520 - Kind of Meant to Be-ish

This week, Georgia covers the wrongful convictions of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and Karen tells the incredible survival story of Lieutenant Leon Crane.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Hello, and welcome my favorite Murder. That's Georgia Hard Start,
that's Karen Kilgariff, And this is a podcast that's also
a video party. Don't I feel like we haven't done
this in months?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Does it feel like that?

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Yeah, it feels very foreign. You know what it was
because we flipped our record days, all right, so it
actually is much longer between records in our minds.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
Which I hate because we talk about the super Bowl
now and how amazing bad Bunny was.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
That happened fucking two weeks and people are.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Like, shut up, bad Buddy was amazing.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
But then did we talk about the reaction videos from
the families who were watching the super Bowl and then
watching themselves be represented and recognizing all the references and
people who know Puerto Rico, And I mean, I have
been just sitting around my house watching families have big
emotional shared experiences and crying, staring.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
At my phone.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
It's amazing, It's so crazy. That thing was incredible.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, it was.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
It was moving, like, so beautiful and wonderful, especially because
there are people who just didn't like it based on
the fucking based on nothing, based on fear, Yeah, very
stupid fear.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
And hopefully this did something to fix that divide. I
don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
Well, one hundred and sixty four million people watched it, yeah,
and we're into it, or at least watched it long
enough to be recorded. Yeah, So I think that's all
people need to know. So the majority of people are
open into it, want to be a part.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
Of things, support it, all the things, dancing grass and
all of it.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
What's going on with you?

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Just exactly what I told you me watching families have experiences? Well,
is I took Instagram off my phone because I was
getting just trigger upon trigger with the Epstein files shit,
Like I just needed to stop because you know, as
soon as I start clicking on it, that's all they
feed me. Yeah, so I'm getting fed and fed and
so now I took it off, but I'm just reading

(02:16):
Virginia Roberts Jeffree's memoir, yeah, which is you know, at
least it's from her mouth.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
So you were reading it on social media and then
listening to a book about it.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah wow.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Yeah, that's we got to measure out and meet out
our horrible realities, right and our and our unbelievable truths
that we're all now living through. Yeah, because I just
co hosted Brief Recess.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
With Michael That's awesome.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
On it, I was told for the first time, and
I don't know if you've already heard this, they're now
getting together the evidence that Kurt Cobain did not kill himself.
That was breaking on that show where I was like, sorry,
like he was telling me, was the evidence now, Well,
they want it to be looked at again because and
then they did, like point by point evidence that they have.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
I fucking buy it.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
One of the things was that all of the caps
were put back on the heroin needles that he supposedly
used to.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
The word is that he odd with.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
Three needles full of heroin and then shot himself, right,
and the caps were on those needles.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, that doesn't really add up.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
That all together.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
I was just like, wait what And then that's just
the first couple of things you mentioned.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
My god, Okay, now I have to get back on it.
But I can't wait to hear more about that.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
There's just so much to absorb and so.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
And by the time this comes out, that could already
be that could already.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Be solved completely. Yes, So just bear with us, you guys.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
We're we're a little bit behind on our uh break
on our breaking weekly podcast. You can't weekly is not enough,
dailies not enough.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
No, we're a little behind on the uptake. Is that
what they say?

Speaker 1 (03:56):
And it's it's not behind on the uptake, it's slow
on the uptakes.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Slow on the take. I am slow. I'm behind on
the slow uptake.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
Took me literally seven full seconds to tell you what
it actually is to correct you about being slow.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
And that's what we guarantee you here at my favorite murder.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
Do you know what podcasting is? Because you just sought
an action? Okay, So we have a podcast network called
exactly Right. There's many wonderful shows on it. We'd love
to tell you about some of them right now.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
This week on I Said No Gifts, Bridger does his
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(04:47):
I said, no gifts. Yeah, they're classy scones.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
And then over on Brief Recess, I tease this already.

Speaker 3 (04:53):
Michael's joined by substitute co host Karen Kilgariff with a
special guest appearance from the therapist from Euphoria.

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Speaker 2 (05:01):
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I love the trailer for the new season where she's
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Speaker 1 (05:15):
It'll make this character even better when you know how
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Speaker 2 (05:19):
Really Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
And then on Dear Movies, I Love You Millian Casey
on her Black History Month by revisiting the twenty eighteen
film Sorry to Bother You. They also dig into listener
emails and pose the eternal question, should you finish a
movie even if you're not feeling it? No? No? Never? Right,
I never do.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
Okay, I have to get up and go stand in
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puttering over on, trust me. Lola and Megan have such
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Rad Precious This Week is part one of their conversation,

(05:59):
where Martina breaks down John of God's rise to international
fame as a self proclaimed psychic surgeon.

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I just saw Megan and Lola in the kitchen hear
at Exactly Right Studios And speaking of two Face John
of God, episode four is now out. It follows journalists
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God's rape allegations. As more women come forward, it becomes
clear the story is far bigger than anyone realized.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
Such a good podcast, Gotta go listen to it. Also,
if you're listening to us right now, you might be
interested to know that you can also watch us on
Netflix and then long take to the camera, Light, Surprise, Fear, trepidation,
and joy.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
All Right.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
New episodes of My Favorite Murder and Buried Bones are
released weekly, so when you're there, please remember to hit
the double thumbs up.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
Yeah, don't be confused. It's thumbs up in some places.
It's double thumbs up in Netflix. Yeah, so don't forget
that one way to start it, to like it, to
hurt it. And if you're outside the US or not
into Netflix, that's okay. Just remember the fan calt has
you covered. Full episode videos are now available, along with
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(07:15):
There's a lot of that and more. Join at fancult
dot supercast dot com to get access and join in
the fun wee. Today's story is one most of us
are probably familiar with because it's been immortalized in a
Bob Dylan song and a nineties biopick starring My Mom's

(07:37):
Hall Pass Denzel Washington.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Janit Janet Is.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
Janet's right about that, Yeah, but the whole story actually
has several more twists and turns. This is the story
of a promising boxer who was wrongfully convicted twice or more,
depending on who you ask. He went on to become
one of the world's most prominent advocates for the wrongfully convicted.
As the Bob Dylan song goes, here comes the story
of the hurricane such a good movie, Such a good movie,

(08:02):
such a good song. I played it for Vince, who
of course knows the song but didn't realize what it
was about, so we'd like listen to it together. It's
a great fucking song. The main sources I used for
the story are Ruben Hurricane Carter's own autobiography, The Sixteenth Round,
which he published from prison, and Ruben's New York Times obituary,
and the rest of the sources are found in the
show notes. In regard to Ruben, I'm gonna call him

(08:25):
Rubin for now. His childhood in his own words, he says,
quote the kindest thing I can say about my childhood
is that I survived it.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
End quote.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
He's born in nineteen thirty seven to Lloyd and Bertha
Carter and grows up in Passaic in Patterson, New Jersey.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Do you know them?

Speaker 1 (08:43):
I've heard of Passaic?

Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, I have two. Isn't there a of a Passic
Passaic or something?

Speaker 1 (08:50):
Is the Wives of Passaic? If there is?

Speaker 3 (08:53):
I mean, MOLLI do we know if the Bravo team
has gotten on the Passaic in the way that we
think they should.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
Isn't it near that falls Niagara Falls? I think it is.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
I thought it was near an airport, the Pasaic Airport. Sure,
all done, not on Bravo.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Great confirmed Potomac. I'm thinking of Potomac.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yes, got it.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
He's one of seven kids and the family is more
comfortable than a lot of their neighbors. But Ruben has
a very difficult relationship with his dad, who is physically abusive.
It's all the stories we've heard so many, so many times.
And also Ruben stutters, which is hard for him. But
by the time he's eight, he does gain a reputation
in the neighborhood for being a talented fighter, and that

(09:36):
outweighs the fact that he has a stutter, and so
he falls in with sort of a kid's streaking that
fights other kids and commits minor crimes. It's just, you know,
juvenile delinquency. Pretty early on.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
Also, I would imagine that his fighting and his stutter
are interconnected, because he's just like, you're going to let
people bully you or say shit to you about something,
go fight them, right.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Really, it's like he kind of had to do that.
It's like do or die sort of. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
When Ruben's dad finds out about a petty theft that
he and his friends committed in town. He beats Ruben
and then turns him into the police, leaving Reuben alone
with them for questioning, and the officer also beats Ruben again.
He's not much older than eight at this time. Oh
my god, when Ruben is eleven years old, so we're
talking like the late forties. He and some other boys

(10:26):
are at Passaic Waterfalls, which you've seen. Ali says, you've
seen them in the Sopranos. Okay, oh yeah, I remember them, okay, right.
When a man attempts to sexually abuse several of them,
The boys fight back and Ruben, who has a knife
in his pocket, stabs the man. The man's injured, but
he survives. But consequently Ruben is sent to a state

(10:47):
run juvenile facility called james Burg Home for the Boys,
and just we can think about old timey, you know,
institutions for children children who are not behaving is like nightmare, right,
and it is a nightmare. There's no rehabilitation and no
education actually going on. The boys are assigned to work

(11:08):
details and Reuben works in the industrial laundry room. Ruben
writes in his book that kids from eight years old
ended up there for varying infractions, and that the setting
was a quote atmosphere more vicious than the slums they
left could ever be wold quote. Reuben is supposed to
be pearled when he's seventeen, but when that's taken away

(11:29):
by an abusive corrections officer for a made up disciplinary infraction,
and now he has to stay longer, Ruben and another
inmate escape. He makes it home to Patterson and miraculously,
the police aren't waiting for him at his parents' house,
so his mother, Bertha, packs him a suitcase and sends
him off to a relative in Philadelphia. It seems like
the dad was the one who was like vying for

(11:50):
him to be sent incarcerated and locked up, and yeah,
and the mom just sent him to a family member.

Speaker 3 (11:56):
I mean, it's one thing to punish a child, but
especially like we've all seen those and that those kinds
of like reformatory exactly where it's just the adults aren't trained.
You know, it's for profit in child prison.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
There's not enough of those employees or yeah, yeah, there's
just not enough of anything.

Speaker 3 (12:16):
No, and if your children of color, right, worst case scenario.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
Reuben spends just two weeks in Philadelphia and then he
joins the Army. They don't know that he had been
locked up and he's basically got a warrant out for
his arrest. He goes through basic training in South Carolina,
and while the other recruits struggle to get used to
the discipline, the physical conditioning, and the terrible food, it's
actually a significant step up from Jamesburg, so he actually

(12:41):
doesn't mind it that much. But then when a white
superior's berating him calls him a racial slur, Reuben punches
him in the face and he gets some other disciplinary
infractions along those lines. So the movie with Denzel Washington
kind of glosses over a lot of the rough and
tumble you know of his life, but you know you
can understand why. So Ruben's unit goes to a base

(13:04):
in Germany when he's around eighteen, and on the base
there's a lieutenant who coaches the boxing team.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
The lieutenant has Ruben.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
Try out boxing with no prior training by entering the
ring with the two year All Army heavyweight champion, just
get on in there and let's see what you can do,
thinking this will show him, and Ruben is actually only
five eight and like one hundred and fifty pounds to
begin with, but he knocks the guy out cold after
three punches. Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
Yeah, And after that.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
I think the Lieutenant's like, oh shit, you got it,
the like you need to do this, And he's assigned
to a special unit so that he can become the
new star of the army's boxing team.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
I mean, he's been training since he was eight years old, right, right,
that's incredible.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
After he starts boxing, other things start to fall into place.
Ruben gets speech therapy and overcomes his stutter, and that
opens a new passion for expressing himself, for reading and
writing and education, and he writes, quote, silence was no
longer a defense mechanism for me. It became instead a luxury.
If I kept quiet now it was only because I
wanted to, and not because I felt I had to

(14:10):
end quote to hide his stutter. At this point in time,
Ruben also starts exploring Islam under the tutelage of a
fellow soldier. He finds its messaging empowering, especially having been
oppressed by multiple systems of white supremacy over the course
of his life, though he.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
Doesn't ever formally convert.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
Now, even though Reuben is flourishing in a lot of
ways during this time in his life, he's not exactly
becoming a model soldier, and he gets in trouble repeatedly
in the army and he's eventually discharged. He intends to
become a professional boxer, but he first gets in trouble
with the law. He sent to prison for ten months
because there's still that warrant out for from something he

(14:48):
did when he was a child.

Speaker 3 (14:49):
I mean, also, it makes sense that he has problems
with authority, you know what I mean. It's just like
the army would be perfect for him in some ways,
but then it's not like he's getting therapy. It's not
like he's right, you know, he fits in and there's
a bunch of stuff. He's natural app but then he's
also like the shadow of his past abusers are right
there as but now they're his sergeants, are his leaders.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
And they're not not racist. I mean, it's kind of
the same thing. It's the what forties, fifties? Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's the twenty twenty six and it's still
a fucking pretty racist. So he's sent to prison for
ten months, and then he serves about three more years
because he snatched a woman's purse and assaulted a man,
both of which he did while he was drunk. So

(15:30):
he's released from prison in nineteen sixty one, when he's
about twenty four years old, and this is when he
actually starts to get his boxing career off the ground.
He's quickly named the Hurricane because of his aggressive fighting style.
And around this time, Ruben meets a woman named this
is the best name, may Thelma Basket and they get
married and have a daughter. There's a photo of him

(15:52):
in the military Wow. And then this is him in
the boxing stance. Oh yeah, I know right, he's serious. Yeah,
I'd be scared if I were an opponent, can I
just me being a boxer, It'd go real fast because
I'd be like a hummingbird. Right.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Over the next three years, he climbs from the bottom
of the top ten middleweight fighters toward the top and
he becomes a well known fighter. It's got a lot
of similarities to Muhammad, all these story which I've covered
in the past and Mike Tyson.

Speaker 2 (16:25):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
So in this background, Rubin gets a reputation for being
very charming and charismatic, but also for being unabashedly critical
of law enforcement. In the built up of several of
his fights, he doesn't hide his contempt for the police
or his belief that black people should stand up for themselves.
When confronted with racist violence, he says, quote, if you
act like you're afraid of me, you better be afraid

(16:47):
of me, because I would do to you exactly what
you would do to me.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
And then he says, I'd just do it quicker end quote.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
As a result of this, he is frequently stopped and
harassed by police officers. At this point, when Reuben's twenty nine,
everything in his life comes to a screeching halt. So
in the wee hours of June seventeenth, nineteen sixty six,
in the Loafiette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey,
which is a dive bar in a bad part of
town that's also notorious for not serving black people, four

(17:17):
people are shot. Their names are A Jim Oliver, who's
the bartender, and three customers, Hazel Tannis, Fred Naias, and
Willie Marins. William Hazel initially survive, though Hazel will succumb
to her injuries a month later. Willie is blinded in
one eye, and he and another witness say that the
shooters are two black men, one who held a pistol

(17:39):
and one who held a shotgun. One witness named Alfred
Bellow is standing outside the bar when.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
The police get there, but he had actually.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Gone into the bar after the shooting to try to
take the cash from the register. Oh so this is
going to become their main witness against Reuben. Yeah, so
this is what we're talking about. He says he saw
two black men, both of whom were around five eleven.
And let's remember Ruben is famously on the short side
for a middleweight boxer at five eight, Like, those are
not tights that you get mixed up, right. So Ruben's

(18:10):
car actually matches the description of the getaway car, and
so he had been out driving around that night and
he is in the car with a nineteen year old
man he knows named John Artists, as well as another man.
They're stuck by the police who say they're.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
Looking for two black men.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
Ruben then quips any two will do, but the police
actually let them go and the third man gets out
of the car and goes home. But later that night
they were looking for two black men. The police circle
back to Reuben and John and they are brought to
the hospital where Willie Maren's, the guy with the whose
I got shot out. He's conscious and police ask him

(18:45):
if Ruben and John are the ones who shot him.
Willy and another witness who knows what Rubens looks like
because he's famous in the area as being this prize fighter,
they both say it's not him. Oh wow, yeah. Despite this,
Ruben and John are brought to the station where they're
in tarry go for hours, insisting that they were not
at the Lafayette, and they're actually let go at this point,

(19:06):
and four months pass, and then in October of nineteen
sixty six, Reuben and John are arrested and charged with
the three murders. What happened over the course of those
four months, well, a ten thousand dollars reward was offered
for information leading to an arrest. How much is ten
thousand dollars in nineteen sixty six seventy thousand, one hundred,

(19:28):
I almost accidentally said it. So this caused Alfred Bello,
the man who police had already spoken to outside the bar,
and another man, Arthur Dexter, Bradley to come forward. So
Bella was the guy who sold the cash from the
register after there was a shooting and people were fucking
dead in a bar. He actually got in there and
got it. Yeah, I think like before the police got there, right,

(19:49):
which is just starring how.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
Well we had points to like the desperation of everybody.
That's it sounds like in a dive bar and a
bad part of town.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
That's what happened, right, And actually it turned out that
he had been a lookout that night while his accomplice Bradley,
was burglarizing a neighboring factory.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
So they're there to burglarize.

Speaker 1 (20:10):
He goes in and steals money from a crime scene,
but he's their main witness. And despite the fact that
Bella's original statement to the police had described men not
matching Ruben and John's descriptions, and despite the fact that
he had previously agreed that Ruben was not one of
the shooters, he now changes his story and says that
Ruben and John were the men that he saw that night,
and Bradley, the other guy who previously didn't admit to

(20:32):
seeing anything, says the same thing. So Ruben and John's
case goes to trial in nineteen sixty seven. Bellow testifies
that he saw both men at the scene that night,
and Bradley testifies that he only saw Ruben. The prosecution
doesn't offer any kind of motive for the killings, and
three other witnesses provide alibis for both men for the

(20:52):
time of the murder. Despite this, Rubin and John are
both found guilty, and Ruben is sentenced to thirty years
to life and John fifteen years to life. So does
it feel like a setup?

Speaker 4 (21:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yeah, I mean it feels like these guys want to
get the money and the cops want to nab somebody
for it, and it's convenient that it all works out
for all the white people.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
Well, but I was going to say that seems like
the cops like if Reuben was the kind of person
that's like any two will do, which it must have
felt amazing just to be able to say that, because
it's absolutely the truth that they had to live under.
But then it's like, you can, I'm sure that there
was some white sergeant somewhere that's like that guy needs

(21:35):
to be taught a lesson, absolutely, And sergeant isn't the rank.
I don't I don't really know.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
While in prison, Reuben refuses to wear his uniform most
of the time, which means he can't leave his cell,
and he forgoes most prison meals, heating up his own
cans of soup on an electric coil. Basically, you know,
it's his own way of fighting the system however he can,
and avoiding that food that you know I was discussed,
My god.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Oh, my god.

Speaker 4 (22:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
He reads voraciously, especially books from the law library, and
while Rubin refuses to acknowledge many of the realities of
prison life, like that uniform, he's also so respected by
his fellow inmates that he is able to keep peace
in the prison on multiple occasions when things could have
turned violent, and in fact, one prison guard credits Ruben

(22:23):
was saving his life.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
Wow during a riot.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Okay. In November of nineteen seventy four, from prison, Ruben,
now thirty seven years old, publishes his autobiography, The Sixteenth Round.
The book gets a lot of attention, and Bob Dylan
reads it and visits Ruben in prison. God, you should
have heard me trying to sing that to Vince while
I was like trying to do you know that song?
And I just kept singing fucking, terrible, terrible, stupid, fucking Yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:49):
It is a really good song. Also, it just makes
me want to stop everything. But it's going to take
too long to tell the story. But I told you
the story of when I walked into the wall in
the movie theater, right, because we came in like no,
and it was the Bob Dylan movie.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
Oh, so it's very dark, and it was.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
Like the beginning where you see that visiting someone in
the hospital and you.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Thought you were turning into the theater and you just
walked into a fucking one.

Speaker 3 (23:09):
I thought that I was going to get to the
stairs on the other side and go down because I
couldn't find my cousins. Yeah, and there were no stairs
on the other side, so I just very slowly walked
into a.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
Wall, a carpeted wall. But luckily Sophie was sitting in
the last seat, so she's like, what are you doing?
And I'm like, god, damn, I would have left.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
I would have fucking left.

Speaker 3 (23:27):
We laughed for the rest of the movie and there
was all these like, of course, heavy things in it,
and we could not stop laughing.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
It was the dumbest Okay, sorry, no, it's good and
we needed a little stuff stopover. Yeah, okay, So Bob
Dylan visits Ruben in prison and then he releases the
song Hurricane, which tells the story of what happened that night,
which charts in the top forty in nineteen seventy five.
Reuben and John's case gains widespread attention at this point,

(23:55):
and at that time there finally awarded a new trial.
So this is chiefly because Bellow and Bradley to witnesses quote,
had recanted their statements. It had also been revealed that
the prosecution had promised to be lenient to each of
them on their own crimes they were committing in that
moment that night. Yeah, so they get the reward money

(24:17):
and they get leniency, you know. To raise money for
their defense, Bob Dylan headlines a concert at Madison Square
Garden and then one at the Houston Astrodome. Jesus, I
know that's amazing. Yeah, we don't do that anymore. Remember
like all the fucking tribute concerts people would do, and the.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
Like Farm Aid and Live Aid and USA for Africa,
those we need that. I think it's because our center
has completely exploded. So there's nobody outside of the bad
stuff to be like, here's how we're going to help.
Everyone's inside of it going like we don't know what
to do. Also, our media is completely state run at

(24:58):
this point. We don't know what's goinging on.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Wow. He just basically he said it all.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
I know what's going on, I don't know what to
do about it, right, And you could play the astrodome,
it's not there anymore.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
So.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
The new Jersey Supreme Court overturns Ruben and John sentences
based on the recantations, but the Passaic County prosecutor decides
they want to try the case again and goes back
to trial in nineteen seventy six. Ruben and John are
out on bail for nine months in between that and
at the new trial, Bellow recants his recantation. Wow, but

(25:35):
Bradley doesn't. He's like, I swear it was a lie.
And so that means he's the prosecution's only witness placing
Ruben at the scene and for other people saying he wasn't.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
You know, Yeah, this time.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
The liar and the steelers, the one holding out exactly,
the one who can actually gain from this whole situation
is your only witness.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah, this time.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
The prosecution does offer a motive, saying the killer was
revenge for the prior shooting of a black bartender in town,
but there's no evidence to back this up. However, Ruben
and John are found guilty again.

Speaker 3 (26:09):
No, I mean you're surprised. I guess I did see
the movie, but I didn't. It's just when you hear
about the details of these things where it's so thin
and it's so overt and it's such a scam.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
Yeah, it's just heartbreaking.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
It is a scamuck man, what do we do.

Speaker 3 (26:25):
We'll work on it later. We have to do this podcast,
I know, man gotta burn. It's coming down anyway.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
So, no, they're found guilty again.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
Ruben's second child, a son, is born two days after
he's found guilty again.

Speaker 3 (26:37):
See this is that heartbreak of like you're telling me,
this man has spent so much time in jail in
his life, and then he gets out for nine months
for the retrial and he gets that taste of real
life again.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah, like maybe this will work out.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
Maybe, like I'm actually free, they saw their error of
their ways.

Speaker 3 (26:53):
There's tons of people behind me now, like my story's
being told right.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
No, No, it doesn't matter who's on your fucking side.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
The system's corrupt. Right after his second conviction, Ruben tells
the New York Times, quote, they can incarcerate my body,
but they can never incarcerate my mind. End quote, And
that holds true as Ruben spends five more years in prison.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
It's a dark time, obviously.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
He and his wife get divorced, and Ruben is so
hopeless that he doesn't read any of the letters that
pile up in his self from supporters of his case,
because now it's like a known story and there's so
many people writing in.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
And reading those letters would just be so bittersweet, if
not just so depressing, right.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
But for some reason, in September of nineteen eighty he
opens a letter, a random letter, and he'll later say
it's because the letter had vibrations. And the letters from
a seventeen year old kid. This is a fucking long
story that I'm going to just truncate, but it's a
seventeen year old kid in Toronto named Lezra Martin, and
Lezra had read Ruben's book and was so moved by

(28:00):
it that he wanted to get in touch and thank him,
and so Lesra's letter to Ruben, leaves him so touched
that he begins corresponding with the teenager. So Lesra had
actually been adopted from a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn by
a commune of artists and academics living in a mansion
in Toronto seriously aka Heaven. It wasn't a great It

(28:25):
ends up not being a totally great place. Shit, right,
But it's when there's a bunch of people together, it's
I was going to go to shit.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 (28:31):
After hearing about Ruben through Lesra, three of the members
of the commune wind up moving down to New Jersey
to work full time on Reuben's wrongful conviction case, and
after numerous appeals, the cases heard in the US District
Court in Newark, and the judge overturns the conviction on
constitutional grounds, ruling that the prosecutors had quote fatally infected

(28:53):
the trial end quote with an unfound theory of racial revenge.
Ruben is free for good in nineteen eighty five at
the age of forty nine, having spent just about twenty
years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, and
James had been paroled in nineteen eighty one, so he
leaves prison and for his first six years after leaving,

(29:15):
Rubin lives at the Commune in Toronto. Oh wow, it
goes back. Eventually, the Commune proves to also be too
oppressive for him and he leaves it. It's a very
long story that I'm making very small that you can
look it up. Once independent in Toronto, Ruben founds a
group called Association in Defense of the Wrongfully Convicted, which
is now called Innocence Canada. They actively work on the

(29:38):
cases of people who they believe are wrongfully convicted. The
group has helped to exonerate thirty six wrongfully convicted Canadians.
In addition, Rubin works as a motivational speaker and advocates
for the wrongfully convicted all over the world, contributing to
many many more exonerations than in nineteen ninety nine, director
Norman Jewison makes a movie about his life called The

(30:00):
Hurricane Denzel. The movie glosses over his military discharge and
his prior convictions to make it look like he's a
purely sympathetic figure. But like when you know the truth
of his actual life and the violence and unfairness that
he overcame, the fact that he spent his formative years
in highly abusive and highly racist institutions. It makes his

(30:21):
later contributions to society that much more impressive, meaning like,
we don't you don't have to gloss over them. You
don't have to be a perfect person to deserve a perfect.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
Life, and to not deserve being wrongfully convicted for a
crime he did not commit to just then be another
body that's being warehoused in this prison system.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
Right, it's almost more impressive that he ended up being
this incredible motivational person. Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
The idea that he left prison to then turn around
and help other wrongfully convicted people says it all to.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Me, exactly. He could have walked away and just lived
his life. Yeah, and he didn't, which is okay too,
Go live your fucking life everyone. When asked about being
played by Denzel Washington, Reuben says, quote, I didn't.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
Know I was that good looking. Well here's a photo
of Ruben and Denzel Washington. Let's show that one.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
Oh I know, Oh, look at that.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
Such a cute pick.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
Ruben dies at seventy six years old in April of
twenty fourteen of prostate cancer, and he spends his last
week's campaigning for the release of a black man named
David McCallum, who had been wrongfully imprisoned for twenty nine years.
He writes an op ed for The New York Daily
News called Hurricane Carter's Dying Wish, saying quote, if I
find a heaven after this life, I'll be quite surprised

(31:42):
in my own years on this planet, though I lived
in hell for the first forty nine years and have
been in heaven for the past twenty eight years. To
live in a world where truth matters and justice, however
late really happens, that world would be heaven enough for us.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
All end. Quote.

Speaker 1 (31:59):
David McCallum is freed four months after Ruben's death. And
that is the story of Reuben Hurricane Carter. Amazing. What
a quote.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
I know, that's a great quote. I know it's really true. Wow,
very inspiring.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
So read his book. It's called The Sixteenth Round.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
All right, So I'm going to take a left turn.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
We as we like to do, we play levels, we
do different tones and tastes.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
It contain multitudes, we always have.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
And I'm going to tell you a survival story, which
is one of my favorite things to do. Classic Karen
Our story begins in Alaska on December twenty first, nineteen
forty three.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
We're in the thick of World War Two. It's around
nine to forty five in the morning, and a crew
of five Americans in a B twenty four Liberator bomber
plane has just taken off for a test flight from
what used to be called lad Field but is now
called Fort Wainwright in Fair Bays, Alaska. Okay, here's the
plane right away.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
Oh yeah, so old school, so old school.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
The co pilots of this plane are Lieutenant Leon Crane
and Second Lieutenant Harold Hoskin. The flight crew is Sergeant
Ralph Wen's, Master Sergeant Richard Pompeo, and Lieutenant James Seibert.
As of this day, there's no active threat, but the
Allies are afraid that there could be an enemy invasion
of America by way of Alaska. So the troops are

(33:27):
taking these routine flights and patrolling the area. So here
is a picture of Lieutenant Leon Crane.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
Hi, he's one of the pilots.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
So I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
The other day I was in Jess's office and I
don't remember. We were chatting about Christina said, do you
know as you ask any man if he thinks you
could land a plane, they all say they can.

Speaker 2 (33:53):
They think they can.

Speaker 1 (33:55):
Really, Yes, that's like when men were saying they thought
they could fight off a bear exactly, I asked Vince
and he laughed and said, hell though, So I'm really
happy for that.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
That's actually pretty wild. I also recently just saw what
was a viral video. Do you ever see that one
of the girl who had just gotten her pilot's license
she'd flown three times and.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
Her she was with her dad.

Speaker 3 (34:17):
No, she's by herself and the landing gear like locked
up and she just didn't have any landing gear in
the back, I think. So a commercial pilot jumps on
and talks her through the landing.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yeah, and she does it and it is fine.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
It's one of the scariest, craziest things that I was like,
I don't want to watch this, but I have to
see what happens.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
Scary is amazing. Okay, So it's all business for this
flight crew until just after noon, when the bomber is
about one hundred and thirty miles out from lad Field,
flying over the Alaskan interior, when one of the engines fails.
So the bomber begins to spin the pilot's fight to
regain control, but the plane goes into a nose dive

(34:58):
at three hundred miles an hour and smashes into the
snowy earth. Oh shit, it's silent until one man's voice
can be heard calling out for the others, and what
begins is a tragedy now restarts as an incredible story
of survival that will play out for the next eighty
one days across the Alaskan interior. This is the story

(35:19):
of twenty four year old Lieutenant Leon Crane's long journey
back to civilization.

Speaker 2 (35:25):
Oh I forgot it was a survivor's story that quickly.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
It's that easy. Yeah, show you a couple of pictures,
done right?

Speaker 2 (35:32):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (35:34):
So the main sources use today are the book eighty
one Days Below Zero by Brian Murphy and two lave Lahoo.
Also at twenty twenty three Anchorage Daily News article by
journalist David Riemer entitled Lost in the Wilderness for eighty
one Days, a write up on the National Park Services
website entitled WW two's survival Story from the Charlie River,

(35:55):
and the rest of the sources are in our show
notes so when the plane was crashing all the chaos,
Lieutenant Crane somehow gets his parachute on and is able
to eject himself from the bomber or bail out. So
as he's floating down to the earth, he watches the
bomber in the distance as it smashes into a mountain

(36:17):
side and erupts into what he'll later describe as quote
a huge blob of red flame. Miraculously, he was like
out before any of that ever happened. When I first
was reading it, I was like, this man survived a
nose dive into the earth.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
I was totally picturing that. So climbing out of the wreckage, no,
snow isn't that powerful.

Speaker 3 (36:40):
The problem, though, is that he's floating down to earth,
he doesn't know if any of the other crew members
have also been able to get out of the plane
like him. Also, as he's floating down, the air around
him is somewhere between forty and fifty degrees below zero,
but the wind chill makes it more than one hundred
degrees below zero. He's wearing his army issued flight suit,

(37:02):
a downfilled parka, and canvas mucklucks, and luckily he also
has several pairs of socks on. What he doesn't have
on are his heavy duty gloves because he had to
just you know, yeah, escape. So the air stings his
exposed hands and face as he's floating toward the earth.
Somehow he avoids all the trees and rocks and everything

(37:24):
that's super dangerous and he lands without injury. But then
he immediately sinks hip deep into snow. He's about two
miles from where the plane crashed. He has no idea
if any of his crewmates are alive or dead. He
just starts shouting anyway, just in case someone could hear him,
but he's met with silence. Lieutenant Leon Crane is now

(37:45):
faced with the fact that he'll have to figure all
of this out on his own, which would be a
huge problem for anybody, but especially Lieutenant Crane, who sources
describe as quote a city boy from Philadelphia.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
Oh shit.

Speaker 3 (37:58):
So it's not like he's got some survival list experience
or anything, and despite being stationed in Alaska for the
last two months, he hasn't gotten any practical survival training
for this cold, rugged environment. The good news is there's
some things that are just playing common sense. He knows
the temperature is going to plummet once the sun goes
down somewhere between two and three o'clock, and that means

(38:21):
he has just a couple of hours before he's at
risk of freezing to death.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
And if by some.

Speaker 3 (38:26):
Miracle he does survive the night, he knows whatever food, water,
or supplies the bomber head on board have gone up
in flames, so that can't help him, like if he
just hikes to the wreckage.

Speaker 1 (38:38):
He also knows that the.

Speaker 3 (38:38):
Last time he and his crew gave their location via
radio contact was around eleven oh eight am when they
were about sixty five miles out from ladd Field, but
they continued traveling for nearly an hour after that without
checking in, so he realizes to the Army he and
his crewmates could be anywhere. So Lieutenant Cranes starts with

(39:00):
what he's got in front of him. He wraps himself
up in his parachute for warmth, and he looks at
the tools that he actually brought, two match boxes with
about forty matches between the two, a boy scout knife
that he carries with him everywhere, and a letter from
his father back in Pennsylvania. Then he scans the area
around him, identifying a small frozen over river, and he

(39:23):
heads toward that. Always go toward the water, Yeah right, yes, okay,
so then you can follow it down because it's always
going down to meet bigger water.

Speaker 1 (39:32):
Where people build homes because it's near the water and
we need water to survive. That's right, you are very smart.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
I made that all up.

Speaker 3 (39:42):
What so Leon can't know this at the time, but
he is at the headwaters of the Charlie River and
that empties out into the Yukon. He starts collecting driftwood
from the river banks, which he then cuts down with
his pocket knife and arranges into a little cone to
start a fire for warmth. But his hands are so
ice cold as he does this they've gone completely numb,

(40:04):
so he struggles to get the fire started, and he
ends up having to use the letter from his father
as kindling. But he does get a small fire going,
so he warms himself up as much as he can.
He's obviously exhausted and he can't help but start wondering
if he might die out there all alone. Fortunately, he
does wake up the next morning, bundled in his parachute,

(40:25):
still very cold, increasingly hungry, and unsure of what comes next.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
But he is alive.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
You carry a knife. I carry a knife.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
Do you carry a knife. I always make sure there's
something sharp in my purse, that something kind of like
could cut through something. But I don't. I so easily
forget things of like, I'm not gonna I'll walk through security.
Oh like beeper with a knife easily.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yes, I had.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
To replace my pepper spray so many times cause I
don't take it out.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
Of the airport.

Speaker 1 (40:55):
Yes, I'm not like savvy savvy, smart aware enough, you
know what I mean. I'm still putting my phone down
when I start looking at sweaters and walking away. I
just can't so me and knives, aren't you know? Oh?
You carry the night? So he wakes up.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
It's day two in the Alaskan wilderness and Lieutenant Crane
is still holding out hope that rescuers will find the
crash site and then be able to save him. He
focuses on that short term survival, so he keeps his
driftwood fire going as he makes an impromptu campsite, and
he stays hydrated by eating snow. This is actually something
experts say can be risky to do because it burns

(41:35):
a lot of your energy because it's cold, and so
then you have to heat it up. Your body expends
too much energy to heat it up. It also risks
cooling your body to the point of hypothermi.

Speaker 1 (41:46):
Oh man, I was like snow, you have unlimited water,
No careful, also ice cream headaches, but it does work
for Lieutenant Crane. In this situation, he waits for the
sounds of a rescue plane all time long, then the
next day and the next day. After nine days pass,
he is forced to accept no one is coming for him.

(42:07):
So on top of that, he hasn't had anything substantial
to eat in that long. But the problem is he
can see squirrels running in the trees above his campsite.
So the hungrier he.

Speaker 3 (42:18):
Gets, the more desperately he tries, like to, you know,
basically hunt these squirrels, but he doesn't have any real
weapons to help him, and he tries to make them,
but he has very limited materials, so he attempts linking
like rudimentary clubs and a slink shot, and he tries
to fashion a sort of spear. None of it works.

(42:38):
The squirrels always get away. Lieutenant Crane's morale is sinking
and Fearing he might starve to death, he decides his
best bet will be to follow the frozen river, hoping
it just leads him to people like he can't just
stay at this campsite.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
But following the.

Speaker 3 (42:53):
River turns out to be a treacherous hike through ice
and snow along sometimes very steep, rocky inclines. The Anchorage
Daily News reports that it takes Lieutenant Crane several hours
just to travel a few hundred feet, So he's in
some serious wilderness.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
You a picture of, like what it looks like?

Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah, can we put up a picture of maybe the
crash site? But that's it. The crash slite is too clear.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
Oh but he's on snow right, Well, he bailed.

Speaker 3 (43:23):
Out, Like I think what it would be like two
miles away from here. Yeah, that's where the crash site.
Like they probably went back to take that picture totally.
So of course he's getting exhausted, but he is able
to find breaks in the ice and he's able to
drink river water, which is good. He still isn't eating
that much though, aside from a few plants here and there.

(43:46):
And then at night he follows the same routine. He
lights a small fire, he warms himself up, he wraps
himself up in his parachute. But the hungrier he gets,
of course, the more he's dreaming of food. He has
vivid dreams about steaks and potatoes, frothy milkshakes, same every day.
So this goes on for another week for Lieutenant Crane,

(44:07):
and at this point he's been out in the wilderness
for over two weeks. He is nearly just depleted, but
he keeps on. He gets up to hike one more time,
and one day, as he's trudging along the river, something
amazing happens. He looks up to see a small log
cabin in the distance. As he gets closer, he discovered

(44:27):
this cabin is not only unlocked, it is fully stocked
with food and supplies.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
And this is not a mirage.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
It's actually customary in the frontier as a sort of
pay it forward practice by hunters and trappers who know
how lethal getting lost in the Alaskan wilderness can be,
so they leave their stuff open and they leave it
fully stocked for anyone who might need it.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
That's amazing, It's kind of beautiful. That's like that.

Speaker 1 (44:51):
In certain towns where polar bears are always around, people
leave their car doors unlocked, just so if you're like walking,
you can get in fucking polar bear. You can jump
someone's car.

Speaker 3 (45:00):
Oh, I didn't know that it has to be Alaska, right,
Oh makes sense. Leon finds a name on some of
the items around the property, and that name is Phil Breil,
and he figures it's the cabin's owner, and he is like, oh,
never forget this person. Yeah, because this cabin is a
literal lifesaver. Lieutenant Crane finds clothes. He also crucially finds

(45:22):
a pair of mittens. Among the supplies, there's also shelf
stable food. There's a gun for hunting. There's all sorts
of tools, there's a stove, there's a supply of ready
to use firewood. Like, he doesn't even have to go
chop firewood.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
It's like he leveled up in a video game.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
Yes, you know he earned this cabin. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:40):
He even finds himself some hot cocoa. Oh yeah, so
he warms up, He feeds himself. He stays the night
in Phil Burreil's cabin, desperately hoping that means that some
other person, maybe Phil himself, if not, an entire homestead
is nearby. But this is the part of the movie
where if the camera pulled up and out of the

(46:01):
roof and then expand it out, you would be able
to see high in the air that Lieutenant Crane is
one hundred miles away from the nearest settlement. Oh no, yeah,
he doesn't know that though. What Lieutenant Crane knows is
that he's fed and rested, and that the next morning,
with mittens finally covering his frost bit and hands and
pockets filled with raisins that he's found at the cabin,

(46:24):
he sets out on his course along the Charlie River.
He spends the entire day hiking that same punishing terrain,
hoping that he is going to find a cabin a
mile away, two miles away. He doesn't find anything, so
then he has to turn back and hike all the
way back to the cabin. When he gets there, he's
exhausted and defeated and he.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
Collapses pocketfull of raisins, with fucking raisins.

Speaker 2 (46:48):
Rh let's don't keep.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
But back then it was like the forties, people were like,
this is nature's candy delicacy. I love this shit. So
Lieutenant Crane spends the next six weeks then sing out
of this cabin a couple miles at a time, hoping
to find something other than vast Snowy expanses it never happens,
and he doesn't know what else to do. What would

(47:12):
you do? Stay there, just keep staying, just live, yeah,
ration stay yep, hope that someone comes back at some point.
I think what I would do is light the forest
around me on fire and be like, try to find
some liquor and be like, if they don't see this smoke,
I don't know what. I don't know how to help
these people.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
My stomach is growling now because I think I'm so
in it with you.

Speaker 1 (47:33):
Yes, that happened.

Speaker 3 (47:35):
I was working on this this morning, but I was
sitting outside, and of course everyone's going to hate me
and you when I say this.

Speaker 1 (47:42):
It was freezing. It was like fifty three.

Speaker 3 (47:44):
Degrees this morning, and I what so I was typing
and I realized I thought I was really into the story,
but I was like, no, my hands are puld. I'm
not used to any temperature fluctuation whatsoever. Okay, So your
plan is what his plan was. At first, Lieutenant Crane
was just going to subsist on what is in Phil
Burrell's cabin until warmer weather comes and basically thaws everything out.

(48:05):
But then he realizes that even if he really rations
barely eats every day, there isn't enough food to sustain
him for that long. So he is forced to once
again set out along the riverside. But this time he
has fashioned himself a very simple sled so that he
can take as many of the supplies and tools with
him as he can, which is great. So now he

(48:26):
has a tent and a sleeping bag. So as bad
as the situation is, it is definitely better than it
was before. He's gained strength, he's gained morale, he's gained
some mittens. So he heads out once again. He walks
for miles and miles. At one point he stops to
get cold water from the river, but he slips and
he falls into the river.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
It's, of course ice cold.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
Somehow Lieutenant Crane manages to get back out, but now
his clothes begin to freeze.

Speaker 2 (48:53):
He's so embarrassed. All those little animals that saw him was.

Speaker 3 (48:58):
Like fucking lands, like on the side of his face
and shoulder.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
His following theirs like just not.

Speaker 3 (49:04):
No one wants to see that, No grown man child
doesn't matter. Falling is the ultimate humiliation alone or not
into it.

Speaker 1 (49:14):
Maybe the first alone where then you're like kind of
grunting and getting up, like, oh, you're really left. No
one comes and says, oh, no, are you Okay, we
could laugh together about how funny and clumsy that was.

Speaker 3 (49:25):
No, I remember every fall it's just you and yourself
beating yourself up for a falling down.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
Okay, wait, sorry, because this is supposed to be exciting. See,
because he's going down the river and he's like, maybe
I'm making progress. He falls into the river immediately he's
in danger, like he's his life is immediately in danger,
like as he's trying to assess the situation and fix it.
He has to do it as quickly as possible, but
he's shivering so hard he can barely control his hands,

(49:52):
and he also kind of can't think straight because his
body is in shock. So he pushes through and he
is able to start a fire. He runs a rope
above it. He strips off all of his.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
Icy clothes, hangs them across the rope, and then he
runs into his tent naked and like you know, wraps
himself up, praying that the flames won't burn so high
that they burn his clothing. But like, basically I have
to dry out that clothing and then warm myself up. Fortunately,
his clothes do dry out, He does warm up, He

(50:23):
puts his clothes back on, he gets into a sleeping bag,
and he just goes to sleep basis. So he then
just has to get up. The next day, he's back
at it, hiking along the river. Occasionally he manages to
catch a squirrel or a bird eating a bird, all
those bones, he covers a couple miles a day.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
He does this for two more weeks. At one point
he has to abandon his sled. It's just too heavy
and clunky and it's too hard. So whatever supplies or
tools he can't carry he has to leave behind. So
just another devastating moment of like, is this am I
just like breadcrumbing my life? Way here totally trying to
get somewhere, which is kind of what life feels like

(51:04):
a lot of the time.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
Sure, we don't all get a sled, some of us
get sleds.

Speaker 3 (51:07):
You got to make your own sled, right, and then
you just got to focus that there will be a
cabin that's unlocked, right, there will be you just got
to keep going.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Hot cocoa in the future. There is a tuck full
of raisins.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
We want people to keep going. You can put the
raisins in the hot coco mean whatever you want them
to mean, Like raisins are symbolical.

Speaker 3 (51:28):
You're right of positive things, right, even though they don't
seem like it. So he doesn't know if doing this
is the best plan for him. He just simply has
no choice, and he continues, and then once again, the
unlikeliest miracle happens. Lieutenant Crane comes across another unlocked and
fully stocked cabin.

Speaker 2 (51:49):
Oh god, this is actually really like life.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
We're like, some people just get fucking come across cabins
stocked full.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
Yeah, and some of us don't. And you can't forget it.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
No, I'm going to continue this.

Speaker 2 (52:02):
You know what it is.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
It's the people who keep trudging along. It's the people
who take risks, and it's the people who dig down
and go like, I want to live and I want
to make this and so I'm just gonna I'm going.

Speaker 3 (52:14):
To play the odds. I'm going to do my best.
I'm not gonna let my brain get me down, and
I will believe that there are unlocked cabin filled with
raisins to the brain.

Speaker 1 (52:23):
But meanwhile, the motherfuckers who were born in the cabin
full of food are saying that the people who weren't
I could just go on and on. I know, are
lazy and taking their skiing jobs.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
I mean, those people do exist, But let's focus on
the people who leave the cabin unlocked, filled with supplies. Okay,
because those people are there's more people like that.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
That's us. I think that's us.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
That's us, that's America right now, those blamers and those
cabin people, those original born in the cabin people.

Speaker 1 (52:57):
Let's not worry about this guys so much. Not in
this story. Okay, this story is filled with raisins.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (53:03):
So Lieutenant Crane lays down his pack and once again
just sets out to recover, just like he did the
first time. He stays in this cabin for about a week.
Now it's March tenth, and that means it's been eighty
one days since Lieutenant Crane parachuted out of the bomber
on December twenty. First shit, he's back on the riverside,
walking along just trying to find someone's I mean, what

(53:25):
a frustrating hike. This would be to be like, you're
just going to hike until you try to find something or.

Speaker 2 (53:32):
Somebody something somewhere at some point.

Speaker 1 (53:34):
But you're in the Alaskan interior.

Speaker 2 (53:37):
Oh thank you.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
Rough.

Speaker 3 (53:38):
He's walking along the riverside, he notices a neat trail
of packed snow and to him, it looks recent and
it looks like it could be tracks from a dog sled,
so there's something to be excited about. He follows these
tracks until they lead him to another cabin, and this
one is occupied. Leon approaches and a man steps outside

(53:59):
to greet him. It's the first person Lieutenant Crane has
spoken to in more than three months, and he tells
the man quote, I've been in a little trouble. Boy,
Am I glad to see you?

Speaker 1 (54:09):
Wow? I bet yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:11):
So this man explains that he is a trapper named
Albert Ames, and he lives in this cabin with his family,
so he actually lives out there. Crane apologizes for not
being particularly coherent. He can barely talk to this man.
Like once he said I'm in trouble, I'm glad to
see you. It was like the man Albertames was trying
to talk to him, and he couldn't have a conversation.

(54:33):
He hadn't seen people in eighty one days, oh for sure.
Albertames shows him mercy. He takes Lieutenant Crane inside, offers
some food, lets him spend the next few days recovering,
and Crane will soon learn he has walked just about
one hundred miles in the last eighty one days. Here's
a map of what it looks like. Whoa him crossing

(54:55):
all those rivers?

Speaker 1 (54:56):
Yeah, and there's really nowhere else he could have gone
right kind of you know where it's like I hate
those stories where it's like if he had just gone
the other way those ten feet, yeah, I know, he
would have been in fucking' whatever. It's triangle of sadness
where it's like there's the sandals right on the other
side of.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
His mountain, but she went that way.

Speaker 1 (55:14):
Wow. Right. Well, and also if he had followed, say,
a different river something else, he wouldn't have gotten to albert.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Ain, right, which is you need people, right.

Speaker 1 (55:24):
The fact that he came upon two cabins is just
so unbelievable. Yeah, crazy kind of meant to be ish. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:30):
This is also when Lieutenant Crane sees himself in the
mirror for the first time in months, and here's how
he describes himself. When he sees himself, he says, quote,
I had a two inch beard, black as coal. My
hair was long and matted, covering my ears and coming
down over my forehead almost to my eyes, so that
I looked like some strange species of prehistoric man. I

(55:51):
was dirty and sunburned and wind burned, and my eyes
stared back at me from the centers of two deep
black circles.

Speaker 2 (55:58):
Jesus yeah. Quote.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
So, as he's recovering, Lieutenant Crane tells Albert about Phil
Berell's cabin and how it was this godsend that he
found at his lowest point, and he's shocked to learn
that Albert knows exactly who Phil Breil is, because actually
everyone in the area does. Fill's a regionally famous hardcore
trapper who's described in the book eighty one Days Below

(56:23):
Zero as having quote an almost scary tolerance for discomfort
or pain. Nothing seemed to make him WinCE unquote wow.
So he's basically a local legend. So three days later,
when Lieutenant Crane is fully rested, Albert Dames loads him
up on his dog sled and takes him on a
two day trip to wood Chopper, Alaska.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
So even on a dog sled to get back to
civilization takes two days.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
Two days, which is like just shows you.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
How far he went, yees, you know, and how far
he had left to go if you hadn't met anyone. Yes,
alone with no sled, with no dogs, got dogs.

Speaker 3 (57:00):
But also I think that the thing, it's like there
was so much snow because he's on a sled, but
Albert Ames is in snowshoes, so they have to get through.
It's like there's no paths, there's no it's been snowing,
like it's the true wilderness.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
Why don't you understand.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
It's like Griffith Park on a rainy day.

Speaker 3 (57:20):
It's exactly when there's a light breeze in Griffith Park. Okay,
So they get to wood Chopper, Alaska, best name of
all time. This is an old gold mining settlement that's
a ghost town now, but there's an air strip there,
so Lieutenant Crane is able to contact his unit and
have him come and pick him up there.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
Hey guys, it's me.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
Yeah, I know you thought it was dead, but it's me.
Wood Chopper also happens to be where Phil Burrell lives,
so they roll into town. Then Albert takes Lieutenant Crane
to Phil's house and basically says, here's the man that
saved your life. From a distance. The two men drink
rum together while you tenant. Crane tells Phil his story

(58:02):
of survival over the past few months, and they bond
over their shared toughness. Wow, because who could appreciate that
story better than the man who doesn't win for sure.
The next morning is March fourteenth, and Lieutenant Leon Crane
boards the airplane that takes him back to Ladd Field
in Fairbanks, Alaska. All this time he's been wearing his
now tattered flight suit, so when he d planes at

(58:25):
Ladd Field, everyone is stunned. It's not like he got
to wood Chopper and was suddenly able to get it
all together. It's a ghost town. Yeah makeover Yeah, so no.
He walks off the plane looking pretty bad. After taking
a hotch shower and getting a medical exam, Leon asks
for a milkshake. It's reported that when Lieutenant Crane learns

(58:46):
his four fellow crewmen have not yet been located, he
immediately gets back onto yet another plane to help the
army find that wreckage site, and it leads to the
recovery of two krewman's bodies, Sergeant Ralph Wentz and Lieutenant James.
It's not until half century later, in two thousand and six,
when remains found not far from the wreckage are positively

(59:06):
linked to Second Lieutenant Harold Hoskin, But to this day,
Master Sergeant Richard Pompeo's remains have never been found.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (59:16):
So, despite Lieutenant Crane's story becoming legendary, especially within the
US military, he actually goes on to live a very
quiet life. He eventually returns to Philadelphia, he starts a family,
he becomes an aeronautical engineer, and he is credited with
working on some of the earliest versions of modern helicopters.

Speaker 2 (59:35):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (59:35):
So, yeah, he's a very smart man in two thousand
and two, and also maybe ooh, that's part of why
it was meant to be, which part that he basically
found those cabins and took the right path because modern
helicopters needed to be invented. Okay, you're not seeing the fate.

Speaker 1 (59:55):
I'm following that trajectory with a lot of doubt. Near us,
I'm trying to be deep. In two thousand and two,
Leon Crane passes away.

Speaker 3 (01:00:04):
He's in his early eighties and he leaves behind six children, who, then,
in the summer of two thousand and five, three years later,
decide they're going to revisit their father's journey along the
Charlie River.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
God. They go via plane and then raft for a week.
They witness the.

Speaker 3 (01:00:20):
World their father survived for eighty one days, including the
ruins of Phil Burrell's cabin.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
They take it all in. They even find some of
the tools their father left near Phil's cabin that he
had described to them when he told the stories.

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:00:36):
Leon Crane never sought fame or seemed to want much attention,
so we don't really have many firsthand quotes from him
on this incredible survival saga. But he did agreed to
a recorded interview in the nineties where he makes his
feelings very well known in that he says, quote, God,
awful place, Alaska, ice and snow and cold as hell,

(01:00:58):
and that is the story of Lieutenant Leon Crane's incredible
survival in the Alaskan wilderness.

Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
Wow, you did it, He did it right, But that
but we did it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
We did it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
Ultimately, this is our victory.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
We're gonna claim it's your own.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
That's all.

Speaker 4 (01:01:16):
Yeah, we're in the car.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
We're in the car, and you know what that means.
That means new honking.

Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
Horays presented by Hyundai.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
I wanna go first.

Speaker 4 (01:01:36):
Sure.

Speaker 3 (01:01:37):
This email was sent to us. It says, Hey, ladies,
excited to share my horay with you. This year, I
turned forty and I did something I've wanted to do
for many years. I joined my local civic choir.

Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
What is that? That's the town choir?

Speaker 4 (01:01:51):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (01:01:52):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
I was in chorus author high school, performed in musicals,
and was a member of the prestigious all female ensemble
called you know we're an ensemble called the Mellow Deers.
It's been twenty two years since I graduated high school,
and I really missed being an acchoir. Every Monday, I'm
excited to go to rehearsal and I've made some wonderful
friends these past few months. It's been such a fulfilling

(01:02:14):
addition to my life, and I'm so glad I overcame
the fear of thinking I was too old, or it
was too late, or people would laugh. You're never too old.
It's never too late, and don't listen to anyone who
laughs at something that brings you joy. As a SDGM
Alana pronounced Elena, my parents couldn't be bothered to add
an extra vowel. I don't know if I messed that up,
but I love that one. I love the idea of

(01:02:36):
doing something you loved it as an adolescent and like
you're allowed to do it as an adult. And also
there's a bunch of other adults that want to go
back and like recapture some of that swing choir glory
that you had long ago.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
I'm going to join a soccer team. Okay, I love
that mine.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
I can you start drinking by a rock again?

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
Start going to a field with random contest?

Speaker 1 (01:02:57):
That's right?

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
This is from Mike kelly Instagram. Next week, I'm starting
a job as an emergency room social worker after leaving
a toxic workplace as a therapist.

Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
Jesus Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:03:09):
Although I was sad to leave my colleagues and the
clients I was working with, I'm so excited for a
move to a new city and a job that is
going to be so fulfilling. Hooray emergency room social worker.
How bad and toxic. Does your job have to be
if you're like you know where I need to go
for some peace and quiet, the er emergency room. Thank you.
I'll handle people's problems with the emergency room.

Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
It's much more calm here.

Speaker 1 (01:03:32):
It's just my zen place. Well, congratulations for making that move. Yeah, parallel,
here's this next one. It says email titled hooray, it's
fun to type Hi, MFM fam gosh. I just love
y'all so much. My horay is after literal years of searching,
I finally landed the perfect job. I work for a

(01:03:53):
small local mom and pop bakery. She's not working for
a small local mom, which is how I write welcome
just this little tiny mother. I work for a small
local mama pop bakery where I get to make sour
dough bread, cookies and cinnamon rolls on the daily. I
finally get to do what I love and get paid
for it. Stay sexy and eat local carbs.

Speaker 2 (01:04:14):
DJ eat me her mm hm.

Speaker 4 (01:04:17):
I love that right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:18):
That's on car with joining choir totally. Like all the
stuff that makes you feel good, brings bringsy joy like
the er, and brings me joy like the ER's like
social work in the er.

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
Thanks you guys for tuning in to honking hoays.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
Thank you Hyundai for making all of this possible.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
Stay sexy and don't get murdered.

Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an
exactly right production. Our senior producer is Molly Smith and
our associate producer is Tessa Hughes. Our editor is Aristotle Ascevedo.

Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
This episode was mixed by Leona Squalacci.

Speaker 1 (01:04:55):
Our researchers are Mary McGlashan and Ali Elkin.

Speaker 2 (01:04:58):
Email your hometowns to My Favorite Murder at gmail dot.

Speaker 1 (01:05:00):
Com and follow the show on Instagram at my Favorite Murder.
Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And now you
can watch My Favorite Murder on Netflix. And when you're there,
hit the double thumbs up and the remind Me buttons.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
That's the best way you can support our show.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
Goodbye,