June 9, 2025 • 49 mins
Occasionally we interview fiction authors who use true crime stories as jumping off points for their novels. Virginia Feito wrote a book called “Victorian Psycho.” And it’s based on several cases you’ve likely heard of. There’s a lecherous head of house, a jealous wife…and a violent governess. Very violent. Feito uses gallows humor to take real stories and craft them into harrowing tales.
Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/4gF2K18
See more information on my books: katewinklerdawson.com
Follow me on social: @tenfoldmore (Twitter) / @wickedwordspod (Facebook) / @tenfoldmorewicked (Instagram)
2025 All Rights Reserved
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
They were constantly punished, and you.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Know, their hair was cut off and they were like
collar epidemics because it was an image just awful and.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Just another run of the mail Victorian school, I guess.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:52):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers made, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. Occasionally we interview fiction authors
who use true crime stories as jumping off points for
(01:13):
their novels. Virginia Fato wrote a book called Victorian Psycho,
and it's based on several cases you've likely heard of.
There's a lecherous head of house, a jealous wife, and
a violent governess. Very violent Fato uses Gallo's humor to
take real stories and craft them into herowing tales. We've
(01:36):
done this a couple of times where we have a
novelist come on who has had an inspiration from real stories,
true crime stories. So I mean, let's start with You've
got these two novels we really want to concentrate. I
think on the second one, which is Victorian Psycho, one
of the best book titles ever.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
I have to say, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
And then the first one's Missus Yes, right, Missus March.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, Missus March.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
And so you know you have mentioned to me that
you have used real stories as inspiration, but I know
these are two really different books. Do you want to
give me kind of a quick summary of Missus March
and then sort of the way that that maybe you
thought maybe you pulled some details without having to go
through the stories if you want.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So Missus March is about a New
York Upper East Side housewife who's apparently very well put together.
She's married to like an important author, and she kind
of lives her life projecting this image of privilege and
wealth and perfection, and then one day she's in this
(02:43):
pastry shop, and the woman who the manager, the owner
of the pastry shop is kind of congratulates her on
her husband's latest novel, and she's like, this is the
first time he's based a character on you, right, and
missus March goes kind of, you know, she freezes because
the character in question is this like awfully, like the
ethetic sex worker nobody wants to even sleep with. Everyone
(03:04):
laughs at you know, which is disgusting and stupid and
all the things. She wouldn't, you know, be just terrified
of anybody considering her to be So she essentially just
starts to go insane. She starts to obsess about it awfully,
and she thinks that everybody knows that everyone's laughing at
her behind her back, that her husband has betrayed her
(03:25):
in this ultimate way, and she just starts to go insane.
And at the same time, in parallel, she starts to
obsess over the fact that her husband may have murdered
this young woman in Maine whose like body was found
in a place where her husband had a cabin very
very close by. So she starts to believe, you know,
if he did this to me, he probably murdered this
(03:46):
young woman as well. Because he's clearly Satan. That's the
beginning of the essence of Missus March.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
I've been working kind of on my own on a
mystery thriller, and as somebody who does nonfiction, you have
to it's so hard to bring out of that. You know,
you're given this sort of like constrained set of rules, your.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Sources or your sources, and that's it.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
I can't make up who this person is, and then
all of a sudden you're unridled from that. So was
that what you thought with the first book? Were you thinking, Okay,
how do I get into this person's completely screwed up mind?
Did you definitely, you know, start considering looking at true
crime stories or anything like that the stranger than fiction.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
There were a couple of things that kind of bled
into the story accidentally, so to speak. Like, firstly, as
I was kind of crafting it, I remember I was
watching the documentary series of The Keepers, about the murder
of a nun and teacher at an old girls Catholic
school in Maryland, Kathy Sesnik, and I remember her body
was found in a wooded area by hunters. I vividly
(04:48):
remember the cause of death was Blanck forced trauma of
the head and something about like maggots being found like
in her throat, in her mouth. I remember those details,
you know, and the fact that it was never officially
even though you know, there's a pretty clear yeah theory
which is absolutely probably what happened, but you know where
this this priest was sexually abusing the girls at the
(05:11):
school and trafficking them. And the theories that Kathy was
murdered because she was going to tell the archdiocese. But
the fact that it was never officially closed and just
these tiny details kind of seeped into Missus March kind
of accidentally because I was kind of listening it to
it and watching it as I was writing it. And
so this plot line of like this young girl goes
missing in Maine and is found in a wooded area
(05:32):
by hunters close to this cabin, blown first trauma to
the head. Those little details that I that I picked out,
But it wasn't like Spitz. I didn't want to like
base it on anything specific. I didn't want it to
be like a plotty like murder mystery. And actually, but
one of the things that most affected me was that
it was never officially solved, and so without wanting to
spoil Missus March, but it's not really about this murder.
(05:54):
It's a murder that isn't really necessarily ever solved, something
that I was very, very frustrated by, and it's a
very big feeling. I think in true crime, isn't it
where a lot of times it's just you're kind of
stuck with that forever. And then I remember I was
reading a lot about Truman Capote's Swans at this time,
you know, because Missus March is kind of a swan
(06:15):
want to be, you know, she's a she, and there
are mentions to several detail like she has a soap
dish that allegedly belonged to Babe Paley, and she wants
to be one of these women. I remember I was
reading and very affected by the story of Anne Woodward
and how Truman Capodi wrote the short story about essentially
accusing her of murdering her husband, who she accidentally shot
(06:40):
one night she believed it was a burglar. They slept
in different bedrooms and she heard a noise at night
and she had they were both avid hunters, and so
she came out of the room and shot him and
killed them, and Truman Capoti wrote a story about it,
you know, and she and she then kind of it's
rumored that she read it and that is why maybe
(07:01):
she killed herself. You know. The thing is she was
shunned by New York high society for the rest of
her life after her husband died, and everyone just gossiping
about her, and so that that had a lot that
has a lot to do with Missus March and the
character and the fear of being ostracized by you know,
everything you hold dear, which is New York high society essentially,
(07:24):
and gotten the force of gossip for these for these women.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
So in that story, you have this woman who is
living the idealized life and you know she has a
you know, a husband and a relationship with a husband.
And do you build that story like a lot of
true crime stories, you know that I would talk about
where it's you know, the on the surface, everything is
fine and then it starts to degrade. Is it a
(07:50):
slow process where we see faults with the husband and
then it's sort of is she really crazy or is
all of this bad stuff happening? Is that kind of
the the route you take with the book.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Yeah, absolutely, that's kind of even though, I think you
can tell from the very beginning that something is not
quite right about missus Mark, just the way that she
constantly notices everything about everyone and intends to think that
it's negative, you know, towards her. It's like a personal attack.
She's clearly obsessed with people's opinions of her. So I
think you get that really, you know early on from
(08:23):
the first page that she's very anxious about this, and
it's slowly like degrading her mental health essentially, but it does.
It is like a slow dissent, and she just keeps
getting you know, worse and worse and obsessive, and it
starts to even you know, later later on see things potentially.
You know, you're not sure what she's because we're with
(08:44):
her constantly. It's her point of view, so we're not
sure whether she's filtering things through her you know, her
lens of like self destruction, or whether these things are objective.
Her husband does seem very distant, but then again, this
is what she's telling us, so we don't really know hmm,
how far she's going with it and how how true
it is. Is this first person it's not actually it
(09:06):
turned out third person, because there was also something about
the narrator being a little judgmental of her, and even
the narrator being like missus March says that it's you know,
there's no milk clip or whatever. You know, it felt
like we were all kind of humiliating her in a way,
both writer and readers, and we're all kind of gossiping
(09:26):
about her as she suspects. You know, that's what it
felt like with a third person narration. And also because
her first name is never revealed, so it's kind of
like does March this and missus March that and missing
you know, it just feels a little insulting in a way,
kind of kind of singing songy.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Interesting though, but because you don't know her first name,
you always have to refer to her in a very
formal time as if you're almost like subservient to her,
Which is that's good.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
I like that twist. That's good. Thanks. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
And she's always she's always the wife.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
She's always her husband's wife, and you know, she likes
whatever her husband likes, and she visits the restaurants her
husband likes, and you know, that's that's who she is.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
So I guess the real mystery is who is she?
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Who is this woman? What year is that? Is that
a present day novel? Or Oh, it's funny you should ask,
because it's actually never really revealed where it's set, but
they are very heavy hints that it's not set in
the modern day. So a lot of people just assume
that it's in the fifties or sixties, but actually their
hints thrown in that keep getting closer to modern times.
(10:27):
So what I what I see it as is kind
of it's probably current, but missus March is living in
a bubble of like, you know, a nineteen fifties like
perfect housewife that she learned from her mother, and that
has been going down through all the generations.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Well, this book did well, and when your second book
came out, which is what we're going to be talking about, really,
the Victorian Psycho book with the great title, you have
to pull this up. There was an article and I
actually I think I recommended you in the book to
our which I often do a lot of times they'll
just say, hey, why don't you know interview this person?
(11:04):
But I found the article. What's wrong with Us is
the title from mccar which is another great time What's
wrong with US novelist Virginia Fato on our morbid obsession
with true crime, and I think that's what really caught
my attention, besides, of course, that you used true crime
as a as a way to explore this story, which
is very different. So before you tell us what you
(11:27):
think is wrong with us, which I'm pretty sure will
make sense to everybody who listens to our show, why
don't you tell me about Victorian Psycho. Completely different book
and a different time period.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Completely different in every way. This one is first person.
It's a very very claustrophobic first person account from a
psycho narrator. I think there's no twist there. It's in
the title, and it's the story of a young governess
who is hired at this state noble estate to teach
these two children. And she carries within her what she
(12:00):
calls a darkness, which is essentially trying to control her.
And I guess the mystery here is whether it will
control her or she will control it, you know, the
darkness essentially being her dark predisposition towards crime and violence.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
So you went from in Missus March the main character
being annoying, I'm sure, but vulnerable and sort of something
that people can connect to in a character, that idea
of what's real what's not. And you're being gas lit
and what's happening to someone who I'm presuming you have
very little sympathy for as a reader or no, do
(12:38):
you make her soft at times? I mean, she's got
some pretty devious thoughts in her head.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
She's pretty dark. But you know what, I love her
because she's just fearless and unapologetic. And those are you know,
qualities that I wish I possessed. You know, I wish
I didn't obsess over an email for forty five minutes.
And I wish I sometimes cared less frankly, quite frankly,
you know, about the things I say or do that
might affect anyone in any way, or might upset anybody
(13:06):
or make anybody uncomfortable, you know. And I'm a little
more awkward in that way. And this person who is
an awful person, you know, who just who just has
a tension for violence and torture and murder and even
the most vulnerable of people, now, you know, not just
evil abusers who will also kind of go into the mix.
But she's just she's I find her very I mean
(13:27):
This is not very humble to say about one's character,
but what can I say. I'm going to say it.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I find her very funny.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
There's I kind of use her as like a stand
up comedy, my stand up comedy. This is Victorian psycho.
You know. I was just like, because she just says
she you know, she just narrates whatever, like any intrusive
thought of any kind, and obviously coming from a psychopath,
those must be really really awful. It's like so awful
that they can become absurdly funny in a way, maybe
as a defense mechanism. But this is honestly kind of
(13:55):
what I felt when I was doing the research on
Victorian you know, murder case in the Victorian era and
just the abuse in the misogyny of the time. I
was getting really weird, aggressive mood when I was reading
up on this and started writing this book. I quite
like her. No, but you're right, but there are certain
moments when we also see that Winifred is her name,
(14:19):
the governess has had a very awful childhood in Victorian England.
She suffered at the hands of you know, abusive adults
of all kinds, and she was handed over to a
what was called a baby farmer at the time, who
basically was killing off the babies. Is that she was
(14:40):
supposed to be caring for and she didn't even want
her so, you know, rejected by everybody, told she was
evil and useless from a very young age. So I
guess there is there is a way to empathize with
her through through that. I guess some people could see
it as a defense mechanism, as a survival instinct, just
kill or be killed.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
I guess did you feel like you had to explain
where this comes from, where Winnifred has all these dark thoughts.
Did it need to have an origin story? I tell
stories often where it's just sort of like this guy
is mean, but you feel like you need to have
an explanation, you think.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
I Actually, that's a great question because one of the
biggest themes of the novel is nature versus nurture, and
I still I find it so compelling. In all the
cases of you know, famous psychopathic serial killers, none of
them have had a happy childhood, none of them, that's
the fact. But I find it very intriguing. How were
(15:38):
they kind of born this? Were they always going to
be this way? If they hadn't been abused in their childhood,
would they still have you know, turned out like this?
Is there something chemical in their brain that just was
never going to work? So I do offer this truth
about her past and suffering and child neglect, et cetera.
But I'm also kind of questioning, you know, whether it's
(16:00):
just I mean, she feels such pleasure and she's also
not out for revenge because she doesn't really do it
against the people who heurt her necessarily, she's also hurting
very vulnerable children, infants, young women who haven't really heard
her at all, you know, very very vulnerable, innocent people. Therefore,
can we really not justified? But like maybe I feel
(16:21):
like sometimes it's explained away a little bit or justified
through like a revenge plot or or oh, of course,
you know, what could this person possibly do other than
just murder a whole bunch of people because they had
an awful time of it. So I'm kind of with you.
Sometimes it's just like, listen, this person's just evil.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
So let's go through the story of Winnifred without you know,
i know, spoiling everything she for somebody who is so
sadistic picked an interesting career, so she's a governess. So
remember we do have, of course a wide range of listeners,
but if there's anything that's particularly British esque, define it.
So a governess would be what a nanny a living name.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah, essentially she was.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
It was very interesting figure, the governess because she wasn't
technically a servant. She was like above servants, but she
was not because usually they were young ladies who had
like not not fallen from grace, but like they didn't
have the means to be stay at home, you know,
mothers of noble estates, etca. So they had to have
a job, but it was like the only job they
(17:23):
could have without resorting to like being servants. So they
were teachers essentially at home. They weren't the nannies either.
I believe those would be the nurses, who were more
in charge of like the children's I don't know, bath time,
that kind of thing. But the governess was in charge
of like their souls essentially, like the you know, teaching
(17:44):
them good from evil morals, and then also like English
and French. Yeah, I thought that figure was very interesting
and it was kind of the only option for women
from like more you know, middle class backgrounds who needed
to have a job. The Bronte's were governesses. I took
a lot from Bronte's from the real life accounts, and
it was awful. And a lot of them were in
(18:05):
various horrible situations in these homes where they were nobody
knew how to go about it. They weren't servants, but
they weren't part of the family either. They were somewhere
in between, So it was kind of was pretty awkward.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
I say, when you talk about upstairs downstairs, I categorize
people like that sort of middle class first floor. Yeah,
they're not downstairs, but they're not unless they marry the
man of the house. They're not upstairs either. So she's
a first floor worker. How does somebody who has these thoughts,
I mean, does she get an education?
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Is that what you were thinking through?
Speaker 1 (18:36):
How do you end up in this type of position,
even though I know you said it's it's pretty much
one of the only options for women of a certain
background to take.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yeah, they were absolutely, they were educated.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
They were very you know, they would have done great
in a parlor room, as I life like to say,
but they just yeah, they had to teach it on
and in this case, there are certain flashbacks in my
novel about her going to this school like an all
like Daughters of the Clergy school, because her stepfather is
a clergyman and it's awful, and it's based on one
(19:09):
of the Brontes.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Well or several of the Brontes.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Actually one of them, I think their younger sister died
at this school where they went, and it was like,
you know, they were like frozen pictures of water and
they were constantly punished, and you know, their hair was
cut off and they were like color epidemics because it was,
you know, just awful and the conditions there were absurdly awful.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Just another run of the mill Victorian school, I guess.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
So she ends up joining in with a family. And
so you said that this is where's the house?
Speaker 3 (19:43):
It's Yorkshire?
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Okay, so it's in Yorkshire. And did you have a
year in mind? Or is this just sort of the
vast Victorian era?
Speaker 3 (19:51):
I never specified, but in my head it was like
the late eighteen forties. I'd say, eighteen forty seven, and
that's that's what. Yeah, that's what I I was kind
of driving towards, but I chicily kind of never said it,
so that I won't have to like get in trouble
or inaccurate situations. Do you worry about accuracy? Yeah, I got.
I got a little obsessed with with that and like anachronism,
(20:13):
and I had to like teach myself to stop it
because it wasn't that kind of novel, you know, And
I was starting to kind of impede like a major
like Liberty and the Pros, and you know where I
went to the just to the point where I was
like triple checking every sentence just to see like was
there gravel in the driveway where you know what kind
of TOPEI area was in style and the lane for
(20:33):
you know, it got to a point where I was
checking the etymology of every single word seven times in
seven different websites.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
So I just stopped. I just stopped doing that. But
I did.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
I did go a little overboard a little bit at first,
and then but if I feel like I absorbed it
and then I just forgot it.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
So she is a governess and there's an opening at
ins Or House, right, which is the home of the
Pounds family. How are you coming up with the character names?
I mean, you have Winnifred nay, yeah, naughty. I would
say naughty in Texas naughty and then you've you've got
missus Pounds, mister Pounds. Are the Pounds also missing their
first name, like Missus March was missing a first name.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Now they're they're mentioned, but it's just not particularly interesting.
It's John and and I believe that Emily. I don't
know if I cut Emily in the end, but yeah,
I mean the yeah, the names. I mean, I don't
know if it's Dickens's influence or what, but I just
names in the in these kinds of novels just make
me very happy. The names of places as well, like
(21:33):
Woe on the World and grim Wolves and you know,
but I just find them really delightful, these kinds of names.
There's a mister and missus fancy as well in there,
and just everyone every name, every name has like a
double on tunder.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Okay, so she arrives at this house, you know, tell
me kind of how things start to unfold. I get
the impression pretty quickly that she is an attractive woman,
because you know, she gets sort of well, I mean
ensnared with with some issues regarding the head of house.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Oh sure, although mister Pound's we kind of get a
feeling fairly quickly that he's you know, done this before
with pretty much any and all governesses. But I don't
know if she is attractive. But she's well, she's very visceral,
and she's very like passionate, like she she's very into
all the like licking and slurping and sniffing.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
You know, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
I think I don't know if that's attractive, but I
think that's very animalistic in a way that could could
be found very sexy by men.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Perhaps, Well, it would be unusual for the Victorian era
for a woman to act like that, certainly.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
It would be.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yeah, yeah, she gets away with a lot.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
And you know, being a governess must be so intimate
with the family. I mean, you're living there and it's
you're right, you have a you're on a floor above
the servants, and so there's a lot more of an
opportunity to sort of be with the family and have
them treat you in a way that they wouldn't be
treating other people. So is that part of it? It's
getting ensnared in this life?
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Yeah? And I read on the governess habits in life
and it was pretty there wasn't like a specific situation
that everybody followed, like was different in every house. I
know in some houses they were invited for meals. In
other homes it was like unheard of. So I did
have like mister Pounds immediately taking an interest in her
(23:29):
and kind of inviting her for meals constantly, which was
maybe frowned upon, but it did happen. So you know, again,
it was like towing that limbo, and she's getting closer
and closer to him, and then missus Pounds is getting
more and more jealous and angry and upset. He doesn't,
you know, he ignores her completely, and so she starts
(23:49):
to dole out little cruelties on Winnifred and Winifred's just
like you know, missus Pounds is unaware of how dangerous
Winnifred really is. And Winnifre it's just like happy, like
a for the ride. She just finds everything so fun
and fascinating. But she's she can snap pretty quickly. So
any any any any show of anything that can which
I think I took this from well, most like Ted Bundy,
(24:12):
Jeffrey Dahmer, like any any any sign of disrespect what
she considers to be disrespect or betrayal or or rejection,
she can snap and become extremely violent and angry.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
I recently saw a speaker who is a fantastic writer,
and he was talking about two things that really stuck
with me, So I want to ask you about both
of them. He said, for me, a successful novel does
two things. Number One, it tells you making the area
or the house, whatever you're in the character a character,
(24:46):
a main character. And he said, I think you have
to explain why this could only happen here, maybe this town,
it could be maybe the country or in her house.
In your case, how do you create a world that
I so often talk about in real life where it's
just so clear that in London this would not have
(25:07):
panned out the way it did, or you know, in
another country. Were you able to kind of think that
through before writing the novel or not at all?
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Such an interesting question. I definitely knew I wanted to
make the house of character, and actually, like the very
one of the very first lines, or the first line
even of the entire novel is describing it in kind
of human terms. It's saying, it's like a class handed
banker with like a double chin, and it's a very
you know, it's described in much detail, just like the tone,
the cues of it, and I don't know, tiles around
(25:39):
the chimney piece that I stole from Dickens, from Scrooge,
and the sort of confusing structure of it. There was
a point where my editor asked me if we wanted
to make it clear what the just what the floor
plan was, and I was like, absolutely not. And also
we don't want to know how many people are in there,
how and how many staff members are in there, because
I wanted to feel extreme confusing and weird and kind
(26:02):
of cold, and and and also like Winnifred does not
care at all about anybody who's working in there, or
like specific names or anything at all. And and just
to make it as kind of contradictory and confusing as
the Victorian era itself, I think is kind of what
I was going for. And as you say, yeah, it
could have happened in London. I mean, this is a distance.
(26:25):
It's like a house on a hill, like on a
stretch of moorland. It feels like it's far away from life,
so to speak, and from people. There's like there are
farmhouses nearby, but not that close, and so not that
many people would come and check in on the you know, family,
apart from the staff who lives there constantly.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
So it's kind of claustrophobic and no.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
One can hear you scream essentially, is what you're trying
to say, And.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
They wouldn't dare to like ask, you know, like is
everybody okay? You know it's I wasn't appropriate. Yeah, so,
and there were people for that. But if all those
people are dead, then you know what happens and how
much time goes by until someone kind of there is
to chance upon whatever has happened in this house. So
that's kind of what I was what I was going for.
I don't know that it's the only place it could
(27:12):
ever happen, but just that kind of structure of the house. Yeah,
Winifred goes kind of crazy, I don't want to spoil it,
but you know there is a big deaththall.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Well, you know, on my other show and Buried Bones,
Paul and I talk about with you know, real cases
when things happen in rural areas and there are guns
that go off, much of the time, people don't respond
because what do you think They think it is hunting,
They think it's hunting, even in the middle of the night,
some idiots out there hunting something. And so that is
so different, I think than in a city where you know,
(27:41):
when I heard when I lived in New York and
I heard a car backfire, I would almost hit the
ground thinking something was going on. Yeah, so that that
place is important, right.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Oh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
And also the people.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
I mean, again, as with Miss March, we have a
character is filter and in this case it is first person,
so it's very very much her opinion of everything, and
everything is filtered through her point of view, which is
skewed evidently, and she treats the other characters like punching bags. Essentially,
she's very you know, insulting, and she thinks everyone's an idiot,
basically as a lot of psychopaths do. But all these people,
(28:16):
all these other characters are presented as evil, you know.
It's kind of like a study on evil in a way,
and why different human beings are evil. So it could
be a survival, it could be a defense mechanism. It
could be the Reverend that is mentioned from her childhood
is evil, but he thinks he's doing good. That's what
he has been taught is good to preach into punish
people who don't follow whatever he thinks is correct and
(28:39):
good and holy. And then mister Pounds is evil as well.
He's also had an evil and all foursive childhood, and
he thinks that evil is what he's supposed to do.
He doesn't think it's evil at all. And then you know,
there are other characters who are evil because they are
being they're under tech and so they respond as missus Pound.
So it's kind of each character is promoting evil in
(29:01):
their own way. Well, and then again, is what I
consider evil? But of course it's very subjective. It is.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Okay, I'm going to challenge you with the other one,
the other point that I took away from this discussion,
So the other question, the other thing that he said,
this author said that was really important that I've heard
so many times, but for some reason it only sunk
in this one time when he talked about it, is
what does your character desire? And I think it was
(29:29):
the way he phrased it. He said because and you
might not agree with this, but he says, because you know,
if it's a serial killer from the serial killer's point
of view, and we make it clear that he wants
to get away with it. This is not going to
be some grand, you know, death by cop kind of thing.
You know, he wants to disappear like Jack the Ripper.
(29:49):
If that's his desire, that it doesn't matter to the
reader whether he gets it or not. The reader just
wants to know it's possible. And then you get to
the end of the book and you kind of accept
whatever the ending is. So did you think in those
terms at all, because now I'm starting to think about
everything I do, nonfiction or fiction in those terms. What
does Winnifred, who is your main thing? I don't know,
(30:10):
protagonist and antagonist whatever, What does she want that you
kind of make clear or or did you not make
clear at all because she doesn't know.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
I don't know if I made it clear, because I
wanted to kind of upend that kind of character where
where everything is stated and again that she's on some
kind of a specific mission which can be real, you know,
and everything's very kind of clearly plotted out, because I thought,
you know, this is the first person to account from
a psychopaths point of view, this is going to be
chaos like in the area. It's going to be awful
(30:41):
and it's going to be all over the place, and
it's going to be comedic, but it's also gonna be
really dark, and it's going to be a period but
it's going to be anachronistic as well. You know, there's
like it's like a vomit of just violence and profanity.
The most immediate thing she wants is pleasure. What she
thinks she wants is a family. But she's very deluded.
She's completely deluded. She thinks she's really gonna and you know,
(31:03):
there's like this other storyline that I don't want to spoil,
but she's in this specific house for specific reason. So
she's come here looking for someone. And some readers might
believe that it was all like a revenge plot that
was very you know, carefully thought out. Knowing Winnifford as
I do, I'm pretty sure that she just she was
(31:26):
deluded enough that she thought she was going to come
to this house and find her family and it was
all you know, and they were going to accept her
and it was going to be wonderful and nobody was
going to get mad at her ever, and she was
going to be allowed to do everything she ever wanted,
you know, kind of like Jeffrey Dahmer thinking he was
going to make himself a sex slave by lobotomizing, you know,
the man that walked into his life. It's just it's insane,
it's ridiculous. So what she really is after, and I
(31:48):
don't think she would admit this to herself, is pleasure,
just immediate pleasure, constantly.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
And she's breaking like all the rules.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
And you know, she just wants to satisfy her every
single need and temptation, you know, be it whatever food, drank, sex, anything, beauty,
what she considers to be beauty. You know, she wants
it all. She wants to take it like a touch
it without consent, of course, and you know, and on
her own terms. And whenever someone gets upset about this,
she lashes out.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Paul and I on Barry Bones actually talked about Constance Kent. Yes,
we covered that story. You know, how much can you
talk about what the influence was? I can give a well,
I mean, can you do a quick summary.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
What do you think? Oh yeah, sure, it was a
big it was a big inspiration. There's actually a lion
early on in Victorian Psycho where she's saying something about
like in my hometown, they found like a baby stuff
down a privy or whatever, and she's like kind of
blase about it, like, oh, I.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Had nothing to do with that, wasn't me, but yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Constance Kent was the case of Francis Savill Kent, who
was four years old, disappeared from his home one day
and he was heavily searched for, and then his body
was found later hours later, shoved down the toilet on
the property, which was the privy right, which was this
essentially like wooden outhouse, Yeah exactly, but without the house
(33:07):
part exactly. Yeah, just a whole, just a whole basically
in the ground or in a piece of wood. So
his body was found shoved down the privy and his
throat was slashed so deeply that he was almost decapitated.
And so immediately I think suspicions turned to his nursemaid.
She was initially arrested, I believe, but then eventually they
(33:31):
called a detective from Scotland yard mister Witcher, Detective Witcher,
and he immediately suspected the boy's sixteen year old half sister,
Constance Kent. I think he zeroed in on a missing
night dress. She said it was. She blamed it on
the local woman who did the laundry, but it was
never found, and then she was arrested, and eventually she
(33:55):
was released because the public was outraged because she was
a young lady of breeding.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
My god, how dare they?
Speaker 3 (34:01):
And then she eventually confessed her guilt to a clergyman
who helped her to turn herself in, and she just
she's just narrated how she apparently did it. And she
said she done it with a razor in the middle
of the night, which I believe was a little weird
because it couldn't be done with a razor, right, it
was a little too deep.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
I think it depends on I mean, if you're talking
like a mens straight razor, I think it could have yeah,
like what her dad used to shave.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
It depends.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
I mean, never underestimate the anger and vigor of a
young woman physical, I mean, you know, and this is it.
He was young, I mean he was, yeah, you're right,
three and a half four years old. So I don't know.
I don't know. And then she carried him out. I
don't think she did she I don't think she did
it outside. I can't remember.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
She did it in the in the prevy. She said
she did it there, Yeah, and kind of wrapped him
in the in a blanket, and I guess her night
dress was was obviously very bloodied, and so it immediately
just disappeared. That night dress was never found, I remember,
I remember there they found a bloody night dress from
another woman in the house. I think she was a
Constance's elder sister. But it was then like a doctor
(35:09):
was called in and he was like, no, this is
this is a natural occurrence blood, so meaning menstrual bread,
which I also mentioned in the book because I just
thought that was kind of hilarious. You know, they couldn't
tell the difference between you know, it was like what
wouldn't have been like over the neckline, Like isn't that
kind of absurd?
Speaker 2 (35:24):
But anyway, so Constance confessed.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
And I don't know when I read, because I came
across this case when I was in college. I think
it was from Kate summer Scale's incredible book, The Suspicions
of Mister Witcher, And I think Kate's summer Scale argues
that maybe Constance was protecting an accomplice, right her brother,
her brother William, with whom she was really close, just
(35:48):
because there were several inconsistencies that people think are weird.
But she never recanted her confession, and she always kept
silent about her motive. She moved eventually to Australia with
her brother and became an ur. Since she died when
she was like a hundred. I don't know, I remember.
I was always a little something bothered me about this case,
a little bit about the resolution. I just thought it
was a little there were few weird things missing and
(36:10):
a few contradictions that made me wonder, But anyway, I
thought it was an incredible I mean, visually, it's really
haunted with the fact that there was this young little
boy with his throat cut and shoved down a privy,
which the whole if I'm not mistaken, it was the
one privy for the entire household. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
When you read Constance's case, did you just in your
head went with, Okay, no matter what anybody else says,
she's sort of my prototype for somebody who could do
something so awful to somebody so innocent. Yeah, right, I mean,
we're just going with the idea that she had psychopathy
or something.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Yeah. And there's also what you said earlier, the figure
of like the teenage girl, which we often underestimate. There
is a teenage girl character that was very important in
Victuarian Psycho. The girl you know there is a brother
and a sister that who WINNIFREDA is going to teach
one of them is a is a thirteen year old girl, Drusilla,
And I even kind of dismissed her when I was
writing the novel, like, oh, a teenage girl, you know
(37:05):
whatever born And then when I went back to it,
I really fleshed out that character because I thought, my gosh,
can you imagine the inner life of a teenage girl
in a time when you know, women, let alone young
young women could speak out about anything at all, and
you know, they were essentially property and they were surrounded
by violence, but they had to be super prim and proper.
(37:26):
But it was so incredibly unfair and they were being
i don't know, tormented in so many different ways, and
nobody knew what they were feeling at all, and it
was kind of frowned upon to talk about it anyway,
and they could immediately cart you off to an asylum.
So it's just like the boiling pot for this young girl,
I thought was incredibly interesting, and I did also kind
of admittedly obsessed over like the Privy, like just as
(37:49):
a setting. I thought it was it was kind of
fascinating that it's just like a toilet foreveryone like hidden
the shrubs. I don't know, I thought it was all
incredibly haunting. But yeah, so the constance thing really grabbed me,
so to speak, and the said, but then I started
researching and just a lot of these kept popping up,
like young especially with young children and babies, which if
(38:10):
you you know, whoever reads fortorin Cycle will realize, like,
what is Virginia's problem with this specifically, why is she's
so obsessed with in fanticide? But it was just I
kept they kept coming up. And there's this one particular
one that really struck me as well. It's mentioned very
quickly in the same novel by the suspicions of mister Witcher.
But it was like about a housekeeper in London who
(38:32):
killed her a two year old illegitimate son and then
like put him in a box and sent him to
her sister in the country. And Witcher was the detective
on this case, and he kind of interviewed the staff
and discovered that like the kitchen maid had carried this
large box to the butler's pantry to be mailed off,
and I just thought it was the most ridiculous, insanely
(38:54):
dark stories I'd ever read.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
You looked at Amelia Dyer's story, all, so right, first
tell me her story and then how it fit in
is a you know, like amused in some way for you?
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Yeah? Meally Dyer who is estimated to be maybe the
most prolific serial killer in history, who is thought to
have possibly murdered about four hundred babies or more. She
was known as a baby farmer. So this was the
practice of adopting unwanted babies. Usually they were illegitimate babies,
babies the mothers could not possibly care for, you know,
(39:28):
they would risk public ruin, they would be ostracized, So
they would leave their babies with these baby farmers and
pay them. This was a common practice. But so the
babies started dying on Amelia very suspiciously quickly, and it
led to like a doctor started to suspect. But then
(39:48):
she instead of being convicted, I think she was sentenced
to like hard labor, and when she finished six months
of hard labor, she just came out and just really
went for the just really went for it. She started
like really murder the babies because I think she was
she was allowing these babies to die in her care
of neglect or hunger or starvation or whatever. And then
(40:08):
she would just take the money. But what she started
to do was like she realized it was taking too long,
so she just started murdering the babies. So she would
just take the like a one off payment or whatever,
or she would take like a monthly payment. And she
would even write letters to these mothers like how's my bib,
you know, kiss my baby for me, and she'd be like, yes, yes,
your baby's fine, and it would start murdering them. I
think she would she would strangle them and dispose of
(40:33):
their bodies and the river I think that's how she
was caught. One package was found in the river. It
contained a little girl, I believe, and it led back
to her. And I took a lot of details from
Melia Dyer. I remember she vividly she strangled the babies
with white edging tape used in dressmaking, and I have
(40:54):
that exactly that in my in my novel. And then
you know, she would throw the babies in the river
in like carpetbags waited with bricks and then her Yeah,
her downfall was when they found this bagged corpse of
one of the infants in the Thames and leading back
to her and she was arrested and it was like
one of the most sensational trials of the Victorian periods.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
So this haunted me to know.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
End what I did with Victorian psychle was I just
in flashbacks I narrate the story of how Winnifred was
brought up by one of these baby farmers, and how
she at an extremely young age, talking.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
One year old or even or two years old, and
she's being allegedly taken care of by this baby farmer
and she's watching the baby farmer murder these babies in
front of her. So that's how Winnifred first kind of
gets a taste of, you know, externally of death and
violence and murder.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
And also what they did was they would give the
babies this godfreeze cordial it was called, which is basically
opium and syrups to kind of shut them up. This
is pretty common practice, but you know, baby farmers used
it a lot. So the infant would often basically die
of starvation because you know the opium is just I'm
not hungry. So we have this character Winnifred, who, at
(42:10):
a very young age, is watching this woman strangling these
babies and she's potentially next. She never knows why she
isn't murdered herself before her mother comes for her, and
essentially the baby farmer throws her out. She's like, your
baby's weird, and you know, I can't quite kill her,
so just take her back. And then her mother tries
to kill her with white edging tape because she doesn't
(42:30):
want to lose her job. And that's the beginning of
a very successful psycho life for Winnifred, my character.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
So I was very, very fascinated by Amelia Dyer.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
You know, I think you fit in with this sort
of long line of authors who use true crime. You know,
we know Poe at growlm Poe, did we know Nathaniel Hawthorne.
My latest book, you know, is about the true story
behind Hester Prynne and what happens, which I think was interesting,
particularly you know, of course because of this book that
(43:04):
I wrote, kind of thinking about what Hawthorne was doing
with the real case of a woman who ends up
dead at the hands of a Methodist minister because he
sexually assaulted her and she was demanding child support. So
the way that I had interpreted in other academics interpreted
was that Hawthorne was sort of reimagining what would happen
if Sarah Cornell had survived all this, So she would
(43:27):
have had a baby, she would have still worked in
a factory, she would have been humiliated as Hester Prynne was,
but at the same time sort of forging a path
of resilience and grit, you know, and Sarah Cornell never
had that opportunity. So, you know, you have all of
these people in your books who you have all these
sort of characters who can float around and provide inspiration.
(43:49):
And what's so great about fiction is you can just
sort of pick different things, you know, even if it's
just the color of the carpet that somebody's wrapped up
in or something that helped move you along. Because I
think fiction writing for me is so difficult. But was
it your way of also kind of processing with these
real characters. You still can't one hundred percent get into
Amelia Dyer's head or you know, Constance Kent, So is
(44:12):
it sort of you're finishing their story in some way,
is that kind of what happens with Winnifred.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
Absolutely, I think there's a lot of that. I think
there's a lot of therapy involved. Firstly, I'm trying to
process what I'm reading and what I'm visualizing happened. A
way to do that is, for me, is humor as well.
So Victorian psycho Is is kind of echoing these stories
in a humorous light because I don't know how to
deal with it otherwise, because it's very frightening and disturbing.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
And then another part.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
Of it is why, like, how in the world could
a human being ever do this? It's like it's to
such a degree, I mean to any degree of course,
but like we're talking about four hundred babies that you've
thrown into the river, you know, and just like coldly
kept the money and they're clothing, and you know, told
(45:01):
their moms that then you'd kiss someone to cheek. This
is insane to me. I don't understand it. So I'm
trying to understand it, and I'm trying to lean into
the theory that maybe sometimes some human beings are just born,
you know, broken, and there's just no other way to
understand it. Like it's just their evil and what we
understand that is evil and they just want to hurt
(45:22):
people or they don't mind hurting people, and it's like,
I don't know, there are different species almost, I don't
understand how else to kind of accept it, but so yeah,
it's definitely a way to like to poke at that,
and it's the way I was reading all these cases,
and I was there was kind of a point where
I was like, this is hope, Like it's just hopeless.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Like there's no way that I could do. We were
just describing where you're like, well, what.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
If they had lived to tell their tale, and like
it could be could they hope then somehow?
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Could you?
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Like I felt so hopeless and desperate when I was
reading all of this that all I could do was
just turn to humor and like passive aggression and just
like like a scream of rage because I couldn't believe
that this would go well for anybody in any situation.
It was so deranged. Is this going to be a
series for you? I don't think so. I think the
(46:09):
story is just it's what it is. And it's a
pretty short book as well, because it just couldn't sustain
more pages because it's too violent and ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
So is there anything that I regret I'll putting in?
Sometimes I do.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
Sometimes there are certain scenes because the first draft was
I just kind of let it all out and then
we like I had to edit it, you know. My
agent was like, let's talk. You know, this is deranged
and it went a little too far maybe, and so
there were some things that I cut out and then
I wonder, damn it that scene. But then I'm like, well,
I didn't want to go so overboard that it's just
(46:43):
impossible to read. I mean, I wasn't a place where,
like I think I needed it for myself, like therapeutically
to write it. But eventually I don't know if I
if I did it, if I did well or not,
And I don't want to I don't want to say
specifically in case I offend any sensibilities. But yeah, there
was like a scene I remember from her childhood, and
(47:03):
that's the one I questioned the most, which was I
decided that like when she was a kid and people
around her started to notice, you know, that she was
a little off, and they started to either avoid her
or in the case of her reverend stepfather, he thinks, hmm,
maybe I can use this, you know, for good and
I can like harness her evil for my own you know, benefits.
(47:27):
So basically it was like he was used like townspeople
would approach him if they wanted to like get rid
of anybody, and he would just put Winnifred in that
person alone in a room for like hours and just
hope that she would like kind of swiftly get rid
of them. And so there was one scene where he
was leaving her with like a child, you know again,
a young girl from the village that her parents wanted
(47:48):
to like take to an asylum or whatever. They just
wanted to get rid of her, and he kept like
opening and closing the door just to check, you know,
whether she'd done it yet. So just because I didn't
want to write like with fear, like I didn't want
to be frightened, like, oh is this too much? So
the ones that I wonder about are those the ones
where I was like, did I take this out because
it didn't make any sense? Or did I take this
out because I was afraid. I try not to think
(48:10):
about it, so I try not to regret anything.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
I was trying to strike a delicate balance.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
I didn't want to shy away from the violence, because
you know, that's not what I was trying to do,
and this is again first person account from a psychopath.
But also I didn't want it to go so far
overboard that it's just gratuitous as hell, and it's just
unreadable because it's so repetitive and boring. So I tried
to strike a balance. I don't know if I did
it right. You all let me know.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis
(49:09):
a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode
was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer,
artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Listen to wicked Words on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
(49:31):
Follow wicked words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked, and
on Facebook at wicked words pod
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
They were constantly punished, and you.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Know, their hair was cut off and they were like
collar epidemics because it was an image just awful and.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Just another run of the mail Victorian school, I guess.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:52):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers made, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. Occasionally we interview fiction authors
who use true crime stories as jumping off points for
(01:13):
their novels. Virginia Fato wrote a book called Victorian Psycho,
and it's based on several cases you've likely heard of.
There's a lecherous head of house, a jealous wife, and
a violent governess. Very violent Fato uses Gallo's humor to
take real stories and craft them into herowing tales. We've
(01:36):
done this a couple of times where we have a
novelist come on who has had an inspiration from real stories,
true crime stories. So I mean, let's start with You've
got these two novels we really want to concentrate. I
think on the second one, which is Victorian Psycho, one
of the best book titles ever.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
I have to say, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
And then the first one's Missus Yes, right, Missus March.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, Missus March.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
And so you know you have mentioned to me that
you have used real stories as inspiration, but I know
these are two really different books. Do you want to
give me kind of a quick summary of Missus March
and then sort of the way that that maybe you
thought maybe you pulled some details without having to go
through the stories if you want.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So Missus March is about a New
York Upper East Side housewife who's apparently very well put together.
She's married to like an important author, and she kind
of lives her life projecting this image of privilege and
wealth and perfection, and then one day she's in this
(02:43):
pastry shop, and the woman who the manager, the owner
of the pastry shop is kind of congratulates her on
her husband's latest novel, and she's like, this is the
first time he's based a character on you, right, and
missus March goes kind of, you know, she freezes because
the character in question is this like awfully, like the
ethetic sex worker nobody wants to even sleep with. Everyone
(03:04):
laughs at you know, which is disgusting and stupid and
all the things. She wouldn't, you know, be just terrified
of anybody considering her to be So she essentially just
starts to go insane. She starts to obsess about it awfully,
and she thinks that everybody knows that everyone's laughing at
her behind her back, that her husband has betrayed her
(03:25):
in this ultimate way, and she just starts to go insane.
And at the same time, in parallel, she starts to
obsess over the fact that her husband may have murdered
this young woman in Maine whose like body was found
in a place where her husband had a cabin very
very close by. So she starts to believe, you know,
if he did this to me, he probably murdered this
(03:46):
young woman as well. Because he's clearly Satan. That's the
beginning of the essence of Missus March.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
I've been working kind of on my own on a
mystery thriller, and as somebody who does nonfiction, you have
to it's so hard to bring out of that. You know,
you're given this sort of like constrained set of rules, your.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Sources or your sources, and that's it.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
I can't make up who this person is, and then
all of a sudden you're unridled from that. So was
that what you thought with the first book? Were you thinking, Okay,
how do I get into this person's completely screwed up mind?
Did you definitely, you know, start considering looking at true
crime stories or anything like that the stranger than fiction.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
There were a couple of things that kind of bled
into the story accidentally, so to speak. Like, firstly, as
I was kind of crafting it, I remember I was
watching the documentary series of The Keepers, about the murder
of a nun and teacher at an old girls Catholic
school in Maryland, Kathy Sesnik, and I remember her body
was found in a wooded area by hunters. I vividly
(04:48):
remember the cause of death was Blanck forced trauma of
the head and something about like maggots being found like
in her throat, in her mouth. I remember those details,
you know, and the fact that it was never officially
even though you know, there's a pretty clear yeah theory
which is absolutely probably what happened, but you know where
this this priest was sexually abusing the girls at the
(05:11):
school and trafficking them. And the theories that Kathy was
murdered because she was going to tell the archdiocese. But
the fact that it was never officially closed and just
these tiny details kind of seeped into Missus March kind
of accidentally because I was kind of listening it to
it and watching it as I was writing it. And
so this plot line of like this young girl goes
missing in Maine and is found in a wooded area
(05:32):
by hunters close to this cabin, blown first trauma to
the head. Those little details that I that I picked out,
But it wasn't like Spitz. I didn't want to like
base it on anything specific. I didn't want it to
be like a plotty like murder mystery. And actually, but
one of the things that most affected me was that
it was never officially solved, and so without wanting to
spoil Missus March, but it's not really about this murder.
(05:54):
It's a murder that isn't really necessarily ever solved, something
that I was very, very frustrated by, and it's a
very big feeling. I think in true crime, isn't it
where a lot of times it's just you're kind of
stuck with that forever. And then I remember I was
reading a lot about Truman Capote's Swans at this time,
you know, because Missus March is kind of a swan
(06:15):
want to be, you know, she's a she, and there
are mentions to several detail like she has a soap
dish that allegedly belonged to Babe Paley, and she wants
to be one of these women. I remember I was
reading and very affected by the story of Anne Woodward
and how Truman Capodi wrote the short story about essentially
accusing her of murdering her husband, who she accidentally shot
(06:40):
one night she believed it was a burglar. They slept
in different bedrooms and she heard a noise at night
and she had they were both avid hunters, and so
she came out of the room and shot him and
killed them, and Truman Capoti wrote a story about it,
you know, and she and she then kind of it's
rumored that she read it and that is why maybe
(07:01):
she killed herself. You know. The thing is she was
shunned by New York high society for the rest of
her life after her husband died, and everyone just gossiping
about her, and so that that had a lot that
has a lot to do with Missus March and the
character and the fear of being ostracized by you know,
everything you hold dear, which is New York high society essentially,
(07:24):
and gotten the force of gossip for these for these women.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
So in that story, you have this woman who is
living the idealized life and you know she has a
you know, a husband and a relationship with a husband.
And do you build that story like a lot of
true crime stories, you know that I would talk about
where it's you know, the on the surface, everything is
fine and then it starts to degrade. Is it a
(07:50):
slow process where we see faults with the husband and
then it's sort of is she really crazy or is
all of this bad stuff happening? Is that kind of
the the route you take with the book.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Yeah, absolutely, that's kind of even though, I think you
can tell from the very beginning that something is not
quite right about missus Mark, just the way that she
constantly notices everything about everyone and intends to think that
it's negative, you know, towards her. It's like a personal attack.
She's clearly obsessed with people's opinions of her. So I
think you get that really, you know early on from
(08:23):
the first page that she's very anxious about this, and
it's slowly like degrading her mental health essentially, but it does.
It is like a slow dissent, and she just keeps
getting you know, worse and worse and obsessive, and it
starts to even you know, later later on see things potentially.
You know, you're not sure what she's because we're with
(08:44):
her constantly. It's her point of view, so we're not
sure whether she's filtering things through her you know, her
lens of like self destruction, or whether these things are objective.
Her husband does seem very distant, but then again, this
is what she's telling us, so we don't really know hmm,
how far she's going with it and how how true
it is. Is this first person it's not actually it
(09:06):
turned out third person, because there was also something about
the narrator being a little judgmental of her, and even
the narrator being like missus March says that it's you know,
there's no milk clip or whatever. You know, it felt
like we were all kind of humiliating her in a way,
both writer and readers, and we're all kind of gossiping
(09:26):
about her as she suspects. You know, that's what it
felt like with a third person narration. And also because
her first name is never revealed, so it's kind of
like does March this and missus March that and missing
you know, it just feels a little insulting in a way,
kind of kind of singing songy.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Interesting though, but because you don't know her first name,
you always have to refer to her in a very
formal time as if you're almost like subservient to her,
Which is that's good.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
I like that twist. That's good. Thanks. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
And she's always she's always the wife.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
She's always her husband's wife, and you know, she likes
whatever her husband likes, and she visits the restaurants her
husband likes, and you know, that's that's who she is.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
So I guess the real mystery is who is she?
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Who is this woman? What year is that? Is that
a present day novel? Or Oh, it's funny you should ask,
because it's actually never really revealed where it's set, but
they are very heavy hints that it's not set in
the modern day. So a lot of people just assume
that it's in the fifties or sixties, but actually their
hints thrown in that keep getting closer to modern times.
(10:27):
So what I what I see it as is kind
of it's probably current, but missus March is living in
a bubble of like, you know, a nineteen fifties like
perfect housewife that she learned from her mother, and that
has been going down through all the generations.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Well, this book did well, and when your second book
came out, which is what we're going to be talking about, really,
the Victorian Psycho book with the great title, you have
to pull this up. There was an article and I
actually I think I recommended you in the book to
our which I often do a lot of times they'll
just say, hey, why don't you know interview this person?
(11:04):
But I found the article. What's wrong with Us is
the title from mccar which is another great time What's
wrong with US novelist Virginia Fato on our morbid obsession
with true crime, and I think that's what really caught
my attention, besides, of course, that you used true crime
as a as a way to explore this story, which
is very different. So before you tell us what you
(11:27):
think is wrong with us, which I'm pretty sure will
make sense to everybody who listens to our show, why
don't you tell me about Victorian Psycho. Completely different book
and a different time period.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Completely different in every way. This one is first person.
It's a very very claustrophobic first person account from a
psycho narrator. I think there's no twist there. It's in
the title, and it's the story of a young governess
who is hired at this state noble estate to teach
these two children. And she carries within her what she
(12:00):
calls a darkness, which is essentially trying to control her.
And I guess the mystery here is whether it will
control her or she will control it, you know, the
darkness essentially being her dark predisposition towards crime and violence.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
So you went from in Missus March the main character
being annoying, I'm sure, but vulnerable and sort of something
that people can connect to in a character, that idea
of what's real what's not. And you're being gas lit
and what's happening to someone who I'm presuming you have
very little sympathy for as a reader or no, do
(12:38):
you make her soft at times? I mean, she's got
some pretty devious thoughts in her head.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
She's pretty dark. But you know what, I love her
because she's just fearless and unapologetic. And those are you know,
qualities that I wish I possessed. You know, I wish
I didn't obsess over an email for forty five minutes.
And I wish I sometimes cared less frankly, quite frankly,
you know, about the things I say or do that
might affect anyone in any way, or might upset anybody
(13:06):
or make anybody uncomfortable, you know. And I'm a little
more awkward in that way. And this person who is
an awful person, you know, who just who just has
a tension for violence and torture and murder and even
the most vulnerable of people, now, you know, not just
evil abusers who will also kind of go into the mix.
But she's just she's I find her very I mean
(13:27):
This is not very humble to say about one's character,
but what can I say. I'm going to say it.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I find her very funny.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
There's I kind of use her as like a stand
up comedy, my stand up comedy. This is Victorian psycho.
You know. I was just like, because she just says
she you know, she just narrates whatever, like any intrusive
thought of any kind, and obviously coming from a psychopath,
those must be really really awful. It's like so awful
that they can become absurdly funny in a way, maybe
as a defense mechanism. But this is honestly kind of
(13:55):
what I felt when I was doing the research on
Victorian you know, murder case in the Victorian era and
just the abuse in the misogyny of the time. I
was getting really weird, aggressive mood when I was reading
up on this and started writing this book. I quite
like her. No, but you're right, but there are certain
moments when we also see that Winifred is her name,
(14:19):
the governess has had a very awful childhood in Victorian England.
She suffered at the hands of you know, abusive adults
of all kinds, and she was handed over to a
what was called a baby farmer at the time, who
basically was killing off the babies. Is that she was
(14:40):
supposed to be caring for and she didn't even want
her so, you know, rejected by everybody, told she was
evil and useless from a very young age. So I
guess there is there is a way to empathize with
her through through that. I guess some people could see
it as a defense mechanism, as a survival instinct, just
kill or be killed.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
I guess did you feel like you had to explain
where this comes from, where Winnifred has all these dark thoughts.
Did it need to have an origin story? I tell
stories often where it's just sort of like this guy
is mean, but you feel like you need to have
an explanation, you think.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
I Actually, that's a great question because one of the
biggest themes of the novel is nature versus nurture, and
I still I find it so compelling. In all the
cases of you know, famous psychopathic serial killers, none of
them have had a happy childhood, none of them, that's
the fact. But I find it very intriguing. How were
(15:38):
they kind of born this? Were they always going to
be this way? If they hadn't been abused in their childhood,
would they still have you know, turned out like this?
Is there something chemical in their brain that just was
never going to work? So I do offer this truth
about her past and suffering and child neglect, et cetera.
But I'm also kind of questioning, you know, whether it's
(16:00):
just I mean, she feels such pleasure and she's also
not out for revenge because she doesn't really do it
against the people who heurt her necessarily, she's also hurting
very vulnerable children, infants, young women who haven't really heard
her at all, you know, very very vulnerable, innocent people. Therefore,
can we really not justified? But like maybe I feel
(16:21):
like sometimes it's explained away a little bit or justified
through like a revenge plot or or oh, of course,
you know, what could this person possibly do other than
just murder a whole bunch of people because they had
an awful time of it. So I'm kind of with you.
Sometimes it's just like, listen, this person's just evil.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
So let's go through the story of Winnifred without you know,
i know, spoiling everything she for somebody who is so
sadistic picked an interesting career, so she's a governess. So
remember we do have, of course a wide range of listeners,
but if there's anything that's particularly British esque, define it.
So a governess would be what a nanny a living name.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah, essentially she was.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
It was very interesting figure, the governess because she wasn't
technically a servant. She was like above servants, but she
was not because usually they were young ladies who had
like not not fallen from grace, but like they didn't
have the means to be stay at home, you know,
mothers of noble estates, etca. So they had to have
a job, but it was like the only job they
(17:23):
could have without resorting to like being servants. So they
were teachers essentially at home. They weren't the nannies either.
I believe those would be the nurses, who were more
in charge of like the children's I don't know, bath time,
that kind of thing. But the governess was in charge
of like their souls essentially, like the you know, teaching
(17:44):
them good from evil morals, and then also like English
and French. Yeah, I thought that figure was very interesting
and it was kind of the only option for women
from like more you know, middle class backgrounds who needed
to have a job. The Bronte's were governesses. I took
a lot from Bronte's from the real life accounts, and
it was awful. And a lot of them were in
(18:05):
various horrible situations in these homes where they were nobody
knew how to go about it. They weren't servants, but
they weren't part of the family either. They were somewhere
in between, So it was kind of was pretty awkward.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
I say, when you talk about upstairs downstairs, I categorize
people like that sort of middle class first floor. Yeah,
they're not downstairs, but they're not unless they marry the
man of the house. They're not upstairs either. So she's
a first floor worker. How does somebody who has these thoughts,
I mean, does she get an education?
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Is that what you were thinking through?
Speaker 1 (18:36):
How do you end up in this type of position,
even though I know you said it's it's pretty much
one of the only options for women of a certain
background to take.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yeah, they were absolutely, they were educated.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
They were very you know, they would have done great
in a parlor room, as I life like to say,
but they just yeah, they had to teach it on
and in this case, there are certain flashbacks in my
novel about her going to this school like an all
like Daughters of the Clergy school, because her stepfather is
a clergyman and it's awful, and it's based on one
(19:09):
of the Brontes.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Well or several of the Brontes.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Actually one of them, I think their younger sister died
at this school where they went, and it was like,
you know, they were like frozen pictures of water and
they were constantly punished, and you know, their hair was
cut off and they were like color epidemics because it was,
you know, just awful and the conditions there were absurdly awful.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Just another run of the mill Victorian school, I guess.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
So she ends up joining in with a family. And
so you said that this is where's the house?
Speaker 3 (19:43):
It's Yorkshire?
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Okay, so it's in Yorkshire. And did you have a
year in mind? Or is this just sort of the
vast Victorian era?
Speaker 3 (19:51):
I never specified, but in my head it was like
the late eighteen forties. I'd say, eighteen forty seven, and
that's that's what. Yeah, that's what I I was kind
of driving towards, but I chicily kind of never said it,
so that I won't have to like get in trouble
or inaccurate situations. Do you worry about accuracy? Yeah, I got.
I got a little obsessed with with that and like anachronism,
(20:13):
and I had to like teach myself to stop it
because it wasn't that kind of novel, you know, And
I was starting to kind of impede like a major
like Liberty and the Pros, and you know where I
went to the just to the point where I was
like triple checking every sentence just to see like was
there gravel in the driveway where you know what kind
of TOPEI area was in style and the lane for
(20:33):
you know, it got to a point where I was
checking the etymology of every single word seven times in
seven different websites.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
So I just stopped. I just stopped doing that. But
I did.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
I did go a little overboard a little bit at first,
and then but if I feel like I absorbed it
and then I just forgot it.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
So she is a governess and there's an opening at
ins Or House, right, which is the home of the
Pounds family. How are you coming up with the character names?
I mean, you have Winnifred nay, yeah, naughty. I would
say naughty in Texas naughty and then you've you've got
missus Pounds, mister Pounds. Are the Pounds also missing their
first name, like Missus March was missing a first name.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Now they're they're mentioned, but it's just not particularly interesting.
It's John and and I believe that Emily. I don't
know if I cut Emily in the end, but yeah,
I mean the yeah, the names. I mean, I don't
know if it's Dickens's influence or what, but I just
names in the in these kinds of novels just make
me very happy. The names of places as well, like
(21:33):
Woe on the World and grim Wolves and you know,
but I just find them really delightful, these kinds of names.
There's a mister and missus fancy as well in there,
and just everyone every name, every name has like a
double on tunder.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Okay, so she arrives at this house, you know, tell
me kind of how things start to unfold. I get
the impression pretty quickly that she is an attractive woman,
because you know, she gets sort of well, I mean
ensnared with with some issues regarding the head of house.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
Oh sure, although mister Pound's we kind of get a
feeling fairly quickly that he's you know, done this before
with pretty much any and all governesses. But I don't
know if she is attractive. But she's well, she's very visceral,
and she's very like passionate, like she she's very into
all the like licking and slurping and sniffing.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
You know, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
I think I don't know if that's attractive, but I
think that's very animalistic in a way that could could
be found very sexy by men.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Perhaps, Well, it would be unusual for the Victorian era
for a woman to act like that, certainly.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
It would be.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yeah, yeah, she gets away with a lot.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
And you know, being a governess must be so intimate
with the family. I mean, you're living there and it's
you're right, you have a you're on a floor above
the servants, and so there's a lot more of an
opportunity to sort of be with the family and have
them treat you in a way that they wouldn't be
treating other people. So is that part of it? It's
getting ensnared in this life?
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Yeah? And I read on the governess habits in life
and it was pretty there wasn't like a specific situation
that everybody followed, like was different in every house. I
know in some houses they were invited for meals. In
other homes it was like unheard of. So I did
have like mister Pounds immediately taking an interest in her
(23:29):
and kind of inviting her for meals constantly, which was
maybe frowned upon, but it did happen. So you know, again,
it was like towing that limbo, and she's getting closer
and closer to him, and then missus Pounds is getting
more and more jealous and angry and upset. He doesn't,
you know, he ignores her completely, and so she starts
(23:49):
to dole out little cruelties on Winnifred and Winifred's just
like you know, missus Pounds is unaware of how dangerous
Winnifred really is. And Winnifre it's just like happy, like
a for the ride. She just finds everything so fun
and fascinating. But she's she can snap pretty quickly. So
any any any any show of anything that can which
I think I took this from well, most like Ted Bundy,
(24:12):
Jeffrey Dahmer, like any any any sign of disrespect what
she considers to be disrespect or betrayal or or rejection,
she can snap and become extremely violent and angry.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
I recently saw a speaker who is a fantastic writer,
and he was talking about two things that really stuck
with me, So I want to ask you about both
of them. He said, for me, a successful novel does
two things. Number One, it tells you making the area
or the house, whatever you're in the character a character,
(24:46):
a main character. And he said, I think you have
to explain why this could only happen here, maybe this town,
it could be maybe the country or in her house.
In your case, how do you create a world that
I so often talk about in real life where it's
just so clear that in London this would not have
(25:07):
panned out the way it did, or you know, in
another country. Were you able to kind of think that
through before writing the novel or not at all?
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Such an interesting question. I definitely knew I wanted to
make the house of character, and actually, like the very
one of the very first lines, or the first line
even of the entire novel is describing it in kind
of human terms. It's saying, it's like a class handed
banker with like a double chin, and it's a very
you know, it's described in much detail, just like the tone,
the cues of it, and I don't know, tiles around
(25:39):
the chimney piece that I stole from Dickens, from Scrooge,
and the sort of confusing structure of it. There was
a point where my editor asked me if we wanted
to make it clear what the just what the floor
plan was, and I was like, absolutely not. And also
we don't want to know how many people are in there,
how and how many staff members are in there, because
I wanted to feel extreme confusing and weird and kind
(26:02):
of cold, and and and also like Winnifred does not
care at all about anybody who's working in there, or
like specific names or anything at all. And and just
to make it as kind of contradictory and confusing as
the Victorian era itself, I think is kind of what
I was going for. And as you say, yeah, it
could have happened in London. I mean, this is a distance.
(26:25):
It's like a house on a hill, like on a
stretch of moorland. It feels like it's far away from life,
so to speak, and from people. There's like there are
farmhouses nearby, but not that close, and so not that
many people would come and check in on the you know, family,
apart from the staff who lives there constantly.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
So it's kind of claustrophobic and no.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
One can hear you scream essentially, is what you're trying
to say, And.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
They wouldn't dare to like ask, you know, like is
everybody okay? You know it's I wasn't appropriate. Yeah, so,
and there were people for that. But if all those
people are dead, then you know what happens and how
much time goes by until someone kind of there is
to chance upon whatever has happened in this house. So
that's kind of what I was what I was going for.
I don't know that it's the only place it could
(27:12):
ever happen, but just that kind of structure of the house. Yeah,
Winifred goes kind of crazy, I don't want to spoil it,
but you know there is a big deaththall.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Well, you know, on my other show and Buried Bones,
Paul and I talk about with you know, real cases
when things happen in rural areas and there are guns
that go off, much of the time, people don't respond
because what do you think They think it is hunting,
They think it's hunting, even in the middle of the night,
some idiots out there hunting something. And so that is
so different, I think than in a city where you know,
(27:41):
when I heard when I lived in New York and
I heard a car backfire, I would almost hit the
ground thinking something was going on. Yeah, so that that
place is important, right.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Oh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
And also the people.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
I mean, again, as with Miss March, we have a
character is filter and in this case it is first person,
so it's very very much her opinion of everything, and
everything is filtered through her point of view, which is
skewed evidently, and she treats the other characters like punching bags. Essentially,
she's very you know, insulting, and she thinks everyone's an idiot,
basically as a lot of psychopaths do. But all these people,
(28:16):
all these other characters are presented as evil, you know.
It's kind of like a study on evil in a way,
and why different human beings are evil. So it could
be a survival, it could be a defense mechanism. It
could be the Reverend that is mentioned from her childhood
is evil, but he thinks he's doing good. That's what
he has been taught is good to preach into punish
people who don't follow whatever he thinks is correct and
(28:39):
good and holy. And then mister Pounds is evil as well.
He's also had an evil and all foursive childhood, and
he thinks that evil is what he's supposed to do.
He doesn't think it's evil at all. And then you know,
there are other characters who are evil because they are
being they're under tech and so they respond as missus Pound.
So it's kind of each character is promoting evil in
(29:01):
their own way. Well, and then again, is what I
consider evil? But of course it's very subjective. It is.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Okay, I'm going to challenge you with the other one,
the other point that I took away from this discussion,
So the other question, the other thing that he said,
this author said that was really important that I've heard
so many times, but for some reason it only sunk
in this one time when he talked about it, is
what does your character desire? And I think it was
(29:29):
the way he phrased it. He said because and you
might not agree with this, but he says, because you know,
if it's a serial killer from the serial killer's point
of view, and we make it clear that he wants
to get away with it. This is not going to
be some grand, you know, death by cop kind of thing.
You know, he wants to disappear like Jack the Ripper.
(29:49):
If that's his desire, that it doesn't matter to the
reader whether he gets it or not. The reader just
wants to know it's possible. And then you get to
the end of the book and you kind of accept
whatever the ending is. So did you think in those
terms at all, because now I'm starting to think about
everything I do, nonfiction or fiction in those terms. What
does Winnifred, who is your main thing? I don't know,
(30:10):
protagonist and antagonist whatever, What does she want that you
kind of make clear or or did you not make
clear at all because she doesn't know.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
I don't know if I made it clear, because I
wanted to kind of upend that kind of character where
where everything is stated and again that she's on some
kind of a specific mission which can be real, you know,
and everything's very kind of clearly plotted out, because I thought,
you know, this is the first person to account from
a psychopaths point of view, this is going to be
chaos like in the area. It's going to be awful
(30:41):
and it's going to be all over the place, and
it's going to be comedic, but it's also gonna be
really dark, and it's going to be a period but
it's going to be anachronistic as well. You know, there's
like it's like a vomit of just violence and profanity.
The most immediate thing she wants is pleasure. What she
thinks she wants is a family. But she's very deluded.
She's completely deluded. She thinks she's really gonna and you know,
(31:03):
there's like this other storyline that I don't want to spoil,
but she's in this specific house for specific reason. So
she's come here looking for someone. And some readers might
believe that it was all like a revenge plot that
was very you know, carefully thought out. Knowing Winnifford as
I do, I'm pretty sure that she just she was
(31:26):
deluded enough that she thought she was going to come
to this house and find her family and it was
all you know, and they were going to accept her
and it was going to be wonderful and nobody was
going to get mad at her ever, and she was
going to be allowed to do everything she ever wanted,
you know, kind of like Jeffrey Dahmer thinking he was
going to make himself a sex slave by lobotomizing, you know,
the man that walked into his life. It's just it's insane,
it's ridiculous. So what she really is after, and I
(31:48):
don't think she would admit this to herself, is pleasure,
just immediate pleasure, constantly.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
And she's breaking like all the rules.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
And you know, she just wants to satisfy her every
single need and temptation, you know, be it whatever food, drank, sex, anything, beauty,
what she considers to be beauty. You know, she wants
it all. She wants to take it like a touch
it without consent, of course, and you know, and on
her own terms. And whenever someone gets upset about this,
she lashes out.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Paul and I on Barry Bones actually talked about Constance Kent. Yes,
we covered that story. You know, how much can you
talk about what the influence was? I can give a well,
I mean, can you do a quick summary.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
What do you think? Oh yeah, sure, it was a
big it was a big inspiration. There's actually a lion
early on in Victorian Psycho where she's saying something about
like in my hometown, they found like a baby stuff
down a privy or whatever, and she's like kind of
blase about it, like, oh, I.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Had nothing to do with that, wasn't me, but yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Constance Kent was the case of Francis Savill Kent, who
was four years old, disappeared from his home one day
and he was heavily searched for, and then his body
was found later hours later, shoved down the toilet on
the property, which was the privy right, which was this
essentially like wooden outhouse, Yeah exactly, but without the house
(33:07):
part exactly. Yeah, just a whole, just a whole basically
in the ground or in a piece of wood. So
his body was found shoved down the privy and his
throat was slashed so deeply that he was almost decapitated.
And so immediately I think suspicions turned to his nursemaid.
She was initially arrested, I believe, but then eventually they
(33:31):
called a detective from Scotland yard mister Witcher, Detective Witcher,
and he immediately suspected the boy's sixteen year old half sister,
Constance Kent. I think he zeroed in on a missing
night dress. She said it was. She blamed it on
the local woman who did the laundry, but it was
never found, and then she was arrested, and eventually she
(33:55):
was released because the public was outraged because she was
a young lady of breeding.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
My god, how dare they?
Speaker 3 (34:01):
And then she eventually confessed her guilt to a clergyman
who helped her to turn herself in, and she just
she's just narrated how she apparently did it. And she
said she done it with a razor in the middle
of the night, which I believe was a little weird
because it couldn't be done with a razor, right, it
was a little too deep.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
I think it depends on I mean, if you're talking
like a mens straight razor, I think it could have yeah,
like what her dad used to shave.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
It depends.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
I mean, never underestimate the anger and vigor of a
young woman physical, I mean, you know, and this is it.
He was young, I mean he was, yeah, you're right,
three and a half four years old. So I don't know.
I don't know. And then she carried him out. I
don't think she did she I don't think she did
it outside. I can't remember.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
She did it in the in the prevy. She said
she did it there, Yeah, and kind of wrapped him
in the in a blanket, and I guess her night
dress was was obviously very bloodied, and so it immediately
just disappeared. That night dress was never found, I remember,
I remember there they found a bloody night dress from
another woman in the house. I think she was a
Constance's elder sister. But it was then like a doctor
(35:09):
was called in and he was like, no, this is
this is a natural occurrence blood, so meaning menstrual bread,
which I also mentioned in the book because I just
thought that was kind of hilarious. You know, they couldn't
tell the difference between you know, it was like what
wouldn't have been like over the neckline, Like isn't that
kind of absurd?
Speaker 2 (35:24):
But anyway, so Constance confessed.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
And I don't know when I read, because I came
across this case when I was in college. I think
it was from Kate summer Scale's incredible book, The Suspicions
of Mister Witcher, And I think Kate's summer Scale argues
that maybe Constance was protecting an accomplice, right her brother,
her brother William, with whom she was really close, just
(35:48):
because there were several inconsistencies that people think are weird.
But she never recanted her confession, and she always kept
silent about her motive. She moved eventually to Australia with
her brother and became an ur. Since she died when
she was like a hundred. I don't know, I remember.
I was always a little something bothered me about this case,
a little bit about the resolution. I just thought it
was a little there were few weird things missing and
(36:10):
a few contradictions that made me wonder, But anyway, I
thought it was an incredible I mean, visually, it's really
haunted with the fact that there was this young little
boy with his throat cut and shoved down a privy,
which the whole if I'm not mistaken, it was the
one privy for the entire household. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
When you read Constance's case, did you just in your
head went with, Okay, no matter what anybody else says,
she's sort of my prototype for somebody who could do
something so awful to somebody so innocent. Yeah, right, I mean,
we're just going with the idea that she had psychopathy
or something.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Yeah. And there's also what you said earlier, the figure
of like the teenage girl, which we often underestimate. There
is a teenage girl character that was very important in
Victuarian Psycho. The girl you know there is a brother
and a sister that who WINNIFREDA is going to teach
one of them is a is a thirteen year old girl, Drusilla,
And I even kind of dismissed her when I was
writing the novel, like, oh, a teenage girl, you know
(37:05):
whatever born And then when I went back to it,
I really fleshed out that character because I thought, my gosh,
can you imagine the inner life of a teenage girl
in a time when you know, women, let alone young
young women could speak out about anything at all, and
you know, they were essentially property and they were surrounded
by violence, but they had to be super prim and proper.
(37:26):
But it was so incredibly unfair and they were being
i don't know, tormented in so many different ways, and
nobody knew what they were feeling at all, and it
was kind of frowned upon to talk about it anyway,
and they could immediately cart you off to an asylum.
So it's just like the boiling pot for this young girl,
I thought was incredibly interesting, and I did also kind
of admittedly obsessed over like the Privy, like just as
(37:49):
a setting. I thought it was it was kind of
fascinating that it's just like a toilet foreveryone like hidden
the shrubs. I don't know, I thought it was all
incredibly haunting. But yeah, so the constance thing really grabbed me,
so to speak, and the said, but then I started
researching and just a lot of these kept popping up,
like young especially with young children and babies, which if
(38:10):
you you know, whoever reads fortorin Cycle will realize, like,
what is Virginia's problem with this specifically, why is she's
so obsessed with in fanticide? But it was just I
kept they kept coming up. And there's this one particular
one that really struck me as well. It's mentioned very
quickly in the same novel by the suspicions of mister Witcher.
But it was like about a housekeeper in London who
(38:32):
killed her a two year old illegitimate son and then
like put him in a box and sent him to
her sister in the country. And Witcher was the detective
on this case, and he kind of interviewed the staff
and discovered that like the kitchen maid had carried this
large box to the butler's pantry to be mailed off,
and I just thought it was the most ridiculous, insanely
(38:54):
dark stories I'd ever read.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
You looked at Amelia Dyer's story, all, so right, first
tell me her story and then how it fit in
is a you know, like amused in some way for you?
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Yeah? Meally Dyer who is estimated to be maybe the
most prolific serial killer in history, who is thought to
have possibly murdered about four hundred babies or more. She
was known as a baby farmer. So this was the
practice of adopting unwanted babies. Usually they were illegitimate babies,
babies the mothers could not possibly care for, you know,
(39:28):
they would risk public ruin, they would be ostracized, So
they would leave their babies with these baby farmers and
pay them. This was a common practice. But so the
babies started dying on Amelia very suspiciously quickly, and it
led to like a doctor started to suspect. But then
(39:48):
she instead of being convicted, I think she was sentenced
to like hard labor, and when she finished six months
of hard labor, she just came out and just really
went for the just really went for it. She started
like really murder the babies because I think she was
she was allowing these babies to die in her care
of neglect or hunger or starvation or whatever. And then
(40:08):
she would just take the money. But what she started
to do was like she realized it was taking too long,
so she just started murdering the babies. So she would
just take the like a one off payment or whatever,
or she would take like a monthly payment. And she
would even write letters to these mothers like how's my bib,
you know, kiss my baby for me, and she'd be like, yes, yes,
your baby's fine, and it would start murdering them. I
think she would she would strangle them and dispose of
(40:33):
their bodies and the river I think that's how she
was caught. One package was found in the river. It
contained a little girl, I believe, and it led back
to her. And I took a lot of details from
Melia Dyer. I remember she vividly she strangled the babies
with white edging tape used in dressmaking, and I have
(40:54):
that exactly that in my in my novel. And then
you know, she would throw the babies in the river
in like carpetbags waited with bricks and then her Yeah,
her downfall was when they found this bagged corpse of
one of the infants in the Thames and leading back
to her and she was arrested and it was like
one of the most sensational trials of the Victorian periods.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
So this haunted me to know.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
End what I did with Victorian psychle was I just
in flashbacks I narrate the story of how Winnifred was
brought up by one of these baby farmers, and how
she at an extremely young age, talking.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
One year old or even or two years old, and
she's being allegedly taken care of by this baby farmer
and she's watching the baby farmer murder these babies in
front of her. So that's how Winnifred first kind of
gets a taste of, you know, externally of death and
violence and murder.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
And also what they did was they would give the
babies this godfreeze cordial it was called, which is basically
opium and syrups to kind of shut them up. This
is pretty common practice, but you know, baby farmers used
it a lot. So the infant would often basically die
of starvation because you know the opium is just I'm
not hungry. So we have this character Winnifred, who, at
(42:10):
a very young age, is watching this woman strangling these
babies and she's potentially next. She never knows why she
isn't murdered herself before her mother comes for her, and
essentially the baby farmer throws her out. She's like, your
baby's weird, and you know, I can't quite kill her,
so just take her back. And then her mother tries
to kill her with white edging tape because she doesn't
(42:30):
want to lose her job. And that's the beginning of
a very successful psycho life for Winnifred, my character.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
So I was very, very fascinated by Amelia Dyer.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
You know, I think you fit in with this sort
of long line of authors who use true crime. You know,
we know Poe at growlm Poe, did we know Nathaniel Hawthorne.
My latest book, you know, is about the true story
behind Hester Prynne and what happens, which I think was interesting,
particularly you know, of course because of this book that
(43:04):
I wrote, kind of thinking about what Hawthorne was doing
with the real case of a woman who ends up
dead at the hands of a Methodist minister because he
sexually assaulted her and she was demanding child support. So
the way that I had interpreted in other academics interpreted
was that Hawthorne was sort of reimagining what would happen
if Sarah Cornell had survived all this, So she would
(43:27):
have had a baby, she would have still worked in
a factory, she would have been humiliated as Hester Prynne was,
but at the same time sort of forging a path
of resilience and grit, you know, and Sarah Cornell never
had that opportunity. So, you know, you have all of
these people in your books who you have all these
sort of characters who can float around and provide inspiration.
(43:49):
And what's so great about fiction is you can just
sort of pick different things, you know, even if it's
just the color of the carpet that somebody's wrapped up
in or something that helped move you along. Because I
think fiction writing for me is so difficult. But was
it your way of also kind of processing with these
real characters. You still can't one hundred percent get into
Amelia Dyer's head or you know, Constance Kent, So is
(44:12):
it sort of you're finishing their story in some way,
is that kind of what happens with Winnifred.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
Absolutely, I think there's a lot of that. I think
there's a lot of therapy involved. Firstly, I'm trying to
process what I'm reading and what I'm visualizing happened. A
way to do that is, for me, is humor as well.
So Victorian psycho Is is kind of echoing these stories
in a humorous light because I don't know how to
deal with it otherwise, because it's very frightening and disturbing.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
And then another part.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
Of it is why, like, how in the world could
a human being ever do this? It's like it's to
such a degree, I mean to any degree of course,
but like we're talking about four hundred babies that you've
thrown into the river, you know, and just like coldly
kept the money and they're clothing, and you know, told
(45:01):
their moms that then you'd kiss someone to cheek. This
is insane to me. I don't understand it. So I'm
trying to understand it, and I'm trying to lean into
the theory that maybe sometimes some human beings are just born,
you know, broken, and there's just no other way to
understand it. Like it's just their evil and what we
understand that is evil and they just want to hurt
(45:22):
people or they don't mind hurting people, and it's like,
I don't know, there are different species almost, I don't
understand how else to kind of accept it, but so yeah,
it's definitely a way to like to poke at that,
and it's the way I was reading all these cases,
and I was there was kind of a point where
I was like, this is hope, Like it's just hopeless.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Like there's no way that I could do. We were
just describing where you're like, well, what.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
If they had lived to tell their tale, and like
it could be could they hope then somehow?
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Could you?
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Like I felt so hopeless and desperate when I was
reading all of this that all I could do was
just turn to humor and like passive aggression and just
like like a scream of rage because I couldn't believe
that this would go well for anybody in any situation.
It was so deranged. Is this going to be a
series for you? I don't think so. I think the
(46:09):
story is just it's what it is. And it's a
pretty short book as well, because it just couldn't sustain
more pages because it's too violent and ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
So is there anything that I regret I'll putting in?
Sometimes I do.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
Sometimes there are certain scenes because the first draft was
I just kind of let it all out and then
we like I had to edit it, you know. My
agent was like, let's talk. You know, this is deranged
and it went a little too far maybe, and so
there were some things that I cut out and then
I wonder, damn it that scene. But then I'm like, well,
I didn't want to go so overboard that it's just
(46:43):
impossible to read. I mean, I wasn't a place where,
like I think I needed it for myself, like therapeutically
to write it. But eventually I don't know if I
if I did it, if I did well or not,
And I don't want to I don't want to say
specifically in case I offend any sensibilities. But yeah, there
was like a scene I remember from her childhood, and
(47:03):
that's the one I questioned the most, which was I
decided that like when she was a kid and people
around her started to notice, you know, that she was
a little off, and they started to either avoid her
or in the case of her reverend stepfather, he thinks, hmm,
maybe I can use this, you know, for good and
I can like harness her evil for my own you know, benefits.
(47:27):
So basically it was like he was used like townspeople
would approach him if they wanted to like get rid
of anybody, and he would just put Winnifred in that
person alone in a room for like hours and just
hope that she would like kind of swiftly get rid
of them. And so there was one scene where he
was leaving her with like a child, you know again,
a young girl from the village that her parents wanted
(47:48):
to like take to an asylum or whatever. They just
wanted to get rid of her, and he kept like
opening and closing the door just to check, you know,
whether she'd done it yet. So just because I didn't
want to write like with fear, like I didn't want
to be frightened, like, oh is this too much? So
the ones that I wonder about are those the ones
where I was like, did I take this out because
it didn't make any sense? Or did I take this
out because I was afraid. I try not to think
(48:10):
about it, so I try not to regret anything.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
I was trying to strike a delicate balance.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
I didn't want to shy away from the violence, because
you know, that's not what I was trying to do,
and this is again first person account from a psychopath.
But also I didn't want it to go so far
overboard that it's just gratuitous as hell, and it's just
unreadable because it's so repetitive and boring. So I tried
to strike a balance. I don't know if I did
it right. You all let me know.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis
(49:09):
a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode
was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer,
artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Listen to wicked Words on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
(49:31):
Follow wicked words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked, and
on Facebook at wicked words pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.