November 18, 2021 • 33 mins
This is the second and final part of episode #40 Barbara Shutt. So if you’ve not yet heard it, go back and listen to that first.
Credits
Heavyweight is hosted and produced by Jonathan Goldstein.
This episode was produced by Stevie Lane, along with Mohini Madgavkar. The senior producer is Kalila Holt.
Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Blumberg, Phia Bennin, Justin McGoldrick, JT Townsend, the Cincinnati History Museum, the Berea College Archives, and Jackie Cohen.
The show was mixed by Bobby Lord.
Music by Christine Fellows, John K Samson, Sean Jacobi, Michael Hearst, Blue Dot Sessions, and Bobby Lord. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records.
To read Lenore DePree's memoir, you can find it under the reissued title, "90 Brothers and Sisters."
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode is the second in a two part series.
If you haven't heard Barbara Part one, please go back
and listen. Thanks, and on with the show. Yeah, you
know I have a passion for dance.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
No, I know that.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
And I was wondering if I could because I'm gonna
be giving break dancing lessons online, and I was wondering
if you could put up a flyer about it at
the hospital. Do you guys have like a you know,
like a little staff room or something not a lover
of dance, I guess from Gimblet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein
(00:42):
and this is Heavyweight Today's episode Barbara Part two Barbara Wilson.
Right after the break, Barbara's online obituary contradicted everything my
(01:09):
mother in law, Becky, thought she knew about her old friend.
So Becky tasked me with finding out the truth. In
the process, I uncovered the murder Barbara committed in nineteen
sixty eight, But reading through the trial transcripts, the prosecution's
argument didn't make sense to Becky or to me. Why
would being asked to leave the nest provoke Barbara to murder?
(01:31):
To understand the why, I need to better understand the
who who was Barbara before Becky met her in Copenhagen.
So I'm heading back to the beginning when Barbara Shot
was Barbara Wilson. I start where I always start when
I'm trying to get to the bottom of anything in
my life. YouTube. Me and a buddy, Brian are down
(01:53):
here off of Whipper Wheel. This is Douglas and his
buddy Brian. On their YouTube channel. They post videos of
semitaries and other creepy locales that have fallen into ruin, and.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
We have located the remnants to an old house down here.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
What's this place called Galilean Children's Home?
Speaker 4 (02:09):
Galilean Children's Home.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
You can google it yourself.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
If you were to google it, you'd see that the
Galilean Children's Home was an orphanage outside Corbin, Kentucky that
shut down in the nineteen fifties. The orphanage is where
Barbara was raised, back before she was adopted by the Shots,
back when she was Barbara Wilson.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
Dad, Gum, here's an old boot.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
There's a kid's sized boot right there. Founded in nineteen
thirty nine by a self ordained mountain preacher named John Vogel,
the orphanage was home to over eighty kids who considered
themselves brothers and sisters and called John Vogel Daddy. When
he was a boy, a house fire killed Vogel's five
step siblings but spared him. He took it as a
(02:54):
sign that he'd been chosen by God for a higher purpose.
Vogel brag that the Galileean Children's Home wasn't supported by
any church, state, or public endowment. He raised money through
donations and by touring the kids around the country in
a yellow school bus as a children's choir. Much of
(03:17):
what I learn about Vogel in the Home comes from
his autobiography, which, as my nephew THEO learned during his
lessons with Becky, is a book written by the person
that it's about.
Speaker 6 (03:29):
Right Otto means self.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Vogel's autobiography, This Happened in the Hills of Kentucky, is
filled with folksy anecdotes about precocious kids getting up to
naughty shenanigans. I search the book for a mention of Barbara,
but only find one anecdote. It's about a little Barbara
who tries to convince Vogel to let her chew gum.
Barbara is a quote champion chatterbox who argues that if
(03:55):
her mouth is busy chewing gum, she won't be able
to talk as much. Barbara is given no last name,
but she reminds me of adult Barbara, who knew how
to get what she wanted. One of the comments on
Barbara's online obituary is from a fellow Galilean Children's Home resident,
(04:16):
a man named Larry Brewster, whom I decided to phone.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
Mister Bruce's speaking.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Oh Hello, mister Brewster.
Speaker 7 (04:24):
Yes, how did I guess? I'll like you to get
to call the new Oh.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I don't know how lucky it makes you, but I
appreciate you saying that I am. Once I've hand fanned
the blush from my cheeks. I explained to Larry that
I'm calling about Barbara Wilson and what life was like
at the Galilean Children's Home.
Speaker 7 (04:44):
We had as many as twenty twenty one, twenty four
of us in one room.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
We had three months high m hmm.
Speaker 7 (04:53):
I was taken there at the age of two years old.
I stayed there until nineteen fifty five. I brought them
thirteen years one long as it kids.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Hah.
Speaker 5 (05:02):
I thought that's where everybody lived, had no, No, my house.
Speaker 7 (05:12):
Wants me to tell you that we had Christmas dinner
with Colonel Sanders five years in a row.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Does Larry mean that Colonel Sanders? I wonder, But then
I take stock of my Yankee bias. Can one not
earn the rank of colonel in the great state of
Kentucky without being mistaken for a white van Dyke chicken
frying string tie tying fast food mascot. But Larry assures
me that indeed he is talking about that colonel. It seems.
(05:38):
Colonel Harlan David Sanders was a patron of the Galilee
and Children's Home, and according to his memoir, life as
I have known it has been finger licking good. The
colonel had many failed careers insurance salesman, army mule tender,
ferryboat entrepreneur, and, perhaps most alarming of all, amateur obstetrician.
(05:58):
But then, at the age of sixty five, the colonel
opened his first KFC, and where he'd failed at birthing children,
the Colonel excelled at birthing chickens. His very first restaurant
was located in Corbin, near the Orphanage. So you guys
had fried chicken for Christmas time.
Speaker 7 (06:16):
Chicken everything, apple pie and ice cream on the cob,
biscuits and gravy.
Speaker 5 (06:23):
We had it all. He spoiled. He said he wanted
to be our grandpa.
Speaker 7 (06:26):
Did you know it won't be legal, but I will
be your grandpa.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Larry speaks warmly of his time at the home. He
says he attended class in a little schoolhouse, sang in
the choir, and performed farm chores like milking goats and cows.
When I asked him about Barbara, though he doesn't remember much.
The boys and girls were kept pretty separate.
Speaker 7 (06:48):
The one time we saw the girls are at school
because the miss Halls were separated. Girls had their own
Miss Hall and the boys had their own Miss Hall.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
John Vogel was pretty strict about segregating the boys and girls,
especially as they entered puberty. Was John Vogel like a
like a father?
Speaker 5 (07:04):
Oh? He was more definitely Uh?
Speaker 7 (07:06):
In his mind. He wasn't for ours. It was was
we call him Dad Vogul. I have no nothing but
but uh.
Speaker 5 (07:14):
The rest of the memories. I tried to forget the
bad ones. Sorry, I tried to forget the bad ones.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
And there there were bad ones. Well, Larry hesitates, as
though what he's thinking of saying next might stir up
the bad ones.
Speaker 7 (07:30):
They didn't have me come back once after I had
left to go to court for Dad Vogel.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
I had to go to court for some reason, and
I went to court. I gave him a.
Speaker 7 (07:41):
Testimony, and I don't know if it helped the director,
if it hurt it did he did ask me to
come back anymore.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Huh, what what what do you remember about the court case?
Speaker 5 (07:50):
No? I really don't know much about it.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
What court case is Larry talking about? When I get
off the phone, I look into it, and the records
I discover reveal a much darker portrait of the place
Barbara was raised than that of Larry's memory. And just
a quick warning, the details I'm about to share deal
with child sexual abuse and other sensitive subject matter. In
(08:15):
nineteen fifty five, sixteen years after opening the home, John
Vogel was indicted for rape. A headline from the Lexington
Herald reads, Daddy John Vogel was a serpent in a
hilly garden of Eden. Two sisters who had grown up
at the home accused Vogel of raping them. The abuse
began in their early teens and lasted years. Vogel threatened
(08:36):
to send them to jail if they ever told anyone.
Whennita was twenty when she finally came forward Ruby nineteen.
Ruby's case went to court first, and parenthetically it was
Colonel Sanders who posted Vogel's bail. A hung jury led
to a mistrial, and at the retrial, Vogel was found innocent.
(08:57):
As for Weanita, fearing a trial would cause her public embarrassment,
she eventually withdrew the charges, but she always maintained that
her accusations against Vogel were true. John Vogel wasn't the
only person to publish a memoir about life at the
Galilean home.
Speaker 6 (09:18):
Memoir comes from a French word meaning memory.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah, it sort of sounds like memory, yes, Now a
memoir is the self anointed. Love and Terror in my
Father's House is written by John Vogel's only biological child,
Leonor Duprie. Lenore is now eighty seven years old and
lives in a Senior Residence hotel in Michigan, where she
talks to me over the phone about her father.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
He could charm the bands off the people, you know,
and everybody thought he was a real wonderful person, but
behind the scenes he was pretty much of a dirty dealer.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
How do you mean, Well, if she got all.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Involved with these girls because he didn't want them ever
to go away, so he started missing around with them
so they would feel obligated to him. Oh, you know,
then everything just kind of got in the wrong pocket.
You know, people have can try to make you do
things for God, and it's not really for God. It's
(10:18):
for them, and they hold the power of you that way.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
In her book, Lenor describes her father calling her into
his study after a fight they'd had. All the other
girls seems so committed to me, Fogel says, why are
you so slow to commit yourself to God? He reached
up and put his hand on my breast, then pulled
me down and kissed me on the mouth. I shuddered. Later,
(10:43):
Lenor writes that she told one of the other girls
about what had happened. The girl just shrugged. He does
things like that all the time, the girl told Leonor.
I explained to Lenora the reason for my call about
my mother in law, Becky, about Copenhagen, about a girl
who grew up at the home named Barbara Wilson.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Oh, yeah, yeah, I do remember Barbara. Yeah, she was
a real cute little kid. She was sort of dark
haired and quite pretty, and she got along real well
with the other kids. She actually was adopted by somebody
after she left there, and she got in a lot
of trouble or something.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
I explained to Leonora that, in fact, it's that trouble
that I'm phoning about. Is there anything from Barbara's past
that might help explain why she later did the thing
she did? Lenora volunteers the details she remembers, including how
Barbara came to live at the home.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Their background was kind of cool. I think that the
mother was slightly feeble minded and had a terrible palsy.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
A palsy a nervous disorder.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, and she was shaking so hard all the time.
She couldn't take care of her children.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Barbara wasn't the only Wilson and left at the orphanage.
An older brother, Earl, had been brought there too. Growing up,
though Barbara and Earl barely knew each other, since Vogel
kept the boys and girls segregated. When I ask Leonora
if she thinks John Vogel might have prayed on Barbara.
She says she doesn't think so that it wouldn't have
fit his mo O. Vogel was mostly focused on the
(12:19):
older girls. Barbara was only a couple of months old
when she arrived at the orphanage.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
She was taken special care of by one of our teachers,
Miriam Jones, just almost adopted her as her private child.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Was it was it typical like were there other teachers
who kind of adopted informally adopted students there?
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Or was that? Oh? Miriam Jones fell in love with
Barbara and she raised her in her You know, the
workers had these separate rooms, and she kept Barbara in
there with her and took care of her, and really
it was wonderful to her.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Leonor depicts the Galileean Children's Home as a dogg eat
dog war. There were the favorites, and there were the
semi favorites, Lenor tells me, and then they were the
lost and forgotten. You needed someone looking out for you
to survive. Listening to Leonore, a pattern emerges. Miss Jones
at the galilee In Children's Home, the warden Miss Wheeler
(13:18):
at the Marysville Prison. Throughout her life, Barbara procured benefactors.
One of the first things Becky told me about Barbara
was that she knew how to get what she wanted.
But what Becky thought was a function of growing up
rich and spoiled was actually just the opposite. Barbara learned
(13:38):
to manipulate in order to survive, and it might have
all begun at the galilee In Children's home, but when the.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Home all broke open, she kind of, like everybody else,
got scattered to the winds.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Though John Vogel was acquitted of the rape charges, he
lost his license to operate the orphanage, so he went
to Florida, where he tried reopening with the remaining children
from the Galilean Home. Among them Barbara.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
She was one of the kids that was left because
so many people came and took their children, and Welsare
came and took some of them. But if she went
to Florida, this means she was one of the core
group left that nobody claimed.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
And so unclaimed. At the age of nine, Barbara moved
three states away with an accused rapist. With his reputation
in ruins, Fogel wasn't able to get the orphanage in
Florida off the ground, and when it finally fell apart completely.
(14:40):
That was when Barbara's life became even less stable. She
bounced around in the Florida foster care system, and at
the age of thirteen, was brought back to Kentucky, where
she moved every few months between distant relatives, some so
poor their homes were without running water. In her junior
year of high school, at the suggestion of her benefactor
from the children's Home, Miriam Jones, Barbara enrolled in a
(15:03):
high school run by a nearby college called Berea, and
it was at Berea that she met the family that
would finally adopt her, the Shots. In a long interview
Barbara gave to the Papers after her arrest, she recounts
the day she originally met Jane Shot. Jane was a
doctor at the Berea infirmary, but Barbara says she didn't
(15:25):
meet her as a patient. Instead, she went to the
infirmary that day to see the doctor that everyone said
was Barbara's doppelganger. All the kids on campus told me
that she and I looked so much alike it was uncanny.
Barbara is quoted as saying, and sure enough, we did,
and it's true. In a photograph, taken around the time.
(15:47):
Barbara and Jane stand side by side. They're both petite,
with small noses and tight lip smiles. They both have
dark hair the same short, boyish cuts. Barbara got close
with Jane and her husband, Charles, a dean at BREA.
Charles tutored Barbara in math, and Barbara babysat their two
younger biological children. When the family moved from Kentucky to
(16:08):
Ohio before Barbara's senior year, they adopted her and took
her with them. Something still doesn't make sense to me, though.
It's one thing to befriend a young high school student,
but another to adopt her, especially at seventeen, one year
away from legal adulthood.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
He had a wife that was much younger than he was.
Speaker 5 (16:29):
Other than that, I don't remember a single thing.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Charles was a beloved figure at Berea College. The class
of nineteen fifty nine even dedicated their yearbook to him.
But when I reach out to alumni who might have
insight into the adoption, I don't find much.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
I don't really think that I have anything to contribute.
He was a kind man.
Speaker 7 (16:51):
I have absolutely no memories, no contact.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
I make a request to Barea for Charles's papers, his
personal notes and correspondence, which they keep in their collection,
anything that might offer information about the family, And I
find something among the documents is the transcript of a
tribute Charles was honored with after his death. In it,
there's a section dedicated to honoring Charles Shutt the family Man.
(17:18):
But as I read further, I slowly realized that the
family under discussion is not the family he had with Jane.
It turns out before Charles was married to Jane, he
was married to a woman named Elva Weidler, with whom
he had two children. In the tribute, neither Jane nor
Barbara are so much as mentioned. They're missing from the
story of Charles's life. Just like in Barbara's obituary, anything
(17:42):
in anyone remotely related to the tragedy has been completely erased.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Yeah, you really picked a story.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
This is Charles's granddaughter from that first family. Something new
to tell me about Barbara after the break.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
Yeah, you really picked a story.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Charles's granddaughter asked me not to use her real name,
so we decided to call her Nancy. It seems I
phoned her in the middle of her daily exercise.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
I've been walking because I can't get my steps counted
while I talk.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Okay, what do you how many steps do you average
a day?
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Five thousand is sedentary, so you have to have over
five thousand a day. Yeah, how many do you get?
Speaker 6 (18:46):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (18:46):
These days, after a few of my patented hems and
trademarked hawes, I reluctantly check my iPhone way below sedentary.
It seems I haven't left my desk in days. Barbara's
case has become all consuming. Nancy is Charles's granddaughter from
(19:08):
his first marriage, but she grew up knowing Jane and
Charles and their kids, which is to say, Nancy grew
up knowing Charles's adopted daughter, Barbara.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
She was aunt Barbara. She was part of the family.
It is kind of a surprise, obviously when someone is
adopted when they're an adult, but we didn't really think
about that.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
According to Nancy, Barbara was distraught when she learned of
the move. Charles and Jane were planning from Berea to Cincinnati,
which is why they adopted her.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
She was just begging them to take her with them,
don't leave her behind, don't abandon her. And then if
they left, you had no one she had no family,
She had no one. Barbara was communicating to them that
if they didn't adopt her, they were hurting her, they
were harming her.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Once the adoption was official, Nancy says Charles and Jane
were very attentive to Barbara, sometimes at the expense of
their other kids. She remembers family gatherings where all the
energy was focused on to Barbara, what she was up to,
how she was doing. Nancy remembers an extended family conversation
about Barbara's trip to Copenhagen, a graduation gift from Jane
(20:22):
and Charles. Nancy says was especially devoted to Barbara. He'd
buy her anything she wanted and take her on expensive vacations.
In fact, the summer after Jane's murder, while Barbara was
out on bail, Charles and she went to Florida together.
Throughout his life, Charles remained convinced that Barbara was innocent.
He continued to visit her in prison, driving the two
(20:44):
hours each way and always bringing little gifts.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
He had an emotional attachment to Barbara.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, I mean, wouldn't that have been why he I mean,
did he think of her as a daughter? Nancy hesitates
choosing her words carefully.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
They were According to one of my cousins, they were
closer than you would expect a father daughter pair to
be in our culture.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
How do you think they meant that?
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Well, I know what he meant. He meant that he
went to a drive in movie with them, and he
was in the front seat and they were in the
back seat. He described them as hugging and.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Kissing, like romantically like.
Speaker 8 (21:42):
Yes, yes, that was one of the discoveries that they
had some kind of romantic relationship.
Speaker 6 (21:58):
Charles and Barbara.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Yeh yeah. For my mother in law, Becky and I,
the discovery fills a gap and are understanding of Barbara's
motive to commit murder?
Speaker 6 (22:09):
Was it to get rid of a rival? I mean,
if she was in love in that way with her father,
how did she feel about her mother? Did she hate
her mother than her mother was in the way?
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Did Barbara murder Jane not just because Jane was kicking
her out of the house, as the prosecution argued, but
because she saw her mother as a romantic competitor, someone
who was trying to break up her and Charles.
Speaker 6 (22:34):
In some ways, it kind of makes the story, It
makes it makes more sense I mean, if you're in
love with somebody and you feel like that's going to
be taken away from you, that's a pretty strong motivation.
(22:55):
You know, you can fall pretty hard when you're a
twenty three year old girl.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
You can also be taken advantage of. I think back
on the letters from Charles that Becky so envied in
Copenhagen and what they might have actually contained. Charles had
been fifty one years old when he married Jane, who
was just twenty at the time, around the same age
Barbara was when they adopted her. Was Charles using Barbara
to replace Jane? Did Jane want Barbara out of the
(23:22):
house because Jane was threatened by her? I put the
theory to Charles's granddaughter Nancy.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
I could only speculate that Jane would be more concerned
about the boundary violate about this as a boundary violation
than as a threat to herself. She would not see
it as healthy.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Not healthy for Barbara. Correct that is, Jane wasn't threatened
by Barbara, she was worried for her. She might have
been more concerned with Barbara's well being.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Yeah, in Barbara's mental health.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
There's another version of how Barbara first met Jane that
day on the Berea campus, one that has nothing to
do with them looking alike. According to the court transcript,
Barbara was brought to the campus infirmary because she'd attempted
suicide by drinking ammonia, and Jane was the attending physician
who received her. Jane would have known just how fragile
(24:26):
Barbara was. Nancy believes that Jane was kicking Barbara out
of the house not because she was jealous, but to
protect her from Charles. All Barbara's life, she sought benefactors, protectors, mothers.
It's ironic that the mother who was arguably trying to
protect her from the greatest harm, the one really looking
(24:47):
out for her well being, is the one Barbara killed.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
I would like to know what else your mother in
law knew about Barbara. Did Barbara ever mention her by
a lot her family of origin, No, because she never
mentioned them to us either. The story we got was
that she had no family, and it wasn't even true
her obituary it describes a family.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
The shots aren't mentioned in Barbara's obituary, but the Wilsons are.
Besides Barbara's deceased brother, Earl, the obituary names a few
surviving relatives, including a niece. Patty a reach out to her,
and though she doesn't want to be recorded, she agrees
to talk. Patty tells me that in the last few
years of Barbara's life, her extended biological family reconnected with her.
(25:47):
As it turns out, the Wilsons knew of their distant
and Barbara, who had been abandoned as a baby, and
finally tracked her down for the first time in Barbara's life.
She wasn't the one seeking family, family was seeking her.
Patty tells me that in her later years, long after prison,
Barbara moved into a retirement home. The other residents were
(26:08):
from wealthier backgrounds, and Patty says Barbara try as she
might never really passed for the fancy type like she
had in Copenhagen. In Becky's eyes, Patty thinks Barbara was
shunned by the other residents and that drove her to
her death. It was a suicide. Patty tells me Barbara
committed suicide in twenty twelve. In the end, there were
(26:30):
no benefactors in the home to turn to, no one
to offer sanctuary. In trying to understand who Barbara was.
I spoke to many people who knew her from many
different points in her life, her school days, her working life,
her retirement. But when I talked to the kids she
(26:53):
lived with at the Galilee in Children's home, there was
a recurring refrain. No one wanted to believe that Barbara
had done it, perhaps because Barbara was the one who
got out, the one who graduated college, who found a
nice family and made something of herself. I'm eighty four
years old, said one woman from the home, who didn't
want me to use her name. What happens to you
(27:14):
as a child, you will never get over it, never ever, ever.
I often wonder how many of these kids made it okay,
how many of these kids didn't go to jail or
something like that.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
A baby was born at the county jail and we
were asked to take him. His name was Jackie.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
This is Leonora again, John Vogel's daughter, reading from her memoir.
In it, she never mentions Barbara, but she does include
a passage about a little boy named Jackie. Jackie is
the pseudonym Lenor used for Earl Wilson, Barbara's older brother.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
His name was Jackie. The mother was a ripe victim,
and the baby was tiny and sickly. It was a risk.
If he had died, we would have been in for
some kind of investigation. But the baby lived and no
one ever inquired about him, and watched him grow and
become a beautiful child. Sometimes I stare at him, wondering
(28:08):
how such an exquisite thing could come into the world
under such horrible conditions. Was it possible that each life
was a fresh start, a gift channel straight from the beyond,
without regard to its surroundings? Did Jackie have a chance
to grow up normal? Sometimes I get a bit choked
(28:32):
up and I can't do it on the Did Jackie
have a chance to grow up normal? Did any of us?
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Thank you, Leonora. When my mother in law, Becky first
told me Barbara's story, Copenhagen was just one more interlude
in Barbara's life with privilege and good fortune. But Copenhagen
might have been a special for Barbara as it was
for Becky. The trip is mentioned in the court transcript.
(29:08):
It comes up when Barbara's lawyer asked Barbara to give
an account of her life. She lists a series of
milestones getting into Berea, finally being adopted and the summer
she spent working at the laundromat in Denmark. The first
time I saw it, it surprised me. But now knowing
what Barbara's life was like before the trip and after it,
(29:29):
I think I understand.
Speaker 6 (29:31):
I believe that she was totally happy when she was
in Denmark, and I just wonder if maybe that wasn't
one of the happiest times, or certainly her last happy time.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Yeah, it might have been.
Speaker 6 (29:46):
Our friendship was almost I had a purity to it,
like we didn't bring our baggage to it. We enjoyed
the moment with each other and that was all. It
had no past and it had no future no matter
what she did afterwards. We had what we had and
(30:11):
that won't change for me.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
While at my in laws for dinner recently, I saw
pinned to the kitchen courtboard, beside the emergency phone numbers
and coupons, a photograph of Becky and Barbara. In the photo,
they're in city Hall Square in Copenhagen. Becky is in
jeans and a striped t shirt, carrying a tote bag.
Barbara has an expensive looking leather purse and is wearing
(30:37):
a skirt and trench coat. She looks as glamorous as
she does in all the newspapers and courtroom photos, except
in this photo she's smiling.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
Now that the fern entures riff turning to its goodwill home,
now that the last month's rent is scheming with.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
The damage to poss take this moment.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
To to solve.
Speaker 5 (31:45):
If we ment, if we talked, we.
Speaker 4 (31:49):
Remember felt around for five t from things that accidentally
talked to.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Stevie Lane, along
with me Jonathan Goldstein, and Maheiney mcgaukerd Our. Senior producer
is Khalila Holt. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg,
Fia Bennen, Justin McGoldrick, j T. Townsend, and Jackie Cohen.
Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows,
John K. Sampson, Sean Jacoby, Michael Hurst, and Bobby Lord.
(32:23):
Additional music credits can be found on our website, gimltmedia
dot com slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by The
Weaker Bands, courtesy of Epitaph Records. Follow us on Twitter
at Heavyweight or email us at Heavyweight at gimltmedia dot
com we'll be back with new episodes after Thanksgiving, exclusively
on Spotify
This episode is the second in a two part series.
If you haven't heard Barbara Part one, please go back
and listen. Thanks, and on with the show. Yeah, you
know I have a passion for dance.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
No, I know that.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
And I was wondering if I could because I'm gonna
be giving break dancing lessons online, and I was wondering
if you could put up a flyer about it at
the hospital. Do you guys have like a you know,
like a little staff room or something not a lover
of dance, I guess from Gimblet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein
(00:42):
and this is Heavyweight Today's episode Barbara Part two Barbara Wilson.
Right after the break, Barbara's online obituary contradicted everything my
(01:09):
mother in law, Becky, thought she knew about her old friend.
So Becky tasked me with finding out the truth. In
the process, I uncovered the murder Barbara committed in nineteen
sixty eight, But reading through the trial transcripts, the prosecution's
argument didn't make sense to Becky or to me. Why
would being asked to leave the nest provoke Barbara to murder?
(01:31):
To understand the why, I need to better understand the
who who was Barbara before Becky met her in Copenhagen.
So I'm heading back to the beginning when Barbara Shot
was Barbara Wilson. I start where I always start when
I'm trying to get to the bottom of anything in
my life. YouTube. Me and a buddy, Brian are down
(01:53):
here off of Whipper Wheel. This is Douglas and his
buddy Brian. On their YouTube channel. They post videos of
semitaries and other creepy locales that have fallen into ruin, and.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
We have located the remnants to an old house down here.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
What's this place called Galilean Children's Home?
Speaker 4 (02:09):
Galilean Children's Home.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
You can google it yourself.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
If you were to google it, you'd see that the
Galilean Children's Home was an orphanage outside Corbin, Kentucky that
shut down in the nineteen fifties. The orphanage is where
Barbara was raised, back before she was adopted by the Shots,
back when she was Barbara Wilson.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
Dad, Gum, here's an old boot.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
There's a kid's sized boot right there. Founded in nineteen
thirty nine by a self ordained mountain preacher named John Vogel,
the orphanage was home to over eighty kids who considered
themselves brothers and sisters and called John Vogel Daddy. When
he was a boy, a house fire killed Vogel's five
step siblings but spared him. He took it as a
(02:54):
sign that he'd been chosen by God for a higher purpose.
Vogel brag that the Galileean Children's Home wasn't supported by
any church, state, or public endowment. He raised money through
donations and by touring the kids around the country in
a yellow school bus as a children's choir. Much of
(03:17):
what I learn about Vogel in the Home comes from
his autobiography, which, as my nephew THEO learned during his
lessons with Becky, is a book written by the person
that it's about.
Speaker 6 (03:29):
Right Otto means self.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Vogel's autobiography, This Happened in the Hills of Kentucky, is
filled with folksy anecdotes about precocious kids getting up to
naughty shenanigans. I search the book for a mention of Barbara,
but only find one anecdote. It's about a little Barbara
who tries to convince Vogel to let her chew gum.
Barbara is a quote champion chatterbox who argues that if
(03:55):
her mouth is busy chewing gum, she won't be able
to talk as much. Barbara is given no last name,
but she reminds me of adult Barbara, who knew how
to get what she wanted. One of the comments on
Barbara's online obituary is from a fellow Galilean Children's Home resident,
(04:16):
a man named Larry Brewster, whom I decided to phone.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
Mister Bruce's speaking.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Oh Hello, mister Brewster.
Speaker 7 (04:24):
Yes, how did I guess? I'll like you to get
to call the new Oh.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I don't know how lucky it makes you, but I
appreciate you saying that I am. Once I've hand fanned
the blush from my cheeks. I explained to Larry that
I'm calling about Barbara Wilson and what life was like
at the Galilean Children's Home.
Speaker 7 (04:44):
We had as many as twenty twenty one, twenty four
of us in one room.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
We had three months high m hmm.
Speaker 7 (04:53):
I was taken there at the age of two years old.
I stayed there until nineteen fifty five. I brought them
thirteen years one long as it kids.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Hah.
Speaker 5 (05:02):
I thought that's where everybody lived, had no, No, my house.
Speaker 7 (05:12):
Wants me to tell you that we had Christmas dinner
with Colonel Sanders five years in a row.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Does Larry mean that Colonel Sanders? I wonder, But then
I take stock of my Yankee bias. Can one not
earn the rank of colonel in the great state of
Kentucky without being mistaken for a white van Dyke chicken
frying string tie tying fast food mascot. But Larry assures
me that indeed he is talking about that colonel. It seems.
(05:38):
Colonel Harlan David Sanders was a patron of the Galilee
and Children's Home, and according to his memoir, life as
I have known it has been finger licking good. The
colonel had many failed careers insurance salesman, army mule tender,
ferryboat entrepreneur, and, perhaps most alarming of all, amateur obstetrician.
(05:58):
But then, at the age of sixty five, the colonel
opened his first KFC, and where he'd failed at birthing children,
the Colonel excelled at birthing chickens. His very first restaurant
was located in Corbin, near the Orphanage. So you guys
had fried chicken for Christmas time.
Speaker 7 (06:16):
Chicken everything, apple pie and ice cream on the cob,
biscuits and gravy.
Speaker 5 (06:23):
We had it all. He spoiled. He said he wanted
to be our grandpa.
Speaker 7 (06:26):
Did you know it won't be legal, but I will
be your grandpa.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Larry speaks warmly of his time at the home. He
says he attended class in a little schoolhouse, sang in
the choir, and performed farm chores like milking goats and cows.
When I asked him about Barbara, though he doesn't remember much.
The boys and girls were kept pretty separate.
Speaker 7 (06:48):
The one time we saw the girls are at school
because the miss Halls were separated. Girls had their own
Miss Hall and the boys had their own Miss Hall.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
John Vogel was pretty strict about segregating the boys and girls,
especially as they entered puberty. Was John Vogel like a
like a father?
Speaker 5 (07:04):
Oh? He was more definitely Uh?
Speaker 7 (07:06):
In his mind. He wasn't for ours. It was was
we call him Dad Vogul. I have no nothing but
but uh.
Speaker 5 (07:14):
The rest of the memories. I tried to forget the
bad ones. Sorry, I tried to forget the bad ones.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
And there there were bad ones. Well, Larry hesitates, as
though what he's thinking of saying next might stir up
the bad ones.
Speaker 7 (07:30):
They didn't have me come back once after I had
left to go to court for Dad Vogel.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
I had to go to court for some reason, and
I went to court. I gave him a.
Speaker 7 (07:41):
Testimony, and I don't know if it helped the director,
if it hurt it did he did ask me to
come back anymore.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Huh, what what what do you remember about the court case?
Speaker 5 (07:50):
No? I really don't know much about it.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
What court case is Larry talking about? When I get
off the phone, I look into it, and the records
I discover reveal a much darker portrait of the place
Barbara was raised than that of Larry's memory. And just
a quick warning, the details I'm about to share deal
with child sexual abuse and other sensitive subject matter. In
(08:15):
nineteen fifty five, sixteen years after opening the home, John
Vogel was indicted for rape. A headline from the Lexington
Herald reads, Daddy John Vogel was a serpent in a
hilly garden of Eden. Two sisters who had grown up
at the home accused Vogel of raping them. The abuse
began in their early teens and lasted years. Vogel threatened
(08:36):
to send them to jail if they ever told anyone.
Whennita was twenty when she finally came forward Ruby nineteen.
Ruby's case went to court first, and parenthetically it was
Colonel Sanders who posted Vogel's bail. A hung jury led
to a mistrial, and at the retrial, Vogel was found innocent.
(08:57):
As for Weanita, fearing a trial would cause her public embarrassment,
she eventually withdrew the charges, but she always maintained that
her accusations against Vogel were true. John Vogel wasn't the
only person to publish a memoir about life at the
Galilean home.
Speaker 6 (09:18):
Memoir comes from a French word meaning memory.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah, it sort of sounds like memory, yes, Now a
memoir is the self anointed. Love and Terror in my
Father's House is written by John Vogel's only biological child,
Leonor Duprie. Lenore is now eighty seven years old and
lives in a Senior Residence hotel in Michigan, where she
talks to me over the phone about her father.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
He could charm the bands off the people, you know,
and everybody thought he was a real wonderful person, but
behind the scenes he was pretty much of a dirty dealer.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
How do you mean, Well, if she got all.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Involved with these girls because he didn't want them ever
to go away, so he started missing around with them
so they would feel obligated to him. Oh, you know,
then everything just kind of got in the wrong pocket.
You know, people have can try to make you do
things for God, and it's not really for God. It's
(10:18):
for them, and they hold the power of you that way.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
In her book, Lenor describes her father calling her into
his study after a fight they'd had. All the other
girls seems so committed to me, Fogel says, why are
you so slow to commit yourself to God? He reached
up and put his hand on my breast, then pulled
me down and kissed me on the mouth. I shuddered. Later,
(10:43):
Lenor writes that she told one of the other girls
about what had happened. The girl just shrugged. He does
things like that all the time, the girl told Leonor.
I explained to Lenora the reason for my call about
my mother in law, Becky, about Copenhagen, about a girl
who grew up at the home named Barbara Wilson.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Oh, yeah, yeah, I do remember Barbara. Yeah, she was
a real cute little kid. She was sort of dark
haired and quite pretty, and she got along real well
with the other kids. She actually was adopted by somebody
after she left there, and she got in a lot
of trouble or something.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
I explained to Leonora that, in fact, it's that trouble
that I'm phoning about. Is there anything from Barbara's past
that might help explain why she later did the thing
she did? Lenora volunteers the details she remembers, including how
Barbara came to live at the home.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Their background was kind of cool. I think that the
mother was slightly feeble minded and had a terrible palsy.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
A palsy a nervous disorder.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, and she was shaking so hard all the time.
She couldn't take care of her children.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Barbara wasn't the only Wilson and left at the orphanage.
An older brother, Earl, had been brought there too. Growing up,
though Barbara and Earl barely knew each other, since Vogel
kept the boys and girls segregated. When I ask Leonora
if she thinks John Vogel might have prayed on Barbara.
She says she doesn't think so that it wouldn't have
fit his mo O. Vogel was mostly focused on the
(12:19):
older girls. Barbara was only a couple of months old
when she arrived at the orphanage.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
She was taken special care of by one of our teachers,
Miriam Jones, just almost adopted her as her private child.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Was it was it typical like were there other teachers
who kind of adopted informally adopted students there?
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Or was that? Oh? Miriam Jones fell in love with
Barbara and she raised her in her You know, the
workers had these separate rooms, and she kept Barbara in
there with her and took care of her, and really
it was wonderful to her.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Leonor depicts the Galileean Children's Home as a dogg eat
dog war. There were the favorites, and there were the
semi favorites, Lenor tells me, and then they were the
lost and forgotten. You needed someone looking out for you
to survive. Listening to Leonore, a pattern emerges. Miss Jones
at the galilee In Children's Home, the warden Miss Wheeler
(13:18):
at the Marysville Prison. Throughout her life, Barbara procured benefactors.
One of the first things Becky told me about Barbara
was that she knew how to get what she wanted.
But what Becky thought was a function of growing up
rich and spoiled was actually just the opposite. Barbara learned
(13:38):
to manipulate in order to survive, and it might have
all begun at the galilee In Children's home, but when the.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Home all broke open, she kind of, like everybody else,
got scattered to the winds.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Though John Vogel was acquitted of the rape charges, he
lost his license to operate the orphanage, so he went
to Florida, where he tried reopening with the remaining children
from the Galilean Home. Among them Barbara.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
She was one of the kids that was left because
so many people came and took their children, and Welsare
came and took some of them. But if she went
to Florida, this means she was one of the core
group left that nobody claimed.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
And so unclaimed. At the age of nine, Barbara moved
three states away with an accused rapist. With his reputation
in ruins, Fogel wasn't able to get the orphanage in
Florida off the ground, and when it finally fell apart completely.
(14:40):
That was when Barbara's life became even less stable. She
bounced around in the Florida foster care system, and at
the age of thirteen, was brought back to Kentucky, where
she moved every few months between distant relatives, some so
poor their homes were without running water. In her junior
year of high school, at the suggestion of her benefactor
from the children's Home, Miriam Jones, Barbara enrolled in a
(15:03):
high school run by a nearby college called Berea, and
it was at Berea that she met the family that
would finally adopt her, the Shots. In a long interview
Barbara gave to the Papers after her arrest, she recounts
the day she originally met Jane Shot. Jane was a
doctor at the Berea infirmary, but Barbara says she didn't
(15:25):
meet her as a patient. Instead, she went to the
infirmary that day to see the doctor that everyone said
was Barbara's doppelganger. All the kids on campus told me
that she and I looked so much alike it was uncanny.
Barbara is quoted as saying, and sure enough, we did,
and it's true. In a photograph, taken around the time.
(15:47):
Barbara and Jane stand side by side. They're both petite,
with small noses and tight lip smiles. They both have
dark hair the same short, boyish cuts. Barbara got close
with Jane and her husband, Charles, a dean at BREA.
Charles tutored Barbara in math, and Barbara babysat their two
younger biological children. When the family moved from Kentucky to
(16:08):
Ohio before Barbara's senior year, they adopted her and took
her with them. Something still doesn't make sense to me, though.
It's one thing to befriend a young high school student,
but another to adopt her, especially at seventeen, one year
away from legal adulthood.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
He had a wife that was much younger than he was.
Speaker 5 (16:29):
Other than that, I don't remember a single thing.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Charles was a beloved figure at Berea College. The class
of nineteen fifty nine even dedicated their yearbook to him.
But when I reach out to alumni who might have
insight into the adoption, I don't find much.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
I don't really think that I have anything to contribute.
He was a kind man.
Speaker 7 (16:51):
I have absolutely no memories, no contact.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
I make a request to Barea for Charles's papers, his
personal notes and correspondence, which they keep in their collection,
anything that might offer information about the family, And I
find something among the documents is the transcript of a
tribute Charles was honored with after his death. In it,
there's a section dedicated to honoring Charles Shutt the family Man.
(17:18):
But as I read further, I slowly realized that the
family under discussion is not the family he had with Jane.
It turns out before Charles was married to Jane, he
was married to a woman named Elva Weidler, with whom
he had two children. In the tribute, neither Jane nor
Barbara are so much as mentioned. They're missing from the
story of Charles's life. Just like in Barbara's obituary, anything
(17:42):
in anyone remotely related to the tragedy has been completely erased.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Yeah, you really picked a story.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
This is Charles's granddaughter from that first family. Something new
to tell me about Barbara after the break.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
Yeah, you really picked a story.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Charles's granddaughter asked me not to use her real name,
so we decided to call her Nancy. It seems I
phoned her in the middle of her daily exercise.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
I've been walking because I can't get my steps counted
while I talk.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Okay, what do you how many steps do you average
a day?
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Five thousand is sedentary, so you have to have over
five thousand a day. Yeah, how many do you get?
Speaker 6 (18:46):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (18:46):
These days, after a few of my patented hems and
trademarked hawes, I reluctantly check my iPhone way below sedentary.
It seems I haven't left my desk in days. Barbara's
case has become all consuming. Nancy is Charles's granddaughter from
(19:08):
his first marriage, but she grew up knowing Jane and
Charles and their kids, which is to say, Nancy grew
up knowing Charles's adopted daughter, Barbara.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
She was aunt Barbara. She was part of the family.
It is kind of a surprise, obviously when someone is
adopted when they're an adult, but we didn't really think
about that.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
According to Nancy, Barbara was distraught when she learned of
the move. Charles and Jane were planning from Berea to Cincinnati,
which is why they adopted her.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
She was just begging them to take her with them,
don't leave her behind, don't abandon her. And then if
they left, you had no one she had no family,
She had no one. Barbara was communicating to them that
if they didn't adopt her, they were hurting her, they
were harming her.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Once the adoption was official, Nancy says Charles and Jane
were very attentive to Barbara, sometimes at the expense of
their other kids. She remembers family gatherings where all the
energy was focused on to Barbara, what she was up to,
how she was doing. Nancy remembers an extended family conversation
about Barbara's trip to Copenhagen, a graduation gift from Jane
(20:22):
and Charles. Nancy says was especially devoted to Barbara. He'd
buy her anything she wanted and take her on expensive vacations.
In fact, the summer after Jane's murder, while Barbara was
out on bail, Charles and she went to Florida together.
Throughout his life, Charles remained convinced that Barbara was innocent.
He continued to visit her in prison, driving the two
(20:44):
hours each way and always bringing little gifts.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
He had an emotional attachment to Barbara.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, I mean, wouldn't that have been why he I mean,
did he think of her as a daughter? Nancy hesitates
choosing her words carefully.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
They were According to one of my cousins, they were
closer than you would expect a father daughter pair to
be in our culture.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
How do you think they meant that?
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Well, I know what he meant. He meant that he
went to a drive in movie with them, and he
was in the front seat and they were in the
back seat. He described them as hugging and.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Kissing, like romantically like.
Speaker 8 (21:42):
Yes, yes, that was one of the discoveries that they
had some kind of romantic relationship.
Speaker 6 (21:58):
Charles and Barbara.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Yeh yeah. For my mother in law, Becky and I,
the discovery fills a gap and are understanding of Barbara's
motive to commit murder?
Speaker 6 (22:09):
Was it to get rid of a rival? I mean,
if she was in love in that way with her father,
how did she feel about her mother? Did she hate
her mother than her mother was in the way?
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Did Barbara murder Jane not just because Jane was kicking
her out of the house, as the prosecution argued, but
because she saw her mother as a romantic competitor, someone
who was trying to break up her and Charles.
Speaker 6 (22:34):
In some ways, it kind of makes the story, It
makes it makes more sense I mean, if you're in
love with somebody and you feel like that's going to
be taken away from you, that's a pretty strong motivation.
(22:55):
You know, you can fall pretty hard when you're a
twenty three year old girl.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
You can also be taken advantage of. I think back
on the letters from Charles that Becky so envied in
Copenhagen and what they might have actually contained. Charles had
been fifty one years old when he married Jane, who
was just twenty at the time, around the same age
Barbara was when they adopted her. Was Charles using Barbara
to replace Jane? Did Jane want Barbara out of the
(23:22):
house because Jane was threatened by her? I put the
theory to Charles's granddaughter Nancy.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
I could only speculate that Jane would be more concerned
about the boundary violate about this as a boundary violation
than as a threat to herself. She would not see
it as healthy.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Not healthy for Barbara. Correct that is, Jane wasn't threatened
by Barbara, she was worried for her. She might have
been more concerned with Barbara's well being.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Yeah, in Barbara's mental health.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
There's another version of how Barbara first met Jane that
day on the Berea campus, one that has nothing to
do with them looking alike. According to the court transcript,
Barbara was brought to the campus infirmary because she'd attempted
suicide by drinking ammonia, and Jane was the attending physician
who received her. Jane would have known just how fragile
(24:26):
Barbara was. Nancy believes that Jane was kicking Barbara out
of the house not because she was jealous, but to
protect her from Charles. All Barbara's life, she sought benefactors, protectors, mothers.
It's ironic that the mother who was arguably trying to
protect her from the greatest harm, the one really looking
(24:47):
out for her well being, is the one Barbara killed.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
I would like to know what else your mother in
law knew about Barbara. Did Barbara ever mention her by
a lot her family of origin, No, because she never
mentioned them to us either. The story we got was
that she had no family, and it wasn't even true
her obituary it describes a family.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
The shots aren't mentioned in Barbara's obituary, but the Wilsons are.
Besides Barbara's deceased brother, Earl, the obituary names a few
surviving relatives, including a niece. Patty a reach out to her,
and though she doesn't want to be recorded, she agrees
to talk. Patty tells me that in the last few
years of Barbara's life, her extended biological family reconnected with her.
(25:47):
As it turns out, the Wilsons knew of their distant
and Barbara, who had been abandoned as a baby, and
finally tracked her down for the first time in Barbara's life.
She wasn't the one seeking family, family was seeking her.
Patty tells me that in her later years, long after prison,
Barbara moved into a retirement home. The other residents were
(26:08):
from wealthier backgrounds, and Patty says Barbara try as she
might never really passed for the fancy type like she
had in Copenhagen. In Becky's eyes, Patty thinks Barbara was
shunned by the other residents and that drove her to
her death. It was a suicide. Patty tells me Barbara
committed suicide in twenty twelve. In the end, there were
(26:30):
no benefactors in the home to turn to, no one
to offer sanctuary. In trying to understand who Barbara was.
I spoke to many people who knew her from many
different points in her life, her school days, her working life,
her retirement. But when I talked to the kids she
(26:53):
lived with at the Galilee in Children's home, there was
a recurring refrain. No one wanted to believe that Barbara
had done it, perhaps because Barbara was the one who
got out, the one who graduated college, who found a
nice family and made something of herself. I'm eighty four
years old, said one woman from the home, who didn't
want me to use her name. What happens to you
(27:14):
as a child, you will never get over it, never ever, ever.
I often wonder how many of these kids made it okay,
how many of these kids didn't go to jail or
something like that.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
A baby was born at the county jail and we
were asked to take him. His name was Jackie.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
This is Leonora again, John Vogel's daughter, reading from her memoir.
In it, she never mentions Barbara, but she does include
a passage about a little boy named Jackie. Jackie is
the pseudonym Lenor used for Earl Wilson, Barbara's older brother.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
His name was Jackie. The mother was a ripe victim,
and the baby was tiny and sickly. It was a risk.
If he had died, we would have been in for
some kind of investigation. But the baby lived and no
one ever inquired about him, and watched him grow and
become a beautiful child. Sometimes I stare at him, wondering
(28:08):
how such an exquisite thing could come into the world
under such horrible conditions. Was it possible that each life
was a fresh start, a gift channel straight from the beyond,
without regard to its surroundings? Did Jackie have a chance
to grow up normal? Sometimes I get a bit choked
(28:32):
up and I can't do it on the Did Jackie
have a chance to grow up normal? Did any of us?
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Thank you, Leonora. When my mother in law, Becky first
told me Barbara's story, Copenhagen was just one more interlude
in Barbara's life with privilege and good fortune. But Copenhagen
might have been a special for Barbara as it was
for Becky. The trip is mentioned in the court transcript.
(29:08):
It comes up when Barbara's lawyer asked Barbara to give
an account of her life. She lists a series of
milestones getting into Berea, finally being adopted and the summer
she spent working at the laundromat in Denmark. The first
time I saw it, it surprised me. But now knowing
what Barbara's life was like before the trip and after it,
(29:29):
I think I understand.
Speaker 6 (29:31):
I believe that she was totally happy when she was
in Denmark, and I just wonder if maybe that wasn't
one of the happiest times, or certainly her last happy time.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Yeah, it might have been.
Speaker 6 (29:46):
Our friendship was almost I had a purity to it,
like we didn't bring our baggage to it. We enjoyed
the moment with each other and that was all. It
had no past and it had no future no matter
what she did afterwards. We had what we had and
(30:11):
that won't change for me.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
While at my in laws for dinner recently, I saw
pinned to the kitchen courtboard, beside the emergency phone numbers
and coupons, a photograph of Becky and Barbara. In the photo,
they're in city Hall Square in Copenhagen. Becky is in
jeans and a striped t shirt, carrying a tote bag.
Barbara has an expensive looking leather purse and is wearing
(30:37):
a skirt and trench coat. She looks as glamorous as
she does in all the newspapers and courtroom photos, except
in this photo she's smiling.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
Now that the fern entures riff turning to its goodwill home,
now that the last month's rent is scheming with.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
The damage to poss take this moment.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
To to solve.
Speaker 5 (31:45):
If we ment, if we talked, we.
Speaker 4 (31:49):
Remember felt around for five t from things that accidentally
talked to.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Stevie Lane, along
with me Jonathan Goldstein, and Maheiney mcgaukerd Our. Senior producer
is Khalila Holt. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg,
Fia Bennen, Justin McGoldrick, j T. Townsend, and Jackie Cohen.
Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows,
John K. Sampson, Sean Jacoby, Michael Hurst, and Bobby Lord.
(32:23):
Additional music credits can be found on our website, gimltmedia
dot com slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by The
Weaker Bands, courtesy of Epitaph Records. Follow us on Twitter
at Heavyweight or email us at Heavyweight at gimltmedia dot
com we'll be back with new episodes after Thanksgiving, exclusively
on Spotify
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