at least not the version I made. Now, let me
back up the truck for a minute, because I don't
want to blame the recipe maker. I but it's delicious.
It's just not like apple pie. I think probably if
you are making it with normal apple juice from the store,
it probably does start to taste like apple pie. But
(37:22):
I bought organic, unsweetened hippie apple juice to go with
the legs. So what happened is that it tastes like
you have just picked a fresh apple off of a
tree and taken a bite of it. Because that vodka
has that grassy flavor that makes it feel like a
(37:45):
fresh plant based item. And it's absolutely beautiful. It's very crisp,
sounds delicious. It's like it's a summer day cocktail. For sure.
It was very delightful. I could see that she would
probably drink that while she was waiting for her husband
to die, Like while she was knitting her hat. She's like, Oh,
I just something refreshing to drink. While I will say this,
(38:07):
I will say this that cocktail vibes to me a
little too fancy for her. I picture her as like
a bear drink. It does seem a little fancy. And
remember Chicago in the twenties. Probably not like I want
fancy imported vodka. I doubt I would like the imported
bison grass vodka from my homeland. Okay, probably didn't come
up much. I guess noo, and I guess now. But
(38:29):
that is this week's What's Your Poison? And thank you
for joining us again on Criminalia. If you would like
to subscribe to the podcast, we would like you to
do that as well, and you can do that on
the iHeartRadio app, at Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is
you listen. Criminalia is a production of Shondaland Audio in
(38:52):
partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast Tasks, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, this is Ali Wentworth, host of Go Ask Galley.
My listeners want more, so we are digging in. It's real.
It's honest, open and unexpected and sometimes amusing. He told
me you chased him with a butcher knife and tried
to cut off his penis. But that's his version, and
everybody has everybody has two two sides of every store exactly.
(00:20):
All new episodes of Go Ask Galley release every Thursday.
Listen to Go Ask Ally on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Laverne
Cox and on my podcast, The Laverne Cox Show, we're
ripping the band aid off. Trauma, resilience, dating, diet culture dating,
white supremacy dating. Okay, I'm not gonna get explicit, but
(00:44):
just because you're cute, like I'm not going you're gonna
say yes, girl, and honey. We have a lot of
fun along the way. You have a lot of lesbian
fans who love your femininity and glamour and they just
really really want you. I want us to talk openly
about the difficult things we all face as humans and
(01:04):
as humans in America. Racist white people in the United
States will sign their own death certificates. They will vote
for policies that crush them, no safety nets, no healthcare
because they feel too much like entitlements. And those are
folks of color, right. Listen to the Laverne Cox Show
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get
(01:26):
your podcast Make sure you subscribe and share. Hi, this
is Ali Wentworth, host of Go Ask Gali. Season two
will be back soon with more new episodes. As always,
Go ask Alli is there for binging and catching up,
purpose and meaning in life or how you figure out
what life is all about. And that requires unhappiness. So
(01:46):
here's the great paradox. To be happy, you also have
to be unhappy. Don't miss a single episode. Listen to
Go Ask Ally on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you
get your podcasts. Make sure you subscribe and share. Welcome
to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. Hello,
(02:12):
and welcome to Criminalia. I'm Mariach from Marquis, and I'm
Holly Fry. We know that humans have always managed to
commit crimes, almost certainly before there was even recorded history,
so we decided that we would start looking at those
crimes and get our hands dirty. We wanted to dig
in and look at some of history's crimes and criminals
to understand them better, and in doing so, we're curious
(02:33):
if we can find commonality with our modern world and
our modern problems, and whether these crimes look different a
little bit of distance on the timeline, and whether any
of these perpetrators emerge as more sympathetic characters. This first
season is going to be all about poisoners, specifically women poisoners.
Poison is often called a woman's weapon, despite the fact
(02:54):
that roughly two thirds of the poisonings committed throughout time
have been the work of men. So let's start looking
at these women and their motivations and see if any
patterns develop. This week, we're looking into the life and
crimes of Tilly Clinic, a Polish immigrant who killed at
least one and possibly as many as twenty people and
at least one dog between the years nineteen fourteen and
(03:14):
nineteen twenty two. I will confess that when you were
telling me about the research you were doing initially on
this and you mentioned the dog, I was like, well,
I hate her, Not that it wasn't terrible. It she
killed people, just you know, that was for me, the
worst thing that she could have done as well. She
(03:44):
was born Tiafila Burick to Michelina and Michael Burick on
October twenty second, eighteen seventy seven, and Tilly was probably
right around four years old when her family immigrated to
the United States. They moved from Poland to the Little
Poland neighborhood of Chicago, and of the seven children in
the family, at Tilly, as she was called, was the eldest.
(04:06):
Chicago has a long history of Polish immigration, and Polish
Americans have lived in the area for well over a century.
In eighteen ninety, around the time Tilly was born, there
was a wave of immigration to the United States. At
that time, the number of Polish immigrants in the city
blossomed to more than twenty five thousand. By nineteen thirty,
a few years before she died, that number had grown
to one hundred and sixty five thousand. Most they lived
(04:28):
below the poverty line. Is the tale of immigration in
so many ways. So let's set the scene of the
actual situation we're talking about today. So this is Chicago
in the early twentieth century. You couldn't necessarily count on
(04:52):
your food and drinks to be clean. Upton Sinclair started
publishing the serialized version of his groundbreaking X baz of
the meat industry in the US, The Jungle, in nineteen
oh five, and while that led to the creation of
the Meat Inspection Act in nineteen oh six, food safety
legislation was still in its infancy. But if you were
at a restaurant or a club or a hotel around
(05:14):
the city, there were other dangers when it came to
what you consumed at the table. In particular, wait staff
were known to target patrons who didn't tip well. Not
like the content of the chatter in Fight Club, although
honestly maybe a little of that. They usually chose poisons
and various other things you really don't want to be
in your food, So remember always tip well. But moreover,
(05:36):
it turns out that you couldn't really count on food
safety at home either, at least if you lived with
a Tilly Clinic. During the time that Chicago's most visible
criminal element was organized crime, Tilly was quietly becoming the
city's most prolific female serial killer. She'd allegedly killed between
six and twenty people. Like we said, but that was
(05:57):
all through arsenic poisoning. So we're gonna talk first just
about what arsenic actually is. It is a naturally occurring
element in the Earth's crust and in its raw state.
As much as it has this instant conjuring of poison,
it's not actually harmful the way it naturally exists. Arsenic
only really becomes poisonous when it's converted into arsenic trioxide,
(06:19):
which is better known as white arsenic. White arsenic not
only is odorless, but it's tasteless, and it's white or
transparent in form, so it's easily confused with sugar or flour.
But it's highly toxic when it's inhaled into your lungs
or when you ingest it. And it might surprise you
that even white arsenic is actually fairly benign in relatively
small amounts, because it is very lethal at higher doses.
(06:42):
In fact, doctors have actually prescribed white arsenic through the
years in its low dosage as a treatment for things
like asthma, typhus, malaria, even menstrual cramps, and it continues
to be administered intravenously as a chemotherapy for a specific
type of leukemia. When arsenic is ingested, initially it causes
symptoms such as abdominal pain, diarrhea that's often being accompanied
(07:06):
by bleeding and vomiting. It's terrible. As the dose gets
more and more lethal in the body, though, the symptoms
also begin to include convulsions, cardiovascular problems, hair loss, liver
and kidney problems, and even organ damage. So not a
peaceful way to go. Definitely not sugar. No, and despite
its potency, it has been used in the production of semiconductors.
(07:30):
It's been used as wood preservative, and it's also sometimes
found in pesticides. Manufacturers in the nineteenth century started using
it for it's a green pigment in products like paint
and wallpaper, fabrics, beauty products, and as food coloring. The
list goes on because green is very beautiful color, so
(07:50):
sometimes those products would actually make people sick, but at
the time, no one was suspecting that the arsenic in
them was the problem that was causing their ailment. In
the early twentieth century, when Tilly was busy murdering people
in her community, the average Americans medicine cabinet was stocked
with all sorts of toxic things like radioactive radium for
(08:10):
acne and mercury as a topical antiseptic for cuts and
scrapes and burns. Morphine showed up in everyday products and
everything from teething medications to cures for heroin addiction. From
roughly the late eighteenth into the early twentieth century is
considered to be the golden age of poisoners, and during
that time, arsenic specifically caught the nickname the inheritance powder.
(08:35):
And you can probably imagine why the police really didn't
have any of the tools to test the corpse for poison.
Arsenic wasn't only easy to acquire, it was hard to
detect as a cause of death, which was win win
for the Golden Age of poisoners. It was common practice
for doctors to treat suspected poisoning with leeches bleeded out
(08:57):
or try to identify the poisons by sniffing the contents
of the person's stomach. Remember how we said arsenic was
odorless though, Yeah, so you just sniff those contents for nothing.
But it was also just unusual for a doctor or
a coroner to suspect arsenic as a cause of death,
mainly because the symptoms of arsenic poisoning that Maria just
(09:18):
talked about diarrhea and vomiting and abdominal pain are so
similar to a lot of other disorders. It's also really
hard to place a poisoner at the scene of the murder.
Dying can typically take hours or longer if you administered
the poison gradually, such as with someone's meals, so the
perpetrator could easily have a seemingly airtight alibi for their
(09:40):
whereabouts because the window of time had such fuzzy edges.
But it actually wouldn't be until the late nineteenth century
that a chemist named James marsh would come up with
a reliable chemical test for arsenic poisoning. Today, arsenic poisoning
is treated with chelation therapy, which uses special drugs that
bind to metal ions in your blood. So rough on
(10:04):
Rats was the product that became popular in the late
eighteen hundreds. It was composed mainly of arsenic and a
little black coal for masking the poison, and while i
was advertised for use in killing rats, mice, bedbugs, flies, roaches,
it occasionally was used for the very off label purpose
of killing husbands. Believe it or not, the marketing slogan
(10:26):
for this poison rough on Rats was don't die in
the house, thinking, of course, being that the creature you
had poisoned would scurry away to die. It was also
really easily available at the local store, and Tillie actually
got her first bottle of rough On Rats from her
cousin Nellie Kulik, and Nellie, it would turn out, was
(10:49):
also a fellow poisoner murder and husbands. According to your
accounts from her neighbors, Tillie was sent to have precognitive dreams,
meaning that she could predict the future in real life
through sort of a sixth sensish kind of way. She
began to predict the depths of neighborhood dogs, and she
was surprisingly accurate, but it turns out she was just
(11:13):
scheduling their depths. We're getting a little ahead of ourselves though,
in the progression of Tilly's activities with rough On Rats.
So we're gonna back up to eighteen ninety five. Hi,
it's Laverne Cox and on my podcast, The Laverne Cox Show,
we're ripping the band aid off. Trauma, resilient dating, diet
culture dating, white supremacy dating. Okay, I'm not gonna get explicit,
(11:38):
but just because you're cute, like I'm not going, You're
gonna say yes, girl, and honey, we have a lot
of fun along the way. You have a lot of
lesbian fans who love your femininity and glamour and they
just really really want I want us to talk openly
about the difficult things we all face as humans and
(11:59):
as humans in America, racist white people in the United
States will sign their own death certificates. They will vote
for policies that crush them, no safety nets, no healthcare
because they feel too much like entitlements. And those are
folks of color, right. Listen to the Laverne Cox Show
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
(12:20):
your podcast. Make sure you subscribe and share. Hi. This
is Ali Wentworth, host of Go Ask Gali. Season two
will be back soon with more new episodes, but what
you can do is binge the first half of season
two or revisit our first spectacular season. Everyone has to
deal with money, and typically like people don't talk about it.
(12:41):
It's like this quiet thing that everyone wants to avoid.
But then everyone wants to live this life and doesn't
matter what how you define that life, but you need
money for it. Just a few of our fabulous guests
the season are former editor of People magazine Jess Cagel,
New York Times bestselling author Isabel Gillies, and writer and
Oprah's favorite life coach Martha Beck. And people come to
(13:02):
me now and they will say negative things, and I think,
I respectfully do not give a crap what you think,
because I'm a crazy old bat now and you can't
stop me. That's great. Our guests have so much to say.
One listen isn't enough Listen to go ask Ali on
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Make
(13:23):
sure you subscribe and share. Hey, I'm Gabrielle Collins, Period
drama nerd and you're behind the scenes guide to Bridgerton.
On Bridgerton, the official podcast. We're learning how this fantasy
world dipped in history came to life. Daphanie. Her costume
(13:43):
design really is about the elegance of simplicity. It's just
color and shape. We went old school and we got
two scene cartists in who painted the backings for us
by hand. These dukes are all like in their late
twenties early thirties. Almost all of them were unmarried, really
good looking, and none of them have syphilis. Can you
(14:06):
imagine when he looks into your eyes and then he
dicts you we just heard this sort of ripping sound. Yeah,
I think that's just been a wardrobe malfunction. Listen to
Bridgerton the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or anywhere you get your favorite shows. Welcome back to Criminalia.
(14:35):
By eighteen ninety five, Tillie was married to John mckaywitz.
His name may have been Joseph not John. Records aren't
entirely consistent, but we're gonna go with John because that's
what the majority of records from the time referred to
him as. That is one of the delights word I'm
using ironically of doing historical research, particularly when you are
(14:55):
talking about immigrants, because there was not a vested interest
always in the government in keeping accurate records about them,
So you often have these people's stories that get really
muddy because their names do shift around in the historical record. Anyway,
by all accounts this couple, Tilly and John were well
(15:17):
liked in their community, and their marriage appeared by all
accounts to be happy. Tilly made her life as a housekeeper,
but it was also during this time that Tilly started
telling neighbors about some visions that she was having. She was,
as we mentioned before the break, an alleged psychic who
was skilled specifically at predicting deaths. This included predicting the
(15:39):
death of her own husband, John, who had left her
a thousand dollars When he died in nineteen fourteen. The
coroner's report listed his death as a result of heart trouble,
nothing suspicious. There was no reason at the time to
suspect that John had been poisoned by his wife. The
nickname black widow, which is often given to women who
kill their lovers in order to inherit their wealth, would
(16:01):
eventually be bestowed upon Tilly, but not just yet. Here's
a little more in detail on John's sudden end. Okay.
In the beginning of nineteen fourteen, Tilly began telling friends
and those in the community that she dreamed that John
was ill. She expected he would be on his deathbed
in just a few weeks, and when he died in
January thirteenth that year, the cause of death was listed
(16:23):
as heart trouble, and Tilly collected a thousand dollars in
life insurance. I guess after nineteen years she just didn't
want to gun it to twenty. She's like enough. After
receiving that payout on John's life insurance policy, Tilly actually
remarried pretty quickly. See now that's the thing. She remarried
quickly often. And I always sort of wonder like if
(16:44):
she would follow in love with someone new and be like, oh,
I'll kill my husband and we'll start out fresh with
like this new thousand dollars. It's just my own personal theory. Yeah,
I think there's merit to it. But her new husband,
Joseph Raskowski, died just three months after they got married,
and he happened to leave his widow twelve hundred dollars
in cash and seven hundred twenty two dollars in insurance money.
(17:10):
Not only did Tilly predict Joseph's death, she went on
to predict the deaths of her third husband, although they
may or may not have been married, it's a little sketchy.
And her fourth husband, as well as children, she cared
for a few neighbors and possibly some other family members.
And not only did she joke with neighbors that her
fourth husband, Frank, had quote two inches to live, which
(17:34):
is a really interesting, fascinating turn of phrase. She allegedly
taunted him on his deathbed and said things like it
won't be long now, and you'll be dying soon, which
is in my own home. You got two inches to live.
(17:56):
I don't know, right, it's like callous on a level
that's hard to comprehend, right right. She also, in an
act of both cruel and creative, knitted herself a morning
hat as she sat by his bedside while he was dying.
(18:17):
She even so far as to purchase a thirty dollars
bargain coffin to keep in the basement of her house
waiting for his death. That storage areatment was a little
unsettling request made of her landlord, who began to be
a little suspicious of Tilly after that came in. Frank
did die on April twentieth, nineteen twenty one, and it
(18:39):
is said that when it happened, Tillie played dance music
in the room. The coroner listed Frank's cause of death
as bronchial pneumonia. Tillie's poisonous predilections unnoticed. She once again
collected on his life insurance, this time in the amount
of six hundred seventy five dollars nearly as much as
(19:00):
the last two. I know she's downgrading the insurance situation
with each one. They're going faster now, you know. There's
just not enough time to like build up to the thousand.
That's another theory I have. It's interesting and grimly fun
to note that Frank An Tillie's home at nine twenty
four Winchester. It's a house in East Dillige in Chicago,
(19:20):
shows up on the Old Fourth Square social networking site
as Old Lady Tilly Climic's Haunted House. Even today, Tilly
was still not arrested, though that didn't happen until after
she botched an attempt at poisoning husband number five, that
was Joseph Clemick. She and Joseph had gotten married in
July of nineteen twenty one, again not long after Frank's demise,
(19:42):
just a few and Clemmick is said to have been
a relatively wealthy man, but Tilly did not like that.
He also apparently had a wandering eye, and by October
of nineteen twenty two he was in the hospital experiencing
arm numbness, leg paralysis, and other symptoms consist with severe
arsenic poisoning. So while he was in the hospital, Tillie's
(20:04):
husband recalled that his food had tasted strangely lately, and
here's one big red flag. He remembered, the dog dying
after eating scraps of food till he had cooked. Her
husband also stated he'd planned to press charges against her
and till he kissed him. Such a strange dynamic at play.
But it was not poisoning Joseph that she went on
(20:25):
trial for. While Tilly was arrested initially for the attempted
murder of Joseph Klemick, who would survive her poison his
hand after an investigation into the deaths of her previous husbands,
the crime Tilly was eventually tried for was the murder
of Frank, her third husband, but even as she was
taken in, she appeared completely indifferent to the whole situation.
(20:46):
It is said that she told the arresting officer, who
was Lieutenant William Malone, the next one I want to
cook dinner for is you. You made all my trouble.
After eighteen hours of interrogation, Tilly confessed her crimes, admitting
to mixing rat poison into her victim's food and drink
note plural. It's interesting, right, Like eighteen hours of interrogation
(21:08):
is considered extreme, it is, and she just gives it
all up. Then there's that whole thing of like is
this a coerced confession at that point? But her later
behavior makes it seem like she she's pretty down with
this information being one true and part of public records. Yeah,
she's a badass. Just two grains of arsenic is enough
(21:31):
to kill almost anyone, and as much as eight grains
were found in Frank's organs, so enough to kill four people.
Authorities decided to exoom Tillie's other husbands and found their
stomachs each contained lethal doses of arsenic, and although evidence
existed to convict her of as many as twenty murders
(21:52):
by arsenic, only one charge resulted in a conviction. Although
she was not the only woman and wife in her
community to be arrested for suspicion of poisoning, she was
the only one of them who was sentenced. Yeah. Remember
how we mentioned her cousin earlier. Yeah. Authorities went on
to investigate a possible poison ring in the Little Poland neighborhood,
(22:13):
arresting other local women. In what the Assistant state Attorney
at the time. That was A man named William McLaughlin
called quote the most astonishing wholesale poisoning plot uncovered. He
wanted the death penalty for Tilly, but without better evidence,
the other women who had been rounded up just had
to be released. As Tilly's story unfurls, it becomes apparent
(22:36):
that it wasn't just husbands that she poisoned. She played
fast and loose with rough on rats, poisoning people who
irritated her and dogs who barked too much in the neighborhood.
Life was especially risky if you were one of Tillie's cousins.
In nineteen twelve, Tilly's cousin, Stanley Zaczuski, died at the
age of sixteen. Tilly, who was in her mid thirties
at the time, tended on him while he was ill.
(23:00):
Their cousin, Stanley's sister, Stell, died in nineteen thirteen. She
was twenty three at the time, and again Tillie played
the role of caregiver. After her husband Frank's death, Tillie
started seeing a man named Joseph Grandkowski, like lovers before him.
Joseph died in nineteen fourteen after jilting her and back
(23:20):
to cousins. In nineteen fifteen, Tillie's cousin Helen died at
age fifteen. Another cousin, Nick Micko, became sick from arsenic poisoning,
but he was lucky enough to actually recover. In nineteen nineteen,
Tillie's cousin Rose died after attending Tillie and Frank's wedding party.
In nineteen eighteen, Tillie may have been involved in the
(23:40):
poisoning of woejek Strummer, who was the husband of her
cousin Nellie, the same Nellie from she procured her rat poison.
It turns out that Tillie wasn't only cooking arsenic in
two meals, she was also a confectioner. Twizzlers may make
mouse happy, but you definitely want to skip Tillie's streets.
So Stella Guskowski, sister of Tillie's former boyfriend Joseph, got
(24:05):
sick after she ate a candy that was given to
her by Tillie after the two women had an argument.
Joseph died from tainted candy as well. Rose, split had
also stayed un Tillie gave her arsenic confused candies after
Joseph Klinik talked to her. So a jealous Tillie was
willing to go after innocent women who her husband even
dared to converse with. So let's keep going because we're
(24:28):
only about halfway through the body count. There was also
a woman named Bessie Kupzick's sister in law of Tilly's
husband Frank, who fell sick after eating Tillie's cooking, but
Bessie recovered. Children, primarily relatives, were also on Tillie's hit list.
At least four children in Tillie's sphere were poisoned between
nineteen seventeen nineteen eighteen. Dorothy Spara died at age two.
(24:51):
Twins Sophie and Ben Strummer also died. John Strummer was
the only one to recover. Lillian's drummer, who was in
her early teens, lived at Tillie's home for a year
when she became deathly ill from the food and suffered
heart trouble. So skip ahead just a few years to
March nineteen twenty three, and a man named Myers goes missing.
(25:12):
Suspicious Maybe he might have been one of Tilly's husbands,
but he was more likely just a boyfriend. Records from
this time, as we've mentioned, not always robust, and a
lot of times people would just claim to be spouses
without going through the paperwork, kind of like common law,
but more like they were just like, well, we lived
together and we live as a married couple. Either way,
(25:32):
the risk of dying was obviously considerably high for any
of Tilly's paramours, legally wed or not. I don't think
she cared about the paperwork, just the life insurance. At
her trial, Tillie wore the black hat that she had
made when her third husband, Frank, had been on his deathbed.
She had also warned it to his funeral as she
had planned. Historically, in Chicago in the early twentieth century,
(25:56):
women who were brought to trial for murder, which was
usually murder of their husbands, were almost always acquitted. If
a woman was unlucky enough to be convicted, she was
generally going to be given an amazingly light sentence in
comparison to men who had stood trial for murder, and
it really helped your case. If you were very feminine,
(26:19):
Weeping a bit and flirting would always help. In the
years leading up to Tillie's trial, twenty eight women had
been charged with murder in Cook County, where Chicago is located.
Twenty four were acquitted. It is probably no coincidence that
all twenty four of those women were considered conventionally attractive.
Up to twenty eight. Only four were found guilty Hilda Axeland,
(26:41):
who is not considered imady Vera trepagnier who was middle aged,
Emma Simpson, who was determined to be insane, and Dora Waterman,
who also was not known for her looks. On the
other hand, who well dressed, well groomed Cora Orthuin, who
shot her boyfriend over his cheating walked free. Tillie, though
did not have these advantages. She was nothing like skylish
(27:03):
Belva Gartner and beautiful Beulah Annam, the killers who inspired
the play Chicago. According to Genevieve Forbes, a prime reporter
who covered the trial for the Chicago Tribune, Tilly was
neither beautiful nor charming. She was described as a middle
aged woman forty five who was squat quote unquoted, with
a greasy complexion and a lumpy figure. Her dull brown
(27:26):
hair was pulled back into a nod at the back
of her head. Despite having lived in Chicago since she
was just a little kid. She spoke only broken English,
and it was recorded that she growled, I shudder to
think what genevieve for. During the proceedings, prosecutors read a
list of twenty alleged victims of Tilly, pausing after each
(27:49):
name to ask her did you kill this person? And
each time she would reportedly shrug, responding to each of
the simple yeah, I wish I could have bet. At
this trial, the trial judge asked for something called a
psychopathic lab report. According to the examining doctor, Tillie was
a quote subnormal mentality with an intellect and I quote
(28:09):
again no higher than that of an eleven year old child.
As we just mentioned, she didn't really speak English especially well,
so let's take these results with a grain of salt.
It was reported she was afflicted with dementia precox, a
diagnosis today that would be schizophrenia. She was also described
as a rattlesnake, as a heartless woman, and due to
(28:29):
the murders around her, she got the nickname we mentioned earlier,
Black Widow. Hi it's Ali Wentworth, a middle aged woman
with a lot of questions and a lot of answers
I pulled out of my tush as host of Go
ask Ali, my listeners want more, So we are digging in.
It's real, it's honest, open and unexpected and sometimes amusing.
(28:49):
Can you start with your infamous nineteen thousand dollars haircut? Yes,
and this is a great story I feel about mothers
and daughters with a dream and an empty bank account.
Just a few of our fabulous guests this season are
New York Times bestselling author Isabel Gillies, writer and Oprah's
Favorite Life coach Martha Beck, and former editor of People
(29:11):
magazine Jess Cagel. If we know intimate details about another person,
then that person is socially important to us. Okay, so
that's what you like to gossip about? Wait, what do
you gussip about? All new episodes of Go ask Alli
release every Thursday. Listen to Go ask Ally on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, guys,
(29:36):
Katie Lowe's here. You might know me as Quinn Perkins
on Scandal. I am also the host of Katie's Crib.
It's a podcast about all things parenthood. Katie's Crib is
back with new episodes every Thursday. We have got an
amazing lineup of guests. We have got the amazing Katerina Scorsone,
who you might also know as doctor Amelia Shephard from
(29:59):
Grey's Anatomy. She is talking about her three children. We've
also got kat McPhee Foster. She just became a mom
like two seconds ago. We just have a great hang
sessh talking about all things new Mama. We are going
to be covering everything from discipline to mom ring. Tune
in as I bring on celebrities, experts, and even more
(30:21):
guests to continue to help you get through parenthood one
step at a time. Listen to Katie's Crib on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Because
of the evidence beyond the single murder, investigators obtained permission
to exzoom the corpses of Tillie's dead husbands for arsenic
toxicity testing. Newspaper headlines covering the trial featured headlines like
(30:43):
three more bodies to be exoomed in clinic case and
bodies of other relatives will be exhoomed. All those cousins,
all those cousins, all the children, Yeah, the children and
dogs thing. I just obviously, killing anybody is bad. But Tillie, though,
stuck to a story that Frank had died of alcohol
poisoning and that she had absolutely not killed her spouses.
(31:06):
She said, quote, I loved them, they loved me. They
just died, same as other people. She continued, I'm not
responsible for that. I could not help if they wanted
to die. Contrary to her statement during the trial, the
coroner accusingly asserted, quote, there is no question that missus
Klak poisoned everyone she wanted to get out of the way.
(31:27):
After the jury deliberated for just an hour and twenty minutes,
Tilly was found guilty of the murder of her third husband,
Frank Kopsick. In nineteen twenty three, Judge Marcus Kavanaugh sentenced
her to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
That was the harshest sentence ever given to a woman
in Chicago at that time. Four jurors thought she should
(31:48):
be given the death penalty. At the time, no woman
had ever been sentenced to death in the state of Illinois.
The Chicago Tribune reporter Forbes called her gruesomely cruel and
went on to say that Tilly is a spectator in
her own drama. While on all accounts, Tilly is considered
to have been friendly to the other prisoners once she
was incarcerated, she definitely did not want to talk about
(32:11):
the poisonings. It has said that she would yell, quote,
I didn't rob nobody. I didn't shoot nobody. I didn't
poison nobody. I didn't everybody picks on me. Everybody makes
eyes at me like they're going to eat me. Why
do they make eyes like that. I tell the truth.
Anything I did, I did to myself, nobody else. She
(32:32):
was incarcerated at the Illinois State Penitentiary at Juliet, with
one stipulation. It said that while Tilly enjoyed the few
food served to her in prison, the judge declared that
she never be allowed to cook for her fellow inmates.
After thirteen years of incarceration, she died on November twentieth,
nineteen thirty six. So Tilly clearly does seem to have
had a certain detachment and a callousness about the crime
(32:55):
she was found guilty of, and that cannot have helped
her case. But we also can't regard another significant influence
in the outcome of her trial, which we briefly touched on. Now,
you might hope something like physical appearance wouldn't matter today
in the courtroom, as it clearly did in Tillie's day.
You might surprise to hear that the judge and jury
can still be swayed by a pretty face. What we
(33:17):
know from study upon study is that most people, even
without being conscious of it, consider physically attractive adults to
be healthier, more intelligent, and to have better personalities than
those who are not considered as esthetically pleasing. In fact,
in economics, there's a phenomenon known as the beauty premium,
and on the opposite side of the spectrum there's what's
(33:38):
called the ugliness penalty. But that's just not limited to economics,
it's just how humans work with each other. In recent years,
studies have also found that as humans, we generally consider
attractive people in our society to just be better people,
whether that's in the workplace, at school, in relationships, or
in the courtroom, where you would hope and expect to
(34:00):
find impartiality. Studies in the last few decades have found
that juries tend to be biased in the favor of
good looking defendants. This can mean people considered to be
attractive or not only found guilty less often, but that
they also received less severe sentences when they are found
guilty unattractive, however you define it. Defendants, on the other hand,
(34:20):
we're more likely to be served with longer and harsher sentences,
an average of twenty two months longer in prison, and
that's even today. So while Tilly we could never paint
as a good guy in any of this, she definitely
still was also a victim of this kind of weird
(34:41):
bias that people won't even acknowledge that they have. Right,
we feel that we're above it now, but we're not.
We're clearly not. No. And the thing is, it's one
of those things that's insidious, right like we all have it.
We all have these biases. So you can't presume that,
in recognizing that they exists, that you have overcome your
(35:01):
own because it's hardwired almost in some ways, it's not
really hardwired. You can relearn it, but it takes an
awful lot of conscious effort, absolutely, and a constant conscious
effort probably for the rest of your life. You're always
practicing it. Yes, But in less downer talk, Hey, Maria,
(35:25):
it's my favorite time of the show. Cocktail Hour. Yes, indeed,
What's Your Poison? Our time where we'd come up with
a little something, something that will relate to the show
in a fun way. And since we've been talking about Tilly,
and since she was a Polish immigrant, I wanted to
do something in honor of her Polish heritage. So I
(35:46):
squirreled around on the internet for a while because I
couldn't come up with anything on my own, and I
discovered this recipe. It's called a few different things. The
name that I enjoy is Polish and what this is
is Zubrowka vodka, which is a bison grass vodka. Did
(36:08):
you say bison grass vodka? I did. That's interesting. Yeah,
I don't know if it's the grass that bison prefer,
like five bison everywhere. I don't swear by this grass.
I don't know. It has a blade of grass in
the bottle. I also came across this drink called a
Frisky Bison aka the Polish Kiss. So clearly so the
(36:38):
Polish Kiss is the version that I found was one
point five ounces of this bison grass vodka and then
five ounces of apple juice. And the way it was
touted when I read about it was that it tastes
just like apple pie, and does it It does not,
(37:00):
at least not the version I made. Now, let me
back up the truck for a minute, because I don't
want to blame the recipe maker. I but it's delicious.
It's just not like apple pie. I think probably if
you are making it with normal apple juice from the store,
it probably does start to taste like apple pie. But
(37:22):
I bought organic, unsweetened hippie apple juice to go with
the legs. So what happened is that it tastes like
you have just picked a fresh apple off of a
tree and taken a bite of it. Because that vodka
has that grassy flavor that makes it feel like a
(37:45):
fresh plant based item. And it's absolutely beautiful. It's very crisp,
sounds delicious. It's like it's a summer day cocktail. For sure.
It was very delightful. I could see that she would
probably drink that while she was waiting for her husband
to die, Like while she was knitting her hat. She's like, Oh,
I just something refreshing to drink. While I will say this,
(38:07):
I will say this that cocktail vibes to me a
little too fancy for her. I picture her as like
a bear drink. It does seem a little fancy. And
remember Chicago in the twenties. Probably not like I want
fancy imported vodka. I doubt I would like the imported
bison grass vodka from my homeland. Okay, probably didn't come
up much. I guess noo, and I guess now. But
(38:29):
that is this week's What's Your Poison? And thank you
for joining us again on Criminalia. If you would like
to subscribe to the podcast, we would like you to
do that as well, and you can do that on
the iHeartRadio app, at Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is
you listen. Criminalia is a production of Shondaland Audio in
(38:52):
partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast Tasks, or wherever you
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