May 14, 2020 • 42 mins
On a spring day in 1919, a woman’s body was found bound, gagged, and strangled in a garden in Barre, Vermont. Who was she? Who killed her? In this episode, we try to solve a cold case - reopening a century-old murder investigation - as a way to uncover the history of evidence itself. What is a clue? What is a fact? What is a mystery? We put the pieces of the puzzle together: photographs, newspaper articles, a private eye’s notebook, the trial record and, last but not least, a trip to the scene of the crime.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. There's a place in our world where the known
things go, A corridor of the mind. Along the walls,
shelves stucked with proof, and all around a clutter of clues.
(00:36):
Here's a photograph of a corpse. Paste it onto the
page of a moldering leather bound album. Here a teetering
stack of newspapers tied with twine. Oh, and this, this
is very good. A detective's notebook smells like tobacco. And
(00:58):
look over here on this oak stand a medieval manuscript
writing so tiny it looks like an army of ants.
And down hidden, Oh, as he roll under the shelf
a glass bottle blue as indigo. This place stores the
(01:19):
facts that matter, and matters of fact. It's all that
stands between reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. It
lies in a time between now and then. Welcome to
the Last Archive, A place I like to go to
figure out how we know what we know, how we
used to know things, and why it seems sometimes lately
(01:41):
as if we don't know anything at all. I'm the
historian Jilla Bore stepped through the door to an unfinished grave.
The body was found face down early in the morning
of May fourth, nineteen nineteen, A rainy morning, a Sunday
(02:06):
in springtime, a century ago, in a little park in
the center of Barry Vermont, a quarry town known as
the Granite City, Young Harold Jackson was out for a
walk before breakfast when he came across the body and
rushed off to find a policeman. Boficer. There's a naked
(02:29):
dead woman in a vaked lot near the Bustle Hotel.
Dead woman, you say. The body lay pale, an animal
against the dark, wet grass, a kill, like something hunted,
a fox in a trap, prey like something caught, a
fish on a hook, tied up like something about to
(02:53):
be roasted, a bird on a spit. Her hands were
tied behind her back. Her mouth was gagged, her neck
was garreted. She was naked, stripped of everything but her
gray blue silk stockings, her laced leather shoes, her yellow
kid gloves. Her clothes lay rumpled in a pile. Her
(03:15):
eyeglasses were caught in her hair. The policeman hurried toward
the body. A crowd began to gather. People on their
way to church wearing their Sunday hats and bonnets, stopped
and stared, as if they were a spur of the moment, mourners.
(03:38):
How could do such a Why do all murder mysteries
start this way? Fiction, non fiction, true crime, pulp fiction, magazines, movies, podcasts,
It doesn't matter where you come across them. A dead woman,
(03:59):
a beautiful woman, a young woman killed viciously, found naked, exposed,
dead and doubly silent, not just killed, but gagged, And
we stare and stare and stare. This murder really happened.
The recordings from the scene we reenacted ourselves, but everything
(04:21):
here really happened. Who was she? Who killed her? Good questions?
I want to answer those questions. But I've also got
bigger questions about the history of knowledge and evidence, questions
important to ask in our muddle headed, fake news, post
truth world. On this season of The Last Archive, I'm
(04:41):
going to try to solve a crazy big who done it?
Who killed truth? I love nothing more than an investigation,
but you have to have a plan. The place to
start looking for answers to really big questions is with
something small. If you want to understand biology, you start
with a cell, or not even a cell, A chromosome
(05:01):
or not even a chromosome, a nucleotide history works the
same way to answer question and about the history of evidence.
You don't start with philosophy. You start with a single
mystery on a particular day, and not even that, but
with one tiny clue, gray blue silk stocking, say, or
(05:23):
a white linen handkerchief, just the kind of things you
can find in the last archive. The dead body that
a crowd had gathered around in Barry, Vermont on a
(05:43):
Sunday morning in nineteen nineteen. Everyone wanted to turn it,
turn her into a set of facts, a body of evidence.
They came by ones and twos. The chief of police,
the deputy chief, the attorney general, two doctors, a reporter,
and a photographer. The photograph was how I came across
(06:07):
this case. I found it in an archive. I held
it in my hands. It made my head hurt, It
broke my heart. It had been pasted into a leather
bound album, pasted almost lovingly, an ancient photo album of
murdered bodies, nearly all of them were women. But this
photograph was somehow the worst, the saddest, the cruelest. I
(06:33):
saw that photograph and I needed to know more, a
lot more, silenced women bother me. They really bother me.
I needed to know who she was and what happened
to her. I wanted to hear her speak. There are
methods when you conduct a historical investigation steps. Here's what
(06:56):
I like to do. I like to start with the
easy stuff. Find out first what everyone knew about whatever
it is you're interested in. Then think about all the
stuff that was so obvious to people that they didn't
even notice it at the time. They took it for
granted and didn't quite see it anymore. Then find out
the stuff that only a few people knew. And then, finally,
(07:18):
and this is the best part, and it only happens
if you're doing your work right, find out the stuff
that no one knew. Step one, How do you find
out what everyone knew? And Berry, Vermont in nineteen nineteen
the newspaper. So I went to the library and took
up old issues of this town's main paper, the Buried
(07:39):
Daily Times. One thing everyone knew. It had been a
lot of death and barry in the last year the
pandemic influenza Spanish flu hit. It hit Berry very hard,
partly because the man who worked in the quarry for
years had very weak lungs. Schools had closed for months,
and about the only public events being held were funerals.
(08:02):
The misery had only just begun to end. The quarantine
had only been lifted a few months before this body
was found murdered more senseless death. Anyway, I dug up
the Barry paper. When I read a newspaper like that,
I can pretty much hear the reporter talking to me
in my head, and just the way reporters talk then,
(08:23):
or at least the way I imagine it. I listen
for what's weird, and here it's what's weird. Starting with
this very first story, the reporter for the Very Daily
Times crammed in the details, detail after detail after detail,
Very Daily Times, Monday, May fifth, nineteen nineteen, woman was
(08:44):
strangled and naked. Body left and garden off Main Street.
Between the fence and the body was a small patch
of tall grass which did not appear to be trampled,
but the dirt between the body and the hat, on
a northerly line seemed to have been disturbed slightly, as
if it might have been done by dragging some object.
While the grass still further northerly and under a loose
(09:06):
wire fence, was somewhat flattened it by the trampling of feet,
or by the dragging of an object over or through
the fence. He was writing a style of true crime
that's familiar now, so familiar that it sounds old fashioned.
But back then it was new. It really only begun
a few decades earlier. In the eighteen eighties. The public
(09:29):
wanted details, and newspapers gave them every last clue, as
if readers too might solve the murder. Coming within the
perspective of the camera were the woman's clothing, partly under
the body, perhaps lying some eight feet away and perhaps
not discernible in the picture. A pocketbook lying about eighteen
feet on the opposite side of the body from the hat,
(09:51):
and her gold watch, the ladder of which had in
the meantime been picked up. The watch was still running.
The watch was still running, and it was inscribed with
three initials l PC. This, by the end of the
day led the police to her name, Lucina Courser Broadwell.
(10:12):
Her maiden name was Lucina Phillips Courser LPC twenty nine,
one hundred and ten pounds, five ft three. Her husband,
Harry Broadwell, was a carpenter. They had three children, Doris eight,
Hildred seven, and Wendell, who was only five. Finally, hours
(10:36):
after the body was found, a horse hitched to a
wagon carried her to an undertaker's. That afternoon, two doctors
drove to the undertakers to conduct an autopsy. The word
autopsy auto plus opsy means something you see with your
own eyes, the evidence of your senses. This, too, was
(10:59):
mostly new pathologists gathering evidence and conducting that autopsy in Fermont.
They were trying to get the dead body to speak.
In a century on, that's what I'm doing. Historians are
coroners too. A lot of things, a lot more things
than murders. Used to be mysteries. A mystery for centuries
(11:24):
meant what God knows and we do not but must believe,
the mystery of the origins of life, the mystery of
what happens to you after you die. After a while,
the mystery began yielding to the fact as the elemental
unit of knowledge, as if knowledge is made up of facts,
the way a body is made up of atoms, or
electricity is made up of electrons. I took a while.
(11:48):
This process was slow, but people eventually got fact mad.
They believed they had discovered a universe of truth. You
can see that even in how people understood the causes
of death centuries ago. Starting the late fifteen hundreds, during
the Age of Mystery, authorities began writing up a special
document for every death, something called a bill of mortality.
(12:12):
On a bill of mortality, you could be said to
have died of lots of different things. What all of
them to me have a kind of poetry of breach,
of blasted, of cramp, of each, of a lethargy of fight.
I love that list. People do die of these things,
(12:32):
of fright, grief, and misery. The way we think now
about death comes not from the ancient bills of mortality,
from the Age of Mystery, but from the modern death certificate,
from the age of facts. The pathologist who examined Lucine A.
Broadwell's body in nineteen nineteen, he was looking for a
cause of death, a fact. He found bruises on her
(12:54):
hips and thighs, and he also found seamen. And then
the medical examiner used all this evidence to fill out
a certificate of death. He had a list to choose from,
taken from the International List of Causes of Death. You
could die of all sort to things on that list,
but unfortunately there's no poetry to it. Number one eighty
(13:14):
two homicide by firearms. One three homicide by cutting or
piercing instruments. In the age of mystery, if I'd been
writing Lucina Broadwell's bill of mortality, I'd have written down
two things she died of, oh being savaged and of terror.
But instead the medical examiner wrote something else on her
death certificate. Number one hundred eighty four homicide by strangulation.
(13:39):
Her throat had been crushed. But who killed Lucina Broadwell.
Most people in Barry figured her husband, Harry, had done it.
He'd been arrested before for beating her he wants cut
her with a razor. But Harry had an alibi. He'd
(14:00):
been out drinking, and he had some witnesses to at
least for part of the night. He'd been at a dance,
and then he knocked on a friend's door late at
night and gotten him to make him an egg sandwich.
The chief suspect had an alibi, and the police had
no other suspects. They were stumped, so they made a decision.
What they needed was a detective, a private detective. This,
(14:23):
after all was the golden age of detective fiction, the
age of Hercule Pirot and Charley Chan and Lord Peter
Whimsy and Barry. Though they didn't have any private detectives,
but they knew one, so they put in a call
to Boston to the offices of James R. Wood Wood
(14:45):
Detective Agency James R. Wood Junior speaking. This agency would
correspondence in all parts of the world. Is prepared to
undertake all legitimate detective business for co operations, companies or individuals.
Male and female operatives furnished. James R. Wood was head
of the first detective agency in New England. It had
(15:05):
been founded by his father in eighteen seventy, nine years
before the fictional Sherlock Holmes solved his first mystery. Wood
wore a thin mustache, owl's eye, spectacles and an impeccably
knotted tie. He smoked a pipe. I mean, of course,
he smoked a pipe. His specialty was rural murder. Like
(15:28):
the Broadwell case. It was a complete mystery which had
baffled the authorities. He took the sleeper train up from Boston,
smoking his pipe, pondering the evidence. Wood was thirty nine
at the time and he was also his own Watson.
He wrote chronicles of his cases James R. Wood's detective notebook.
(15:49):
That's the gold mine. Most of the stuff you're going
to hear from him, the stuff comes straight out of
the pages of his notebook. The case I'm about to
relate to you has been considered throughout New England as
one of the strongest circumstantial cases ever tried. James R.
Wood was not a modest man, but his account of
the case is pretty thorough. He got to town just
(16:15):
before Lucie A. Broadwell was to be buried days after
the murder. He went first to the Broadwell house and
inspected the body. He interviewed Harry Broadwell, and then he
wrote four words in his notebook satisfied the husband innocent? Okay,
but why Harry would seem to have been the most
likely suspect and even though he had an alibi, it
(16:36):
was hardly air tight, especially since nobody knew exactly when
in the night his wife had been murdered. That was
one of the first things that didn't quite make sense
to me when I started reading about this case, that is,
reading James Wood's account. After first seeing the photograph of
Lucien A. Broadwell's dead body, but would like the Barry.
Police just wasn't interested in Harry Broadwell, even though they
(16:59):
knew that he had beaten his wife. A century ago,
men could hit their wives and even rape them without
much of any consequence, so would dismiss the idea of
Harry as a suspect. Instead, he started looking for a
very particular kind of fact. He started looking for a clue.
(17:21):
A clue used to mean a ball of yarn or thread.
The word kept that meaning in English for hundreds of years,
and then people started using the word clue to describe
the yarn you'd use if you were stuck in a maze.
If you enter a maze, a really good idea is
to unravel a ball of yarn to mark your way,
since you can find your way back out. So clue
(17:42):
started to mean a thing you would use to find
your way out of a maze. And here's another reason
we use the word clue this way. A lot of
murder victims are women, and their clothes are often torn,
so there were lots of clues at the scenes of crimes,
actual not figurative threads trailing from torn items of women's clothing.
(18:03):
Wood wrote about the stuff in his notes on Lucine
a Broadwell. Tied around her neck was her torn shirtwaist
with the knots in the shirtwaist secured by a man's
handkerchief with a sail as knot. After a while, clues
started to mean anything you could find at the scene
of a crime and follow to solve a mystery. But
(18:24):
still the best clues tended to be bits of clothes.
During the day, we had ascertained that the handkerchief belonged
to Eddie Barrow. We identified it by the landry mark.
A man's handkerchief with a laundry mark on it. That
is a pretty good clue. I'd led to a man
named Eddie Barrow, a drifter. Wood's operatives tracked him down.
(18:47):
Barrow had lent his handkerchief to someone else, he said,
a fellow by the name of George Long, a lanky,
wiry Canadian. But what did George Long have to do
with Lucina Broadwell. Wood thought he knew mister Broadwell was
suspicious that his wife was spotty. Sporty meant that you
slept around. They had been considerable family trouble and had
(19:09):
told Broadwell that they had seen his wife coming out
of the Pocket house at the lower end of Main
Street on more than one occasion. Aha. Another big clue
for James Wood. Missus Parker's house was sort of the
town brothel. She'd hosts men who came to town to
work in the quarries. She'd matched them up with sporty
women from Barry, including Lucina Broadwell and a friend of
(19:30):
hers named Grace Grimes. Wood followed his trail of clues
all the way to Grace Grimes's house, where she told
him that Lucina had written her a letter on the
very day she died. In the first part of the letter,
Missus Broadwell explained about having been down to Missus Parker's
house several times, of having met a lodger there by
the name of George, that George and she had been
(19:52):
quite friendly, that George talked about buying an automobile, that
George had asked her to go to California with him,
That she, Missus Broadwell, had decided that George was full
of hot air, that he was no good, and that
she was not going to see him again. That the
second part of the written on Saturday, red I've received
a call from Missus Parker, and she wants me to
(20:14):
come down tonight and meet George again. Most everything our
actors say in this podcast is taken from historical documents.
We know they said this stuff, But this little bit
of Lucia Broadwell, this is not that. This is what
James Wood wrote down from what Grace Grimes told him
(20:34):
that she remembered from a letter Lucia Broadwell had written
to her that Grimes had destroyed. I'm sick and tired
of the whole bunch. However, I'll go down tonight and
I'll tell Missus Parker what I think of her, and
I'll ditch George as I know he is full of
hot air and has no money, and as a bluff
would believed he had found his man. George Long was
(20:55):
a drifter in love, and Lucina Broadwell had lost patience
with him. He'd been fun for a while, but she
planned to break up with him because he was full
of hot air and he was a bluff. A liar.
Put this new insight into the miss of Broadwell's murder.
Wood headed back to Vermont. It all started with the
laundry mark on that white handkerchief. Wood loved this clue.
(21:18):
He loved it so much that he titled his account
of the case The Clue of the White Handkerchief. Wood
knew he was now near the end of the maze.
On Sunday morning, May eleventh, he invited George Long to
meet him at the hotel Barry, a big, elegant Victorian,
and then he and the deputy sheriff kept Long at
(21:39):
that hotel, questioning him for four days. They submitted him
to an ordeal, a very ancient sort of ordeal. In
the age of mystery, no one could know could truly
know the guilt of another person. Only God could know.
The point of a trial was to find a way
(21:59):
for God to reveal someone's guilt. These tests were called
trials by ordeal. One kind was the ordeal of the corpse,
where you'd be found guilty if the murdered corpse bled
when you touched it. The Pope banned trial by ordeal
in the year twelve fifteen, But that year twelve fifteen
(22:20):
something else happened. In Magna Carta, the King of England
established the right to a trial by jury. So just
hold on it and think about that for a minute.
The end of trial by ordeal and the beginning of
trial by jury took judgment out of the hands of
God and placed it into the hands of men. But
(22:45):
still the age of mystery lingered. I've come across American
cases from as late as eighteen ninety four where the
suspects were subjected to the ordeal of the corpse, told
to approach or murdered body to see if it would
bleed again. And something very much like that happened in
that hotel room in Berry, Vermont in nineteen nineteen, when
(23:06):
Detective James R. Wood questioned his suspect, George Long, in
that hotel room. Wood tried for hours at a time
to get Long to confess. Long admitted to knowing Lucina
Broadwell and even having dinner with her on the night
of her death in missus Parker's house. He admitted two
that he'd had sex with her that night, but he
(23:27):
insisted he hadn't killed her, and then, desperate for evidence,
would had submitted Long to a series of what I
think you can fairly call ordeals, those old tests of
truth from the age of mystery. One day, Wood handed
Long two pieces of rope, and he asked them to
tie them together. Long you've been lying to me. I
(23:49):
want you to tell me the truth about it. Tie
a square knot. A square knot is about the only
knot I know how to tie. A square knot happened
to be the type of knot the murderer had used
to tie up Lucina Broadwell. Could it be a clue? Later,
Wood took out the photographs of Lucina Broadwell's dead body
and made Long look at them, subjecting him to a
(24:12):
kind of ordeal of the photograph. While Long looked at
the photographs, Wood opened a box containing the clothes that
had been found next to the body, and then carefully,
one by one, he draped them over the railing at
the foot of the brass bed in the hotel room.
After Long finished looking at the photographs, he got out
of his chair and stepped over to the bedrail to
(24:33):
look at the clothes, and made as if we were
about to pick them up. Suddenly, there in that hotel
turned interrogation room, Wood interrupted him. Look out, George, you
get your hands all covered with blood. There isn't a
goddamn bit of blood on these clothes. Wood figured he'd
nailed him. Lucian A. Broadwell had been strangled. She hadn't bled.
(24:53):
But if George Long hadn't been there, if he wasn't
the murderer, how did he know there wouldn't be blood
on those clothes? Like I said, Wood question Long for days,
the ordeal of the rope, the ordeal of the photograph,
the ordeal of the clothes, And then at the end
of those four days, the police charged George Long with
(25:14):
first degree murder. This case was going to a trial
by jury. It began on a Friday in autumn, the
leaves falling to the ground, rustling in the wind, at
the Washington County Courthouse in Montpelier, Vermont. The courthouse was
packed with spectators, and there were seven reporters there too,
(25:37):
including four from big city papers in Boston. The story
was front page news all over New England. Oiay oiay.
George Long sat next to his lawyer, who planned a
question Harry Broadwell's alibi and to point out that it
was Broadwell, not Long, who had a motive to kill
Lucina Broadwell. The prosecution had a difficult case to make,
(26:01):
after all, there were no witnesses to the crime, but
the prosecution hoped to prove that Long had raped Lucina
Broadwell and then strangled her. Quite why, it was harder
to say. And when Long took the stand, he denied everything,
including everything he'd told James Wood in that hotel room.
You knew missus Broadwell, didn't you? No? I didn't you
(26:25):
say you never spoke with missus Broadwell, No, sir. It
went on like this. Then ten days into the trial,
the prosecution did something really interesting. Now called to the
stand James Wood Junior. Long had just testified under oath
that he'd never met Lucina Broadwell. Perfect. The prosecution must
(26:50):
have thought, we've caught him lying, because when Wood had
questioned him, Long had admitted not only that he knew Broadwell,
but they did had dinner with her, even that he'd
had sex with her on the night of the murder.
The prosecution could have asked Wood to tell the jury
what Long had said, but it wanted something better, and
wanted the court to admit as evidence the entire transcript
(27:10):
of Wood's interrogation. To this scheme, Long's lawyer objected. He
said that Wood and the deputy sheriff had essentially kept
Long as their prisoner for four days and four long
nights in the hotel. Berry not arresting him, just grilling him,
which of course was against the law. Well, all that time,
from Sunday until the next Thursday, mister Long was kept
(27:33):
in close confinement up there in that hotel by you
or some other officers. Wasn't me, No, sir, what sir? No, sir,
You were pumping him. You were some of your associates
all the time, No, sir, weren't you? No, sir? Didn't
you wake him up in the middle of the night,
out of a sound sleep and pump him about this murder?
I did not? Do you know who did? No? Sir.
(27:55):
Long's lawyers cross examination relied on a bigger point about evidence.
There are rules. They're old, change all the time, but
there are rules, and the prosecution had broken a bunch
of them, mainly because of the circumstances under which Wood
had questioned Long. Another judge might have disallowed as evidence
the transcript of James Wood's interrogation of George Long, but
(28:18):
this judge allowed it, and so the entire transcript of
Wood's interrogation was read to the jury so that the
jury could imagine that they too were sitting in that
room in the hotel. Berry watching Wood give Long the
third degree. Long's lawyer, in his closing argument, pleaded with
the jury to ignore all of it. I say and
(28:39):
submit you, gentlemen, that under the evidence there must be
a doubt. But the prosecution said the case was open
and shut. And the prosecutor and his closing argument was
very good. He talked about the rope of evidence that
tied this case together. And as he walked around the courtroom,
he held in his hands a rope which he tied
(29:01):
and untied, tied and untied, as if he had George
Long all roped up. The jury deliberated for less than
a day, party fun on a charge of second degree murder.
We find the defendant guilty as charged. All right. The
(29:27):
judge sentenced Long to life in prison, and Barry Vermont declared,
mystery solved facts one the day. But to me, either
something was missing or else something had gone terribly wrong.
Long might have done it, sure, but on what evidence,
said the jury actually convicted him. I couldn't see it.
(29:48):
Somewhere along the line, I must have missed something, some
stray fact, some clue. Here's what you do when your
investigation reaches a dead end. You do it all over again.
So I went back and I looked at that super
creepy photograph again, the one where Luciena Dwell looks like
(30:09):
a hunted animal, tied and about to be roasted on
a spit. And then I looked at the newspaper stories again,
and I read Wood's notes again. And then I noticed
something I hadn't noticed before. I noticed that when Wood
first took the stand, the prosecution read a statement into
the record, but in the newspaper the contents of that
(30:31):
statement just got a passing mention. You'd think it would
have been summarized in full by that very Daily Times reporter,
poured over by. The reporter had been so eager to
report every last fact gathered at the scene of the crime,
But nope, he had only this to say. Much of
the statement has to do with facts that cannot appear
in print. Why what facts were unprintable? Then I figured
(30:58):
whatever the newspaper didn't print I might still survive in
the original trial transcripts. Those would be stored far away,
deep in Vermont's state archives. There should be more cows.
Landscape would be well, it's not a visual media. We
could just say there it cows. It's mostly cows here.
(31:20):
That's my son. Since this is a show about truth,
I should just stay for the record. There were no
cows in sight, so just ignore my son and ignore
me and ignore to my producer Ben on the right,
that's some arrowloom wild cows. Okay, cows, Look at brand.
(31:52):
I don't get that one. The trial records were waiting
for us in a low slung building on the side
of Root two in Montpelier. I've got some of the
boxes pulled. Few of them have changed their box numbers
because we would reprocessed them, so I should be all
set free. You too. That's reference artivist Marisa Dobrick, and
(32:12):
she'd pulled out a big box full of George Long's
trial record, bound in giant books. The record runs to
more than twelve hundred pages, so we can kind of
get a whole piece of the puzzle this way, I
see it is when you're doing a court case, you're
looking at pieces of a puzzle. I drive past or
murderacing every day? Do you really think of her? Just
(32:32):
about every day? The trial records had actually been misfiled,
and it had been lost for a very long time
until this amazing archivist Gregory Sandford, the man who'd hired Marissa,
found them after I'd emailed him with a few questions.
There's almost nothing as thrilling as finding something you've been
looking for for a really long time. So you open
(32:54):
that one box and all of a sudden there are
two or three volumes and saying, wow, this is it.
Anybody should research at any point, because there's that moment
of discovery that it's like, wow, you know this is cool,
and it is cool, it's super cool. But it takes
a long time to read through trial transcripts, and I
noticed there was a lot in them that hadn't made
(33:16):
it into the very daily times. Okay, first thing to report.
There was so much hanky panky going on in this
little granite city, especially at Missus Parker's house, that brothel
where George Long had met Lucina Broadwell. A great many
of the hundred witnesses who marched to the stand during
the trial were asked about the goings on at Missus
(33:36):
Parker's house. That stuff was scandalous, but it wasn't entirely unprintable.
Hundreds of pages into the trial transcript I finally found
the part of the testimony that the very Daily Times
could not print something that George Long had told James
Wood about the Knight of Lucina Broadwell's death. Go ahead, yes,
(33:57):
go ahead. And we was in the room then a
while and came out. Were you intimate with her there? Yeah?
But before become an intimate did she get any money
from you? No, sir? Did you remove a close her skirt,
just skirt, just her skirt and a hat, yeah, and
her hat and gloves and gloves. Now on that occasion
when you were intimate with her, is that the occasion
(34:19):
you told me about once you used some sort of preventative.
She used a blue tablet. I have a bottle in
my room over there. Now I can't tell the name
of the tablet, but there's a blue wash that comes
in an oblong bottle or a three cornered bottle. Those
blue tablets or the blue liquid in that oblong bottle
that must have been a concoction made from a plant
(34:39):
called blue koosh, a perennial with blueberries. Who's the sort
of thing you'd take Before birth control was legal, it
was advertised as aiding menstruation. This part of the interrogation
transcript was unprintable because legally, it was obscene. That is,
it violated the terms of the eighteen seventy three Comstock Act,
(35:01):
a federal law that prohibited the printing of any information
relating to, among other things, the prevention of conception or
for causing unlawful abortion. The newspapers could say that lucian
A Broadwell's stomach had veal and bread in it when
they opened her up. They could talk about the bruises
on her thighs, but they couldn't mention her alleged use
of birth control that was illegal. Is that something you gava? Yes,
(35:26):
I had them sitting there in the dresser, and I
had them in my pocket that night. None of the
evidence used to convict George Long had ever been very good,
but in the end it hadn't really mattered. George Long
had provided a married woman and mother of three with
birth control in order to have sex with her without
fear of pregnancy and discovery by her husband, and then
(35:49):
he lied about it. These on principal facts were reason
enough for the jurors, a jury of twelve men, to convict.
That evidence cinched the case. Not the clue of the
white handkerchief, but the clue of the blue bottle up
(36:13):
in on Pelio. In the state archives. Some people think
Lucia broadwell spirit has never found dressed. Berry's got a
feel into it. It's weighted with history, and I mean
I think that sometimes you can feel that. That's Marisa
Dobrick again, reference archivist for the State of Vermont. All
I can say honestly is I feel like she haunts it.
(36:33):
I'm not sure I believe in ghosts myself, but I
find her stories so haunting that every day I drive
past it. I don't think any good answers were given.
I think she's still there. I do. I don't think
they found him that place. I mean, you can go there.
You can go to the parking lot. Lucina Broadwell has
been dead and buried for a hundred years. I never
(36:56):
really got her to speak, but I did want to guess,
to pay my respects, I decided to go find that
unfinished grave, the place where she'd been first found naked,
bound and gag. So my producer Ben and my son
Simon and I piled into my subaru and headed twenty
minutes south on Vermont sixty two to barry to the
(37:17):
scene of the crime. Like Maurica said, there's a parking
lot there. Now. We brought with us a stack of photographs,
that terrible photograph of Luciena Broadwell's corpse and then all
the other forensic photographs shots of the scene. It looks
really different there now, So it took a lot of
looking to find the exact spot. There's like the garden,
(37:39):
then there's a road. Here's this street right here, and
then there's a garden a little way as a road,
and then this curb and then the fence again. So
that parking lot really is the former garden man. Yeah,
we're pretty sure that we found the spot, and so
we just stood there a moment of silence for her.
(38:06):
Standing there, During that long moment of silence, my mind wandered.
Jurors are known as finders of facts, but for a
very long time women couldn't serve on juries. Only men
then could decide what was true and what wasn't true.
Who killed truth? Standing there on the spot where James R.
(38:28):
Wood had once stood, I thought about his sister, maud
Wood Park. She hadn't joined the family business, the Wood
Detective Agency instead. In nineteen nineteen, the year Lucia Broadwell
was murdered, Maudwood Park, who was arguably the most influential
woman in American politics, was leading the fight for women's
(38:49):
suffrage as a congressional lobbyist in Washington, and she hadn't
stopped after women finally got the right to vote with
the Nineteenth Amendment. After its ratification in nineteen twenty, women
like Maudwood Park went on to fight for the right
of women to serve on juries. That fight's date by
state took a really long time. In Vermont, women didn't
(39:11):
get to serve on juries to decide on matters of
fact until nineteen forty three. That same year, Moudwoodpark started
collecting documents chronicling women's history. Like me, she couldn't stand
the idea of silenced women, so she created her own archive,
an archive of women's history, the Sleasanter Library on the
(39:33):
History of Women in America. Lately, libraries like that archives
have been busy digitizing their records. A few years back,
the library that holds the records of the Wood Detective
Agency digitize them. They lived at James Wood's notebook and
(39:53):
his leather bound photo album out of boxes and plays
them gently in scanners, and then they uploaded them to
the Internet. If today you do a Google search for
Lucyna Broadwell, a photograph of her dead, bo pale and
animal might float to the surface of the ocean of
the Internet. That's how most of us find evidence these days,
(40:17):
not by way of mysteries and ordeals, facts and clues,
juries and rules, but searches and data. Why does it
seem lately as if it's hard to know anything at
all because of the nature of this search Lucino Broadwell,
like every other search result, she will have been ripped
(40:40):
from her context and stripped bare of her history. She
will be faceless and factless. True crime. Here in the
Last Archive, we've got all kinds of records, shelved, stacked, filed,
(41:03):
sprawling all over the floor, photographs, ledgers, facebook posts, fingerprints.
This season we'll be pawing through all this stuff to
find out what happened to knowledge and truth and maybe
even what to do about it. Stick around the doors
always unlocked. The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane,
(41:33):
mckibbon and Bennette of Haafrey. Our editor is Julia Barton,
and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrell is
our Engineer, fact checking by Emy Gaines, original music by
Matthias Bosse and John Evans of Selwagen Symfinette. Many of
our sound effects are from har Janette Junior and the
star Ganette Foundation. Our full approoved players are Barlow, Adamson,
Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becka A. Lewis,
(41:56):
and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The last archive is brought to
you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in
the American Repertory Theater, to Emily Shulman at Harvard Law School,
to Vicki Merrick Atlantic Public Media, and to Alex Allenson
and the Bridge Sound in stage and at Pushkin. To
Heather Fane, Maya Caney, Carl Migliori, Emily Roostick, Maggie Taylor,
(42:18):
and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham,
Henrietta Riley, Oliver Ruskin Kutz and Emily Spector. I'm Jill
Lapoor
Pushkin. There's a place in our world where the known
things go, A corridor of the mind. Along the walls,
shelves stucked with proof, and all around a clutter of clues.
(00:36):
Here's a photograph of a corpse. Paste it onto the
page of a moldering leather bound album. Here a teetering
stack of newspapers tied with twine. Oh, and this, this
is very good. A detective's notebook smells like tobacco. And
(00:58):
look over here on this oak stand a medieval manuscript
writing so tiny it looks like an army of ants.
And down hidden, Oh, as he roll under the shelf
a glass bottle blue as indigo. This place stores the
(01:19):
facts that matter, and matters of fact. It's all that
stands between reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. It
lies in a time between now and then. Welcome to
the Last Archive, A place I like to go to
figure out how we know what we know, how we
used to know things, and why it seems sometimes lately
(01:41):
as if we don't know anything at all. I'm the
historian Jilla Bore stepped through the door to an unfinished grave.
The body was found face down early in the morning
of May fourth, nineteen nineteen, A rainy morning, a Sunday
(02:06):
in springtime, a century ago, in a little park in
the center of Barry Vermont, a quarry town known as
the Granite City, Young Harold Jackson was out for a
walk before breakfast when he came across the body and
rushed off to find a policeman. Boficer. There's a naked
(02:29):
dead woman in a vaked lot near the Bustle Hotel.
Dead woman, you say. The body lay pale, an animal
against the dark, wet grass, a kill, like something hunted,
a fox in a trap, prey like something caught, a
fish on a hook, tied up like something about to
(02:53):
be roasted, a bird on a spit. Her hands were
tied behind her back. Her mouth was gagged, her neck
was garreted. She was naked, stripped of everything but her
gray blue silk stockings, her laced leather shoes, her yellow
kid gloves. Her clothes lay rumpled in a pile. Her
(03:15):
eyeglasses were caught in her hair. The policeman hurried toward
the body. A crowd began to gather. People on their
way to church wearing their Sunday hats and bonnets, stopped
and stared, as if they were a spur of the moment, mourners.
(03:38):
How could do such a Why do all murder mysteries
start this way? Fiction, non fiction, true crime, pulp fiction, magazines, movies, podcasts,
It doesn't matter where you come across them. A dead woman,
(03:59):
a beautiful woman, a young woman killed viciously, found naked, exposed,
dead and doubly silent, not just killed, but gagged, And
we stare and stare and stare. This murder really happened.
The recordings from the scene we reenacted ourselves, but everything
(04:21):
here really happened. Who was she? Who killed her? Good questions?
I want to answer those questions. But I've also got
bigger questions about the history of knowledge and evidence, questions
important to ask in our muddle headed, fake news, post
truth world. On this season of The Last Archive, I'm
(04:41):
going to try to solve a crazy big who done it?
Who killed truth? I love nothing more than an investigation,
but you have to have a plan. The place to
start looking for answers to really big questions is with
something small. If you want to understand biology, you start
with a cell, or not even a cell, A chromosome
(05:01):
or not even a chromosome, a nucleotide history works the
same way to answer question and about the history of evidence.
You don't start with philosophy. You start with a single
mystery on a particular day, and not even that, but
with one tiny clue, gray blue silk stocking, say, or
(05:23):
a white linen handkerchief, just the kind of things you
can find in the last archive. The dead body that
a crowd had gathered around in Barry, Vermont on a
(05:43):
Sunday morning in nineteen nineteen. Everyone wanted to turn it,
turn her into a set of facts, a body of evidence.
They came by ones and twos. The chief of police,
the deputy chief, the attorney general, two doctors, a reporter,
and a photographer. The photograph was how I came across
(06:07):
this case. I found it in an archive. I held
it in my hands. It made my head hurt, It
broke my heart. It had been pasted into a leather
bound album, pasted almost lovingly, an ancient photo album of
murdered bodies, nearly all of them were women. But this
photograph was somehow the worst, the saddest, the cruelest. I
(06:33):
saw that photograph and I needed to know more, a
lot more, silenced women bother me. They really bother me.
I needed to know who she was and what happened
to her. I wanted to hear her speak. There are
methods when you conduct a historical investigation steps. Here's what
(06:56):
I like to do. I like to start with the
easy stuff. Find out first what everyone knew about whatever
it is you're interested in. Then think about all the
stuff that was so obvious to people that they didn't
even notice it at the time. They took it for
granted and didn't quite see it anymore. Then find out
the stuff that only a few people knew. And then, finally,
(07:18):
and this is the best part, and it only happens
if you're doing your work right, find out the stuff
that no one knew. Step one, How do you find
out what everyone knew? And Berry, Vermont in nineteen nineteen
the newspaper. So I went to the library and took
up old issues of this town's main paper, the Buried
(07:39):
Daily Times. One thing everyone knew. It had been a
lot of death and barry in the last year the
pandemic influenza Spanish flu hit. It hit Berry very hard,
partly because the man who worked in the quarry for
years had very weak lungs. Schools had closed for months,
and about the only public events being held were funerals.
(08:02):
The misery had only just begun to end. The quarantine
had only been lifted a few months before this body
was found murdered more senseless death. Anyway, I dug up
the Barry paper. When I read a newspaper like that,
I can pretty much hear the reporter talking to me
in my head, and just the way reporters talk then,
(08:23):
or at least the way I imagine it. I listen
for what's weird, and here it's what's weird. Starting with
this very first story, the reporter for the Very Daily
Times crammed in the details, detail after detail after detail,
Very Daily Times, Monday, May fifth, nineteen nineteen, woman was
(08:44):
strangled and naked. Body left and garden off Main Street.
Between the fence and the body was a small patch
of tall grass which did not appear to be trampled,
but the dirt between the body and the hat, on
a northerly line seemed to have been disturbed slightly, as
if it might have been done by dragging some object.
While the grass still further northerly and under a loose
(09:06):
wire fence, was somewhat flattened it by the trampling of feet,
or by the dragging of an object over or through
the fence. He was writing a style of true crime
that's familiar now, so familiar that it sounds old fashioned.
But back then it was new. It really only begun
a few decades earlier. In the eighteen eighties. The public
(09:29):
wanted details, and newspapers gave them every last clue, as
if readers too might solve the murder. Coming within the
perspective of the camera were the woman's clothing, partly under
the body, perhaps lying some eight feet away and perhaps
not discernible in the picture. A pocketbook lying about eighteen
feet on the opposite side of the body from the hat,
(09:51):
and her gold watch, the ladder of which had in
the meantime been picked up. The watch was still running.
The watch was still running, and it was inscribed with
three initials l PC. This, by the end of the
day led the police to her name, Lucina Courser Broadwell.
(10:12):
Her maiden name was Lucina Phillips Courser LPC twenty nine,
one hundred and ten pounds, five ft three. Her husband,
Harry Broadwell, was a carpenter. They had three children, Doris eight,
Hildred seven, and Wendell, who was only five. Finally, hours
(10:36):
after the body was found, a horse hitched to a
wagon carried her to an undertaker's. That afternoon, two doctors
drove to the undertakers to conduct an autopsy. The word
autopsy auto plus opsy means something you see with your
own eyes, the evidence of your senses. This, too, was
(10:59):
mostly new pathologists gathering evidence and conducting that autopsy in Fermont.
They were trying to get the dead body to speak.
In a century on, that's what I'm doing. Historians are
coroners too. A lot of things, a lot more things
than murders. Used to be mysteries. A mystery for centuries
(11:24):
meant what God knows and we do not but must believe,
the mystery of the origins of life, the mystery of
what happens to you after you die. After a while,
the mystery began yielding to the fact as the elemental
unit of knowledge, as if knowledge is made up of facts,
the way a body is made up of atoms, or
electricity is made up of electrons. I took a while.
(11:48):
This process was slow, but people eventually got fact mad.
They believed they had discovered a universe of truth. You
can see that even in how people understood the causes
of death centuries ago. Starting the late fifteen hundreds, during
the Age of Mystery, authorities began writing up a special
document for every death, something called a bill of mortality.
(12:12):
On a bill of mortality, you could be said to
have died of lots of different things. What all of
them to me have a kind of poetry of breach,
of blasted, of cramp, of each, of a lethargy of fight.
I love that list. People do die of these things,
(12:32):
of fright, grief, and misery. The way we think now
about death comes not from the ancient bills of mortality,
from the Age of Mystery, but from the modern death certificate,
from the age of facts. The pathologist who examined Lucine A.
Broadwell's body in nineteen nineteen, he was looking for a
cause of death, a fact. He found bruises on her
(12:54):
hips and thighs, and he also found seamen. And then
the medical examiner used all this evidence to fill out
a certificate of death. He had a list to choose from,
taken from the International List of Causes of Death. You
could die of all sort to things on that list,
but unfortunately there's no poetry to it. Number one eighty
(13:14):
two homicide by firearms. One three homicide by cutting or
piercing instruments. In the age of mystery, if I'd been
writing Lucina Broadwell's bill of mortality, I'd have written down
two things she died of, oh being savaged and of terror.
But instead the medical examiner wrote something else on her
death certificate. Number one hundred eighty four homicide by strangulation.
(13:39):
Her throat had been crushed. But who killed Lucina Broadwell.
Most people in Barry figured her husband, Harry, had done it.
He'd been arrested before for beating her he wants cut
her with a razor. But Harry had an alibi. He'd
(14:00):
been out drinking, and he had some witnesses to at
least for part of the night. He'd been at a dance,
and then he knocked on a friend's door late at
night and gotten him to make him an egg sandwich.
The chief suspect had an alibi, and the police had
no other suspects. They were stumped, so they made a decision.
What they needed was a detective, a private detective. This,
(14:23):
after all was the golden age of detective fiction, the
age of Hercule Pirot and Charley Chan and Lord Peter
Whimsy and Barry. Though they didn't have any private detectives,
but they knew one, so they put in a call
to Boston to the offices of James R. Wood Wood
(14:45):
Detective Agency James R. Wood Junior speaking. This agency would
correspondence in all parts of the world. Is prepared to
undertake all legitimate detective business for co operations, companies or individuals.
Male and female operatives furnished. James R. Wood was head
of the first detective agency in New England. It had
(15:05):
been founded by his father in eighteen seventy, nine years
before the fictional Sherlock Holmes solved his first mystery. Wood
wore a thin mustache, owl's eye, spectacles and an impeccably
knotted tie. He smoked a pipe. I mean, of course,
he smoked a pipe. His specialty was rural murder. Like
(15:28):
the Broadwell case. It was a complete mystery which had
baffled the authorities. He took the sleeper train up from Boston,
smoking his pipe, pondering the evidence. Wood was thirty nine
at the time and he was also his own Watson.
He wrote chronicles of his cases James R. Wood's detective notebook.
(15:49):
That's the gold mine. Most of the stuff you're going
to hear from him, the stuff comes straight out of
the pages of his notebook. The case I'm about to
relate to you has been considered throughout New England as
one of the strongest circumstantial cases ever tried. James R.
Wood was not a modest man, but his account of
the case is pretty thorough. He got to town just
(16:15):
before Lucie A. Broadwell was to be buried days after
the murder. He went first to the Broadwell house and
inspected the body. He interviewed Harry Broadwell, and then he
wrote four words in his notebook satisfied the husband innocent? Okay,
but why Harry would seem to have been the most
likely suspect and even though he had an alibi, it
(16:36):
was hardly air tight, especially since nobody knew exactly when
in the night his wife had been murdered. That was
one of the first things that didn't quite make sense
to me when I started reading about this case, that is,
reading James Wood's account. After first seeing the photograph of
Lucien A. Broadwell's dead body, but would like the Barry.
Police just wasn't interested in Harry Broadwell, even though they
(16:59):
knew that he had beaten his wife. A century ago,
men could hit their wives and even rape them without
much of any consequence, so would dismiss the idea of
Harry as a suspect. Instead, he started looking for a
very particular kind of fact. He started looking for a clue.
(17:21):
A clue used to mean a ball of yarn or thread.
The word kept that meaning in English for hundreds of years,
and then people started using the word clue to describe
the yarn you'd use if you were stuck in a maze.
If you enter a maze, a really good idea is
to unravel a ball of yarn to mark your way,
since you can find your way back out. So clue
(17:42):
started to mean a thing you would use to find
your way out of a maze. And here's another reason
we use the word clue this way. A lot of
murder victims are women, and their clothes are often torn,
so there were lots of clues at the scenes of crimes,
actual not figurative threads trailing from torn items of women's clothing.
(18:03):
Wood wrote about the stuff in his notes on Lucine
a Broadwell. Tied around her neck was her torn shirtwaist
with the knots in the shirtwaist secured by a man's
handkerchief with a sail as knot. After a while, clues
started to mean anything you could find at the scene
of a crime and follow to solve a mystery. But
(18:24):
still the best clues tended to be bits of clothes.
During the day, we had ascertained that the handkerchief belonged
to Eddie Barrow. We identified it by the landry mark.
A man's handkerchief with a laundry mark on it. That
is a pretty good clue. I'd led to a man
named Eddie Barrow, a drifter. Wood's operatives tracked him down.
(18:47):
Barrow had lent his handkerchief to someone else, he said,
a fellow by the name of George Long, a lanky,
wiry Canadian. But what did George Long have to do
with Lucina Broadwell. Wood thought he knew mister Broadwell was
suspicious that his wife was spotty. Sporty meant that you
slept around. They had been considerable family trouble and had
(19:09):
told Broadwell that they had seen his wife coming out
of the Pocket house at the lower end of Main
Street on more than one occasion. Aha. Another big clue
for James Wood. Missus Parker's house was sort of the
town brothel. She'd hosts men who came to town to
work in the quarries. She'd matched them up with sporty
women from Barry, including Lucina Broadwell and a friend of
(19:30):
hers named Grace Grimes. Wood followed his trail of clues
all the way to Grace Grimes's house, where she told
him that Lucina had written her a letter on the
very day she died. In the first part of the letter,
Missus Broadwell explained about having been down to Missus Parker's
house several times, of having met a lodger there by
the name of George, that George and she had been
(19:52):
quite friendly, that George talked about buying an automobile, that
George had asked her to go to California with him,
That she, Missus Broadwell, had decided that George was full
of hot air, that he was no good, and that
she was not going to see him again. That the
second part of the written on Saturday, red I've received
a call from Missus Parker, and she wants me to
(20:14):
come down tonight and meet George again. Most everything our
actors say in this podcast is taken from historical documents.
We know they said this stuff, But this little bit
of Lucia Broadwell, this is not that. This is what
James Wood wrote down from what Grace Grimes told him
(20:34):
that she remembered from a letter Lucia Broadwell had written
to her that Grimes had destroyed. I'm sick and tired
of the whole bunch. However, I'll go down tonight and
I'll tell Missus Parker what I think of her, and
I'll ditch George as I know he is full of
hot air and has no money, and as a bluff
would believed he had found his man. George Long was
(20:55):
a drifter in love, and Lucina Broadwell had lost patience
with him. He'd been fun for a while, but she
planned to break up with him because he was full
of hot air and he was a bluff. A liar.
Put this new insight into the miss of Broadwell's murder.
Wood headed back to Vermont. It all started with the
laundry mark on that white handkerchief. Wood loved this clue.
(21:18):
He loved it so much that he titled his account
of the case The Clue of the White Handkerchief. Wood
knew he was now near the end of the maze.
On Sunday morning, May eleventh, he invited George Long to
meet him at the hotel Barry, a big, elegant Victorian,
and then he and the deputy sheriff kept Long at
(21:39):
that hotel, questioning him for four days. They submitted him
to an ordeal, a very ancient sort of ordeal. In
the age of mystery, no one could know could truly
know the guilt of another person. Only God could know.
The point of a trial was to find a way
(21:59):
for God to reveal someone's guilt. These tests were called
trials by ordeal. One kind was the ordeal of the corpse,
where you'd be found guilty if the murdered corpse bled
when you touched it. The Pope banned trial by ordeal
in the year twelve fifteen, But that year twelve fifteen
(22:20):
something else happened. In Magna Carta, the King of England
established the right to a trial by jury. So just
hold on it and think about that for a minute.
The end of trial by ordeal and the beginning of
trial by jury took judgment out of the hands of
God and placed it into the hands of men. But
(22:45):
still the age of mystery lingered. I've come across American
cases from as late as eighteen ninety four where the
suspects were subjected to the ordeal of the corpse, told
to approach or murdered body to see if it would
bleed again. And something very much like that happened in
that hotel room in Berry, Vermont in nineteen nineteen, when
(23:06):
Detective James R. Wood questioned his suspect, George Long, in
that hotel room. Wood tried for hours at a time
to get Long to confess. Long admitted to knowing Lucina
Broadwell and even having dinner with her on the night
of her death in missus Parker's house. He admitted two
that he'd had sex with her that night, but he
(23:27):
insisted he hadn't killed her, and then, desperate for evidence,
would had submitted Long to a series of what I
think you can fairly call ordeals, those old tests of
truth from the age of mystery. One day, Wood handed
Long two pieces of rope, and he asked them to
tie them together. Long you've been lying to me. I
(23:49):
want you to tell me the truth about it. Tie
a square knot. A square knot is about the only
knot I know how to tie. A square knot happened
to be the type of knot the murderer had used
to tie up Lucina Broadwell. Could it be a clue? Later,
Wood took out the photographs of Lucina Broadwell's dead body
and made Long look at them, subjecting him to a
(24:12):
kind of ordeal of the photograph. While Long looked at
the photographs, Wood opened a box containing the clothes that
had been found next to the body, and then carefully,
one by one, he draped them over the railing at
the foot of the brass bed in the hotel room.
After Long finished looking at the photographs, he got out
of his chair and stepped over to the bedrail to
(24:33):
look at the clothes, and made as if we were
about to pick them up. Suddenly, there in that hotel
turned interrogation room, Wood interrupted him. Look out, George, you
get your hands all covered with blood. There isn't a
goddamn bit of blood on these clothes. Wood figured he'd
nailed him. Lucian A. Broadwell had been strangled. She hadn't bled.
(24:53):
But if George Long hadn't been there, if he wasn't
the murderer, how did he know there wouldn't be blood
on those clothes? Like I said, Wood question Long for days,
the ordeal of the rope, the ordeal of the photograph,
the ordeal of the clothes, And then at the end
of those four days, the police charged George Long with
(25:14):
first degree murder. This case was going to a trial
by jury. It began on a Friday in autumn, the
leaves falling to the ground, rustling in the wind, at
the Washington County Courthouse in Montpelier, Vermont. The courthouse was
packed with spectators, and there were seven reporters there too,
(25:37):
including four from big city papers in Boston. The story
was front page news all over New England. Oiay oiay.
George Long sat next to his lawyer, who planned a
question Harry Broadwell's alibi and to point out that it
was Broadwell, not Long, who had a motive to kill
Lucina Broadwell. The prosecution had a difficult case to make,
(26:01):
after all, there were no witnesses to the crime, but
the prosecution hoped to prove that Long had raped Lucina
Broadwell and then strangled her. Quite why, it was harder
to say. And when Long took the stand, he denied everything,
including everything he'd told James Wood in that hotel room.
You knew missus Broadwell, didn't you? No? I didn't you
(26:25):
say you never spoke with missus Broadwell, No, sir. It
went on like this. Then ten days into the trial,
the prosecution did something really interesting. Now called to the
stand James Wood Junior. Long had just testified under oath
that he'd never met Lucina Broadwell. Perfect. The prosecution must
(26:50):
have thought, we've caught him lying, because when Wood had
questioned him, Long had admitted not only that he knew Broadwell,
but they did had dinner with her, even that he'd
had sex with her on the night of the murder.
The prosecution could have asked Wood to tell the jury
what Long had said, but it wanted something better, and
wanted the court to admit as evidence the entire transcript
(27:10):
of Wood's interrogation. To this scheme, Long's lawyer objected. He
said that Wood and the deputy sheriff had essentially kept
Long as their prisoner for four days and four long
nights in the hotel. Berry not arresting him, just grilling him,
which of course was against the law. Well, all that time,
from Sunday until the next Thursday, mister Long was kept
(27:33):
in close confinement up there in that hotel by you
or some other officers. Wasn't me, No, sir, what sir? No, sir,
You were pumping him. You were some of your associates
all the time, No, sir, weren't you? No, sir? Didn't
you wake him up in the middle of the night,
out of a sound sleep and pump him about this murder?
I did not? Do you know who did? No? Sir.
(27:55):
Long's lawyers cross examination relied on a bigger point about evidence.
There are rules. They're old, change all the time, but
there are rules, and the prosecution had broken a bunch
of them, mainly because of the circumstances under which Wood
had questioned Long. Another judge might have disallowed as evidence
the transcript of James Wood's interrogation of George Long, but
(28:18):
this judge allowed it, and so the entire transcript of
Wood's interrogation was read to the jury so that the
jury could imagine that they too were sitting in that
room in the hotel. Berry watching Wood give Long the
third degree. Long's lawyer, in his closing argument, pleaded with
the jury to ignore all of it. I say and
(28:39):
submit you, gentlemen, that under the evidence there must be
a doubt. But the prosecution said the case was open
and shut. And the prosecutor and his closing argument was
very good. He talked about the rope of evidence that
tied this case together. And as he walked around the courtroom,
he held in his hands a rope which he tied
(29:01):
and untied, tied and untied, as if he had George
Long all roped up. The jury deliberated for less than
a day, party fun on a charge of second degree murder.
We find the defendant guilty as charged. All right. The
(29:27):
judge sentenced Long to life in prison, and Barry Vermont declared,
mystery solved facts one the day. But to me, either
something was missing or else something had gone terribly wrong.
Long might have done it, sure, but on what evidence,
said the jury actually convicted him. I couldn't see it.
(29:48):
Somewhere along the line, I must have missed something, some
stray fact, some clue. Here's what you do when your
investigation reaches a dead end. You do it all over again.
So I went back and I looked at that super
creepy photograph again, the one where Luciena Dwell looks like
(30:09):
a hunted animal, tied and about to be roasted on
a spit. And then I looked at the newspaper stories again,
and I read Wood's notes again. And then I noticed
something I hadn't noticed before. I noticed that when Wood
first took the stand, the prosecution read a statement into
the record, but in the newspaper the contents of that
(30:31):
statement just got a passing mention. You'd think it would
have been summarized in full by that very Daily Times reporter,
poured over by. The reporter had been so eager to
report every last fact gathered at the scene of the crime,
But nope, he had only this to say. Much of
the statement has to do with facts that cannot appear
in print. Why what facts were unprintable? Then I figured
(30:58):
whatever the newspaper didn't print I might still survive in
the original trial transcripts. Those would be stored far away,
deep in Vermont's state archives. There should be more cows.
Landscape would be well, it's not a visual media. We
could just say there it cows. It's mostly cows here.
(31:20):
That's my son. Since this is a show about truth,
I should just stay for the record. There were no
cows in sight, so just ignore my son and ignore
me and ignore to my producer Ben on the right,
that's some arrowloom wild cows. Okay, cows, Look at brand.
(31:52):
I don't get that one. The trial records were waiting
for us in a low slung building on the side
of Root two in Montpelier. I've got some of the
boxes pulled. Few of them have changed their box numbers
because we would reprocessed them, so I should be all
set free. You too. That's reference artivist Marisa Dobrick, and
(32:12):
she'd pulled out a big box full of George Long's
trial record, bound in giant books. The record runs to
more than twelve hundred pages, so we can kind of
get a whole piece of the puzzle this way, I
see it is when you're doing a court case, you're
looking at pieces of a puzzle. I drive past or
murderacing every day? Do you really think of her? Just
(32:32):
about every day? The trial records had actually been misfiled,
and it had been lost for a very long time
until this amazing archivist Gregory Sandford, the man who'd hired Marissa,
found them after I'd emailed him with a few questions.
There's almost nothing as thrilling as finding something you've been
looking for for a really long time. So you open
(32:54):
that one box and all of a sudden there are
two or three volumes and saying, wow, this is it.
Anybody should research at any point, because there's that moment
of discovery that it's like, wow, you know this is cool,
and it is cool, it's super cool. But it takes
a long time to read through trial transcripts, and I
noticed there was a lot in them that hadn't made
(33:16):
it into the very daily times. Okay, first thing to report.
There was so much hanky panky going on in this
little granite city, especially at Missus Parker's house, that brothel
where George Long had met Lucina Broadwell. A great many
of the hundred witnesses who marched to the stand during
the trial were asked about the goings on at Missus
(33:36):
Parker's house. That stuff was scandalous, but it wasn't entirely unprintable.
Hundreds of pages into the trial transcript I finally found
the part of the testimony that the very Daily Times
could not print something that George Long had told James
Wood about the Knight of Lucina Broadwell's death. Go ahead, yes,
(33:57):
go ahead. And we was in the room then a
while and came out. Were you intimate with her there? Yeah?
But before become an intimate did she get any money
from you? No, sir? Did you remove a close her skirt,
just skirt, just her skirt and a hat, yeah, and
her hat and gloves and gloves. Now on that occasion
when you were intimate with her, is that the occasion
(34:19):
you told me about once you used some sort of preventative.
She used a blue tablet. I have a bottle in
my room over there. Now I can't tell the name
of the tablet, but there's a blue wash that comes
in an oblong bottle or a three cornered bottle. Those
blue tablets or the blue liquid in that oblong bottle
that must have been a concoction made from a plant
(34:39):
called blue koosh, a perennial with blueberries. Who's the sort
of thing you'd take Before birth control was legal, it
was advertised as aiding menstruation. This part of the interrogation
transcript was unprintable because legally, it was obscene. That is,
it violated the terms of the eighteen seventy three Comstock Act,
(35:01):
a federal law that prohibited the printing of any information
relating to, among other things, the prevention of conception or
for causing unlawful abortion. The newspapers could say that lucian
A Broadwell's stomach had veal and bread in it when
they opened her up. They could talk about the bruises
on her thighs, but they couldn't mention her alleged use
of birth control that was illegal. Is that something you gava? Yes,
(35:26):
I had them sitting there in the dresser, and I
had them in my pocket that night. None of the
evidence used to convict George Long had ever been very good,
but in the end it hadn't really mattered. George Long
had provided a married woman and mother of three with
birth control in order to have sex with her without
fear of pregnancy and discovery by her husband, and then
(35:49):
he lied about it. These on principal facts were reason
enough for the jurors, a jury of twelve men, to convict.
That evidence cinched the case. Not the clue of the
white handkerchief, but the clue of the blue bottle up
(36:13):
in on Pelio. In the state archives. Some people think
Lucia broadwell spirit has never found dressed. Berry's got a
feel into it. It's weighted with history, and I mean
I think that sometimes you can feel that. That's Marisa
Dobrick again, reference archivist for the State of Vermont. All
I can say honestly is I feel like she haunts it.
(36:33):
I'm not sure I believe in ghosts myself, but I
find her stories so haunting that every day I drive
past it. I don't think any good answers were given.
I think she's still there. I do. I don't think
they found him that place. I mean, you can go there.
You can go to the parking lot. Lucina Broadwell has
been dead and buried for a hundred years. I never
(36:56):
really got her to speak, but I did want to guess,
to pay my respects, I decided to go find that
unfinished grave, the place where she'd been first found naked,
bound and gag. So my producer Ben and my son
Simon and I piled into my subaru and headed twenty
minutes south on Vermont sixty two to barry to the
(37:17):
scene of the crime. Like Maurica said, there's a parking
lot there. Now. We brought with us a stack of photographs,
that terrible photograph of Luciena Broadwell's corpse and then all
the other forensic photographs shots of the scene. It looks
really different there now, So it took a lot of
looking to find the exact spot. There's like the garden,
(37:39):
then there's a road. Here's this street right here, and
then there's a garden a little way as a road,
and then this curb and then the fence again. So
that parking lot really is the former garden man. Yeah,
we're pretty sure that we found the spot, and so
we just stood there a moment of silence for her.
(38:06):
Standing there, During that long moment of silence, my mind wandered.
Jurors are known as finders of facts, but for a
very long time women couldn't serve on juries. Only men
then could decide what was true and what wasn't true.
Who killed truth? Standing there on the spot where James R.
(38:28):
Wood had once stood, I thought about his sister, maud
Wood Park. She hadn't joined the family business, the Wood
Detective Agency instead. In nineteen nineteen, the year Lucia Broadwell
was murdered, Maudwood Park, who was arguably the most influential
woman in American politics, was leading the fight for women's
(38:49):
suffrage as a congressional lobbyist in Washington, and she hadn't
stopped after women finally got the right to vote with
the Nineteenth Amendment. After its ratification in nineteen twenty, women
like Maudwood Park went on to fight for the right
of women to serve on juries. That fight's date by
state took a really long time. In Vermont, women didn't
(39:11):
get to serve on juries to decide on matters of
fact until nineteen forty three. That same year, Moudwoodpark started
collecting documents chronicling women's history. Like me, she couldn't stand
the idea of silenced women, so she created her own archive,
an archive of women's history, the Sleasanter Library on the
(39:33):
History of Women in America. Lately, libraries like that archives
have been busy digitizing their records. A few years back,
the library that holds the records of the Wood Detective
Agency digitize them. They lived at James Wood's notebook and
(39:53):
his leather bound photo album out of boxes and plays
them gently in scanners, and then they uploaded them to
the Internet. If today you do a Google search for
Lucyna Broadwell, a photograph of her dead, bo pale and
animal might float to the surface of the ocean of
the Internet. That's how most of us find evidence these days,
(40:17):
not by way of mysteries and ordeals, facts and clues,
juries and rules, but searches and data. Why does it
seem lately as if it's hard to know anything at
all because of the nature of this search Lucino Broadwell,
like every other search result, she will have been ripped
(40:40):
from her context and stripped bare of her history. She
will be faceless and factless. True crime. Here in the
Last Archive, we've got all kinds of records, shelved, stacked, filed,
(41:03):
sprawling all over the floor, photographs, ledgers, facebook posts, fingerprints.
This season we'll be pawing through all this stuff to
find out what happened to knowledge and truth and maybe
even what to do about it. Stick around the doors
always unlocked. The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane,
(41:33):
mckibbon and Bennette of Haafrey. Our editor is Julia Barton,
and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrell is
our Engineer, fact checking by Emy Gaines, original music by
Matthias Bosse and John Evans of Selwagen Symfinette. Many of
our sound effects are from har Janette Junior and the
star Ganette Foundation. Our full approoved players are Barlow, Adamson,
Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becka A. Lewis,
(41:56):
and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The last archive is brought to
you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in
the American Repertory Theater, to Emily Shulman at Harvard Law School,
to Vicki Merrick Atlantic Public Media, and to Alex Allenson
and the Bridge Sound in stage and at Pushkin. To
Heather Fane, Maya Caney, Carl Migliori, Emily Roostick, Maggie Taylor,
(42:18):
and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham,
Henrietta Riley, Oliver Ruskin Kutz and Emily Spector. I'm Jill
Lapoor
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