April 27, 2023 • 59 mins
This week, Karen and Georgia cover serial killer Pedro Rodrigues Filho, aka the "Brazilian Dexter," and the death of Russia's literary hero, Alexander Pushkin.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Love, Hell, Hello, and welcome. So my favorite murder. That's
Georgia Hardstar. Okay, that's Karen Kilcaras. Hello, Hi, And we're
(00:27):
here to tell you some very very bad things. And
we have exciting news about bad things.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
We have stories of horror, but it's couched in love, yep.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
And every time I have to tell a uber driver
or doctor about what my podcast is, it's awkward.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
There's a lot of people out there who don't know
what podcasts are, don't follow true crime, and then hear
the name and then they're like.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Yeah, slowly slide away from you, yeah, name and that,
or you say it's true crime and comedy, and the
same thing I do when someone says where are you from?
And I have to say Orange County about a bunch
of caveats because I don't like the fact that I'm
from Orange County. I have to explain that we're not
making fun of this, is that the comedy isn't about
(01:16):
the murder, it's about you know. I just feel like
I have to explain myself.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
You know, that's a piece of life that we all carry,
a burden we carry where we think some fucking rando
deserves our time and our justification. Yeah, definitely, what's going on?
Did you watch Succession last night?
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I absolutely I'm caught up on Succession and the fabulousness
about everything about it.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
I want to go to Norway now so badly. Every
thing I saw, every person that was on screen, every mountain,
every what are those things called the vernicular or whatever?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
It went up? The little traveling Snow, what are this called?
There's nicular at the Okay, that's all I know. Okay,
it's like a sky away thing but for snow times.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Right, and for obviously high powered deals, right and negotiating apparently, Oh.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
My god, that's so good. Fucking Berry is so good.
Like we're in a moment. I'm on the last season
of Ozark, which is like heavy, Oh yeah and so good.
That's a great show. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
I have a couple show recommendations for the Good ViBe's
only commendation list.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Right, that wasn't the name of it, well yeah, it's
a good name though. It was for our yah positive
TV shows to watch when you need a positivity.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
List, I'm going to give I want to give a
name to this segment that then we could go down
to Home Goods and find a sign and then hang
it on the wall because that's how original that idea
of good vibes only is. Yeah, that it's that idea
is on sale at home Goods right now for seven
ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
But this really worked.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I was, God, what was going on? I really can't remember.
I just know that my friend was with me. Maybe
we were talking about something that was a bummer, I
can't remember. And then I remember and I was like,
wait a second, have you seen Kunk on Earth?
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Oh? And he was like, I haven't seen it.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
And we turned it on and then just laughed for
like thirty minutes straight.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
She's so hilarious Filhamina Kunk. I know we've talked. Have
we talked about it before? I don't think so. I
don't think so, or maybe we mentioned it neither of
us had watched it yet, but it is.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
It is so jam packed with the funniest jokes. She
is so good, and it is the kind of like
it's just being dumb for dumbness sake, and it's just
pure comedy that's dressed up like a very high budget
British nature documentary or history documentary.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
It's so funny.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
And she did a thing once she was talking about
Egypt and then she she was she it led up
to she said, mummy of Scooby Doo fame, and that's
what I was like, this is my favorite thing I've
ever seen.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
It's so good A scholar if Jesus was the first
person to get canceled.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
She also said it was ironic that Jesus Christ was
a carpenter because he was named after the one thing
you yell when you hate your thumb with a hammer.
It's just like, who are I want to meet every
writer from that show.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
She was in the show after Life, Ricky's the show,
and she's so funny in that too. I mean, god,
what is that on Hulu? Something? Uh? Netflix? Netflex cool?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, it almost is like the irritating girl from Ricky
Gervas's newspaper got a spin off show, and it seems
like it's really her, Like that woman who I know
is an actress as a comedic actress and so good
at it, but she plays it so real. It's just
so perfectly ry.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
It's so dry and so realistic of what idiots are
actually like.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
And she's just got kind of the big eyes and
she just is like a little argumentative in the way
of like she's she is already thinking about it in
this one way, so about Yeah, she just wants confirmation.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
She's argumentative in the way that only people who are
always wrong are. Yes, you know you guys have those
parents too, right, right, you've seen it.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
It's just so enjoyable. It just made us. It put
us in the best mood we were watching it. So
that's a great one for that. Okay, thank you, I
needed it. Well, should we get into it?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Let's get into it. Okay. So here are some highlights
from our podcast network, Exactly Right Media. The Banana Boys
Kurt Roneller and Scotti Landis have a live episode of
Bananas for You from Portland, so check that out.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
All the bananimals from Portland showed up. Also over on
do You Need a Ride? This week, it's just christ
and Me talking about tripping balls in the desert and
the faking ski injuries, all the topics you love from
the two people who know the best.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah. And then there's also a new must see episode
of MFM animated by Nick Terry, available on the Exactly
Right YouTube channel. It features the famous hot dog statue
from Minnesota three twenty three. On March twentieth, So go
watch it and catch up if you miss the last
one featuring Steven's mom visiting Chippendale's. We've got it All Nick.
(06:23):
Terry doesn't quit. He just like brings the funny, he
drops hits.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
He's the Missy Elliott of MFM Animated Production.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
All hits all the time. Yeah, exactly right, YouTube channel.
Check that out. Ollen.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
This is very exciting, especially to me. We've restoked my
favorite merch item, which is the here's the thing, Fuck
Everyone raft mug, which was designed by friend of the
family Katzlan Kat is the artist who made our very
first T shirts, the ones that looked like big book covers,
and she illustrated the final moments of Terry Joe Dupero's
(07:00):
survival story. That's from episode twenty eight of My Favorite Murder.
The title of that episode is I twenty eight his
liver with some fava beans and a nice county Back
when we were trying to do number puns.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Oh, that was so hard. I'm so glad we got
out of that. And it's what's so crazy about that
story that you did is that it was episode twenty
eight and yet I still remember all the details of it.
Because it was so intense, it was.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
So good, and that like I remember reading something more
recently of Terry Joe as an adult being like for
a long time she did not want to talk about
that story and then she re it like was this thing?
She realized it's like her story and she gets to
tell it. And so if you haven't seen, the research
that I have from that episode is entirely from Terry
(07:47):
Joe's own retelling of her story from her episode of
I Survived So incredible, go find that because that's really
you should listen to tell it.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
It's incredible, right, So go to our instagram at my
Favorite Murder and tag us if you have one of
those mugs or any of our merch we'd like to
see out in the wild. Just tag us and go
to my Favorite Murder dot com to get your mug
and stuff. Today or tomorrow. I'm not in a hurry, no,
it's this snow rush. We're heading into the summer season.
(08:19):
I'm first today, right.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
So before I start, I tell you what I'm covering today,
what story I'm covering. I'm going to tell you a
little bit about the television show Dexter.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I don't know did you ever watch Dexter. No, I didn't.
Dexter was.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I believe it was on Showtime. It could be wrong
about that though, but I think it was ran for
eight seasons twenty six to twenty fourteen or so. They
recently rebooted it. It starred Michael Sea Hall, the wonderful
actor Michael Sea Hall. He plays a Miami blood spatter expert.
That's how long ago it was named Dexter Morgan, who
(08:56):
is also secretly a serial killer, right, but because of
his very moralistic upbringing, his father caught that he was
a sociopath or a psychopath when he was young, and
so he abides by a strict code when it comes
to killing. He only murders other serial killers. Okay, so
part of that show and go watch it if you
(09:18):
never have, because it's pretty great. I know how much
you love Miami, So a show taking place there is
probably your favorite. Yeah, top of my list, right, lots
of linen shirts, lots of convertible corvettes. But you'll see
this on the internet if you are the kind of
person who just kind of cold searches true crime stories.
(09:38):
There is a serial killer or is arguably a mass murderer.
They call him the real life dexter.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yes, So today I'm going to tell you together, we're
going to learn about the notorious Brazilian serial killer Pedro
Rodriguez Filo. The main sources used in today's story are
a heavily episode of case File, the great classic true
crime podcast that has been around forever, award winning I
believe so good, so well done, and that episode is
(10:10):
called Killer Pet. The writer who researched that episode is
a writer named Eileen Ormsby, and she wrote a twenty
twenty three medium post called killer Pet as well, so
that was also a source. And then an uncredited twenty
twenty three article on the Brazilian website g one titled
who was Proedrino Matador? And the rest of the sources
(10:33):
are in today's show notes. So all this begins in
October of nineteen fifty four. Pedro Rodriguez Filo is born
in southeastern Brazil, the oldest of eight children. His parents
struggled to keep food on the table. Pedro's earliest experiences
are marked by horrible domestic violence. Pedro's father is described
as a violent alcoholic to the degree where Pedro is
(10:55):
born with a bruised skull and presumably a head injury,
which is the direct result of his father beating his
mother while she was pregnant.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Oh my god, so just horrible.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
That abuse continues throughout Pedro's childhood, and his mother was
very strict, so she was also kind of abusive, but
hers was like, keep it in line, you know, she
has eight kids, whereas the father's was horrifying alcoholic. So
by the time Pedro's thirteen, he begins experiencing his own
violent impulses. After Pedro borrows his cousin's horse without asking,
(11:31):
aka stealing his cousin's horse, his cousin, who's older and
stronger than Pedro, paunches him in the face, and of
course that's humiliating. It's even more embarrassing when his family
finds out and relentlessly tease him about it, and they
tease him for being small and weak and unable to
defend himself. Pedro will later claim that this is the
(11:53):
situation where he first feels the urge to kill, so
he actually spends the next several weeks quietly seething and
plotting his revenge. So the next time he sees his cousin.
They're at the local mill helping their grandfather juice sugarcane.
So if we were watching TV and this scene unfolded,
when we saw the juicing machine, we'd be like, oh no,
(12:16):
because it's essentially two huge rollers set on top of
each other. And then you send him and his cousin
were picking up sugarcane and pushing it through the rollers
and then it gets juiced that way. And as Pedro
is feeding sugarcane, standing there feeding the sugarcane into the
machine alongside his cousin, he gets an idea. He suddenly
(12:39):
pushes his cousin toward the machine, and as his cousin
tries to get his footing, he stumbles with his arms
out in front of him, and one arm gets sucked
into the machine and gets crushed. Pedro just stands there
and watches as his cousin struggles to free himself. Now,
there are some accounts that say that Pedro used this
opportunity to pick up a knife and repeatedly stab his cousin,
(13:02):
But there are other reports that claim that Pedro tries
to force other parts of his cousin's body into the machine.
So either way, it's a blood bath. It's horrifying. The
grandfather quickly intervenes. Pedro's cousin is eventually freed from the machine.
His arm is crushed, and Pedro's thirteen years old.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Holy does this? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
So he spends this next several nights in jail, but
ultimately the charges against him are dropped. And that's not
because anyone thinks he is innocent or should be free
or anything that has to do with justice.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
It's just that he is the oldest.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Boy in his family and his family will starve if
he doesn't work to put food on the table, along
with his parents, so.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
They know that.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
And he's freed on one condition, and the condition is
that he has to go back to the mill and
clean the blood out of the sugar cane press.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Fuck.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Reportedly, this takes him weeks two finish the job. So
Pedro will return to this attack again and again throughout
his life, and he has absolutely no remorse about it.
He claims to never feel any guilt for what he's
done to his cousin. Instead, he brags over and over
about how much he enjoyed hurting him, and he also
(14:18):
seems to enjoy instilling fear by talking like this to
the people around him, especially his cousin, which is another
recurring theme with Pedro. He basically if he feels he's
been mistreated by someone, he becomes obsessed with getting revenge.
So his next violent incident takes place a year later,
when he's fourteen, and that's when he learns that his dad,
(14:39):
who works as a night shift security guard for a
local school, has been accused of stealing supplies. Pedro's father's
insistent that the thief is actually the daytime guard, but
no one believes him and he is fired from his job.
So this is devastating for Pedro's family. It means everyone
else will have to work doubly hard to make up
for the lost income. But Pedro isn't just fearful about
(15:01):
how his family will survive. He is incredibly enraged. He
believes his father's innocent and has taken the fall, so
his fury builds, and a few days later, he goes
to city hall. He asks to speak with the vice
mayor of the town, and that's the person who's responsible
for hiring and firing local school guards, and when the
(15:24):
man comes into the room, Pedro shoots him in the
face with a sod off shotgun. Then he drives to
the school and he tracks down the daytime guard and
murders him as well.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
So after these murders, Pedro skips town. He's fifteen years old.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Oh God.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
So he skips town and he goes to hide out
in the bustling city of Sao Paulo. He's supposed to
blend in, he ends up standing out because he starts
selling drugs.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
He takes part in burglaries.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
He makes a ton of enemies, and pretty soon he's
rubbing elbows big time drug dealers who actually like him
and take a shine to him, and he quickly climbs
the ranks of the city's criminal underworld. He meets his girlfriend,
Maria Aparacita Olympia, and we don't know much about her,
but they move in together when Pedro's around seventeen, and
(16:19):
within months she's pregnant with his child. Some people claim
Pedro begins his career as a vigilante when he's in
Sao Paulo. For example, they say that he if he
finds out shop owners are cheating customers, that he will
like he threatens them basically, like to keep everybody honest,
and so people aren't getting ripped off, but mostly he's
(16:40):
known for being brutal, homicidal, and a ruthless criminal. He
also has so many enemies he gets death threats from
other gang members constantly, and also he's squarely in the
radar of the police, so he becomes a deeply paranoid person.
But he's one of those paranoid people whose fears are
actually very founded, or his fears aren't unfounded. When he's
(17:05):
eighteen years old, he comes home to find Maria pregnant,
Maria dead on the floor, and someone has written on
a nearby wall in blood, we will get you.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Yeah, you know, he's running with the worst people he
possibly could be. It's all, you know, horrible nightmarish life
of crime. So the death of Maria and their unborn
child sets off Pedro's homicidal, revenge obsessed rage, of course,
probably worse than it ever has been, But he doesn't
know who did it, and he has so many enemies
(17:40):
at this point it really could be anyone. So he
spends the next year obsessively trying to find out who
killed Maria. He interrogates and harasses and tortures any person
he thinks might know something, and eventually he does figure
it out. The man who ordered the hit on Maria
is a rival drug kingpin who goes by the name China.
So Pedro ambushes China at a wedding party, shoots him
(18:04):
in the face, killing him instantly, which seems to be
his em o, which is very, very disturbing.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Yeah, it's just the most horrible way to do it. Violent.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah, and then Pedro and his two accomplices kill seven
additional men at this party, and injure many more. It's
like the Red Wedding, horrifying. Yeah, they spare the women
and the children. And that's because by this point Pedro
claims that he's living by a moral code and that
he would never kill women or children, and then he
also claims he won't kill decent, honest men. But this
(18:39):
idea that they just killed seven dudes at this aside
from the one guy that he wanted to kill, is like, well,
that seems convenient. So this massacre makes Pedro even more
notorious in Sal Paulo, and it boosts his sympathetic kind
of vigilante reputation because everyone knows he was avenging his girlfriend's.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Death right honorable suddenly.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
You're right, which is that kind of thing where it's like, yes,
if it were simply a vigilante, but then you tacked
on six more murders. Right. So by the early nineteen seventies,
Pedro is at the top of the Sal Paulo criminal underworld.
He's known as quote Pedrino Mattador, which translates to little
Pedro the Killer. Which remember in the Nightstalker documentary that
(19:27):
all the women in Boyle Heights that saw him in
that store they started yelling El matador, El matador because
it means the killer.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Oh my god. So he's living this kind of scarface lifestyle. Now.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
He has a ton of money, multiple girl friends, power,
and he it kind of is obsessed with pr which
I think the more I read this kind of story
and the way he's lived his life, it's very psychopath
kind of traits where it's like everything is I me,
me me, and he wants to tell his story, and
(19:59):
he wants to kind of with the truth of his
story of like this is why I'm doing it, and
I'm justified and it's okay that I do it right.
He works tirelessly to be feared. He starts getting very
vocal about his love of killing. And he claims that
and when I say, he claims like he was doing
press all the time. He was constantly talking to reporters.
(20:19):
That's weird.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
He claims his homicidal urges are so intense that he
has to kill one person a day and if he doesn't,
he basically experiences withdrawals Jesus. To remove any doubt about
his obsession with homicide, Pedro gets a tattoo of Maria's
name on his left arm, and underneath that are the
words I can kill for love. And then on his
(20:43):
right arm, he gets a tattoo that simply says, I
love to kill. Chill, right, just fun stuff when you're
taking off your shirt at the beach.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Yeah, I'd love to see buzzfeeds like Top twenty five
tattoos about scary stuff about oh my god, let's get
out of here. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
So in May nineteen seventy three, Pedro is now nineteen
years old, like he isn't he can't legally get a
beer in America. He has already killed so many people.
He's finally arrested and charged with eighteen counts of murder
after he's arrested, he makes sure that everyone knows he's
actually killed over one hundred men. We don't know if
that's true or an exaggeration, but that was you know,
(21:23):
that's his tendency. It's exaggeration, and it's like, this is
my story. You should fear me. He's ultimately convicted of
fourteen murders and he's sentenced to one hundred and twenty
six years in prison, although he won't spend that entire
time behind bars, I mean, obviously, but Brazil's penal code
maxes out basically at thirty years, So regardless of formal sentencing,
(21:46):
he's going to spend thirty years in jail, and which
is surprising to probably two American listeners, but it's very
common in a lot of other countries like to max
out those those years, and the United States is hard
when it comes to sentencing compared to other countries. So
in the nineteen seventies, and he's facing thirty years in
(22:06):
a Brazilian prison, that could be a death sentence for
a lot of people. At the time this, Brazil's justice system,
especially their prisons, had a dismal reputation. They were known
for having awful sanitary conditions, corrupt guards, a serious overcrowding,
disease and violence are rampant. Many prisoners die before they
(22:27):
serve out their full sentences. Unfortunately, this bleak and brutal
environment actually makes Pedro a.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
More prolific murderer.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Sure, he gets into jail and pulls one of those
I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in
here with me moves and just starts murdering other people
in jail. God, so when Pedro's being transferred to prison
after his conviction, he's put into a police van, so
it starts immediately. He's put into a police van with
other inmates, and before the van arrives at its destination,
(23:00):
has killed another passenger. God, this man was a convicted rapist,
so you know this goes along with his story of
like it's this noble serial killing in prison. He uses
smuggled weapons, homemade shifts in his own bare hands to
continue killing based on his so called moral code. Many
of his victims are convicted sex offenders, pedophiles, and men
(23:23):
who've harmed women and children. When articles or podcasts point
out his similarities to Dexter, they often only focus on
those killings. But the truth is that Pedro kills whoever
he wants to kill. In one case, he says he
murdered his cellmate because he was a loud snorer. In another,
he claims to have killed a prisoner because he didn't
(23:43):
like his face. And in one of Pedro's most horrific
acts of violence, he actually finds out that there's like
there's a cell block where transgender prisoners are being kept,
and under the pretenses of looking for and kill one prisoner,
he says this prisoner is responsible for his friend's death.
(24:04):
He gets into this cell block and massacres sixteen people
in the transgender cell block.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Oh my god, horrifying.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Pedro's most inference murder happens about a year after he's incarcerated.
He learns that his mother has been murdered by his
abusive father, and his father gets sent to the same
prison he's in.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Oh yeah, So one.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Day Pedro ambush is a prison guard, takes his gun,
corrals the other guards into a prison cell, locks them inside,
and then once they're out of the way, he tracks
down his father in a different cell block and stabs
him over twenty times.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Oly shit, this guy has free reign over the prison
it seems like.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yeah, it seems like he has that you know, that psychopath,
like he's up above everyone else and kind of like
seeing this big picture where he's not afraid of other people.
I'm sure people can smell the like, oh there's something
wrong with that guy vibe.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Like it's real.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
He's the real deal, like some people trying to act
you know, hard ass. And it's like this guy invented
it and it's been doing it since he was a
pre pubescent basically, shit, it's so insane.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Oh sorry, I'm.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Trying to talk about that, so I wouldn't have to
finish this part of the story. Pedro then rips his
father's heart out, takes a bite of it, and spits
it back down onto his dead body.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
What's that, dad?
Speaker 2 (25:32):
So can you imagine just like you stole a car
and then you're just in this person being like holy
fucking shit, oh.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
My god, you're walking by, and then I'm like, okay,
just fucking nightmare.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
I mean, this is like it's flipping over into just
pure horror movie. Yes, details, and also it's you know,
Pedro never shows remorse for any of these murders. During
his interviews with journal lists he justifies the murders, claiming
his victims to serve their fates. He even tells one
reporter quote the things I do are good for society
in my opinion, and Brazil's justice system just does not
(26:12):
know what to do with him. He's transferred to nine
different facilities, but he just keeps killing other prisoners. So
by the early nineteen nineties, he's moved into a psychiatric
facility where he's diagnosed with psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder,
which I did at the beginning of this podcast. I
didn't wait for actual doctors. I saw this coming because
(26:34):
of the dangery poses to others. He is placed in
solitary confinement for almost ten years because it's just like, well,
what else are you going to do? Totally totally, but
it's horrifying and what a nightmare. During those ten years,
the only other people the pedro sees ar speaks with
are prison guards. Then in two thousand and two, when
(26:56):
he's getting close to his release date, he's moved back
into gen pop.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
It's crazy the thing that we're going into like two
thousands that he's still because I'm like, okay, it's from
the seventies, it's fine. Yeah, but suddenly we're like, yeah,
he has dedicated his entire life to murder. Yeah, please don't.
You can't let him out. You can't let him out?
Well tell me.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
During his bloody prison sentence, the number of people Pedro
has murdered balloons up to seventy one victims.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Meanwhile, his formal sentence has been bumped up to four
hundred years, but he only winds up serving an additional
four years because he's already served thirty and ten of
which in isolation. So basically, in two thousand and seven,
he has served thirty four years behind bars. So fifty
three year old Pedro is released back into the world.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Oh, there had to be a loophole. We could have
held hands together and jumped through. Please they get to it,
to it?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I mean, it couldn't It couldn't have felt great that
they were just like, well, I guess this is the
next option. Basically, after he gets out, his day to
day seems mostly quiet. He hasn't killed anyone since the
late eighties because.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
He's been in solitary sucking goodlignement.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yes, exactly, because they had to just keep going to
bigger and bigger extremes.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
There's nobody to kill.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Some suspected Brazilian police are eager to rearrest Pedro, which
I think is a good suspicion and very likely. In
twenty eleven, he's sent back to prison on charges for
participating in a prison riot while he was serving his
first prison sentence, so they were absolutely looking for anything. Yeah,
and also a possession of an illegal firearm. But by
(28:47):
all accounts, Pedro's a model prisoner this time. So he's
released in twenty eighteen on good behavior. Oh my god,
Like they tried to get him, you know, like this
guy campy out in the world, and he was just like,
it's fine, I won't do anything, and he doesn't. So
now he's sixty four years old. It seems like his
days of murderer behind him. But he still really does
(29:09):
enjoy being in the spotlight site, which is a psychopath trait.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
So he now has a YouTube page. He amasses hundreds
of thousands of followers and millions of views on his channel,
where he posts about his unusual life story. He comments
on high profile cases, and he warns young people against
the life of crime.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Okay, so when you go check out that Nick Terry video.
Hop on over afterwards you can get some advice.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
This is where his story ends, and it ends as
violently as the rest of his life that he led
to no surprise, in early of March twenty twenty three, this.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Just happened last month.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Oh my god, Pedro is sitting outside of his house
in Sao Paulo chilling. A black car pulls up, A
group of mass men jump out, open fire. They shoot
him four times, and then somebody slits his throat. Oh
and as of this recording, the police have not identified
the killers or the motive. He was sixty nine years old.
(30:15):
So Pedro's life from start to finish was filled with bloodshed,
abuse and terror. And although he was a victim of
violence himself, his self aggrandizing arguably psychopathic belief that he
was some sort of noble vigilante killing only those who
deserved it does stretch the bounds of logic after seventy
(30:36):
one murders. Yeah, and that is the story of the
so called real life dexter Pedro Rodriguez Filo.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I'm sweating now. I mean, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
That was one of those ones where like because I'd
seen that headline on a bunch of you know, like
websites and stuff, and you're like, oh my god, I
think I really love the idea of a person who
has like there is a moral code, even though I'm
a moral inherently, But that's like from a book.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
And the truth of it is is like, sure that
you can be stating moral reasons why you're doing this
horrible thing, It doesn't make it any less horrible. It
just doesn't. Yeah, at what point are you just playing
god and what you think is immral just like to
other people, isn't it? So you kind of you're not
(31:28):
the chooser of immorality.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
You're not the chooser, and I think that is you know,
Maren pointed out in her research, She's like, this is
the slippery slope of vigilanteism, where if you believe that
you're on the side of right, then you can justify
doing kind of anything and like the worst it gets
where it's like, well that's fine, that's a real argument
and real kind of like him, I'm going to ponder
(31:54):
this when it's say those stories we know about mothers
that go and murder their children's molester, right, we know
about a lot of those stories and you're like, huh no,
it's it is wrong. But then again and da da da,
and you can understand it. In this case though, it's
just like sir, we're going to have to ask you please,
(32:16):
you must stop.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
This is like it can't be this way. Oh my god,
it's so out of control. Yeah, wow, great job, great story.
I never heard it before. Yeah, crazy one, right, fucked up. Yeah,
we're going to Russia today, Karen. Oh, I'd love a
change of pace. Yeah, we're going to change pace. I'm
going to take you over to Russia. Great. This is
(32:38):
basically like picture it happening at the same time as
like Bridgerton. You know. Oh, it's got some Bridgerton overlapping.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Kind of like the dress, like the mpure waist dresses
type of stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, and like it's got romance, it's got jeweling, it's
got like it's excuse me, what is does it happen jeweling?
Dual dueling, Scott at all? Because I'm going to tell
you the story of an infamous nineteenth century scandal featuring
the most famous poet in Russian history. This is the
(33:13):
story of the death of Alexander Sergovich Pushkin Bushkin Pushkin, Pushkin, Pushkin.
The sources I'm using in today's episode include an Encyclopedia
Britannica entry by Dmitri Dmitrovitch Dmitri Dmitrovitch Dmitri Dmitrovs Blogoy,
an article by Michael Phillips for the British Library Board,
(33:34):
an article by George Steiner for The Observer, and a
Newsweek article by Anna Nemsova. And the rest could be
found in our show notes. So, before Karen we get
to the juicy and tragic details of its death, obviously,
I'm going to give you some background, and I'm going
to give you some context as to why Alexander Pushkin
(33:54):
is so important. Simply put, he's the father of modern
Russian literature. His writing is part of school and college
curriculums around the globe. Some of his famous works include
the poem The Bronze Horseman, the novel Eugene o'negan, and
the short play Mozart and Saliary, which would later inspire
(34:14):
Peter Shaffer's play and movie Amadeis Amadeus. The best one
of the wishes I have in life is to be
able to go get into a time machine and see
the original stage play of Amadeus because I let you
that was fucking insane. Yeah, and you've been to Russia, right,
is that?
Speaker 2 (34:32):
What's I've been bursting at the seams to tell you
once again for the million of time that, yes, I
have been to Russia. And the reason I was saying
pushkin like that is because we had a tour guide
on one of our buses, and it's one of the
only things I can remember clearly is she was looking
like this into a microphone in the front of the
boast and she just keeps seeing things like this was
(34:53):
the This was the way she spoke the entire time,
and then she would go pushkin and it was muic.
We were supposed to be paying attention, but I was
so distracted by just I was like, I just want
her to have the inflection go up a little bit, yeah,
way down or something, but it was just this and
then pushkin Pushkin was born here. I think they were
driving us around like wow, I was born or something.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
But anyway, I just I'll fill.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
In that kind of amazing color commentary as you go.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
That'd be great. Tell me about the weather. M Okay.
So he's a playwriter, a poet, and a novelist whose
work touches on themes of Russian identity, history, and politics,
which is what made him so huge. He's born on
June sixth, seventeen ninety nine in Moscow. Pushkin is one
of three siblings. They're born into a famous noble family.
(35:40):
He's the great grandson of a famous Russian military general,
and he's raised mostly by his grandmother outside of Moscow,
where he becomes a voracious reader and spends his days
wandering the countryside, talking to local peasants and learning all
he can. He hears Russian folk tales and stories his ancestors.
(36:01):
He develops a really solid political understanding not only of
the Russian noble class, but also of the greater Russian people,
so he really connects to them. When he begins his
formal studies at a school for aristocratic boys, he starts
to write. He publishes his first poems at age fourteen.
So like, we're talking about two completely different lives, your
(36:22):
guy and my guy.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Oh my god, like they were living the inverse of
each other. Where It's just like, imagine if Pedro could
have just gone to the country and walked around in
a field and maybe written some poems.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah, made some observations and wrote them down. Just had
fucking a little bit of quiet and a little less
rage anyway, And so he first poems at fourteen, gets
a lot of positive attention for his literary work. Then
he graduates in eighteen seventeen and he throws himself into
the high society world of Saint Petersburg, which sounds fun.
(36:56):
It is beautiful. I'll tell you all about it. I
just can't help but picture Bridgerton, That's all I'm picturing.
Is like promenades through the park in like layers upon
layers of clothes, sweating, so fancy.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
I mean, we saw everything from a bus window, So
this is I'm absolutely exaggerating in every way, shape and form.
But we did get to go to Peter the Great
Summer Palace. It was one of I can still remember
all of it. It was one of the most breathtaking
places I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Amazing. Yeah, and he starts getting even more attention, but
this time it's less positive. He's kind of a prolific
partier as a poet in high society. He hooks up
with ladies, he drinks and carouses all over town, and
he gets kind of a reputation for it. He's known
to have a temper and threaten duels all the time,
(37:45):
so it's like getting in a fight instead is like
let's go outside and fight. It's like, let's go outside
in duel. Yeah, you know, I don't know why I
have to say it like that, but I do. It's fun.
I love it. At the same time, he's getting a
lot of attention socially, Pushkin is also writing poetry that's
highly political. He gets into trouble for it. He's critical
of what he sees as an oppressive government and advocates
(38:08):
for constitutional reform, which the Russian government does not like
at all, of course what government does, and so in
eighteen twenty he's exiled to southern Russia for three years
due to these outspoken political beliefs. Exile without a trial
is not unusual at this time in Russia, and I
feel like it still isn't. Probably if you did something
(38:30):
to upset the emperor, he could just send you away.
So Pushkin turns his exile into a kind of a
road trip during the Caucuses and Crimea and using the
context of his travels to inspire further writing. And he's
also partying it's like a road trip movie. He's just
like partying all over la.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
I mean, he's it seems like he's kind of figured
out how to live, which is just like jot down
your results, have a drink, have a diary, have a drink,
meet some people, do your thing.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Look at women's ankles and you know.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Scandalize their older brothers or what, and then you know
it jewel.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
And then duel. So he's also falling in love, falling
in love all over town. He's writing love poems, mostly
for married women and shaking up this like quiet high
society of every town he visits. So sounds fun.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Wait, he's writing love poems to married women or about
or for them to read.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
To them for them Yeah, oh yeah, nice, yeah, okay,
having some fun, even though the Russian Emperor of the
time ultimately welcomes him back to Russian society in eighteen
twenty three, Pushkin's life is marked by political scandal and
romantic drama. Because he's so outspoken in his political views
and never stops advocating for individual freedom and self determination,
(39:53):
he has a target on his back for the rest
of his life. Letters he writes are intercepted, and his
publications are sometimes censored, and his romantic exploits also make
him a target of rage at times. It's rumored that
he has had sex with over one hundred women over
the course of his life. Pushkin, which is like, no shame. Yeah,
so you're saying he's a slut, so fine, were it proud?
(40:17):
But this does upset a lot of people because you're
not supposed to be that like blatantly, you know, free, free,
And so he does end up in a lot of
duels because of this. One account reports that he was
involved in twenty six duels throughout his life. Oh my god. Yeah,
it's a lot. But duels are really popular at this
point in Russian history, but they're also illegal, and twenty
six is considered by historians to be more more duels
(40:40):
than average.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yeah, you know, imagine that, like how many twenty six
times he went out at sun up right and had
someone shoot at him from like ten pieces.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Totally And it's most of them are canceled before weapons
can be drawn, it says, But it is worth noting
that he's a good, very good marksman, so I think
a lot of people can't before you know, he can
shoot at them, got it? Smart. So around eighteen twenty eight,
Pushkin meets Natalia Goncharaza at a fancy ball. She's only
sixteen years old at the time and is already considered
(41:13):
one of the most beautiful girls in Moscow. Here we
have Bridgerton again, if not one of the most beautiful
women in all of Russia, so drop dead gorgeous. In
most paintings or drawing, she's wearing a white dress, has
this gorgeous brunette updew, and is pictured with really dainty
facial features. You know, not any of this? What's wrong
(41:34):
with the big moon face? I always ask, look my teeth,
heart accentuate my face. Okay, so what of it?
Speaker 2 (41:43):
My Irish heritage makes my face cover as much ground
as possible. It's a sort of vival technat. You can
all be dainty. It's deadly, that's right, and who wants
to be so.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Her family is poor, but because she's so frickin gorgeous,
she's really popular among Russian noble and she also has
a playful personality. So if she sounds pretty rad, Pushkin
falls for her immediately and courts her over a period
of two years, writing countless poems about her. It's hard
to tell how she feels about him. He has money
and is a well known writer by now, but she's
(42:16):
hesitant to marry him because of that hundred women reputation
that he's got, and also like he's been exiled before.
She's like, this guy doesn't seem totally stable. But Natalia
is a favorite of the Emperor himself due to her
good looks, and so he assures her that the government
won't exile Pushkin again if she marries him. Nice. So yeah,
So they get married on March second, eighteen thirty one
(42:38):
in Moscow. So he fucking picks up the biggest hottie
in Russia.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
I mean, I'm proud. And also it makes a lot
of sense for this guy.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Sure, So over the course of their marriage they have
four children together. By now, Pushkin is even more famous
across Russia for his poetry and prose, but is still
disliked by the court for his politics. It's only being
married to Natalia that keeps him even remotely close to
being in the Emperor's good graces. So she brings She
brings a lot to him too, but he's still writing
(43:09):
profusely despite the social drama, and Pushkin is totally in
love with Natalia. She's his muse, his idol, his everything.
He doodles pictures of her in the margins of his notebooks.
He calls her his quote Madonna, and writes long, sweet
letters to her, even years into their marriage when he's away.
It's like, oh my god. Nice. In one letter, Pushkin
(43:31):
tells Natalia that quote without you, I would have been
unhappy all my life. Oh huh, I'll say it. Oh
oh oh. But Pushkin is not Natalia's only devoted admirer,
then continually make advances towards her, despite her being a
married woman. And one such man is George Dantees or
(43:54):
just his name is George. George. He's George. His name
is George. It's George to you, It's George to them. Yeah,
my name is Georgia. So I feel like I get
to pick how I want to say it, Dan, just
to make this story your own. So George is dashing.
He's a handsome Frenchman who signed up for the Russian
(44:15):
Army as a way to advance his career. Planned works,
and now he's a fixture in the Russian noble circles.
He's well connected and around eighteen thirty four, George and
Natalia meet at an event and he's totally smitten with her,
which is like, get in line, dude, Pushkin is away
a lot during this time. He's off writing in the
(44:35):
countryside while his wife is in the city, participating in
the court life, eating tiny food on silver trays, probably
you know, drinking, gossiping, gossiping. George and Natalia start to
spend a lot of time together and rumors start to circulate,
and George and Natalia later say they both insist nothing
(44:56):
ever happened between them, but it doesn't matter. People think
something inappropriate's happening. Yeah, So months turn into years, and
now it's well known around town that George is aggressively
pursuing Natalia. And because Natalia has a charismatic, flirtatious nature
that has gotten her super far in life, just you know,
she came from nothing, people are quick to believe this
(45:18):
alleged affair. She's obviously in a difficult position for a
woman of her background and station at the time. She
needs to she needs to flirt, and she needs to
get along with everyone, right, But like, well, at what
point this fucking guy over here thinks you're interested in him,
so she's kind of damned if you do, and damned
if you don't, you know, right.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
It's like her goal is supposed to be at to
be at the top of the social scene, but then
to be at the top of the social scene, it's like,
then you're creating fodder for people to gossip about you.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
Right, so they can knock you off the top of
the social scene exactly, And it seems like this guy
is just kind of getting in the way of that.
In the fall of eighteen thirty six, Pushkin receives an
anonymous letter, and the letter is it's like this cruel
satire making fun of him and pointing out and kind
of talking about this alleged affair between his wife and
this dude, claiming that Pushkin has been elected as the
(46:12):
quote Grandmaster of the Order of Cuckolds, which is a
huge insult at the time. To this very day, it's
an insult to this day on all.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
The threads and social media part friends, it is right forbid.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Tis tis tists. It's never revealed who wrote this letter.
It's thought to be someone in George's inner circle, but
it infuriates Pushkin and he's heard the rumors about his
wife as well, and after receiving this letter pushed Pushkin
to the edge. Oh I know, and he promptly challenges
George to a jewel, a duel a due well, so
(46:50):
that's set for November fourth, eighteen thirty six. You know,
hot heads. Got to solve it with murder, got to right.
So George is encouraged by his friends and supporters to
smooth things over because again this Pushkin's famous and also
a great marksman, so he pulls out all his stops
to try and cancel this duel. He knows also that
because jeeling is illegal and he's from France, he might
(47:13):
get kicked out of Russia if he survives it, so
he taps all his elite social connections, which ends up
being a good plan because the effort of his allies
to stop this duel actually have some effect on Pushkin.
So it's delayed for two weeks, then it's canceled. But
then on November seventeenth, less than two weeks after the
original duel challenge, George asks Natalia's sister Ekaterina to marry him.
(47:37):
Oh so he goes for the sis instead, interesting and
they're married less than a month later, but a lot
of people see this intention to smooth things over and
save everyone's reputation. It actually generates more attention on the situation,
leading to even more gossip and dishonor for everyone involved
(47:58):
because everyone thinks it's just a ploy.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
It looks like a cover up. Wow, you cannot win
in the Russian court, truly.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
This is like episode six and Bridgerton when like there's
a foy bowl and like so and so is in
love with so and so, but actually you know.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
And secret let like secret bitchy letters. That's such a
funny there, it's real.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
It's based on some historical and like kind of less
hot sisters and like it's just the whole thing. And
still Georgia is publicly spending time with the Natalia as well,
which makes this marriage to eat Katerina It's poor fucking
woman look like a sham. Yeah, the whole thing makes
it much worse. Pushkin is furious. The duel is back on.
(48:43):
Uh oh, so the rules of a Russian duel let me,
I know you know them, but let me refresh your memory.
Just refresh it. Okay, there are two duelists, obviously, then
there's what's known as their seconds who is like their
bro that shows up to make sure that their friend
gets the fair you know, shot, et cetera. And then
everything goes according to protocol. And finally there's usually a
(49:04):
doctor on hand and everyone shows up at the agreed
upon location, typically as you said, early in the morning,
and once everyone arrives, last minute negotiations can happen, so
duels are often canceled, but if not, then guns are
loaded and the terms are set. So on January twenty seventh,
eighteen thirty seven, Pushkin and George meet on the banks
of the Black River just outside of Saint Petersburg. Wow,
(49:28):
it's early in the morning near snowy Field. It's very
cold outside. Each man has their their bro their second
there to make sure the duel proceeds as it should,
and their sleigh drivers are present. But it seems like
they couldn't find a doctor to come on the scene,
so there's no doctor there. Seems important. It does seem
like a big deal. Take the time, yeah, yeah, and
(49:51):
no efforts made to negotiate or cancel the duel. So
the terms are set. They are going to have eight
what's called a barrier duel, meaning they will be faced
each other, so it's not back to back. They're facing
each other at about a distance of about twenty to
thirty feet, and then they start walking towards each other,
closing the distance until about ten feet. And in this
kind of duel, the duelists don't fire at the same time.
(50:14):
Either one of them can fire first at any time
they want, so it's like a surprise duel. Shit. But yeah,
surprise face to face duel. That's yeah. Yeah, So they
could hit the target, they could miss, but if they miss,
or even if they hit, then the other duellist has
the option to fire back if they're able. So it's
like you can't like let off a bunch of shots.
(50:35):
You have to, like you have to aim and fire
and get one shot. Yeah, And these kinds of duels
are often deadly unless someone misses on purpose because they're
fire at close range. As we said, push Can and
George stand about twenty feet away from each other, facing
each other. At the command of one of the spectators.
They both start taking slow, deliberate steps towards each other,
(50:57):
and no one, including the duellist, knows who's in a
fire first and what's going to happen next and after
about ten steps, George suddenly fires first. In all his
history of dueling, Pushkin has never fired first, and George
probably knows that. So his bullet hits Pushkin in the stomach.
Pushkin falls to the ground. He's horribly wounded, you know.
(51:21):
Back then it's like one shot and you're fucked, you know, Yeah,
but he still manages to fire back at George, graizing
his hand, and even with his injured hand, George helps
the injured Pushkin into his sleigh with the help of
the few spectators. The lead bullet has entered Pushkin's stomach
near the hip, damaging the lower half of his body
(51:42):
considerably and making it impossible to walk. I feel like
those bullets back then probably like explode it, you.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
Know, they were like, yeah, a big I don't even
know what is a super ball, A piece of lead
probably yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
Yeah. He's losing a lot of blood and they're in
a very remote place without a doctor around. So it
seems like George his immediate reaction based on that is
that he didn't mean to shoot Pushkin in the stomach. Well,
he some believe he just meant to shoot him in
(52:17):
the lower leg to hurt him, not kill him. So
he seems like he's freaking out a little bit of
the fact that he might have just mortally wounded this
like great poet, you know, yeah, because he was flirting
with his wife. It's like kind of sucks. Yeah. So
Pushkin is loaded into the sleigh and makes the hour
and a half long journey home, which kind to suck
(52:38):
every fucking minute, and he's bleeding out as he rides.
When Pushkin arrives at his house, he's conscious but actively dying.
His first request is that someone tell his wife that
his wound isn't serious, even though it's clear to him
and everyone around that it is, he doesn't want to
alarm her. He's moved indoors, set up on a sofa
(52:59):
in his and even though he receives medical treatment, it's
too late. According to witnesses, he's stoic and remains calm
throughout this extremely painful process. Natalia is beside him when
he's not with the doctors. She's clearly distraught, but she's
holding it together for him. He's trying to hold it
together for her. It's very sweet, and he tries to
(53:19):
downplay his pain. In one report, when a doctor encourages
him to like moan out loud like that sometimes helps
relieve pain. You know, when you're in a lot of pain,
you just want to be like fuck, it helps. He
refuses to because he doesn't want to scare his wife. Wow,
I know. So this is what's so freak crazy to me.
It takes him two days to die, no, I know,
(53:42):
Like back then, it was just like, yeah, you're definitely dying,
but it's going to take a while.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
Just you're just gonna keep on bleeding and then there'll
be a bit of an infection.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
Yeah, and then goodbye. He's only thirty seven years old
when he dies. Oh No. However, it does seem like
the mortality rate is pretty close to that in general.
So yeah, he maybe lived a long, happy life. I
could say, maybe maybe a full life for sure. Definitely
have fun of what is men say, I'm not here
(54:13):
for a long time. I'm here for a good time. Yeah.
The people of Russia enter into a state of public
mourning as news spreads of Pushkin's death. He's very popular
with the greater public, and their grief turns into anger
at the death of their literary champion. And the years
that follow his death, Pushkin remains a symbol of resistance
to an impressive regime. After the duel, Georges is arrested
(54:37):
and imprisoned because dueling is illegal and he kills someone. Yeah,
but he's pardoned by the Emperor, but he's banned from
living in Russia. He moves back to France with his wife,
who's Natalia's sister, and he lives a long, happy life
surrounded by children and grandchildren in France. And he dies
in eighteen ninety five. Wow, so he's the victor of
(54:58):
this story. Natalia is heartbroken about the murder of her husband.
She quickly becomes a villain of his story for the
greater Russian public. Of course, of course she does. The
nasty gossip about her part in the duel only increases
after Pushkin's death. She's financially provided for by the Emperor
because he pays off all of Pushkin's debts and provides
(55:19):
a regular stipend for Natalia and her four kids, But
the rest of her life is marked by attacks on
her character and blame for her husband's death. Because, of course,
she tries to live a quiet life. She remarries seven
years after the duel in eighteen forty three, and has
three more kids, and she dies at the age of
fifty one on November sixteenth, eighteen sixty three, which Sarah
(55:41):
does point out is basically a little old lady in
terms of like how long is that ride? Yeah? Yeah.
For over a century Natalia is maligned. Pushkin admirers think
of Natalia as quote, an empty spot in his life.
Just chill. Also, it's factually correct.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Yeah, that's if everything he did was about her and
for her totally, then they're acting, yeah.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
Against his wishes. Basically she was his muse. Yeah. But
scholars today thankfully have a softer review of Natalia because
she saved all his letters to her and allowed them
to be published. She has provided an invaluable resource for
researchers and devotees to Pushkin's work. She is no longer
considered by most to be the villain of Pushkin's story,
(56:29):
just a wife and a mother doing her best. Alexander
Pushkin is remembered as a champion of Russian literature who
captured the values, dreams, and identity of the people in
his huge body of work that is still revered today,
And that is the story of Alexander Pushkin, literary hero
of Russia. And the scandalous circumstances that led to his
(56:50):
early death in a duel in a jewel okad too.
That was like an amazing history lesson.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
And also I could see like the movie amadaeis the
movie Dangerous Liaison's that's very similar to that at a
lot of jewels in that movie, and its kind of
same thing of like, oh that was that was amazing.
Speaker 1 (57:16):
It's a real left turn of fun. That was fun
for me because I didn't go to college, so I
really didn't know much about Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (57:24):
Yeah, I flunked out of college and I went to Russia,
and I don't know anything about Pushkin.
Speaker 1 (57:29):
And that lady tried to tell me about Pushkin. I
wouldn't listen to her about Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (57:33):
Now I know.
Speaker 1 (57:34):
About who Pushkin. Thank you? Any Pushkin arenos out there,
let us know in our Instagram notes.
Speaker 2 (57:43):
Hi, guys, I got my master's degree in Russian literature.
Speaker 1 (57:47):
Are you a scholar?
Speaker 2 (57:49):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (57:49):
Are you a jewel scholar or a duel expert?
Speaker 2 (57:52):
Any duelists out there that still shoot to this day,
it's still threaten people in bars and try to shoot
them at dawn.
Speaker 1 (57:58):
We'd love to hear from you as well, we want
to hear your hometown story. Email us at my Favorite
Murder as Gmail. That was a good show that that
had a real variety to it. Yeah, lot's going on. Yeah,
it's kind of the you know, the beautiful tableau of
the human experience. It was just presented in an hour
and eleven minutes.
Speaker 2 (58:19):
This is what we promise you as the audience of
this podcast. We are all podcasts combined history, that's right, gossip,
you know, literature jewels.
Speaker 1 (58:32):
But we don't have to explain ourselves to you.
Speaker 2 (58:34):
We sure fucking don't stay sexy and don't get murdered.
Speaker 1 (58:38):
Can I Elvis? Do you want a cookie? This has
been an exactly right production. Our producer is Alejandra Keck.
Our senior producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton. This episode was
engineered and mixed by Stephen Ray Morris.
Speaker 2 (58:58):
Our researchers are Mare and Clashom and Sarah Blair Jenkins.
Speaker 1 (59:02):
Email your hometowns and fucking horays to my Favorite Murder
at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (59:06):
Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at my Favorite
Murder and Twitter at my Favorite Murder.
Speaker 1 (59:12):
Heyobye
Love, Hell, Hello, and welcome. So my favorite murder. That's
Georgia Hardstar. Okay, that's Karen Kilcaras. Hello, Hi, And we're
(00:27):
here to tell you some very very bad things. And
we have exciting news about bad things.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
We have stories of horror, but it's couched in love, yep.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
And every time I have to tell a uber driver
or doctor about what my podcast is, it's awkward.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
There's a lot of people out there who don't know
what podcasts are, don't follow true crime, and then hear
the name and then they're like.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Yeah, slowly slide away from you, yeah, name and that,
or you say it's true crime and comedy, and the
same thing I do when someone says where are you from?
And I have to say Orange County about a bunch
of caveats because I don't like the fact that I'm
from Orange County. I have to explain that we're not
making fun of this, is that the comedy isn't about
(01:16):
the murder, it's about you know. I just feel like
I have to explain myself.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
You know, that's a piece of life that we all carry,
a burden we carry where we think some fucking rando
deserves our time and our justification. Yeah, definitely, what's going on?
Did you watch Succession last night?
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I absolutely I'm caught up on Succession and the fabulousness
about everything about it.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
I want to go to Norway now so badly. Every
thing I saw, every person that was on screen, every mountain,
every what are those things called the vernicular or whatever?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
It went up? The little traveling Snow, what are this called?
There's nicular at the Okay, that's all I know. Okay,
it's like a sky away thing but for snow times.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Right, and for obviously high powered deals, right and negotiating apparently, Oh.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
My god, that's so good. Fucking Berry is so good.
Like we're in a moment. I'm on the last season
of Ozark, which is like heavy, Oh yeah and so good.
That's a great show. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
I have a couple show recommendations for the Good ViBe's
only commendation list.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Right, that wasn't the name of it, well yeah, it's
a good name though. It was for our yah positive
TV shows to watch when you need a positivity.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
List, I'm going to give I want to give a
name to this segment that then we could go down
to Home Goods and find a sign and then hang
it on the wall because that's how original that idea
of good vibes only is. Yeah, that it's that idea
is on sale at home Goods right now for seven
ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
But this really worked.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I was, God, what was going on? I really can't remember.
I just know that my friend was with me. Maybe
we were talking about something that was a bummer, I
can't remember. And then I remember and I was like,
wait a second, have you seen Kunk on Earth?
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Oh? And he was like, I haven't seen it.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
And we turned it on and then just laughed for
like thirty minutes straight.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
She's so hilarious Filhamina Kunk. I know we've talked. Have
we talked about it before? I don't think so. I
don't think so, or maybe we mentioned it neither of
us had watched it yet, but it is.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
It is so jam packed with the funniest jokes. She
is so good, and it is the kind of like
it's just being dumb for dumbness sake, and it's just
pure comedy that's dressed up like a very high budget
British nature documentary or history documentary.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
It's so funny.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
And she did a thing once she was talking about
Egypt and then she she was she it led up
to she said, mummy of Scooby Doo fame, and that's
what I was like, this is my favorite thing I've
ever seen.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
It's so good A scholar if Jesus was the first
person to get canceled.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
She also said it was ironic that Jesus Christ was
a carpenter because he was named after the one thing
you yell when you hate your thumb with a hammer.
It's just like, who are I want to meet every
writer from that show.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
She was in the show after Life, Ricky's the show,
and she's so funny in that too. I mean, god,
what is that on Hulu? Something? Uh? Netflix? Netflex cool?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, it almost is like the irritating girl from Ricky
Gervas's newspaper got a spin off show, and it seems
like it's really her, Like that woman who I know
is an actress as a comedic actress and so good
at it, but she plays it so real. It's just
so perfectly ry.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
It's so dry and so realistic of what idiots are
actually like.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
And she's just got kind of the big eyes and
she just is like a little argumentative in the way
of like she's she is already thinking about it in
this one way, so about Yeah, she just wants confirmation.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
She's argumentative in the way that only people who are
always wrong are. Yes, you know you guys have those
parents too, right, right, you've seen it.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
It's just so enjoyable. It just made us. It put
us in the best mood we were watching it. So
that's a great one for that. Okay, thank you, I
needed it. Well, should we get into it?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Let's get into it. Okay. So here are some highlights
from our podcast network, Exactly Right Media. The Banana Boys
Kurt Roneller and Scotti Landis have a live episode of
Bananas for You from Portland, so check that out.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
All the bananimals from Portland showed up. Also over on
do You Need a Ride? This week, it's just christ
and Me talking about tripping balls in the desert and
the faking ski injuries, all the topics you love from
the two people who know the best.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah. And then there's also a new must see episode
of MFM animated by Nick Terry, available on the Exactly
Right YouTube channel. It features the famous hot dog statue
from Minnesota three twenty three. On March twentieth, So go
watch it and catch up if you miss the last
one featuring Steven's mom visiting Chippendale's. We've got it All Nick.
(06:23):
Terry doesn't quit. He just like brings the funny, he
drops hits.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
He's the Missy Elliott of MFM Animated Production.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
All hits all the time. Yeah, exactly right, YouTube channel.
Check that out. Ollen.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
This is very exciting, especially to me. We've restoked my
favorite merch item, which is the here's the thing, Fuck
Everyone raft mug, which was designed by friend of the
family Katzlan Kat is the artist who made our very
first T shirts, the ones that looked like big book covers,
and she illustrated the final moments of Terry Joe Dupero's
(07:00):
survival story. That's from episode twenty eight of My Favorite Murder.
The title of that episode is I twenty eight his
liver with some fava beans and a nice county Back
when we were trying to do number puns.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Oh, that was so hard. I'm so glad we got
out of that. And it's what's so crazy about that
story that you did is that it was episode twenty
eight and yet I still remember all the details of it.
Because it was so intense, it was.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
So good, and that like I remember reading something more
recently of Terry Joe as an adult being like for
a long time she did not want to talk about
that story and then she re it like was this thing?
She realized it's like her story and she gets to
tell it. And so if you haven't seen, the research
that I have from that episode is entirely from Terry
(07:47):
Joe's own retelling of her story from her episode of
I Survived So incredible, go find that because that's really
you should listen to tell it.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
It's incredible, right, So go to our instagram at my
Favorite Murder and tag us if you have one of
those mugs or any of our merch we'd like to
see out in the wild. Just tag us and go
to my Favorite Murder dot com to get your mug
and stuff. Today or tomorrow. I'm not in a hurry, no,
it's this snow rush. We're heading into the summer season.
(08:19):
I'm first today, right.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
So before I start, I tell you what I'm covering today,
what story I'm covering. I'm going to tell you a
little bit about the television show Dexter.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I don't know did you ever watch Dexter. No, I didn't.
Dexter was.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I believe it was on Showtime. It could be wrong
about that though, but I think it was ran for
eight seasons twenty six to twenty fourteen or so. They
recently rebooted it. It starred Michael Sea Hall, the wonderful
actor Michael Sea Hall. He plays a Miami blood spatter expert.
That's how long ago it was named Dexter Morgan, who
(08:56):
is also secretly a serial killer, right, but because of
his very moralistic upbringing, his father caught that he was
a sociopath or a psychopath when he was young, and
so he abides by a strict code when it comes
to killing. He only murders other serial killers. Okay, so
part of that show and go watch it if you
(09:18):
never have, because it's pretty great. I know how much
you love Miami, So a show taking place there is
probably your favorite. Yeah, top of my list, right, lots
of linen shirts, lots of convertible corvettes. But you'll see
this on the internet if you are the kind of
person who just kind of cold searches true crime stories.
(09:38):
There is a serial killer or is arguably a mass murderer.
They call him the real life dexter.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yes, So today I'm going to tell you together, we're
going to learn about the notorious Brazilian serial killer Pedro
Rodriguez Filo. The main sources used in today's story are
a heavily episode of case File, the great classic true
crime podcast that has been around forever, award winning I
believe so good, so well done, and that episode is
(10:10):
called Killer Pet. The writer who researched that episode is
a writer named Eileen Ormsby, and she wrote a twenty
twenty three medium post called killer Pet as well, so
that was also a source. And then an uncredited twenty
twenty three article on the Brazilian website g one titled
who was Proedrino Matador? And the rest of the sources
(10:33):
are in today's show notes. So all this begins in
October of nineteen fifty four. Pedro Rodriguez Filo is born
in southeastern Brazil, the oldest of eight children. His parents
struggled to keep food on the table. Pedro's earliest experiences
are marked by horrible domestic violence. Pedro's father is described
as a violent alcoholic to the degree where Pedro is
(10:55):
born with a bruised skull and presumably a head injury,
which is the direct result of his father beating his
mother while she was pregnant.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Oh my god, so just horrible.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
That abuse continues throughout Pedro's childhood, and his mother was
very strict, so she was also kind of abusive, but
hers was like, keep it in line, you know, she
has eight kids, whereas the father's was horrifying alcoholic. So
by the time Pedro's thirteen, he begins experiencing his own
violent impulses. After Pedro borrows his cousin's horse without asking,
(11:31):
aka stealing his cousin's horse, his cousin, who's older and
stronger than Pedro, paunches him in the face, and of
course that's humiliating. It's even more embarrassing when his family
finds out and relentlessly tease him about it, and they
tease him for being small and weak and unable to
defend himself. Pedro will later claim that this is the
(11:53):
situation where he first feels the urge to kill, so
he actually spends the next several weeks quietly seething and
plotting his revenge. So the next time he sees his cousin.
They're at the local mill helping their grandfather juice sugarcane.
So if we were watching TV and this scene unfolded,
when we saw the juicing machine, we'd be like, oh no,
(12:16):
because it's essentially two huge rollers set on top of
each other. And then you send him and his cousin
were picking up sugarcane and pushing it through the rollers
and then it gets juiced that way. And as Pedro
is feeding sugarcane, standing there feeding the sugarcane into the
machine alongside his cousin, he gets an idea. He suddenly
(12:39):
pushes his cousin toward the machine, and as his cousin
tries to get his footing, he stumbles with his arms
out in front of him, and one arm gets sucked
into the machine and gets crushed. Pedro just stands there
and watches as his cousin struggles to free himself. Now,
there are some accounts that say that Pedro used this
opportunity to pick up a knife and repeatedly stab his cousin,
(13:02):
But there are other reports that claim that Pedro tries
to force other parts of his cousin's body into the machine.
So either way, it's a blood bath. It's horrifying. The
grandfather quickly intervenes. Pedro's cousin is eventually freed from the machine.
His arm is crushed, and Pedro's thirteen years old.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Holy does this? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
So he spends this next several nights in jail, but
ultimately the charges against him are dropped. And that's not
because anyone thinks he is innocent or should be free
or anything that has to do with justice.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
It's just that he is the oldest.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Boy in his family and his family will starve if
he doesn't work to put food on the table, along
with his parents, so.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
They know that.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
And he's freed on one condition, and the condition is
that he has to go back to the mill and
clean the blood out of the sugar cane press.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Fuck.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Reportedly, this takes him weeks two finish the job. So
Pedro will return to this attack again and again throughout
his life, and he has absolutely no remorse about it.
He claims to never feel any guilt for what he's
done to his cousin. Instead, he brags over and over
about how much he enjoyed hurting him, and he also
(14:18):
seems to enjoy instilling fear by talking like this to
the people around him, especially his cousin, which is another
recurring theme with Pedro. He basically if he feels he's
been mistreated by someone, he becomes obsessed with getting revenge.
So his next violent incident takes place a year later,
when he's fourteen, and that's when he learns that his dad,
(14:39):
who works as a night shift security guard for a
local school, has been accused of stealing supplies. Pedro's father's
insistent that the thief is actually the daytime guard, but
no one believes him and he is fired from his job.
So this is devastating for Pedro's family. It means everyone
else will have to work doubly hard to make up
for the lost income. But Pedro isn't just fearful about
(15:01):
how his family will survive. He is incredibly enraged. He
believes his father's innocent and has taken the fall, so
his fury builds, and a few days later, he goes
to city hall. He asks to speak with the vice
mayor of the town, and that's the person who's responsible
for hiring and firing local school guards, and when the
(15:24):
man comes into the room, Pedro shoots him in the
face with a sod off shotgun. Then he drives to
the school and he tracks down the daytime guard and
murders him as well.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
So after these murders, Pedro skips town. He's fifteen years old.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Oh God.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
So he skips town and he goes to hide out
in the bustling city of Sao Paulo. He's supposed to
blend in, he ends up standing out because he starts
selling drugs.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
He takes part in burglaries.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
He makes a ton of enemies, and pretty soon he's
rubbing elbows big time drug dealers who actually like him
and take a shine to him, and he quickly climbs
the ranks of the city's criminal underworld. He meets his girlfriend,
Maria Aparacita Olympia, and we don't know much about her,
but they move in together when Pedro's around seventeen, and
(16:19):
within months she's pregnant with his child. Some people claim
Pedro begins his career as a vigilante when he's in
Sao Paulo. For example, they say that he if he
finds out shop owners are cheating customers, that he will
like he threatens them basically, like to keep everybody honest,
and so people aren't getting ripped off, but mostly he's
(16:40):
known for being brutal, homicidal, and a ruthless criminal. He
also has so many enemies he gets death threats from
other gang members constantly, and also he's squarely in the
radar of the police, so he becomes a deeply paranoid person.
But he's one of those paranoid people whose fears are
actually very founded, or his fears aren't unfounded. When he's
(17:05):
eighteen years old, he comes home to find Maria pregnant,
Maria dead on the floor, and someone has written on
a nearby wall in blood, we will get you.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Yeah, you know, he's running with the worst people he
possibly could be. It's all, you know, horrible nightmarish life
of crime. So the death of Maria and their unborn
child sets off Pedro's homicidal, revenge obsessed rage, of course,
probably worse than it ever has been, But he doesn't
know who did it, and he has so many enemies
(17:40):
at this point it really could be anyone. So he
spends the next year obsessively trying to find out who
killed Maria. He interrogates and harasses and tortures any person
he thinks might know something, and eventually he does figure
it out. The man who ordered the hit on Maria
is a rival drug kingpin who goes by the name China.
So Pedro ambushes China at a wedding party, shoots him
(18:04):
in the face, killing him instantly, which seems to be
his em o, which is very, very disturbing.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Yeah, it's just the most horrible way to do it. Violent.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah, and then Pedro and his two accomplices kill seven
additional men at this party, and injure many more. It's
like the Red Wedding, horrifying. Yeah, they spare the women
and the children. And that's because by this point Pedro
claims that he's living by a moral code and that
he would never kill women or children, and then he
also claims he won't kill decent, honest men. But this
(18:39):
idea that they just killed seven dudes at this aside
from the one guy that he wanted to kill, is like, well,
that seems convenient. So this massacre makes Pedro even more
notorious in Sal Paulo, and it boosts his sympathetic kind
of vigilante reputation because everyone knows he was avenging his girlfriend's.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Death right honorable suddenly.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
You're right, which is that kind of thing where it's like, yes,
if it were simply a vigilante, but then you tacked
on six more murders. Right. So by the early nineteen seventies,
Pedro is at the top of the Sal Paulo criminal underworld.
He's known as quote Pedrino Mattador, which translates to little
Pedro the Killer. Which remember in the Nightstalker documentary that
(19:27):
all the women in Boyle Heights that saw him in
that store they started yelling El matador, El matador because
it means the killer.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Oh my god. So he's living this kind of scarface lifestyle. Now.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
He has a ton of money, multiple girl friends, power,
and he it kind of is obsessed with pr which
I think the more I read this kind of story
and the way he's lived his life, it's very psychopath
kind of traits where it's like everything is I me,
me me, and he wants to tell his story, and
(19:59):
he wants to kind of with the truth of his
story of like this is why I'm doing it, and
I'm justified and it's okay that I do it right.
He works tirelessly to be feared. He starts getting very
vocal about his love of killing. And he claims that
and when I say, he claims like he was doing
press all the time. He was constantly talking to reporters.
(20:19):
That's weird.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
He claims his homicidal urges are so intense that he
has to kill one person a day and if he doesn't,
he basically experiences withdrawals Jesus. To remove any doubt about
his obsession with homicide, Pedro gets a tattoo of Maria's
name on his left arm, and underneath that are the
words I can kill for love. And then on his
(20:43):
right arm, he gets a tattoo that simply says, I
love to kill. Chill, right, just fun stuff when you're
taking off your shirt at the beach.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Yeah, I'd love to see buzzfeeds like Top twenty five
tattoos about scary stuff about oh my god, let's get
out of here. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
So in May nineteen seventy three, Pedro is now nineteen
years old, like he isn't he can't legally get a
beer in America. He has already killed so many people.
He's finally arrested and charged with eighteen counts of murder
after he's arrested, he makes sure that everyone knows he's
actually killed over one hundred men. We don't know if
that's true or an exaggeration, but that was you know,
(21:23):
that's his tendency. It's exaggeration, and it's like, this is
my story. You should fear me. He's ultimately convicted of
fourteen murders and he's sentenced to one hundred and twenty
six years in prison, although he won't spend that entire
time behind bars, I mean, obviously, but Brazil's penal code
maxes out basically at thirty years, So regardless of formal sentencing,
(21:46):
he's going to spend thirty years in jail, and which
is surprising to probably two American listeners, but it's very
common in a lot of other countries like to max
out those those years, and the United States is hard
when it comes to sentencing compared to other countries. So
in the nineteen seventies, and he's facing thirty years in
(22:06):
a Brazilian prison, that could be a death sentence for
a lot of people. At the time this, Brazil's justice system,
especially their prisons, had a dismal reputation. They were known
for having awful sanitary conditions, corrupt guards, a serious overcrowding,
disease and violence are rampant. Many prisoners die before they
(22:27):
serve out their full sentences. Unfortunately, this bleak and brutal
environment actually makes Pedro a.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
More prolific murderer.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Sure, he gets into jail and pulls one of those
I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in
here with me moves and just starts murdering other people
in jail. God, so when Pedro's being transferred to prison
after his conviction, he's put into a police van, so
it starts immediately. He's put into a police van with
other inmates, and before the van arrives at its destination,
(23:00):
has killed another passenger. God, this man was a convicted rapist,
so you know this goes along with his story of
like it's this noble serial killing in prison. He uses
smuggled weapons, homemade shifts in his own bare hands to
continue killing based on his so called moral code. Many
of his victims are convicted sex offenders, pedophiles, and men
(23:23):
who've harmed women and children. When articles or podcasts point
out his similarities to Dexter, they often only focus on
those killings. But the truth is that Pedro kills whoever
he wants to kill. In one case, he says he
murdered his cellmate because he was a loud snorer. In another,
he claims to have killed a prisoner because he didn't
(23:43):
like his face. And in one of Pedro's most horrific
acts of violence, he actually finds out that there's like
there's a cell block where transgender prisoners are being kept,
and under the pretenses of looking for and kill one prisoner,
he says this prisoner is responsible for his friend's death.
(24:04):
He gets into this cell block and massacres sixteen people
in the transgender cell block.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Oh my god, horrifying.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Pedro's most inference murder happens about a year after he's incarcerated.
He learns that his mother has been murdered by his
abusive father, and his father gets sent to the same
prison he's in.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Oh yeah, So one.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Day Pedro ambush is a prison guard, takes his gun,
corrals the other guards into a prison cell, locks them inside,
and then once they're out of the way, he tracks
down his father in a different cell block and stabs
him over twenty times.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Oly shit, this guy has free reign over the prison
it seems like.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yeah, it seems like he has that you know, that psychopath,
like he's up above everyone else and kind of like
seeing this big picture where he's not afraid of other people.
I'm sure people can smell the like, oh there's something
wrong with that guy vibe.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Like it's real.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
He's the real deal, like some people trying to act
you know, hard ass. And it's like this guy invented
it and it's been doing it since he was a
pre pubescent basically, shit, it's so insane.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Oh sorry, I'm.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Trying to talk about that, so I wouldn't have to
finish this part of the story. Pedro then rips his
father's heart out, takes a bite of it, and spits
it back down onto his dead body.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
What's that, dad?
Speaker 2 (25:32):
So can you imagine just like you stole a car
and then you're just in this person being like holy
fucking shit, oh.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
My god, you're walking by, and then I'm like, okay,
just fucking nightmare.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
I mean, this is like it's flipping over into just
pure horror movie. Yes, details, and also it's you know,
Pedro never shows remorse for any of these murders. During
his interviews with journal lists he justifies the murders, claiming
his victims to serve their fates. He even tells one
reporter quote the things I do are good for society
in my opinion, and Brazil's justice system just does not
(26:12):
know what to do with him. He's transferred to nine
different facilities, but he just keeps killing other prisoners. So
by the early nineteen nineties, he's moved into a psychiatric
facility where he's diagnosed with psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder,
which I did at the beginning of this podcast. I
didn't wait for actual doctors. I saw this coming because
(26:34):
of the dangery poses to others. He is placed in
solitary confinement for almost ten years because it's just like, well,
what else are you going to do? Totally totally, but
it's horrifying and what a nightmare. During those ten years,
the only other people the pedro sees ar speaks with
are prison guards. Then in two thousand and two, when
(26:56):
he's getting close to his release date, he's moved back
into gen pop.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
It's crazy the thing that we're going into like two
thousands that he's still because I'm like, okay, it's from
the seventies, it's fine. Yeah, but suddenly we're like, yeah,
he has dedicated his entire life to murder. Yeah, please don't.
You can't let him out. You can't let him out?
Well tell me.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
During his bloody prison sentence, the number of people Pedro
has murdered balloons up to seventy one victims.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Meanwhile, his formal sentence has been bumped up to four
hundred years, but he only winds up serving an additional
four years because he's already served thirty and ten of
which in isolation. So basically, in two thousand and seven,
he has served thirty four years behind bars. So fifty
three year old Pedro is released back into the world.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Oh, there had to be a loophole. We could have
held hands together and jumped through. Please they get to it,
to it?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I mean, it couldn't It couldn't have felt great that
they were just like, well, I guess this is the
next option. Basically, after he gets out, his day to
day seems mostly quiet. He hasn't killed anyone since the
late eighties because.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
He's been in solitary sucking goodlignement.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yes, exactly, because they had to just keep going to
bigger and bigger extremes.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
There's nobody to kill.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Some suspected Brazilian police are eager to rearrest Pedro, which
I think is a good suspicion and very likely. In
twenty eleven, he's sent back to prison on charges for
participating in a prison riot while he was serving his
first prison sentence, so they were absolutely looking for anything. Yeah,
and also a possession of an illegal firearm. But by
(28:47):
all accounts, Pedro's a model prisoner this time. So he's
released in twenty eighteen on good behavior. Oh my god,
Like they tried to get him, you know, like this
guy campy out in the world, and he was just like,
it's fine, I won't do anything, and he doesn't. So
now he's sixty four years old. It seems like his
days of murderer behind him. But he still really does
(29:09):
enjoy being in the spotlight site, which is a psychopath trait.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
So he now has a YouTube page. He amasses hundreds
of thousands of followers and millions of views on his channel,
where he posts about his unusual life story. He comments
on high profile cases, and he warns young people against
the life of crime.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Okay, so when you go check out that Nick Terry video.
Hop on over afterwards you can get some advice.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
This is where his story ends, and it ends as
violently as the rest of his life that he led
to no surprise, in early of March twenty twenty three, this.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Just happened last month.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Oh my god, Pedro is sitting outside of his house
in Sao Paulo chilling. A black car pulls up, A
group of mass men jump out, open fire. They shoot
him four times, and then somebody slits his throat. Oh
and as of this recording, the police have not identified
the killers or the motive. He was sixty nine years old.
(30:15):
So Pedro's life from start to finish was filled with bloodshed,
abuse and terror. And although he was a victim of
violence himself, his self aggrandizing arguably psychopathic belief that he
was some sort of noble vigilante killing only those who
deserved it does stretch the bounds of logic after seventy
(30:36):
one murders. Yeah, and that is the story of the
so called real life dexter Pedro Rodriguez Filo.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I'm sweating now. I mean, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
That was one of those ones where like because I'd
seen that headline on a bunch of you know, like
websites and stuff, and you're like, oh my god, I
think I really love the idea of a person who
has like there is a moral code, even though I'm
a moral inherently, But that's like from a book.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
And the truth of it is is like, sure that
you can be stating moral reasons why you're doing this
horrible thing, It doesn't make it any less horrible. It
just doesn't. Yeah, at what point are you just playing
god and what you think is immral just like to
other people, isn't it? So you kind of you're not
(31:28):
the chooser of immorality.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
You're not the chooser, and I think that is you know,
Maren pointed out in her research, She's like, this is
the slippery slope of vigilanteism, where if you believe that
you're on the side of right, then you can justify
doing kind of anything and like the worst it gets
where it's like, well that's fine, that's a real argument
and real kind of like him, I'm going to ponder
(31:54):
this when it's say those stories we know about mothers
that go and murder their children's molester, right, we know
about a lot of those stories and you're like, huh no,
it's it is wrong. But then again and da da da,
and you can understand it. In this case though, it's
just like sir, we're going to have to ask you please,
(32:16):
you must stop.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
This is like it can't be this way. Oh my god,
it's so out of control. Yeah, wow, great job, great story.
I never heard it before. Yeah, crazy one, right, fucked up. Yeah,
we're going to Russia today, Karen. Oh, I'd love a
change of pace. Yeah, we're going to change pace. I'm
going to take you over to Russia. Great. This is
(32:38):
basically like picture it happening at the same time as
like Bridgerton. You know. Oh, it's got some Bridgerton overlapping.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Kind of like the dress, like the mpure waist dresses
type of stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, and like it's got romance, it's got jeweling, it's
got like it's excuse me, what is does it happen jeweling?
Dual dueling, Scott at all? Because I'm going to tell
you the story of an infamous nineteenth century scandal featuring
the most famous poet in Russian history. This is the
(33:13):
story of the death of Alexander Sergovich Pushkin Bushkin Pushkin, Pushkin, Pushkin.
The sources I'm using in today's episode include an Encyclopedia
Britannica entry by Dmitri Dmitrovitch Dmitri Dmitrovitch Dmitri Dmitrovs Blogoy,
an article by Michael Phillips for the British Library Board,
(33:34):
an article by George Steiner for The Observer, and a
Newsweek article by Anna Nemsova. And the rest could be
found in our show notes. So, before Karen we get
to the juicy and tragic details of its death, obviously,
I'm going to give you some background, and I'm going
to give you some context as to why Alexander Pushkin
(33:54):
is so important. Simply put, he's the father of modern
Russian literature. His writing is part of school and college
curriculums around the globe. Some of his famous works include
the poem The Bronze Horseman, the novel Eugene o'negan, and
the short play Mozart and Saliary, which would later inspire
(34:14):
Peter Shaffer's play and movie Amadeis Amadeus. The best one
of the wishes I have in life is to be
able to go get into a time machine and see
the original stage play of Amadeus because I let you
that was fucking insane. Yeah, and you've been to Russia, right,
is that?
Speaker 2 (34:32):
What's I've been bursting at the seams to tell you
once again for the million of time that, yes, I
have been to Russia. And the reason I was saying
pushkin like that is because we had a tour guide
on one of our buses, and it's one of the
only things I can remember clearly is she was looking
like this into a microphone in the front of the
boast and she just keeps seeing things like this was
(34:53):
the This was the way she spoke the entire time,
and then she would go pushkin and it was muic.
We were supposed to be paying attention, but I was
so distracted by just I was like, I just want
her to have the inflection go up a little bit, yeah,
way down or something, but it was just this and
then pushkin Pushkin was born here. I think they were
driving us around like wow, I was born or something.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
But anyway, I just I'll fill.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
In that kind of amazing color commentary as you go.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
That'd be great. Tell me about the weather. M Okay.
So he's a playwriter, a poet, and a novelist whose
work touches on themes of Russian identity, history, and politics,
which is what made him so huge. He's born on
June sixth, seventeen ninety nine in Moscow. Pushkin is one
of three siblings. They're born into a famous noble family.
(35:40):
He's the great grandson of a famous Russian military general,
and he's raised mostly by his grandmother outside of Moscow,
where he becomes a voracious reader and spends his days
wandering the countryside, talking to local peasants and learning all
he can. He hears Russian folk tales and stories his ancestors.
(36:01):
He develops a really solid political understanding not only of
the Russian noble class, but also of the greater Russian people,
so he really connects to them. When he begins his
formal studies at a school for aristocratic boys, he starts
to write. He publishes his first poems at age fourteen.
So like, we're talking about two completely different lives, your
(36:22):
guy and my guy.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Oh my god, like they were living the inverse of
each other. Where It's just like, imagine if Pedro could
have just gone to the country and walked around in
a field and maybe written some poems.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah, made some observations and wrote them down. Just had
fucking a little bit of quiet and a little less
rage anyway, And so he first poems at fourteen, gets
a lot of positive attention for his literary work. Then
he graduates in eighteen seventeen and he throws himself into
the high society world of Saint Petersburg, which sounds fun.
(36:56):
It is beautiful. I'll tell you all about it. I
just can't help but picture Bridgerton, That's all I'm picturing.
Is like promenades through the park in like layers upon
layers of clothes, sweating, so fancy.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
I mean, we saw everything from a bus window, So
this is I'm absolutely exaggerating in every way, shape and form.
But we did get to go to Peter the Great
Summer Palace. It was one of I can still remember
all of it. It was one of the most breathtaking
places I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Amazing. Yeah, and he starts getting even more attention, but
this time it's less positive. He's kind of a prolific
partier as a poet in high society. He hooks up
with ladies, he drinks and carouses all over town, and
he gets kind of a reputation for it. He's known
to have a temper and threaten duels all the time,
(37:45):
so it's like getting in a fight instead is like
let's go outside and fight. It's like, let's go outside
in duel. Yeah, you know, I don't know why I
have to say it like that, but I do. It's fun.
I love it. At the same time, he's getting a
lot of attention socially, Pushkin is also writing poetry that's
highly political. He gets into trouble for it. He's critical
of what he sees as an oppressive government and advocates
(38:08):
for constitutional reform, which the Russian government does not like
at all, of course what government does, and so in
eighteen twenty he's exiled to southern Russia for three years
due to these outspoken political beliefs. Exile without a trial
is not unusual at this time in Russia, and I
feel like it still isn't. Probably if you did something
(38:30):
to upset the emperor, he could just send you away.
So Pushkin turns his exile into a kind of a
road trip during the Caucuses and Crimea and using the
context of his travels to inspire further writing. And he's
also partying it's like a road trip movie. He's just
like partying all over la.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
I mean, he's it seems like he's kind of figured
out how to live, which is just like jot down
your results, have a drink, have a diary, have a drink,
meet some people, do your thing.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Look at women's ankles and you know.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Scandalize their older brothers or what, and then you know
it jewel.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
And then duel. So he's also falling in love, falling
in love all over town. He's writing love poems, mostly
for married women and shaking up this like quiet high
society of every town he visits. So sounds fun.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Wait, he's writing love poems to married women or about
or for them to read.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
To them for them Yeah, oh yeah, nice, yeah, okay,
having some fun, even though the Russian Emperor of the
time ultimately welcomes him back to Russian society in eighteen
twenty three, Pushkin's life is marked by political scandal and
romantic drama. Because he's so outspoken in his political views
and never stops advocating for individual freedom and self determination,
(39:53):
he has a target on his back for the rest
of his life. Letters he writes are intercepted, and his
publications are sometimes censored, and his romantic exploits also make
him a target of rage at times. It's rumored that
he has had sex with over one hundred women over
the course of his life. Pushkin, which is like, no shame. Yeah,
so you're saying he's a slut, so fine, were it proud?
(40:17):
But this does upset a lot of people because you're
not supposed to be that like blatantly, you know, free, free,
And so he does end up in a lot of
duels because of this. One account reports that he was
involved in twenty six duels throughout his life. Oh my god. Yeah,
it's a lot. But duels are really popular at this
point in Russian history, but they're also illegal, and twenty
six is considered by historians to be more more duels
(40:40):
than average.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yeah, you know, imagine that, like how many twenty six
times he went out at sun up right and had
someone shoot at him from like ten pieces.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Totally And it's most of them are canceled before weapons
can be drawn, it says, But it is worth noting
that he's a good, very good marksman, so I think
a lot of people can't before you know, he can
shoot at them, got it? Smart. So around eighteen twenty eight,
Pushkin meets Natalia Goncharaza at a fancy ball. She's only
sixteen years old at the time and is already considered
(41:13):
one of the most beautiful girls in Moscow. Here we
have Bridgerton again, if not one of the most beautiful
women in all of Russia, so drop dead gorgeous. In
most paintings or drawing, she's wearing a white dress, has
this gorgeous brunette updew, and is pictured with really dainty
facial features. You know, not any of this? What's wrong
(41:34):
with the big moon face? I always ask, look my teeth,
heart accentuate my face. Okay, so what of it?
Speaker 2 (41:43):
My Irish heritage makes my face cover as much ground
as possible. It's a sort of vival technat. You can
all be dainty. It's deadly, that's right, and who wants
to be so.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
Her family is poor, but because she's so frickin gorgeous,
she's really popular among Russian noble and she also has
a playful personality. So if she sounds pretty rad, Pushkin
falls for her immediately and courts her over a period
of two years, writing countless poems about her. It's hard
to tell how she feels about him. He has money
and is a well known writer by now, but she's
(42:16):
hesitant to marry him because of that hundred women reputation
that he's got, and also like he's been exiled before.
She's like, this guy doesn't seem totally stable. But Natalia
is a favorite of the Emperor himself due to her
good looks, and so he assures her that the government
won't exile Pushkin again if she marries him. Nice. So yeah,
So they get married on March second, eighteen thirty one
(42:38):
in Moscow. So he fucking picks up the biggest hottie
in Russia.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
I mean, I'm proud. And also it makes a lot
of sense for this guy.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Sure, So over the course of their marriage they have
four children together. By now, Pushkin is even more famous
across Russia for his poetry and prose, but is still
disliked by the court for his politics. It's only being
married to Natalia that keeps him even remotely close to
being in the Emperor's good graces. So she brings She
brings a lot to him too, but he's still writing
(43:09):
profusely despite the social drama, and Pushkin is totally in
love with Natalia. She's his muse, his idol, his everything.
He doodles pictures of her in the margins of his notebooks.
He calls her his quote Madonna, and writes long, sweet
letters to her, even years into their marriage when he's away.
It's like, oh my god. Nice. In one letter, Pushkin
(43:31):
tells Natalia that quote without you, I would have been
unhappy all my life. Oh huh, I'll say it. Oh
oh oh. But Pushkin is not Natalia's only devoted admirer,
then continually make advances towards her, despite her being a
married woman. And one such man is George Dantees or
(43:54):
just his name is George. George. He's George. His name
is George. It's George to you, It's George to them. Yeah,
my name is Georgia. So I feel like I get
to pick how I want to say it, Dan, just
to make this story your own. So George is dashing.
He's a handsome Frenchman who signed up for the Russian
(44:15):
Army as a way to advance his career. Planned works,
and now he's a fixture in the Russian noble circles.
He's well connected and around eighteen thirty four, George and
Natalia meet at an event and he's totally smitten with her,
which is like, get in line, dude, Pushkin is away
a lot during this time. He's off writing in the
(44:35):
countryside while his wife is in the city, participating in
the court life, eating tiny food on silver trays, probably
you know, drinking, gossiping, gossiping. George and Natalia start to
spend a lot of time together and rumors start to circulate,
and George and Natalia later say they both insist nothing
(44:56):
ever happened between them, but it doesn't matter. People think
something inappropriate's happening. Yeah, So months turn into years, and
now it's well known around town that George is aggressively
pursuing Natalia. And because Natalia has a charismatic, flirtatious nature
that has gotten her super far in life, just you know,
she came from nothing, people are quick to believe this
(45:18):
alleged affair. She's obviously in a difficult position for a
woman of her background and station at the time. She
needs to she needs to flirt, and she needs to
get along with everyone, right, But like, well, at what
point this fucking guy over here thinks you're interested in him,
so she's kind of damned if you do, and damned
if you don't, you know, right.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
It's like her goal is supposed to be at to
be at the top of the social scene, but then
to be at the top of the social scene, it's like,
then you're creating fodder for people to gossip about you.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
Right, so they can knock you off the top of
the social scene exactly, And it seems like this guy
is just kind of getting in the way of that.
In the fall of eighteen thirty six, Pushkin receives an
anonymous letter, and the letter is it's like this cruel
satire making fun of him and pointing out and kind
of talking about this alleged affair between his wife and
this dude, claiming that Pushkin has been elected as the
(46:12):
quote Grandmaster of the Order of Cuckolds, which is a
huge insult at the time. To this very day, it's
an insult to this day on all.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
The threads and social media part friends, it is right forbid.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Tis tis tists. It's never revealed who wrote this letter.
It's thought to be someone in George's inner circle, but
it infuriates Pushkin and he's heard the rumors about his
wife as well, and after receiving this letter pushed Pushkin
to the edge. Oh I know, and he promptly challenges
George to a jewel, a duel a due well, so
(46:50):
that's set for November fourth, eighteen thirty six. You know,
hot heads. Got to solve it with murder, got to right.
So George is encouraged by his friends and supporters to
smooth things over because again this Pushkin's famous and also
a great marksman, so he pulls out all his stops
to try and cancel this duel. He knows also that
because jeeling is illegal and he's from France, he might
(47:13):
get kicked out of Russia if he survives it, so
he taps all his elite social connections, which ends up
being a good plan because the effort of his allies
to stop this duel actually have some effect on Pushkin.
So it's delayed for two weeks, then it's canceled. But
then on November seventeenth, less than two weeks after the
original duel challenge, George asks Natalia's sister Ekaterina to marry him.
(47:37):
Oh so he goes for the sis instead, interesting and
they're married less than a month later, but a lot
of people see this intention to smooth things over and
save everyone's reputation. It actually generates more attention on the situation,
leading to even more gossip and dishonor for everyone involved
(47:58):
because everyone thinks it's just a ploy.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
It looks like a cover up. Wow, you cannot win
in the Russian court, truly.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
This is like episode six and Bridgerton when like there's
a foy bowl and like so and so is in
love with so and so, but actually you know.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
And secret let like secret bitchy letters. That's such a
funny there, it's real.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
It's based on some historical and like kind of less
hot sisters and like it's just the whole thing. And
still Georgia is publicly spending time with the Natalia as well,
which makes this marriage to eat Katerina It's poor fucking
woman look like a sham. Yeah, the whole thing makes
it much worse. Pushkin is furious. The duel is back on.
(48:43):
Uh oh, so the rules of a Russian duel let me,
I know you know them, but let me refresh your memory.
Just refresh it. Okay, there are two duelists, obviously, then
there's what's known as their seconds who is like their
bro that shows up to make sure that their friend
gets the fair you know, shot, et cetera. And then
everything goes according to protocol. And finally there's usually a
(49:04):
doctor on hand and everyone shows up at the agreed
upon location, typically as you said, early in the morning,
and once everyone arrives, last minute negotiations can happen, so
duels are often canceled, but if not, then guns are
loaded and the terms are set. So on January twenty seventh,
eighteen thirty seven, Pushkin and George meet on the banks
of the Black River just outside of Saint Petersburg. Wow,
(49:28):
it's early in the morning near snowy Field. It's very
cold outside. Each man has their their bro their second
there to make sure the duel proceeds as it should,
and their sleigh drivers are present. But it seems like
they couldn't find a doctor to come on the scene,
so there's no doctor there. Seems important. It does seem
like a big deal. Take the time, yeah, yeah, and
(49:51):
no efforts made to negotiate or cancel the duel. So
the terms are set. They are going to have eight
what's called a barrier duel, meaning they will be faced
each other, so it's not back to back. They're facing
each other at about a distance of about twenty to
thirty feet, and then they start walking towards each other,
closing the distance until about ten feet. And in this
kind of duel, the duelists don't fire at the same time.
(50:14):
Either one of them can fire first at any time
they want, so it's like a surprise duel. Shit. But yeah,
surprise face to face duel. That's yeah. Yeah, So they
could hit the target, they could miss, but if they miss,
or even if they hit, then the other duellist has
the option to fire back if they're able. So it's
like you can't like let off a bunch of shots.
(50:35):
You have to, like you have to aim and fire
and get one shot. Yeah, And these kinds of duels
are often deadly unless someone misses on purpose because they're
fire at close range. As we said, push Can and
George stand about twenty feet away from each other, facing
each other. At the command of one of the spectators.
They both start taking slow, deliberate steps towards each other,
(50:57):
and no one, including the duellist, knows who's in a
fire first and what's going to happen next and after
about ten steps, George suddenly fires first. In all his
history of dueling, Pushkin has never fired first, and George
probably knows that. So his bullet hits Pushkin in the stomach.
Pushkin falls to the ground. He's horribly wounded, you know.
(51:21):
Back then it's like one shot and you're fucked, you know, Yeah,
but he still manages to fire back at George, graizing
his hand, and even with his injured hand, George helps
the injured Pushkin into his sleigh with the help of
the few spectators. The lead bullet has entered Pushkin's stomach
near the hip, damaging the lower half of his body
(51:42):
considerably and making it impossible to walk. I feel like
those bullets back then probably like explode it, you.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
Know, they were like, yeah, a big I don't even
know what is a super ball, A piece of lead
probably yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
Yeah. He's losing a lot of blood and they're in
a very remote place without a doctor around. So it
seems like George his immediate reaction based on that is
that he didn't mean to shoot Pushkin in the stomach. Well,
he some believe he just meant to shoot him in
(52:17):
the lower leg to hurt him, not kill him. So
he seems like he's freaking out a little bit of
the fact that he might have just mortally wounded this
like great poet, you know, yeah, because he was flirting
with his wife. It's like kind of sucks. Yeah. So
Pushkin is loaded into the sleigh and makes the hour
and a half long journey home, which kind to suck
(52:38):
every fucking minute, and he's bleeding out as he rides.
When Pushkin arrives at his house, he's conscious but actively dying.
His first request is that someone tell his wife that
his wound isn't serious, even though it's clear to him
and everyone around that it is, he doesn't want to
alarm her. He's moved indoors, set up on a sofa
(52:59):
in his and even though he receives medical treatment, it's
too late. According to witnesses, he's stoic and remains calm
throughout this extremely painful process. Natalia is beside him when
he's not with the doctors. She's clearly distraught, but she's
holding it together for him. He's trying to hold it
together for her. It's very sweet, and he tries to
(53:19):
downplay his pain. In one report, when a doctor encourages
him to like moan out loud like that sometimes helps
relieve pain. You know, when you're in a lot of pain,
you just want to be like fuck, it helps. He
refuses to because he doesn't want to scare his wife. Wow,
I know. So this is what's so freak crazy to me.
It takes him two days to die, no, I know,
(53:42):
Like back then, it was just like, yeah, you're definitely dying,
but it's going to take a while.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
Just you're just gonna keep on bleeding and then there'll
be a bit of an infection.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
Yeah, and then goodbye. He's only thirty seven years old
when he dies. Oh No. However, it does seem like
the mortality rate is pretty close to that in general.
So yeah, he maybe lived a long, happy life. I
could say, maybe maybe a full life for sure. Definitely
have fun of what is men say, I'm not here
(54:13):
for a long time. I'm here for a good time. Yeah.
The people of Russia enter into a state of public
mourning as news spreads of Pushkin's death. He's very popular
with the greater public, and their grief turns into anger
at the death of their literary champion. And the years
that follow his death, Pushkin remains a symbol of resistance
to an impressive regime. After the duel, Georges is arrested
(54:37):
and imprisoned because dueling is illegal and he kills someone. Yeah,
but he's pardoned by the Emperor, but he's banned from
living in Russia. He moves back to France with his wife,
who's Natalia's sister, and he lives a long, happy life
surrounded by children and grandchildren in France. And he dies
in eighteen ninety five. Wow, so he's the victor of
(54:58):
this story. Natalia is heartbroken about the murder of her husband.
She quickly becomes a villain of his story for the
greater Russian public. Of course, of course she does. The
nasty gossip about her part in the duel only increases
after Pushkin's death. She's financially provided for by the Emperor
because he pays off all of Pushkin's debts and provides
(55:19):
a regular stipend for Natalia and her four kids, But
the rest of her life is marked by attacks on
her character and blame for her husband's death. Because, of course,
she tries to live a quiet life. She remarries seven
years after the duel in eighteen forty three, and has
three more kids, and she dies at the age of
fifty one on November sixteenth, eighteen sixty three, which Sarah
(55:41):
does point out is basically a little old lady in
terms of like how long is that ride? Yeah? Yeah.
For over a century Natalia is maligned. Pushkin admirers think
of Natalia as quote, an empty spot in his life.
Just chill. Also, it's factually correct.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Yeah, that's if everything he did was about her and
for her totally, then they're acting, yeah.
Speaker 1 (56:08):
Against his wishes. Basically she was his muse. Yeah. But
scholars today thankfully have a softer review of Natalia because
she saved all his letters to her and allowed them
to be published. She has provided an invaluable resource for
researchers and devotees to Pushkin's work. She is no longer
considered by most to be the villain of Pushkin's story,
(56:29):
just a wife and a mother doing her best. Alexander
Pushkin is remembered as a champion of Russian literature who
captured the values, dreams, and identity of the people in
his huge body of work that is still revered today,
And that is the story of Alexander Pushkin, literary hero
of Russia. And the scandalous circumstances that led to his
(56:50):
early death in a duel in a jewel okad too.
That was like an amazing history lesson.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
And also I could see like the movie amadaeis the
movie Dangerous Liaison's that's very similar to that at a
lot of jewels in that movie, and its kind of
same thing of like, oh that was that was amazing.
Speaker 1 (57:16):
It's a real left turn of fun. That was fun
for me because I didn't go to college, so I
really didn't know much about Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (57:24):
Yeah, I flunked out of college and I went to Russia,
and I don't know anything about Pushkin.
Speaker 1 (57:29):
And that lady tried to tell me about Pushkin. I
wouldn't listen to her about Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (57:33):
Now I know.
Speaker 1 (57:34):
About who Pushkin. Thank you? Any Pushkin arenos out there,
let us know in our Instagram notes.
Speaker 2 (57:43):
Hi, guys, I got my master's degree in Russian literature.
Speaker 1 (57:47):
Are you a scholar?
Speaker 2 (57:49):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (57:49):
Are you a jewel scholar or a duel expert?
Speaker 2 (57:52):
Any duelists out there that still shoot to this day,
it's still threaten people in bars and try to shoot
them at dawn.
Speaker 1 (57:58):
We'd love to hear from you as well, we want
to hear your hometown story. Email us at my Favorite
Murder as Gmail. That was a good show that that
had a real variety to it. Yeah, lot's going on. Yeah,
it's kind of the you know, the beautiful tableau of
the human experience. It was just presented in an hour
and eleven minutes.
Speaker 2 (58:19):
This is what we promise you as the audience of
this podcast. We are all podcasts combined history, that's right, gossip,
you know, literature jewels.
Speaker 1 (58:32):
But we don't have to explain ourselves to you.
Speaker 2 (58:34):
We sure fucking don't stay sexy and don't get murdered.
Speaker 1 (58:38):
Can I Elvis? Do you want a cookie? This has
been an exactly right production. Our producer is Alejandra Keck.
Our senior producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton. This episode was
engineered and mixed by Stephen Ray Morris.
Speaker 2 (58:58):
Our researchers are Mare and Clashom and Sarah Blair Jenkins.
Speaker 1 (59:02):
Email your hometowns and fucking horays to my Favorite Murder
at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (59:06):
Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at my Favorite
Murder and Twitter at my Favorite Murder.
Speaker 1 (59:12):
Heyobye
Hosts And Creators
Georgia Hardstark
Karen Kilgariff
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