Voodoo Murders | Halloween 2025 with Marlene and Henry | Podcast - Stories of the Supernatural

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, this is Marlene with Miami Ghost Chronicles and I
want to welcome you to another episode of Stories of
the Supernatural. Wherever you find us, whether it's a video
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(00:20):
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I narrate night Shade Diary and you can find links
at Nightshaddiary dot com. If scary stories are your bag,
and listening to encounters with cryptids, ghost dog men, and

(00:41):
other weird creatures sends us shure up your spine, then
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Noteworthy news about the paranormal world, true crime, conspiracy stories,
and anything that is just plain weird can be found
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(01:01):
tap at Miami ghost Chronicles dot com. Please subscribe to
my newsletter on substack. Just go to Mppelliser dot com
for a link. I want to thank you for being
part of my audience and I think you are all
so wonderful.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Happy Halloween, everybody. It's Marlene and Henry. Happy Halloween.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Hit it.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Wait, we only do this, of course, when it's Halloween.
Otherwise people think that you're nuttier than you really are.
But anyway, guys, yeah, we're doing a pre recorder because
we're both under the weather a little bit. You know,
it's just one of those things. So we thought, you
know what, in case we're both going to uh coughing fits,

(01:42):
I can edit it out. So but anyway, anyway, Happy
Halloween to everybody. Uh it's it's not a Friday, so
I know there's gonna be a lot of people partying
out there. So if you don't catch the video now
on the on its release, please come back and enjoy it.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
All right.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
I think I believe this is my fourth year or
the fifth year that we've done this. In fifth something
like that. Anyway, here we are once again. Time flies
when you're having fun, even when you're not. But yes, yes,
it's here. We are coming almost to the end of
twenty twenty five, and let's face it, you know, to

(02:22):
be honest with you, even now we were we were
commenting on that. Now you even go to some of
the stores and the Halloween stuff is all gone, even
though it's not the Halloween technically yet, and all the
Christmas stuff is there, and you know, it's like, you know,
where tradition is, Tradition is gone.

Speaker 3 (02:38):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
So we're, you know, we're keeping our own tradition, which
is the show. And here we are. So anyway, I
started looking, you know, because I already did the you know,
what's what's the uh the history of or the meaning
of Halloween, et cetera, blah blah blah blah. So it
start as, you know what, let's look at some weird stuff.

(03:01):
And one of the things that I found really interesting was, uh,
the title of this year's Halloween show is called Voodoo Murders.
And I started doing some research, and I realized that
whenever any type of weird murder death occurred, not whether
it was sometimes it did have a flavor of wood,
don't get me wrong, it did and other times, but

(03:22):
just the fact that it was weird or unusual or
there was something. They the newspapers right away dubbed it
h voodoo murder. And I said, you know what, let's
let's let's follow this along and see where it leads.
All right, and and and it's really funny because along
the way we remember, these are all true stories. These are

(03:44):
not made up. These are true stories. I hold true
to what was said, what was and I even researched
beyond that what I could. And you meet characters, Okay
that I was like, how's this. If I was a
movie producer or director, I say, I can make a
movie out of this. This would be a great movie
because these characters, again, they're even if they're like sometimes
for lack of a better word, they're the villain or

(04:05):
not the villain. But yeah, they're so interesting. And the
best thing, of course, is that we're they were real
that you're like and you were kind of, uh, you
know what, but god, you're interesting. You're you know, you
know that type of person, Henry, Yeah, that you that
you know sometimes I'm sure everybody's seen series that you
kind of like, not that admire, but you kind of
look at the like the villain sometimes ends up being

(04:28):
the most interesting character in the cast. Kind of deal.
But anyway, they're human, like all things.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
You know.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
Now, the the first story that we're gonna go to
on this okay, and these these all these stories are
gonna see they they all have happened like maybe around
the turn right after the turn of the century, and
uh the you know, into the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties,

(04:57):
and uh, of course you know, forensics is not what
it is now, all right, so you're going to see
that some of the things that happened. As a matter
of fact, you're going to see on this first case.
This is these cases that I want to talk about
made the make caused a change in the law, right, Okay, Now,

(05:19):
this first case, all right, it's out of I think
it wasn't New York and New Jersey. Let me take
a look here before I get my stories. Okay, sorry, Philadelphia, Philadelphia,
it's Philly. It's nineteen oh three, okay, and uh nineteen
oh three, there's an investigation that they were running what

(05:42):
they called a murder mill out of Philadelphia. Okay. Now,
the cost for knocking off a person was one hundred dollars, which,
by the way, back in nineteen oh three, one hundred
dollars was quite a bit of money, all Right, and
once they got into the investigation, it would be found
out that this have been going on for about thirty years,
so in around since the eighteen seventies, they have been

(06:06):
doing this murder contract you know, assassin thing, but it's
just a different angle to it. And this was under
the nose of the authorities, which makes you wonder, with
the authorities, how's this? How hard were the authorities looking for?
You know, you know when you see sometimes that you

(06:31):
know that that how hard were they trying to really
find these people? Okay, because you're gonna see this wall
has all happened as a matter of fact, You're going
to see really what led to this these crimes because
this plural more than one, was not even the police,
which tells you was anybody being bought off? What do
you think, Henry never heard of that? Right, No, no, no,

(06:52):
was the insurance companies. But it was one of those
things that where one door leads opens, another comes open.
But this is the initial thing was okay, so it
starts to unravel, okay, where there's an investigation and it's
spurred by the Philadelphia's Corner all right, and this is

(07:15):
on October nineteen oh two, and what happens is there's
three children that die in the Williams family, all right. Now,
it's really weird. And what catches the insurance the coroner's
attention is that all three kids were insured life insurance thing,
which is unusual because usually the ones you ensure will

(07:37):
be parents, maybe elderly people, but children you think are
gonna be alive. But anyway, so anyway, it's December nineteen
oh two, all right, two months later, and John Williams
and his common law wife Emma Kacklan, they're charged by
a coroner's jewelry with the murder of their young daughters,

(07:57):
Anna and Josephine in order to collect insurance. Now, they
of course, because remember the first back then, the corner
was the one that would bring it to a corner's
jury and from there would go forward with law enforcement.
And they basically the finding of the of the jury,
the corner's jury allows them to exhume the bodies, all right,

(08:21):
so they find arsenic in the children's body. Right now,
at that time, they had three live children, a six
year old boy, a four year old girl, and a
baby that was not even a year old. Right, So,
like I said, this was in December. Two months later,

(08:43):
February nineteen oh three, the judge a judge judge, he
allows the bodies of Anna, Josephine and a third daughter
by the way, that the coroner had not looked into apparently.
I think that was the first one that died to
be exhumed from Oakland Cemetery in Philadelphia. And when this
the coroner, by the way, when he's doing his investigation,

(09:04):
he finds out that the parents had bought what they
called powders from a so called a guy named last
name of Horsey An. He was called a voodoo or
an herb doctor, right, this is what they called him
back then. So this corner basically he does the legwork

(09:28):
for the authorities, all right, and the insant inquiry. You know, again,
when they exume the kids' bodies they find there's arsenic
in it. It's like, okay, they sued children three dead. Okay,
they're at a fifty percent thing that six kids, fifty
percent of them are gone. And I understand that back

(09:50):
then infant mortality was very high and children died easily
from you know, just different things or there was you know,
the stuff that happened. So anyway, this inquiry leads them
to go to the Voodhao doctors home. Okay, now there's
a private investigator who, by the way, has been hired
by the insurance company. Again here's the uh the police

(10:13):
kind of dragging their butts on this. So he goes
in there and he passes himself as a client. Okay.
And what also got the insurance companies to get into
this and beyond the corner is that all of a
sudden they're looking at all their records and they're realizing, man,
we've got a bunch of deaths of people in this
same neighborhood. Wait a minute, you know, because in and

(10:36):
of itself, the Corners thing was just for the investigation
of the Williams kids. And that made because remember, insurance
companies are going to try to do everything they can
not to pay up. So they they say, wait a minute,
let's look at our records. And they realize, man, we
have a bunch of deaths, probably out of proportion in

(10:56):
that general area. So they hired this private detective. He
goes there, passes himself as as a client to horse
see the voodoo doctor. And they find out that this
guy his name was either Horsey or whole sea or
whole See, it's real difficult. And he was a self
describe voodoo doctor. He was a literate He was an
illiterate guy, but he had somehow developed this huge following.

(11:20):
All right, Now, this racket covered murder for money, murder
for hate, murder for illicit love, murder for social position,
or murder for meal revenge. In other words, if you
came to the Voodoo Doctor, whatever your gripe was with somebody,
he had a solution for you. It was like kill him,

(11:42):
you know usually in other words, So by the end,
now remember a lot of these murders, they weren't really
able to prove it because I think of the length
of time. But at the end of this investigation they
had at least thirty four murders that were revealed by
the investigation. That means probably there were more. Okay, Now,

(12:05):
when the you know, when the you know this, this
guy goes in there, all right, he passes himself off ultimately,
like he's telling the doctor, hey, you know what I
I think, you know what I need. At first, it's
like a woman problem kind of deal, right, because he's

(12:26):
he's he's doing a pretty good job. He's trying to
like not come in there, Hey, I want to kill somebody.
He's telling him, Oh, I got woman problems, somebody that
I love, or something something along those lines, right and
down the line, I guess somehow or other, he introduces
the subject of, well, the truth is what I really

(12:50):
need to do is I really need to get rid
of the woman. So, in other words, he kind of
leads this, this the the doctor to to to what
he really wants, because, let's face it, you know, something
simple is not going to be a problem. It's that's

(13:12):
the the that thing about killing somebody, that's that's hey,
take it, take it easy, slim. I mean, anyway, as
you know, I've got my my babies here. Okay. So
now when they go in there, into his house and
they start poking around, they find he's has sold a
large quantity of arsenic. Now, one thing, back then, arsenic

(13:36):
was used a lot for rats, Like people in their houses.
They it was common to have arsenic at their house.
You would use it for rats and for pests, and
in other words, this is right, well, but in and
of itself, it wasn't like an uncommon thing. People would
buy it for household purposes like to kill mice and
rats and all this. The thing is, though, that this

(13:58):
guy had sold a large quantity of it. He also
solicited and he entered, he he got around and he
entered into that contract with that private detective to murder
a woman for one hundred dollars. And and of course
this was the same motivation for all the other contracts
that he had, was that they would come to him

(14:19):
directly and say I want to kill this person, and
that a lot of times could believe it or not.
These people had insurance policies, all right. So sometimes there
was an insurance policy. Other times it was revenge. But
it just so happened that a lot of them had insurances.
Now the cases involved insurance payoffs, but they called disturbed
domestic relations, which you know, a couple had hated each other,

(14:43):
or the interference from a next kin went to him first,
Yeah I killed. It could be the mother in law,
it could be anybody first, all right. So in other words,
if there was somebody that you wanted to get rid of,
this was like your neighborhood hit man kind of. So
now this is the thing. Also, besides selling the arsenic,

(15:07):
he would give instructions on how to pull off the poisoning.
This is what he would tell his customers. Quote, first,
give dose doses of the poisoning. Then send for a doctor.
He gives the ailment some big name. Give another dose then,
but stop after that and let the doctor think he's

(15:28):
treating patient properly. In other words, let the person get better,
then after a while begin again, and don't stop until
death takes place. The doctor will make out a certificate.
The coroner is never notified, and he knows nothing about it.
In other words, what this guy is saying is, you know,

(15:49):
once you get the doctor involved and treating this person,
that's why you pull back from the poison. They're gonna
say the person got better on treating them down the road,
you know, they start having these little symptoms because you start.
This doctor is gonna say, oh, the person that had whatever.

Speaker 4 (16:06):
One of the biggest reasons that the people used then
and then later on is because not because they wanted
to kill people, but because arsenic doesn't have no order
or taste.

Speaker 2 (16:19):
Right well, when people hate it. Sometimes they didn't have
but it could.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
But so if somebody wanted to use it for personal use.

Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, you know they they they would Yeah, well, and
again it was common. It was like if somebody found
you with arsenic at your house, it wasn't like, oh,
what are you doing in the art snake is like, no,
I'm killing I'm killing pests that I have around the house.
So he's this guy's doctor, Holsey Horsey, the voodoo doctor.
He's got it worked out. He's telling you this is
how you're gonna dose them. You're gonna call a doctor.

(16:52):
Because remember sometimes people that were given this art snake,
sometimes they even had their own they already had some
illness going on, maybe to kill him, but depends, all right,
So you bring in the doctor, stop giving them the poison.
They get better, then you start giving it to them again.
Bottom line, And you know what, he was right. A
lot of these doctors never suspected poisoning, all right, and

(17:15):
once the person expires, they would be the first ones
there felt the death certificate. That's it goes away the court.
Nobody comes and looks at it. Why because they were
under a doctor's care. So I mean, I'm telling you this, Uh,
this voodoo doctor had things sewn up. Okay, now now
he but one of the things that they talked about

(17:36):
was that his specialty, though, was to be clearing up
relationships done by deliberate murder, with the insurance feature as
a secondary factor. In other words, everybody would think, oh,
it's always about the money. Not necessarily. Sometimes people would
come to him, and that makes me think, I wonder

(17:57):
if people will come to him and say, hey, I
want to my husband and my wife, my mother in law,
my father, my mother, whatever. He would even I'm surprised
he wouldn't even tell them how I'll have you considered
getting them, you know, putting out on an insurance policy
on them. I would not be surprised. And one thing
his price was always one hundred dollars. Okay. Now when

(18:17):
they go into his into his house and they're going
through all his things, Now, remember I told you this
guy is illiterate. So what they find is he's used.
He's illiterate but smart at the same time. Makes you
wonder if this guy would have gotten some type of education. Wow.
He used the code of numbers and hieroglyphics to refer

(18:40):
to his customers and a list he kept. In other words,
it was indecipherable. He made up his own numbers and codes,
and the hieroglyphics little symbols for that only he understood.
So when they're looking at this list, they have no
idea what's he saying. And it was like an unknown
language kind of deal for lack of a better word,
because he was a literate so he just made his

(19:01):
stuff up that he understood. So now they when they
go there, they seized a wagon load of bottles, drugs, instruments,
and other paraphernalia. And now this is another thing, Henry,
what do you think guess what the majority of his

(19:22):
customers were women? Yeah, we say, well not even scoring.
It's like okay, by the way, when women both married
and single. Now there you go, talk about the fair sex. Yeah,

(19:44):
I think. So anyway, there were they they found what
they called two boxes of rough Unrats poison. That was
the brand name of the poison that that had at
that time. And now the the things they found that
he kept authentic blank death certificates and had signed them

(20:07):
as doctor George Horsey, m d. And in other words,
they never figured out where was he able to get
authentic blank death certificates. Remember at that time, only real
doctors could sign off on this, because basically you would
be saying this person died on this date. From this
collus blah blah blah blah again by the end of

(20:28):
this eventually he goes to a child, but they estimate
he was responsible for countless deaths after running this mail
remember for thirty years. Okay, now what is it?

Speaker 3 (20:39):
What?

Speaker 2 (20:40):
The last one in line is the one that always
gets snagged. One of his latest clients was a lady
by the name of Catherine Dance. She's arrested in March
nineteen oh three. This is a month after the Finally
he goes to a judge and she's charged with poisoning
her husband eighteen months before. Now he's being held as

(21:02):
an accessory to the crime. And they, of course they
come and they arrest her based on information he gave them.
In other words, they couldn't figured out. In other words,
he talked, and I'm sure they squeezed him, like, hey,
if you don't want to be in big, big trouble,
you're gonna give us information. So she was the last

(21:22):
one on his list, and she he he, you know,
talked and said who she was. Now. Her husband was
a guy named William Dance, and he was a butcher.
Lived at twenty six twenty five North Fourth Street in Philly,
just in case you live there. That's a weird place anyway.
In April nineteen oh one, he gets sick and there's

(21:45):
a doctor who's treating him for rheumatism of the heart.
And two months later he dies and the death certificate
lists the cause of death as paralysis of the heart.
Now a month later, less than a month later, live
of nineteen oh one, the life insurance company pays out
three thousand dollars, which was the amount of his you

(22:07):
know insurance. Again, remember these this is nineteen oh one.
Three thousand is.

Speaker 3 (22:11):
A lot of money.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Right now, Well, this is going on even now. The
police are asking physicians in the northeast section of the
Philadelphia who signed death certificates within the past two years
that specified heart lesions as a cause of death. The
reason I think they did this, this was such a
general kind of like cause of death that it could

(22:36):
be anything heart legions, I don't know. So they exhum
this guy, mister Dance, Catherine's husband, and they find that
he had died of arsenical poison. In other words, they
found arsenic to them. So she turns around, Catherine Dance,
and she's telling the police that she gave her husband

(22:58):
drugs from Doc from the rud to from Holesey or
whatever in order to cure her husband from the drink
habit since he was a hard drinker. They had two children,
a sun eighteen and a daughter nineteen at this time,
in other words, I had already been married like twenty years, right.
So she also trial at the end of March of
nineteen oh four. And when she goes to trial, they

(23:23):
they're trying to make him, Hey, we need you to
come and testify at the trial, but they he refused
to be mentally broken. And because at this time he
had already gone to trial and they had sentenced him
to death even though he's an accessory, and he appeared
to be mentally broken, so he couldn't testify to take
the witness stand, which eventually he does, and again he
had been charged as accessory to the murder. William Dance

(23:47):
now missus Dance. She shows up every day at the
at the trial, and she's dressed all in Blaine. She's
got gloves, a heavy veil like somebody mourning, and she
pleads not guilty. And what's really funny is up to

(24:09):
then all her neighbors, she had this excellent reputation. This
lady was not. Somebody was like, oh, yeah, she's I
could see her doing something like that, So she had
an excellent reputation. Now they're in the trial. It comes
out that the voodoo doctor tells her bring three hairs
from your husband's head, and he wounds around the stick.

(24:30):
He gave the stick in the hairs back there with
instructions to bury them in a spot over which her
husband passed daily. But coincidentally, during those days he gets
stuck with about of rheumatism and he did not walk
around as he usually did. Now remember all this time
she's saying, I'm doing all of this because I want
him to stop drinking. So now in the middle of

(24:53):
all this, they find out that the life insurance policy
is payable not to Missus Dance, but to her mother,
in other words, his mother in law. All right, Missus Groff.
Now she had loaned him, the dead guy, a larger
amount than three thousand dollars okay, for him to go

(25:14):
into business, and he failed and he never gave her
the money. So she was the one that paid the
insurance premiums during the time that he was alive, and
she by the way she was she wasn't wealthy wealthy,
but even though she lived with them, she was known
that she owned like various properties in the area. So
the mother in law she gets the money. Now at

(25:36):
the end, Catherine down she is found guilty, and she
appealed the conviction. In April and nineteen oh five, remember
when we're talking. Now two years down the road, she
goes to the Supreme Court in Pennsylvania. By vote five to two,
they decide she's got a hang, right, And in nineteen
oh six, he's found guilty of the murder from the
first degree of George stands and he's supposed to hang.

(25:59):
In March twenty six of nineteen oh six, Now at
the last minute, they commute the death sentence and instead
they say, okay, we're going to give you life from prisonment.
Instead of both of you hanging, we're going to you're
going to spend the rest of your life from prison.

(26:22):
Now fast forward five years, nineteen eleven, the Board of
Pardons grants her a full pardon. Right, all this time
she was being over, she was staying over at Eastern
State Penitentiary. And when they let her out, she comes
dressed and she leaves again dressed all in black veil,

(26:44):
black dress. By the way, she gets to pardon ten
years to the day of her husband died. She's fifty
six years old, and she tells the press afterwards. You
know that when her husband's dying, he begs her forgiveness
for abusing her. And one time he struck her mother
or his mother in law, and blinded her in one eye.

(27:07):
And he was a violent guy. He had thrown their
son out of the house, and she says, I told
him that I wouldn't forgive him, and her law that
was there also didn't forgive him. So I guess this
guy was a real piece of work. And she had
told newspaper reporters that after her pardon. You know that
her mom had died two days before she was sentenced.
So I guess this old lady that grief has killed her.

(27:31):
In other words, that this whole thing had ruined their lives.
Her mom died before she got sentenced, her son left
and joined the military, and her daughter trained to become
a nurse and moved to Illinois, which, by the way,
this is where she was going after her release. Now,
what happened to George the Voodoo doctor. Nobody knows. I
think he was released if he was still alive, because

(27:52):
you really don't know how old this guy was. All right, now,
you remember the original Williams family that was the one
that got this whole thing going, believe it or not,
way back then, it wasn't at the end. But Emma,
for some reason, the one that ends up going to

(28:15):
trial on this is not her husband. It's her. Emma
William's the mom. She's acquitted after experts testify that embalming
fluids were used on her daughters which contained arsenic and antimony,
and that there was no definite proof she had poison them.
In other words, they could say the arsenic in the
children's body was due to the embalming. Now here it

(28:38):
is due to these cases, bills were proposed to use
formaldehyde as an embalming fluid to preserve the bodies instead
of arsenic, so proof of poison could not be blamed
on the embalming process. What do you think, Henry, So
these cases, I guess up to then people were bumping

(29:00):
pople off and they would blame it on the embalming thing.
And by the way, I have come across other stories
where the murderers would make sure that they would give
the body of their deceased person. This is of course
somebody that that can two funeral homes that would that
would embalm them with our snake. In other words, none
of this oh you're going straight into the ground kind

(29:21):
of deal, because it would they could They couldn't prove
was that our snake there to begin with or was
it part of the embalming. So what do you think that, Yeah,
go ahead.

Speaker 3 (29:33):
Our snake. They were still like they watered it down
like in the eighties, back in and back in New York,
they were still using it to kill rats.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
Right.

Speaker 3 (29:46):
But the thing about it is stuff had like an
oil base. You couldn't get that stuff out of your
hands even if you took it, you washed it with chloring.
That stuff was it's like it will stay greasy and
it would just be very annoying.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
And right, yeah, no, no, no, that's the thing that
that the well, so I think it was powders also
because I think that a lot of it that was
stuff that with people just put a little bit like
in people's whatever beverage or whatever, and ye.

Speaker 3 (30:17):
Keep on and and uh, we had a of mortuary
that every single Cuban and Jersey used. It was called
Gorney and Gorney they used they used in bombing Floyd. Yeah,
and Elizabeth. And let me tell you, you were walking

(30:42):
to the back of that place for any kind of business,
you could actually like literally smell it.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Can you imagine?

Speaker 3 (30:52):
And that place was creepy, you could actually like and
you went there at a certain time, even if it
was they didn't have the air conditioned on, you will
feel like cold. And you will see stuff every now and.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
Then, that's absolutely.

Speaker 3 (31:09):
You know, you will. I think one time I actually
thought I saw my dad, But there was so much
there was so much like really weird energy there that
forget it. I my mom was used to do accounting

(31:29):
and she was trying to get their account and I
had to be there with her, and I just said,
I told her, you know, you really need the money
to do it, but I'm not going to be there.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah. Well, you know what, whether it's something there, your
imagination takes off and.

Speaker 3 (31:45):
You and I was a kid, but it's like still
a kid sees what he sees.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
No of course, and and and that's the thing, you know,
where does where does the truth and the imagination take
off and let's face the funeral homes or a tourist
for that. So even if it's not there, you all
you need to see is here one little creek, and
it's like, that's it. I used to work with a
girl many many, many years ago. She was very young, which,
by the way, one of those things, and she was,

(32:13):
for lack of a better word, in turning, but they
were paying her. She was the one that would put
the makeup on the dead people, and uh, you look
at her, and she was a real nice girl, like
you would think. Nah, she to her, she just she
handled it really well. She was young, she was like
in her early twenties, and I remember her asking her done.
She was, no, my, you know, they're not they're not suffering.

(32:36):
I mean that kind of deal. But it was like,
all right, okay.

Speaker 3 (32:40):
In that place it was floor ceiling marbles, so you
shouldn't have been able to hear anything. And you steal
her stuff.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
Okay. The moral of that story is, yeah, okay, let's
you know what. Sometimes, like I said, and you always
hear stuff from different people like hey, you know what, now,
this this is next stories. This is just short little snippets.

(33:07):
This is what I called voodoo crazies. Okay, now we're
gonna fast forward. This is February nineteen twenty, Kansas City, Missouri.
When you see what I mean by crazy, as you
know why I said that. All right, There's a guy
named Tom Tom Bundy all places Bundy, not Ted, but
Tom Bundy. He's twenty one years old. He kills his dad,

(33:30):
Joe Bundy, with an axe because of what a voodoo
doctor told his mother. All right, His mother goes to
see this voodoo doctor because she's got some unknown illness
going on, something that's like she's suffering from it. Right,
So this voodoo doctor turns around and tells her, you
need to get rid of your husband because he put

(33:52):
a spell on you, all right, and he did this bike.
He tells her he boiled some herbs and he tricked
you into drink it. And in other words, this is
all your husband's fault. And so she comes home later on.
By the way, obviously, Tom says that his mother tells him,

(34:13):
I'm telling you, if you love your mother, you will
get rid of your father. So she turns her out,
and she's using her own kid as a hitman. By
the way, you know, lest you think that that the
people believe this to the point that they're willing to kill.
This man is telling her your husband did a trick
with herbs, got you to drink it, and that's why

(34:34):
you're sick. In other words, this is easier for her
to think to believe than to think I might be
really sick with some type of illness. So anyway, he
hits his dad twice with the acts, takes seventy dollars
from him, He gives thirty to his mother who's sick,
gives his wife twenty dollars, and pays the rent with
the rest, And afterwards he's the one that calls the

(34:58):
police and ports his dad's murder. Remember, he's not confessing
to it. He comes and told him, hey, I found
my dad acts to death. So eventually he does confess.
I'm sure there and now they never say whether the
voodoo doctor that told his mom and which basically precipitated
everything there found him doesn't say. You never find out

(35:21):
what happened to to poor Tom Bundy. But I guess
what crazy crazy, crazy, crazy wife, crazy kid and dead husband.
What do you think Henry would be their neighbor? No kidding, Okay,

(35:42):
let's uh this around the same time, nineteen twenty four. Okay,
January nineteen twenty four. And the reason why I'm saying
January it's important. There's a guy named Elsie Simms, right,
and Elsie kills his wife Eleanor Okay, by the way,
this guy's they're fifty. These are not young people. Because

(36:07):
he believes that she cast a voodoo spell over him,
and so he hits her over the head with a
lead pipe and slashes her throat, and then he turns
himself out to the police in Sheridan, Wyoming. By the way,
this is where it's taking place, Sheridan, Wyoming, remember January. Now,

(36:30):
his wife, she was born in France. She had immigrated
to Martinique out in the West Indies. Her father was
French and her mother's Japanese. And she had met this guy,
Elsie Simms, in Cuba after the Spanish American War and
they married there. Apparently he was a soldier, he was
out fighting the Spanish American War. And this is where

(36:52):
they meet they get married. I guess he's originally from Montana.
I don't know how they end up in Montana, but
here they are all right, So they they bring in
to doctors from the United States Veteran Hospital. Remember he's
a veteran at Fort Mackenzie, and they diagnose him with

(37:13):
suffering from paranoia dementia praecox. All right, and a jury
returns a verdict of insane. I recommend this commitment to
the state Institution at Evanston. This is in Wyoming, all right.
So by the way, that paranoia dementtion praye cox. Obviously
you're going crazy. But by the way, that was sometimes

(37:34):
the diagnosis when people had syphilis, untreated syphilis. But I
don't know, we don't know the origin anyway. So he's
they're taking him, all right, in a passenger train to
the asylum, and he leaps from the window of the car.
And that's going at sixty miles an hour. And this

(37:55):
is when they're approaching like Fort Steele. I guess they
didn't think they had to guard him because they're think
he's crazy, but not that crazy. So he jumps out
at sixty miles an hour off the train. About a
few days later of February twenty second, remember January February,
it's gotta be the coldest months in Wyoming. They find

(38:15):
him he's suffering from severe exposure and both of his
feet were so frozen that they had to amputate them. Right, so,
and by the way, and he's of course, he's also starving.
So he tells the police that the spirits had made
him jump from the train and then they told him
you need to give yourself up. Now, what's really funny

(38:37):
is and this happened in nineteen twenty fourth, the nineteen
twenty cents. This is four years before he's living with
his wife. His stepson, a guy named Clement Davis, is
living with him. And ten years later, this guy's life
has drastically changed. Now he's he's at the asylum, all right,
and he's engaged, you know, even though he's missing both feet.

(38:58):
The assign was called ward ward work. I don't know
what that ward work is. But after that we lose
track of him. Chances ar he might have died. But yes,
that's why I call those voodoo crazies. He trustee, Well,
I guess whatever. Maybe they gave him.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
A they consider him saying enough that he could do
some stuff.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
Oh yeah, no, that's what I'm saying. He apparently, even
though he was very deeply disturbed and you know. So anyway, Yeah,
that's my craziest Now this is the next story. This
is one of those characters. I believe me. This guy
is a character. This it is April nineteen twenty five

(39:44):
when it starts out, and this gentleman's name is doctor Ray.
I'm gonna say it only once, not the beginning Ray
Coke e h h Haycock. All right, and this this
opens up and Camden, all right, all of a sudden,
it's April nineteen twenty five, and his charges a murder

(40:08):
pending against doctor Haycock, who calls himself a voodoo doctor.
When they say doctor, they don't mean MD. It's voodoo doctor.
And his house gets raided after his seven year old
father is seven year old sorry, I'm a seven year
old daughter tells says the police that her father had
killed a woman and buried her body in one of

(40:30):
the secret passages under their house, which, by the way,
he rented two houses that were right next to each other,
I at four one three and four one five Liberty Street
and Camden for any of you that live in camped anyway,
So this happens. They had arrested him originally for practicing

(40:52):
medicine without a license. And they're like, oh my god,
you know, whatever, what am I gonna do with this guy? Right,
he's apparently he's a character. And right when they're about
to let them go, his daughter says, oh, by the way,
my dad killed somebody, a lady and buried her. They're
like what. So they go out there. The the police

(41:17):
immediately go out there and they find that there's all
these tunnels and everything running under these two houses. Okay,
there's a bunch of rooms and compartments under the cellar,
and in these chambers they found bodies of chickens, pieces
of dry meat. They found a bunch of really weird
dressed dolls, painted dolls, and they also found some bells

(41:42):
that were operated by an electrical switch in the kitchen.
All right, and so they're like wow. So again when
his daughter, you know, all of a sudden, he's telling them, no,
I don't know anything about that. I hadn't killed that's
my daughter. She's confused, and he's saying, I'm a spiritualist.

(42:03):
And by the way, he also operated a taxi cab
company and a real estate business. In the meantime, his
hit no the daughter as a matter of fact, goes
on to say that when her mom, her mom had
gone to Washington to see a sister, one of her sisters,

(42:27):
that a woman comes knocking at the front door real
late and she hears her husband, her husband, her father
arguing with this lady. Next thing, you know, that's my cat.
Who was it? Boo boo? Okay, Boo Boo is aka
the black cat, crazy cat. Yeah. So anyway, she tells police, yeah,

(42:52):
he he shot her and then he took her away
and burned her and then and they're like, oh, she's confused, this,
this and that. So the police are like, okay, this
is murder, murder, murder and murder, you know. So of
course when they're going out there, they're like they're digging
everything up because they're thinking there's a body buried out here.

(43:13):
So all they're finding is a lot of junk. They
did find the bones of four infants. Again, they also
hold his wife. Now he at that time, he's saying
he's seventy one years old and he had come to
Camden several years before. He had come over from Norfolk, Virginia.

(43:37):
And again, you know, they're trying to hold his wife.
But you know, the daughter said, no, my mom wasn't there.
It was late at night. They were in this big
room in the front of the house. And then her
quote her pop got a gun and shot the woman
and he took her out in his automobile, burned her,
and she said that he told her to keep quiet
and said the woman was sick and died and he

(43:58):
buried her in a cemetery. So they also arrest another
guy whose name is Louis Reeves, and he's like the
voodoo doctor chauffeur. And now now it turns out that
Haycock owns several cars, so that's why he had a
chauffeur to take him around. So they're questioning him, like
we need to know you know, you're just not this

(44:20):
harmless spiritualist guy. He tells them that he's a bigamis
that he's married to five women at once, and that
he had already had thirty seven children. Let me repeat that,
thirty seven children. I'm telling you he's a character. So
while the police are going under all these tunnels and
things under the both of these houses, they find a

(44:41):
bloodstained hatchet buried under a floor inn vault with the
entrance freshly cemented and it was recently wallpapered. They found
a well under the sacrificial room, and when they removed
the lid, it smelled so bad that all the police
had to leave. Like the underground, they'd smelled so bad
whatever it was that they had throwne in there they

(45:03):
found a bloodstained mattress, a mattress cover hidden in a
second story we're room. And like I said, at least
the skeletons of four infants were found in the properties now,
but what they wanted the most to find they couldn't find,
which was a dead lady or dead or dead adult.

(45:26):
How's that a dead adult? So they also find out
by the way that he's involved in what we now
refer to as human trafficking, all right. He admits to
them that he brings girls from different parts in the
southern United States, keeps them hidden in the cellars and

(45:50):
then the sub sellers because of the way seller and
sub sellers until you can find a job for them
someone either Camden in Philadelphia or that vicinity. And he
calls this his girl farm. What do you think, Henry?

Speaker 3 (46:05):
So wow?

Speaker 2 (46:07):
He even says, my last batch was eight girls from Florida. Now,
and you're thinking, well, why is this guy doing this?
Guess what, Once he gets on a spot, like some
type of job, they have to come back every week
and give him part of their earnings. Yeah. So now

(46:27):
they they found what they called a murder letters. They
were founding his house under a bureau and a room
on the third floor, and check out, this is this
is what when when they say murder letters, this is
you're gonna see that this is very similar to what
that other doctor Horsey in Philadelphia, the kind of letters

(46:48):
that that people were sending him. It read this, by
the way, this was bated November twenty seventh, nineteen twenty three,
and it read, dear Doc, I have been wondering why
you don't answer my letters. I got a letter from
your wife saying that you were out of town and
that she would let me know when you came back. Doc.

(47:09):
He went away and came back and went again and back.

Speaker 3 (47:13):
Doc.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Are you working on him? I don't see any change
in him. For God's sake, do something with him. Is
there any way that you can kill him next month?
You know you told me if I did not kill him,
he would kill me. Doc. He is no better than
he was when I was up to see you. If
this powder don't reach him, you'll have to give me

(47:34):
something else. I'm still using the powder every other day.
And only thing I noticed in him When I use
the powder, he gets a little excited. In clothes, you
will find five dollars, and that only leaves fifteen. So
I imagine she's on a layway plan. Please answer at
once and let me know what you are going to do.

(47:54):
Eda m Hersey, fifteen, twenty Arctic Avenue, Atlantic City. It
was registered and send special delivery. There was also another
letter from somebody else asking the same thing, for help
and getting rid of a woman all right. Now, when
the police are doing their investigations, they find out that
he was already had already once been arrested in Philadelphia

(48:16):
nineteen twenty three, and he bought his way out of
jail for one hundred bucks, and that he was arrested
in connection with the shooting of a woman. So and
that before he went to Philadelphia, he used to keep
a dun in Norfolk and he was driven out of town.
He had to leave. I guess people there. I don't
know the police or the people when I get out
of here. So from Virginia, from Norfolk. He went to Philly.

(48:38):
From Philly, he went to Camden. So they come by
the way. These houses that he's living at they're not
even his. These houses are rentals, okay, And they go
to they go the first the guy, his name is

(48:59):
William though he's a druggist. He's the owner of the
one house on Liberty Street by the way. He's the
brother of a city council member, and he gives permission
for like the police to tear out the underground partitions
like everything, and to dig underground. And the other house
is owned by this guy named Nathan Katz, who's a
real estate dealer close by. So it makes you wonder

(49:22):
did these people ever care or wonder or was it
okay with them that this guy.

Speaker 3 (49:26):
I guess at that time they didn't really pay too
much attention and stuff that.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
See, it was like you rented the house. Oh you're
making all these tunnels underneath the house.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
See, at that time, everything everybody was so poor that
you could probably you could probably buy the mayor, the governor,
the president for like five hundred bucks.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
Oh no, this we remember, this is nineteen twenty four.
This is even prior to the Great depression.

Speaker 3 (49:49):
No, no, But back then, I know, I know, it.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
Was like okay, yeah, they're just renting out the house.
So anyway, by the way, when the police are digging
all this up, there's thousands of people that are out.
They're watching the police dig up this whole yard and
all these tunnels and this debris and all this crap.
All right, it's like everybody's there. Like So remember, now,
in April, they release him on bail since the only

(50:14):
charge against him were practicing medicine without a license and
they have found no human bones of an adult all
that found, you know, so he had obviously has to move.
So let's fast forward a few months. This is July
and the neighborhood this is around where the Liberty Street
houses are all of a sudden, in the middle of

(50:36):
the night, they're thrown into what's called a frenzy of terror,
where all the neighbors called police and they say, hey,
we're hearing moans, whimpers, howls. We're hearing it from coming
from what they called the voodoo Dead. So police go
out there, there's always they've always been around. They find
three men and a woman dancing and shouting in an

(50:58):
upstairs bedroom, which, by the way, by then the house
was already considered tainted and haunted. So these dumbasses they're
in there in the third floor. I don't know what
they were doing, and all the neighbors are having a meltdown.
It's just thinking that's it. The voodoo den, you know,
is like it's the spirits, the spirits. So anyway, fast

(51:21):
forward into the next year. It's October nineteen twenty five.
Everybody's forgetting about doctor Haycock and all of a sudden
he makes the newspapers again. When checked this out, there's
a bomb that's set off under the justice of the
peace a guy named Tony Roco, all right, and the

(51:42):
bomb damages this from porch, breaks a few windows in
the district. This was a bomb. By the way, Now
you're asking yourself, pray, tell, what does a bomb going off,
By the way, Tony Roco is an in Camden, What
does Tony Roco having a bomb go off at his
house have to do with Doctor Highcock. Here we go,
so the police they're investigating why is he getting bombed?

(52:08):
And they uncover what they call a strange story of voodooism,
And it turns out that One of the ones that's
involved is a lady who's considered one of Doc Haycock's disciples,
and she because of this, they find what quote is
exposed an orgy of wide open gambling in the third ward,

(52:30):
I'm telling you. Turns out there's a guy all right
named Anthony Paradise, but he's known as Babe Paradise. He
gets arrested on a suspicion that he set off the
bomb to me a favorite, what did I turn out
the kitchen off?

Speaker 3 (52:48):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (52:48):
I did. I'm sorry for folks anyway, Anthony, Babe Paradise,
he's a resting suspicion of having set off the bomb. Yeah.
Who they also arrest is a lady called Leona Brown.
And now Leona Brown is called the mystic of the
third ward. Who Rocco, who's a counselor on the on

(53:10):
the assembly, she had charged them one hundred dollars for
treating his wife, missus Roco and who failed to help her.
And he produces a receipt for the police signed by
Leona Brown for medical services for eighty two dollars. By
the way, again, eighty two dollars is a lot of money.
Run her to his wife according to quote witchcraft methods,

(53:31):
and he tells police, I balled her out because she
didn't help my woman any and she said she would
get me end quote. Now the police at this point
they don't believe that us she'd set off this bomb,
but they believe that she'd been selling these strange charms
and potions to all the sick people in Little Italy.

(53:52):
And now they held her for practicing medicine without a license.
She like hay Cock, when she goes to she's telling
them all I am is, I'm just a spiritualist. The
other guy, Babe Paradise, now he's a different story altogether.
They find out he's operating a big gambling house near

(54:14):
the rocal residence, and he's arrested on charges of forgery
and larcening. All right, So, in other words, everybody's forgetting
about hay Cock, except one of his disciples inadvertently is
part of a bomb going off. And she's treating the
city council guy who's who there also believes in some
type of witchcraft. And she's going all over Little Italy

(54:36):
selling stuff, by the way expensively at eighty two bucks
a pop, all right, and it wasn't working. And of
course here's babe Paradise running a gambling joint and you
name it out of that area. And why he wanted
to put a bomb under this guy's house, Who knows.
But anyway, so fast forward about four years, no, three years.
It's nineteen twenty eight and hay Cox he's arrested. I'm

(55:00):
telling you, I have to laugh at this because it's funny.
He's arrested for having a loaded revolver and he's driving
a motor car without a license. Now he's driving a
box car Sedan from eighteen sixty one. I don't know
how far back this, how he got this. This must
have been an old car. And he's wearing a high

(55:21):
hat and hip boots and he does the police. He's
carrying the weapon for protection. So apparently this cop pulls
him over for driving. He's got no license, he's got
a weapon, and he's got a high hat and hip.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
Boots on those cars are funny, okay.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
So anyway, now fast forward three more years. This is
nineteen thirty one and he gets arrested after a girl
she goes to the police because he told her he
gives her some powders for an illness that he called snakes.
What snakes are? Apparently she mad, maybe he who knows,

(56:01):
She went to the police. Now at this point, this
is the way to describe him. He's a short squad man.
He weighs about two hundred pounds, and at that time
he's saying I'm eighty two years old. And by then
he had followed forty eight children. Again, we don't know
how much of this is true. Thirty seven forty eight
who knows. Now they do say that he looked younger

(56:23):
than that, because in truth, no one really knew his
real age. And by the way, that last time, I
have Haycock. That's a made up name. Nobody knows his
real name. Nobody knows his real, true birth name. So anyway,
fast forward, it's nineteen thirty five. This is already ten
years after the Camden, New Jersey thing, and the federal
agents now by this time remember now by this time

(56:45):
prohibition is all going on. They come up with two
twenty five gallon stills in a labyrinth of tunnels and
caves near Malaga that were tied to him. So this guy,
if he wasn't directly involved in it, he had he
had his finger. Remember he used to run taxi cabs
in real estate. He had his hand and everything, so

(57:08):
even if it was something he wasn't directly doing, he
would in other words, he would somehow or other get
money in his pocket because of it. All right, So
now this is nineteen thirty eight and he's now this
is in this by the way, this is gonna explain

(57:30):
maybe why also the baby's does infants. He's charged with
performing an abortion on a thirteen year old girl, and
the girl stepfather, this guy named Fleming Poindexter. He's also arrested.
Why because apparently he was he had fathered the child,
so they release him for insufficient evidence. But the stepfather's arraigned,

(57:53):
so this might have explained also why they had the
when they dug up those cellars, why they found the
baby's bones. And he dies in May of nineteen forty two.
So now this is the thing. This is right around

(58:16):
around the We're gonna go back track a little bit.
He dies May of ninety four. But nineteen twenty six,
this is like a year after hay Cock is scandalizing
Camden and all that. There's a guy named Sam. He's
also in Camden. His name is Sam Fulton, he's thirty
years old, but he's from Jamaica, New York, all right,

(58:37):
and he's charged with first degree murder in what was
known as the Voodoo Murder. Now he's accused of killing
his common law wife Minie Hall on pump Palm Sunday,
and he remains next tour bed for five weeks, telling
you praying. Now he gives himself up because his dead
wife appeared to him in a dream and told him

(58:59):
to admit to the murder except being electrocuted and join
her in heaven. He gets this guy, I don't know,
I don't know. They didn't even I don't know if
they examined him for being crazy or if not. Bottom line,
he got sentenced to twenty years as Sing Sing pled
guilty to second degree murder, claiming now now he's changed

(59:20):
it was self defense after she had attacked him with
a hatchet, and he escapes a death sentence by admitting
by that plea deal. He escapes a death sentence. Now
he shows the county detective who's out there where he's
got a scar on his head from where she had
gone after him, that the argument had stemmed because he
discovered that she was being unfaithful to him. Now check

(59:41):
this out, Mini Hall. The deceased lady was said to
have been one of several women on the staff of
a Jamaica what they called Cellar Digger, known as doctor
who brooded weird concoctions to ensure the drinker against the
loss of her husband's love. Now who she worked for?
Was it Doc Hai Coock? Was it another voodoo doctor?

(01:00:04):
Nobody knows? And the reason why I say this is
this guy was a character. This is doctor hay Cock.
He was something else. I'm not telling you. He wasn't
the greatest guy because he was into hinky stuff. I
have five I'm a bigger miss. He's just like I think,
if you're facing what is it murder charges because your daughter,
your seven year old daughter tells the cops. Yeah, my

(01:00:26):
dad he had a fight with a lady, shot her
and buried her underneath the house. So you're saying that
you're a bigger miss. Then you have father thirty seven
children who cares. But bottom, why did he get And
you know what, It's really funny because I'm sure that
after getting himself out of these troubles, there was probably

(01:00:47):
people out there who are saying he's really powerful voodoo doctor.
Look he got away with that. By the way, nobody
really knows if he did take that lady out somewhere
and buried her, because that's what she's the kid. One
time the kid says, no, he buried her underneath the house.
And another time she says, he put her in a
in a in a vehicle, drives away and she told

(01:01:09):
him I put took her to the cemetery. Again, no body, no,
no victim, no crime. What do you think, Henry.

Speaker 3 (01:01:16):
But again, you got to give the devil he's due
because he never got caught.

Speaker 2 (01:01:21):
Not no, really no. He died of old age.

Speaker 3 (01:01:24):
He died of old age.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
That's so I'm sure his his his reputation probably were saying, man,
he's the man. Look at that. They dug up his yard.
They were ready to like that's it. Nothing came up.
He kept going in his mood.

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
He died. He died laughing at him.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I say. And
this guy, he was doing human trafficking. He was bringing
in these girls from the Southern States, which I have
a feeling probably some of them were probably maybe from
poor families. He would bring him into Camden Philly in
the Vicinity get them a job. But guess what, they
had to come back and give him part of his earnings.
So he was that's why he had a bunch of cars.

(01:02:05):
Why he had a chauffeur, let.

Speaker 3 (01:02:08):
Me tell you. And he's and him being him being
in Haitian.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
And I never said he was Haitian. No, no, I
know that, but sometimes they would mix that in there.
Then you never he his background was a mystery the
last time of Haig Cock.

Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
The way he spelled it, that's why I say that
might not be his name.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
No, no, no, there wasn't.

Speaker 3 (01:02:32):
There's a name that he gave himself.

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
Nobody knows what his real age.

Speaker 3 (01:02:37):
His real name is probably a French crew.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
Maybe nobody knew his real name. A lot of his
family though they live in Washington, d C. But nobody
knew his real, real, true name. He's nobody knew his
real his real age.

Speaker 3 (01:02:53):
He was like like the Voodoo Virgin of John Gotti,
being all over the place. Because in New York there
was a couple of voodoo families, but they kept so
much under the radar. Unless you actually, like really really new,
you wouldn't know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:10):
Well, let me tell you they they were that guy.
He might have gotten for lack of a better word,
he might have gotten away with murder. But you could
see he had money coming in from.

Speaker 3 (01:03:22):
He was a hustler, oh.

Speaker 2 (01:03:24):
For sure, with a capital age. So anyway, I'm telling you.
By the time I finished, I was like, oh, doctor Haycock.
And by the way he spelled his life and for
those of you who are watching the video, he would
spell his last name hyghcok right, very unusual spelling. Believe

(01:03:47):
I tried. I was like, so, you know this guy
that I said, I need to find out who Maybe
I don't think he was. I don't know. I don't know.
He's a real mystery man. But whatever. So anyway, uh,
this is a really interesting story, this one, and this

(01:04:10):
involves a man called Karl Murker. Okay, December nineteen twenty nine.
This is two months after the the the crash, the
market crash, so we're just heading straight into now. Carl
Marker arrives in Tampa, Florida, and he gets charge of

(01:04:31):
vagrancy and sentenced to thirty days in jail, which, by
the way, this police would do that if they pick
somebody up. This is of course, mostly with men. If
you didn't have a job or place to stay, they'll
put you in jail for vagrancy. So anyway, he spends
thirty days in jail. Now a month later. By the way,
every time, this guy is just twenty two years old.
He's a young guy, all right. They report that this

(01:04:56):
guy was murdered. Carl Marker has been murdered, and and
they contact his his families originally from Nebraska, so they
contact his dad, Fred Mercer, and they tell him, Hey,
your your son has been killed. And he's telling he's

(01:05:17):
telling the Tampa police, you know my son. He's been
traveling for the past four years, and each winter he
goes south. Uh. And his last visit in Nebraska was
a few months before, like in May, and but he
goes He left to New York with a stable of
show mules, but then followed the horses at racetracks. In

(01:05:38):
other words, this guy always worked with the horse race
horses and stuff, so he would go I guess wherever
these horse races were being held at. And he had
written to them that he was in Georgia two months before.
So this corpse, all right, is identified by the ward

(01:06:05):
A County convict Ward and two prisoners. They're in Tampa.
These three guys say he's called Worker who had just
been released from spending thirty days in jail for vagrancy.
So they think, okay, these three guys spent thirty days
with this guy in jail, so they know what they're
looking at. So in the newspapers they're saying, yeah, he

(01:06:27):
saivived by his parents, you know the obituary thing. His
brother a brother's twelve, and his mother a daughter ten,
you know whatever, a sister whatever. Now what makes it
worse is they're telling his dad that he was killed
as part of a sacrifice in a voodoo ritual. And
so the way that it happened is there's a guy

(01:06:50):
named Richard Sheard. This is by the way. He's in Tampa,
and he admitted to the police that he had smashed
Murker's skull with an axe. And what he says is
that he thought was an unknown man had broken into
his cabinet and that he killed them thinking it was
an intruder. He's telling police, I was asleep. It's one am.

(01:07:15):
I wake up because I hear somebody on the back
porch and I look at it and I see a
man prowling around, so he goes out the front door,
gets an axe from a woodpile, comes back and hits
the man on the forehead with the axe. Of course,
as he's trying to force the rear door. Shared turns around,

(01:07:35):
calls a police, and this guy, Murker dies on the
way to the hospital after being struck in the head
with an axe. So the voodoo angle comes into this
because when the police they you know, they arrive and
they start going into this guy's house where he was
trying to break into. They find these wax dummies all

(01:07:57):
bandaged up, hanging by the way, life size, hanging from
the ceiling, and all this bunch of weird paraphernalia that
they said was reminiscent of voodoo rights this inside this
sheared house. He turns around and tells police, look, this dummy,
I'm taking some Red Cross lessons in first aid at

(01:08:19):
where I work at, which kind of sounds suspicious. But anyway,
then they kind of and then he kind of changes
his end and he goes no that they're part of
his activities because he belongs to the local lodges local lodgist.
I don't know if they mean freemason lodges. I don't
know what because apparently there's there's weird parafernalia's just not

(01:08:41):
life sized dummies hanging from the ceiling. So I guess
the cops are thinking, Okay, did this guy? Was this
guy really breaking in and did he kill him or
what was the deal? So the they also the police
thinking okay, he's telling us he had a loaded gun
inside the house, yet he goes to another building outside,

(01:09:05):
gets an axe and kills the guy instead of shooting
him or holding him with a pistol. Now, this dead guy,
he has his own set of unusual stuff on him.
He's got twenty two cheap gold rings, some letters, a razor,
a workman's badge issued in Birmingham, Alabama, and about four
dollars in cash. Okay, to me, that sounds like stuff

(01:09:28):
of a thief, because twenty two cheap gold rings come
on so or something twenty two cheap gold rings. So
this poor guy, Richard, he Richard shared, he's had on
first degree murdered charges because it turns out that they
were saying, hey, this guy shared that killed this guy.
He happened to us, just spend thirty days in jail.

(01:09:49):
Along with a guy that got killed Marker, and they're thinking,
wait a minute, what are the odds that the same
guy that you were in jail with for vagrancy you
end up killing him because he's trying to break into
your house, so they hold him. So anyway, Fred Marker
in Nebraska pays four hundred bucks to get this body
ship to him his son. He's an omaha when after

(01:10:14):
he pays four hundred dollars, all of a sudden he
gets a telegram of wire which is what they call
it back then from in Bowling Green, Florida, by Carl Marker,
his son, and it reads, do not take that body
of that man. I am still alive and doing good.
I'm still with KG Barkkoop show. Send a wire at

(01:10:38):
once and that is like what now? It turns out
Carl Marker is alive according to this wire, and he's
holding down like a dollar a day job with the
bar Coop Carnival Company. And his father imagine, they're like,

(01:10:58):
remember now at this point, nobody knows what to believe.
So it turns out that this guy Murker, Carl Merker,
he left home just after grade school. This guy was
a wanderer. And he went traveling with Wringling, Barnum.

Speaker 3 (01:11:12):
And Bailey.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
And a bunch of other shows. And he, in other words,
he would he worked as a circus what they call
a route about and he most of the time he
was dressed like in a old brown code corduroy trousers,
shoes that basically didn't have any souls left, and an
old blue shirt. Now he looked, in other words, like

(01:11:36):
a bump. But his father was a wealthy real estate dealer.
His family was well off in Omaha, right, But this guy,
he just loved that life. So this body, all right,
is already in transit over to Omaha and where they're

(01:11:56):
waiting when when the body, the dazz hang, I'm not
taking the body, so they put it. They hold it
at a morgue because the dazz hang, I'm not taking
the body. My dad's my son's saying. He's alive. Now.
By the way, this is not the first time this guy,
Karl Marker has done stuff to throw to what they
give his parents what they call a bad turn. Okay,

(01:12:17):
in nineteen seventeen, when he's nine years old, he goes
missing for five days and he's given up for dead.
The parents are thinking somebody took him, he died, he
found whatever. And he turns up in Lincoln, Nebraska, in
the custody of the chief of police, and he tells
the police they had just gone visiting, quote unquote visiting.

(01:12:42):
So apparently this guy was I don't know if he
was from nine years old. He was just one of
these wanderers. Okay. So they have this body, they don't know.
They're sending people all over the place trying to find
out is this guy really live, who's he dead? Well,
if that dead, then who's this guy that got killed?

(01:13:03):
So there's the body. Then another person, another guy named
Ms Haral. He says, look, that guy that got killed,
that dead body is a dock hand by the name
of Henry Rhodes, and I've known him for fifteen years.
And in the middle of this, everybody's okay, it's Rhads.

(01:13:25):
In the middle of this, Henry Rhadess sister arrives at
the funeral at the at the Morgue in Omaha and
she says, that's not my brother. So it's not Henry Rhodes.
So then they say, no, that is the name of
that dead guy is Thomas O'Connell. He's a laborer from Tulsa, Oklahoma,

(01:13:51):
and they get this tip from there's a company. They
got a telegraph from a company and Tulsa construction company saying, hey,
that guy is so and so. At this point, the
coroner saying, I'm not identifying this guy. I'm not, I don't.
In other words, so many people are saying it's him,
it's not him. That he's like, I'm not going to
identify him, Like I'm not going to sign a piece

(01:14:13):
of paper and say this is what is So Tampa's
chief of police detectives this guy named Fred Thomas, and
he says, look, I'm surprised that they ever said that
this guy was Carl Marker to begin with, because Karl
Marker is twenty two years old and this guy is

(01:14:34):
at least forty years old. In other words, you could
tell this was not this this was an older man.
So he's thinking, why did they go with that theory
that this is mrker So and then he says, and
his father should have been required to come down here

(01:14:55):
and identify his son and then just accompany the body
back to Amaha. In other words, they're saying, if he
would have the dad would have come to Tampa. He
would have said, no, that's not my son, and that
would have been it. All right. So at this point,
because they're right now, Tampa's got what they think is
a murder case, but the bodies in another state. Now,
the only thing that they say is that the description

(01:15:15):
of the guy did match Murker, which was that he
had reddish hair, a hooked nose, freckles, and a light complexion.
So when you say does this look yes, the only
thing is that there was like a twenty year difference
between one and the other, So.

Speaker 3 (01:15:31):
That kind of like that kind of that's kind of
like everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:15:39):
Well but back then. But see, but if if they're saying, hey,
it's Murker, remember two convicts and I think that's Mirker,
And they go, yeah, Merker had this this and this
like complexion, freckles, whatever, And they're thinking, Okay, these people
were just in jail with him. And remember this is
another thing. This guy smashed him in the fad with

(01:16:00):
an axe. Makes you think maybe his face was kind
of disfigured to the point that that's the only thing
I could think of. So anyway, now two weeks have
gone by. Now the police take a closer look at
the worksman's badge that they found with him and was stationary,
and it indicates that the guy who remember this guy

(01:16:21):
had a bunch of stuff. So they really don't know
if this ID this is the time before picture I
d's if this picture I D was really him. But
it says that he worked for the William Brothers, Inc.
Of Tulsa, and that part of his job, if that
was really him, was to travel to different states while
working for the company. Okay, now incomes in another guy.

(01:16:43):
His name is George Knapp, he lives in Omaha. He
goes to see the body and the chance that might
be his brother, Jasper Knapp what they call his name
was Jap they called he's fifty two years old, so
his age is better, who three years before had left
with bringing brother circus and was last known to be
out of work and living in Orlando. Like in other words,

(01:17:04):
these people, they will go traveling. The family would hear
on and off from them. Last they knew about him
was he was in Orlando. That was it turns out
that wasn't him. So bottom line. On January twenty ninth,
nineteen thirty, this unknown guy is buried in an unmarked
grave in the potters Field at Forestlawn Cemetery in Omaha.

(01:17:28):
The guy Richard Cheer, he gets released in June. The
charge of manslaughter is dropped. The authorities had no choice
but to believe this version of the story of how
he killed this unknown man who was trying to break
into his house. Now fast forward nineteen sixty nine. Carl Marker,

(01:17:49):
he's alive, he makes the papers, he's still working in
the racetrack thing, and he's held up by three guys.
They take his wallet. He was working at the racetrack
and Elmore, California. It was walking to drop from the
bus stop. And he dies in nineteen seventy at the
age of sixty three. So what do you think, Henry,

(01:18:11):
It turns up to know and this for all, I
have a feeling that it was that guy from the
Tulsa construction company.

Speaker 5 (01:18:17):
But bottom line, it's hard to tell because it's like
around that time there were so many headed, freckled people
that it's like.

Speaker 2 (01:18:28):
You know what, you know, what I think is really sad.

Speaker 3 (01:18:31):
Ginger was the thing back then.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
Okay, you know what I think is sad though that
at least these other men that had gone missing or
had dropped from sight. They had people that showed up
to see if that was really him the sister. You know,
people would show up this person, the guy that supposedly

(01:18:54):
was the employee of that construction company. Apparently I guess
he had no family or somebody that the company could
even say, Hey, we think your brother, father, uncle, cousin, whatever,
he's been killed. Do you want to he's an nobody
ever came. And besides the company is what I'm saying,
your employer is the only one who's kind of trying

(01:19:17):
to get you identified.

Speaker 3 (01:19:18):
Back then, they would actually like either pay people, wear
notes gold or silver. So the only, the only, the
only reason that this somebody would actually come and really
make an effort to do that is because they wanted money.

Speaker 2 (01:19:33):
Well no, no, no, But what I'm saying is that Henry,
that it's sad because you would think that, Like I said,
it's very sad when the only one that's my nice
little kiddy, nothing like a black cat when you're doing
the Halloween show. Hey Marnie, I know, I know she

(01:19:58):
does this usually around his time. Okay, well, well don't.

Speaker 3 (01:20:02):
Worry about it.

Speaker 2 (01:20:05):
Anyway. So you got a lover though, So anyway, what
I'm saying is this guy dies. And by the way,
I'm assuming that because they found that badge, because remember
there's no picture that this was the guy. He might
have stolen it from the original guy. We don't know

(01:20:27):
this poor man. But even but let's go in this
supposition that was really him. If it wasn't for his employer,
this guy just drifted along way from job to job whatever.
This looks like he was a petty thief to go
with it, but still nobody cared to find out how. Hey, no,
that's pretty sad to me. That was like, oh that
that's pretty sad. You know what, I think it's time

(01:20:49):
for this hold on, remember Toller. So anyway, let's keep going.
All right, I'm telling you anything that was weird, anything
that had some type of murder weird like that guy
like stuff hanging from the feeling it ended up being

(01:21:11):
called a voodoo something whatever. Right now, this next one,
this is out there. This is out there, folks, okay
out there. So anyway, this is we're coming back to Philly,
all right, Philadelphia, January nineteen thirty two. And there's a guy.

(01:21:32):
His name is Norman Bechtel and He's an insurance company employee,
and somebody takes him and throws them from an automobile
into the lawn of this huge estate in this area
called Germantown. He's found alive, but dies two hours later
in the hospital. This guy is thirty five years old,

(01:21:56):
and he's he's a member of a very well known
Birks count In other words, his family is very well
known in Burke's County. His father, Samuel, was a merchant
and he worked for his uncle Joseph B. Bechtel. And
this family founded a town called Bechtelville Bechtelsville that was

(01:22:18):
five miles from Boyertown, and many relatives lived in the
nearby town of Palm Congo Valley, Bartow and Gablesville. Now
this guy, he's found by police officer behind a big
mansion that was called Lonoak. And this home was owned
by Missus Stokes. It had stood vacant for about ten years.

(01:22:41):
She would travel so much, was like this huge estate.
And so in other words, it makes it sound like
so whoever threw him out there knew that this place
was empty. Now the officer, here's his moaning coming from
behind some bushes. He had been in the area because
the estate next door belonged to a guy named Judge
Harry mcdavidd who was getting bomb threats. So they had

(01:23:05):
posted a cop out there and when the cops doing
his round, he hears moaning from behind the bushes, finds
this guy and you know, anyway, he dies. He never
gets to talk. So they find out that this guy, Vechtel,
had eight stab wounds near the heart, two in the head,
and his skull was fractured. And later on the cop says, oh, yes,

(01:23:31):
I did notice. I did see an automobile stop near
the area where he was found. All right, Now, remember
this is not like your regular this is not your
regular residential neighborhood. These are states, so the yards are
very far apart that kind of deal.

Speaker 3 (01:23:54):
So they.

Speaker 2 (01:23:58):
They're like, oh my god, you know his his face
had gotten carved up, uh stabbed. So this guy was
an officer for the Mennonite Church. If anybody's not familiar
with the Mennonites, sometimes people confusion with the Amish that
they wear the little bond and the women and the

(01:24:18):
men they kind of have that that, you know, the
hats like the like the Amish there there. I don't
think there's restricted to the Amish. But and so there's this, uh,
there's a there's a guy. This is right after they
discovered that, you know, he's gotten that he's been found
basically on that door. There's a guy named Robert Ross.

(01:24:40):
He's a Mennonite church officer. He tells the police, look,
betch tell okay, we all went him and this other
girl named Eleanor Temple. We were all attending this church
meeting the night before. He tells us, look, I'm gonna
drop you off. He drives, He drops off Robert Ross, okay,

(01:25:04):
and then he drops off Eleanor Temple. Now when before
they really realize what's going on, they even think they
theorize a police think that he had been stabbing with
the stiletto, and that possibly he was trying to defend
the girl, and that because they couldn't find it right away,

(01:25:24):
it turns out this was another case. It was very different.
Next day, by the way, they can't find his car.
Next day, they find his car about five miles away
and it's full of blood. They finally end up talking
to the girl and she says, oh, no, after he
dropped off Robert, he dropped me off. No, like in
other words, it wasn't because over me. But this goes

(01:25:46):
in a different direction from what the police expect. So
when they're looking at his you know, all his wounds,
they're saying that all his wounds are connected to what
they call the Pencilvania Hex doctors these weird symbols that
were found on his forehead, and they said, they said

(01:26:06):
that he had small crescents have been cut on each
side of his forehead, and a horizontal line cut about
one inch under each crescent, okay, and that there was
another cut just starting to beflow the hair line that
ran straight down to the bridge of his nose, and
then two others diagonically upward from each eyebrow. Now the

(01:26:30):
police are thinking with good reason that whoever did this deliberately,
that they marked him with either a razor blade or
a scalpel, and that there was also circle formed around.
In other words, they they stabbed them like around, They
stabbed them once in the heart, and then they stabbed
them like seven times right around the heart. That there
was the puncture. Things right, So they're thinking, because by

(01:26:53):
the way, there's a there's a what they call Hex's
ray or powowers that in some cases some people think
normally if you read up on that, they're mostly like
folk folk or ritual magic. But some people say that
gets darker. Back in nineteen twenty eight, there was another
murder tied into that. But anyway, this is why the

(01:27:13):
police are going in that direction as to why this
guy was killed, and they can't figure it out because
of these markings on his face and the way he
was killed. So they find his diary. This guy Bechel
that gets killed. He's got that diary that goes back
nine years. But no answers to say, hey, this is

(01:27:36):
the person, like, oh, he wrote in his diary, So
and so has it out for me. It only contains
the name of men and women he worked with at
the church and the boy Scouts. Apparently he was involved
with the Boy Scouts. Right So now the police are
also weirded out because they can find no fingerprints on
his car none. It's got blood. Apparently this was where

(01:27:57):
he was killed or something happened, but they can't find
any fingerprints right now. But in a few days of
the crime, they've got three theories. One that was robbery,
two that he's attacked by a maniac. And third that

(01:28:17):
he's what they call a victim, a so called hex
or which victim. In other words, that it wasn't we're
not trying to steal from you. It was not a maniac.
It was that there was some type of weird religious
occult angle to it. Now, this guy he carried life
insurance for like remember he worked for an insurance company.

(01:28:38):
He carries life insurance for sixty thousand dollars, and the
police at well, that's unusual. This guy's only thirty one
years old and he's a bachelor. He doesn't have a family.
But okay, now when he dies, the bulk of his
estate goes to a brother and a half sister gives
some money to the church, and it gives another part
of nominy, the money to the family cemetery. Business. Family

(01:29:01):
is so influential that they have their own cemetery. And
but what the police find out is that yeah, he
had this money that came in after his death, but
that he was virtually penniless. Uh, that he had speculated
and what they call fly by night stalks, but that
this guy didn't have money and nobody can figure out remember,

(01:29:22):
no fingerprints, nothing. Plus remember this is a very respectable,
respected guy. He's his family's very respectable. He's an insurance,
his father everything. And they can like, why who would
want to do this? This is not some guy that's
like a criminal. You think, oh, yeah, there's a million
people who want to kill this guy. But how does
that go? Henry That sometimes looks can be misleading.

Speaker 3 (01:29:45):
What do you think? Yeah, sometimes the least person that
you think. Sometimes they say that the most gentle, quiet
person is the one you gotta worry about.

Speaker 2 (01:29:56):
Oh, or that that their lifestyle has that that you think, Okay,
who would want to.

Speaker 3 (01:30:01):
Kill person that you think? When they we do it?

Speaker 2 (01:30:05):
It's the one who I remember, this guy is a Mennonite.
He's not just a Mennonite. He's active in his church.
He's like a not an elder, but he's in the committees,
he does all his organizations for everything.

Speaker 3 (01:30:16):
They have proven a lot of that to be true.
That is, you really look at it, it's like a
lot of times, eighty five percent of the time, it's
the person who the least person you think will never
do it. It's most likely the one that did it.

Speaker 2 (01:30:35):
Well, well, this is the thing the problem is that
they're having is how can you find out who it
is when you don't have a motive, when you look
at the person's friend's family, the circumstances of his life, like, Okay,
what was this guy doing or what was involved with
or who that will be the one to kill him?
It was nothing. So a few weeks, you know, a

(01:30:55):
few weeks after the murder, there's a guy named Ellis
Park Elis H. Park, and he's considered like the outstanding
manhunter in the United States at that time, the equivalent
of what they call FBI profilers back then. He was
like and he says, quote, the person who killed Norman
or Vegetel probably never saw him before. I would say

(01:31:17):
the murder looks like the work of a person mentally deficient.
That makes it an exceedingly difficult task. I would say
there's a little chance to solve the case, except through
accident or a lucky chance. The illogical furiosity with which
Bechtel was stabbed and slash seems to confirm this. So
this guy Park's basically saying, this guy was like a

(01:31:37):
stranger on Stranger Crime, Like, if you're looking for a motive,
you're not gonna find any what it was his bad
luck well, let's see, now, this guy park Parker had
become famous for solving many murders, including the killing of
John Brunin ten years before. He eventually also he became
involved in the Lindbergh kidnapping of the baby. But anyway,

(01:32:01):
now the police are like they're digging. They're like, they're like, okay,
this guy, this poor guy, he gets dumped out here,
and I think what was what they found perplexing was
that they couldn't find fingerprints, Like woo, how can there
not be any fingerprints on a car full of blood
of nothing?

Speaker 3 (01:32:19):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:32:21):
So there's a detective called Paul Kleipe's klin Spen Okay,
So he starts investigating and he finds out that there
were two unsolved murders in the Vegetall family during the
last thirty years. Two other family members have been killed
never solved. So one was a guy named Harry Bechetel.

(01:32:43):
His body's found out and hadn't filled New Jersey. This
is a nineteen oh five. Like I said, this was
a while back. This guy is an accomplished musician and
he had just moved to Philadelphia. They found him. He's
got cuts and lacerations on his face, but no other injuries.
And the coroner he says, look, the cause of death

(01:33:05):
is exposure, even though he had a bunch of money
on him and he always kept his money inside it
a vest pocket. They did find the pocketbook some distance
away from the body, and his watch is overcoat and
his hat were missing. But this corner saying it was
a robber. He's just saying, oh, check this out. He's saying,

(01:33:28):
Professor Bechtoll was known to be a drinking man. He
had been admitted to a Kelly Cure institution another name
for a sanatorium at least three times that ned been
discharged as incurable. Remember back then, that's how sometimes they
would drink. If you had enough money, like alcoholism, you
were admitted to a sanitarium. But the county physician, he's
saying that this guy, Harry Bechtel, had a light hemorrhage

(01:33:52):
of the brain. He wanders out along this lowly road
and while there the hemorrhage becomes more profuse. He falls
over and he just dies where he's found. But then
never accounts like, okay, so who took all this money
off of him? So basically his murder was never sold
and the family always considered it a murder, even though

(01:34:14):
it was investigates a crime. They never bought into this
idea that the guy had like a hemorrhage and then
he walked around, fell over and died of exposure.

Speaker 3 (01:34:24):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:34:24):
The next family member in the Bechetel family who dies
is nineteen oh three October twenty sixth and her name
is Hannah mabels Vechetel, better known as Mabel's. She's twenty
one years old and her mother finds her body in
the cellar of their home at six twenty seven Cedar

(01:34:44):
Street in Allentown in case you live there, and her
skull has been crushed, but there's no other marks of
violence on her body. She's seen last seen alive driving
with a guy named David Weisenberg the day before she
gets found by her mom. Okay, now, her mom says,
tells the police. Oh, around one am, I hear the

(01:35:05):
dog sparking. I look out the bedroom window and I
see two men carrying an object from a carriage and
place it in the underground alley near the house. Later
that morning, the mother gets up finds the daughter's coda
and scarf inside the house. This doesn't seem strange not
until later she goes outside she finds the daughter's body

(01:35:27):
in that alleyway. Now, she lived at the house with
her mom, her mom who's a widow, a sister, and
several brothers, and she worked at a place called the
Palace Sick Silk Mill. She had two admirers. One was
a guy named Alfred Eckstein or Eckstein, which his family
liked him. And another one was that David Weisenberg, the

(01:35:51):
one that she was seen the last time in live with,
but her family didn't like him because he was Jewish.
Both of these guys end up getting arrested and they
posted bill immediately because they're on their suspicion. These are
both our admirers. Now, when the family go the when
the police go there, even though they find her body
in the alleyway, they find in her bedroom a stained

(01:36:17):
and broken hatchet, and they also find that her outer
clothing had little blood, but her undergarments were saturated, which
according to the police, proved that she was undressed when killed.
Right now, besides those two guys, all her brothers are
brought in by the authorities after the body's found. Now,

(01:36:38):
one of them, his name is Thomas. Thomas Bechtel. He
has stains on his clothes, but he tells police, no, man,
these are tobacco stains. But the police don't believe him.
Like in other words, they tested it. But guess what.
Thomas commits suicide while he's in jail. He cuts his
throat with a pocket knife. No, no, no, not a

(01:37:03):
little hope from his friends. In other words, he's being
held in jail like with all the brothers, everybody, and
he cuts his throat with a pocket knife. But he
left no note admitting that he killed his sister.

Speaker 3 (01:37:19):
That was an inspiration.

Speaker 2 (01:37:21):
So the police they say, hey, he committed suicide. He's
the one that killed her. But in the meantime they
receive an unsigned type written letter from Philadelphia that says, quote,
she was killed by her brother. The body was taken

(01:37:41):
downstairs and laid in the passageway. The story was then
made up between them about the carriage. The struggle with
the girl to get her to release herself from the
jew Weisenberger who was dragging her down to infamy, occurred
that night in a terrible scene when the brother rot
up to madness killed her. It sounds like her brothers

(01:38:02):
had such a meltdown and Thomas guess killed her, and
then the mother got in on it by saying that
there was the cat that shared the carriage. I don't know,
maybe her mom was in a tough spot, thinking I'm
gonna lose my kids. But anyway, now, whether her brother
was the one who killed her, the case was unofficially unsolved,
like the other one. They want to give these reasons.

(01:38:23):
But as far as the investigators who will fast forward
out to Norman, they're saying, hey, this family has got
two very weird unsolved murders in their families. Okay, Now
what happens is like many murder investigations, when they start investigating,
guess what they come up with. They air out the
dirty laundry for the family. So right, So now it

(01:38:49):
turns out that good old Norman the mid of night,
despite his religious activities, he would like to sit in
on large steak poker games. Now a newspaper makes a
comparison to the assassination of Arnold Rolstein in nineteen twenty eight,
who had gotten killed a short time after he sat

(01:39:11):
down at a high stakes card game, and supposedly they
say that they guessed that the motive when Ralstein got
killed was that due to the gaming table, but nobody
was there a prosecute even though he was a mobster.
Now the inference, it's obvious what they're saying, Hey, Norman
bechetell's murder is involved because he was into gambling, all right.

(01:39:36):
Now they dig up more. They find out that he
liked to entertain a group of men in his bachelor
apartment to play poker, which he called a great American game.
But the stakes were now so moderate. In other words,
this guy would have a bunch of guys over for
a poker game, but they weren't paying, like, you know, hey,
a couple of bucks here, a couple of bucks there.
Apparently they were high stakes game. So and they said

(01:40:02):
that even though they're they're finding out, oh, this guy
didn't have money. He was prone to display a thick
roll of bills, and some people even thought, oh, this
is stuff that he wins at this at the card
at the card table. And his uncle who's his employer,
tells police he often carried several hundred dollars on his person,

(01:40:23):
but he thought that it was money he had collected
as a treasure of the church organizations. Have you noticed
how everybody's like pointing in the other direction, like, I
don't know, the card game, the church, I don't know.
He's just always running around with a bunch of money.
Later on, the family's like, oh, shut up, shut up,
and they're saying, no, no, no, that's not true. His
acquaintances he only would carry ten or fifteen dollars, and

(01:40:46):
they were saying that that that thing about him being
robbed for murder for robbery, that that's not true. In
other words, because the police are thinking, okay, if this
guy is walking around with rolls of money, maybe he
got killed for robbery, and the family though the acquaintance,
I know that's not true. So at this point, the
only clue that the that the cops have is the

(01:41:07):
chauffeur's cap that's staying with spots which may have been blood.
But this is found near Bechtel's body. Again, they're assuming
that it's connected to him, but they're not sure. So
by now the police they got rid of that motive
of the being tied to the Hexai Curs, even though
the newspapers were calling it the I Mark murder mystery,

(01:41:30):
that's what they dubbed it. You know, they would call
murders different things. But so now this this thing hex
ray is a practice of witchcraft among the Pennsylvania Dutch.
There are basically three types of magic practitioners pow wowers,
which is white magic generally for healing and hex breaking,

(01:41:53):
Hexai black magic generally for hex casting, and hex doctors,
which is a sort of a great area of magic
including people to practice who practice white and black magic.
So but anyway, by then they're saying, uh, so, there's
the captain of the homicide detectives. His name is Captain
Harry Heenley. He's in charge of the homicide. Now he

(01:42:18):
tells the newspapers, Hey, this guy, besides being stabbed, they
forced his right eye out of its socket. So, in
other words, there was some type of like even torture
involved in it. So there, you know, everybody's trying to think, Okay,
this guy was held up, why would you besides all
this markings and stabbing in the heart, and then you're

(01:42:39):
forcing his eye out of a socket just to robb them.
That's okay. So now the more that the police are
digging into his life, the police realize, man, this guy
took a lot of pains to keep his life mysterious.
He kept his own confidence. This is quote what they wrote.
He kept his own confidence and virtually never talked, even

(01:43:02):
to those who were associated with him in business and
those who presumably were his friends, of his personal affairs
or his personal life. He was known as being friendly
with the neighbors in the apartment where he had lived
for two years, but made no effort to become closely acquainted.
In other words, even friends, acquaintances, people who were people

(01:43:23):
only knew so much about him, and he never discussed
with anybody anything. He didn't have what they would say, Hey,
your best buddy, your best bud, No best friend. Nope.
So he had few of any girl friends. And he
was known to dress immaculately and had meticulous habits, even

(01:43:43):
a little fussy. Now he had an aversion for even
the slightest dust or the slightest disarrangement of furniture in
his apartment. If a chambermaid did not perform her job correctly,
he wouldn't sist that she'd be called immediately to rectify
her error, regardless of the time of day.

Speaker 3 (01:44:04):
It was.

Speaker 2 (01:44:05):
So if he got home at six or seven and
she had moved the furniture, that's my kind of man.
He would be calling up the apartment manager, going change
to come over here and fix this or sweep this
or whatever. Well, okay, so when he gets buried, three
thousand people attend. They go out there, they brave the

(01:44:28):
cold weather, and about three thousand people attend this funeral
because everybody, of course is well. Now, then the next
theory is they attributed to the work of what they
call the Mixterius three EX maniac. This is a maniac
who terrorized Long Island in the summer of nineteen thirty. Right,

(01:44:50):
he had already killed like three men, and he would
send letters to the newspapers. Now, the reason why they
think that it's the three X Maniac is that they
find a bloodstained rag used by the killer to wipe
his hands, and it was wrapped in a newspaper containing
a copy of the letter sent by X the Maniac

(01:45:11):
to Captain William Houghten of the local Secret Service, in
which he had to laugh at this part in which
he promised to reveal information about the recent communist bombing. Okay,
So in other words, they're going in that direction just
based on a piece of news old newspaper. Now, they
also said that the location where he was murdered was

(01:45:32):
similar to that of where the crime was perpetrated on
Long Island, and in June nineteen thirty, the body of
Joseph Muzinski, he was a Long Island grocer, was found
shot through the head in a lonely spot in Queens.
The killer wrote to a New York newspaper, boasting of
his murder and telling where the bodies could be found.

(01:45:52):
A large reward was offered, but the killer was not apprehended.
By the way, he's never been apprehended. I never had
heard of this. Have you ever heard of this Henry
the three X mania from Long Island? I'd never heard
of this guy. So anyway, Long Island is sick.

Speaker 3 (01:46:05):
You guys really want to go there, But Island it's like.

Speaker 2 (01:46:10):
Okay, well I never knew, apparently, but they in other words,
they were running out of reasons why this guy had
been killed.

Speaker 3 (01:46:17):
It was a reason why they called Jamaica Queens.

Speaker 2 (01:46:20):
Okay, okay. So anyway, months passed it, and of course
this is making them all look really bad. So his
murderers remains at large. And as a matter of fact,
if they would have proven that it was a robbery murder,
it's still. So it's December of nineteen thirty two, and

(01:46:41):
there's a detective called Michael Korsky, and he had been
assigned to this case right from the beginning. They tell him,
how you need to find out what's going on with
this guy. Find out and the angle is to why
he got killed. All of a sudden, he gets stabbed
to death in a struggle with a man with an
ice near thirty ninth Street in Pelton Avenue. Now there's

(01:47:05):
a big citywide manhunt and the killers found. It's a
guy named George Sugarfoot Green. He gets captured, tried, sentenced
for six to twelve years. Now people are saying, man,
that's so weird. How his death is very similar to Chetels's.

(01:47:25):
And they're even saying, was this guy coming too close
to learning the identity of the murderer and they killed
him somehow? This detective like everybody's like, okay, talk about
weird motives. So we're going Now five years have passed
April nineteen thirty seven. It's five years after the crime,

(01:47:47):
and all of a sudden, out of the blue, the
police say, hey, we solve the crime. And they're saying,
there's a guy named William Jordan. He's thirty six years old,
he's a chauffeur, and he had confessed to the crime.
And he says, look, there's three others implicated in this.

(01:48:09):
One of them is a woman. There was a fifth
person in the gang. But this guy died between the
murder and now he died. Now, this guy Jordan, he
tells police, look, I didn't kill him. I just saw
what happened. I just saw the attack. And he tells
the police. At the beginning, remember these stories change, that

(01:48:31):
the reason for the crime was that this guy, Norman Bechtel,
was being blackmailed Buddy's gang and their names were John
Coles forty one, Sir Williams thirty, Lucille Young twenty nine,
and Oliver Armstrong was the dead guy. He died. He
was the one supposedly that killed him. All right, Now

(01:48:53):
they're saying, first that this gets straight. Now, First you're
saying Oliver Armstrong, the guy that was dead, had an
engagement to meet Bechtel, and that instead of Armstrong going
by himself to meet this guy, off, five of them
go with Armstrong and when he gets there to this assignation,

(01:49:15):
they got into an argument and then all of a sudden,
this guy, Jordan said, man, all of a sudden, Armstrong
goes crazy and starts stabbing him right with his what
he's called a long bladed pen knife. Armstrong then takes
the guy's car to the estate and you know, they
throw him, They throw the body, and then what happens

(01:49:37):
is in them intervening five years Armstrong dies from natural causes. Now,
while Jordan is giving this story to the police, the
other three guys are going, that's a lie. That's a lie.
They're interrupting him, saying, Hey, what are he's talking about.
We were never there. We're not part of this.

Speaker 3 (01:49:52):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:49:54):
During the murder scene, we're like, we don't know anything
about this. In the middle of this, we're getting to
the crux of the matter, the police become like really
cryptic and they say that the crime was quote very complicated,
and the mayor remembered by now the mayor's involved in

(01:50:14):
this case. He infers that it was motivated by both
robbery and a sex angle. What do you think, Henry,
a sex angle? A sex angle?

Speaker 3 (01:50:27):
You think?

Speaker 2 (01:50:28):
Okay, so guess what a mayor? This new mayor. He
takes to the detectives who were originally in the case
five years before he penalizes them. Even the captain. He
makes them like patrol people because he says that they
took graft. They took money from the guy's family. One

(01:50:49):
of them took twenty eight hundred dollars from the guy's brother,
Wilbur and the other was the homicide squad captain bought
the murder autumn, which was new, for only two hundred
and fifty dollars. S La Mayor is saying, why would
you do that? So this convinced the mayor that something

(01:51:11):
is being hidden about the crime by the family, by
the Vegetel family, and that diary that they have found,
his diary that they have found at the beginning, and
a bunch of other papers. All of a sudden they
went missing. Oh of course they were missing. So when
they bring in the brother, Wilburd Vegetel, he believe me.

(01:51:33):
Remember he's one of him and his half sister are
the ones that get part of the payoffs from the
life insurance. They asked him, hey, why he's made this
loan to the homicide squad. Detective this guy named Frank Chaplinsky.
Once he gave him two thousand bucks and then he
gives him eight hundred and he says no. Chaplinsky said

(01:51:54):
that he needed the money to settle a debt. And
then they asked him, have you ever lent money to
a stranger before? And he said no, okay, And then
it turns out that in reality, the one that he
had that Vegetel had the meeting with, was not that

(01:52:14):
guy Jordan. It was a guy named John Coles, one
of the group. It's forty one, and he's like, he's
what they call a pudgyman. He leures Bechetel to this rendezvous,
and that William Arnstrong did the killing. They're always pointing
at the dead guy, all right, and then they start

(01:52:36):
saying that, no, that the Armstrong he blamed Bechetel because
he lost his job at the apartments where he was
a janitor, and in other words, that that was the
reason for the for the argument, which really doesn't. It doesn't.
So this is what Jordan is telling the police. Remember
he's the first one that he's talking. He says, look

(01:52:56):
him and this guy calls Williams and Armstrong went to
a speake's by the woman that was in the group.
Her name was Lucille Young, This is on January nineteenth.
They sit there all day drinking white mule. All afternoon,
they start running out of money, so this guy calls.

(01:53:17):
He goes to an year old guy garage because he
was a garage attendant or he worked at and he's
trying to borrow money if somebody so they can't keep drinking.
He doesn't get any money. Then he remembers, hey, I
have a meeting with this guy, Norman Bechetel. This man
and that guy, why don't you all come with me.
I don't know if he told him to come with
him or they invited themselves. So when he goes out

(01:53:39):
to meet Chetel, they all come, but Armstrong especially comes
to him with the automobile. This is when the argument
breaks out and an armstrong Armstrong starts hitting this guy,
Norman Bechetel in the head. Now, all of a sudden,
the mayor turns the cold of pudgy guy and says,
do you love silk underwear? His answer was no, sir,

(01:54:02):
Bechitel never bought me any silk underwear. I had no
date with beche Tel that night. Okay, so first of all,
that's a weird question, and his answer is even weirder.
So you know where we're going with this, right, It
was a strange but telling question. Okay. So a few
days after his confession, this guy, William Jordan slashes his

(01:54:24):
throat and legs inside his jail cell. But regardless, they
all go in May of nineteen thirty seven, he goes
to trial. They set the other one's free because there's
not enough evidence to prosecute them. Right, and remember, the
actual murder, according to him, is the dead guy Armstrong.
So when this trial is going on for these people

(01:54:45):
that are accused, they have this lady, Helen Temple, the
one that he supposedly drop off. They tell her, hey,
come to the tell us what happened that night now
that we need to coordinate with what this guy's saying.
And she says, look that she goes, after he dropped
me off, it looked like he was planning on meeting

(01:55:06):
somebody with somebody, and that she like, in other words,
they had never been involved there, he was not like
a suit or anything, and that she had already even
knew him, that she wasn't even his friend, and that
that that that was that night, that night she hadn't
seen him for months, and they were saying, Okay, there's

(01:55:26):
something that he was there, because that neighborhood where he
was driving around, that where he was killed of the
Stokes estate was far from his apartment. In other words,
this didn't happen like, oh, I'm driving on my way home.
This was like on the other side of town from
where he lived at. Now what happened was this guy Colls.
He's identified as an employer or garage where Bechtill keeps

(01:55:47):
his automobile on South Elbow Street, and he was formerly
the manager of the apartment house where bech Tell lived.
So we're thinking this is where these two met all
right now the corner which is a guy named William Wadsworth.

(01:56:10):
He describes that Bechetall had been stabbed eight times in
the heart, once in the hip, and eleven on the head. Now,
this guy, William Jordan, he's found guilty of voluntary manslaughter
and he's sentenced to five to ten years in Eastern
State Penitentiary. And the DA says, look, I didn't pursue
a charge of murder because he believes that Jordan was

(01:56:31):
not the actual killer. In other words, he believes him
that the other guy was. He goes and the place
where Bechetall was found was so far from the route
he would have taken to his home that police war
convinced he went there to keep an appointment. So three
years later, this guy gets acquitted after being granted a
new trip on the state Supreme Court, and lucky for him,

(01:56:54):
there's a dead guy to blame him the murder on. Now,
this is the thing. There's no fingerprints found in the
dead man's car indicating whoever had been inside it had
worn gloves. This did not point to an unplanned encounter.
There was also the peculiar way Bechto was stabbed. William Condon,
superintendent for the Philadelphia mord said at the time the

(01:57:18):
deliberate designs at which the wounds were cast resemble a sculptured,
carved piece of work. I would certainly like to know
the explanation. In other words, this guy didn't just get
stabbed in the face. Oh boom, here he got stop
stop stabbed. They made a design like a ritual killing.
But supposedly it's like so, why would a murder that

(01:57:40):
escalated from an argument end up with a victim getting
wounds on each temple beginning at the top of the
ear and pointing towards the nostril, a crescent shaped wound
carved as if on wood, deliberate, careful, exact, and each
cheekbone was a somewhat similar slash about two inches long.

(01:58:01):
The peculiar knife carvings on each side of the victims
had formed roughly an eye. They had made like a
design in his face of an eye. Could this design
and the fact that one of his eyes had been
removed was done by someone who believed in the evil eye.
The knife thrust that killed Norman Vegeto penetrated through his overcoat,

(01:58:22):
his coat, his steel spectacle case, his shirt, and his underwear.
Do you know how hard you have to stab somebody?

Speaker 3 (01:58:31):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:58:33):
He didn received the seven stab wounds in a circle
around his heart. So what do you think, Henry, I'm
gonna send them off in just a minute, folks, to
go take care of the animals over there.

Speaker 3 (01:58:43):
What do you think?

Speaker 2 (01:58:44):
Do you think that it was that he had a
homosexual encounter and that it went south because they tried
to blackmail him?

Speaker 3 (01:58:52):
Let me tell you one of those songs inspired for
a Beatles song, and.

Speaker 2 (01:59:01):
Because this is what this is what I think? All right? Oh,
by the way, the what it looks like to me,
And I don't know. But even though use one explainationy okay,
it looks like this guy was leading like a double life,
you know, like Superman by day is one thing by

(01:59:21):
night or another. He's you look at him. He's an
upstanding Mennonite church member, belongs to an old influential family.
But it seems like he went out to meet this guy,
John Coles for his homosexual assignation.

Speaker 3 (01:59:34):
I don't know a lot of those people's Mennonite people.

Speaker 2 (01:59:36):
Look, no they're not. But no, Henry, no, no, no.
What I'm saying is that remember that now he I
think he he he goes out there, He's gone out
there to meet John Coles. In other words, John Coles
already knew to meet with him, and they could have
made the appointment because John Coles worked at the garage
or at the apartment building where he worked at so
they already knew we're gonna meet at this time at

(01:59:58):
this place.

Speaker 3 (01:59:58):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:00:00):
And now what happens is calls before he goes out,
there's been drinking with a bunch of his friends and
they've run out of money, and maybe he says, oh,
I gotta leave I'm gonna go meet this whatever or whatever,
and they're thinking, man, this is oh, you know some
guy who's a man. This guy should be easy to blackmail,

(02:00:20):
like make him give us some money, and maybe he refused,
and that's when Armstrong like, remember these guys are spending
all money all afternoon bringing aways at White Mule. Now
this is the thing I don't know. Never this is
the Mennonite Church, especially in the nineteen thirties, saw homosexual

(02:00:41):
activity as a sin, and they define marriage as a
covenant between one man and one woman. This was based
on their interpretation that the Bible teaches general intercourse is
reserved for heterosexual marriage, and that any violation of this covenant,
including homosexual activity, constitutes In other words, I believe this

(02:01:04):
is still their belief. But back then in the nineteen
thirty it was it was like there was there was
no no, no no. In other words, So, could the
nature of his death been the reason why his family
paid off the detectives the homicide squad when in charge
of the investment. Probably, let's face it, the scandal would

(02:01:27):
have reflected on the family, the church, and he was
still going to be just as dead. So maybe they
thought maybe And this is the thing. Did they know,
how they suspect that they had a secret life or
were they just as son as a police. Okay, now
they didn't kill him. Off of what I'm saying is
maybe they they were so I don't know, did they

(02:01:50):
know or they were like surprised, or maybe they thought
he's dead. Oh my god, he brought it himself. Now
you know that I was saying. All right, So anyway,
I'm sure that his sibling is brother and sister. They
went to the mayor I think, who understood really what
had gone on with that crime, and asked to suppress
an ugly truth about their family member, even at the

(02:02:10):
cost of punishing the killer. In other words, they saying, look,
we don't care if you never cast who the killer is.
We just don't want you to put out what really
was going on with his crime. Oh now, now this
leaves a question as to why was he tortured, stabbed
and carved with the symbolism. This appeared to be a

(02:02:30):
methodical and deliberate act.

Speaker 3 (02:02:32):
They were angry betrayed.

Speaker 2 (02:02:35):
But why well his wife, well wife, he has no wife.
He's a single guy.

Speaker 4 (02:02:44):
No.

Speaker 2 (02:02:44):
Oh, now, this is the question.

Speaker 3 (02:02:47):
Because because he's supposed to be loyal to them, not
be a nasty creep.

Speaker 2 (02:02:54):
Well, okay, now, now who kills Bechtel satistic Robert, a
religious fanatic.

Speaker 3 (02:03:00):
Or out rach lover?

Speaker 2 (02:03:01):
Now, yeah, you ask yourself where, uh, where's where it
does one end and the other one start? So do
me a favor. Hold on, I'm gonna send him off
on an eron, go go over there. And I'm almost done.
So if you want to check on what what the

(02:03:21):
dogs are doing, Okay, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna
finish this off. Okay, and this is okay, so just
uh this is this is by the way, this this
has happened like right at the same time that this
thing happened with with becht Okay, this this and by

(02:03:46):
the way, the reason why I bring this up is
why you would think why these people so quick to
uh pin this like as an occult. I mean, besides
the fact of the weird way that he got he
got stabbed and all that thing. Right around the time

(02:04:07):
that he gets killed, they there's a guy named Samuel Ford.
This is three weeks after beach Still gets killed. Okay,
three weeks after beach Done gets killed. This guy named

(02:04:36):
Samuel Ford f O RTE. He's a night watchman in
a place called the Lansdale Foundry. He's forty five years old,
father of ten kids. Now check this out. Turns out
he's a member of a secret cult whose leader, and

(02:04:58):
this is according to Ford's wife, had completely bewitched them.
When they found them. He had a window cord i've
been fastened around his neck and the other end was
tied to a beam which was laid over the top
of two lockers. Now, his hands were tied behind the
body with rags, and the feet were held together by

(02:05:20):
a belt. And the body was found like an ankneeling position,
with the knees barely clear of the floor. The body
was found inside the foundry company where he worked at. Now,
the at the beginning, they're looking at it as as

(02:05:48):
was this a suicide, But then later on they're saying
that the way that, in other words, that he could
that the way his hands were tied so not was
that in other words, he could not have tied his
own hands. Uh that that hard or that than the
knot by himself. All right, there's there's no way. I mean,

(02:06:11):
you can tie maybe your ankles, but you can't tie
your hands that way. Now. His also, his mouth was
cut and his left eye was badly bruised, and his
lunch was like on a nearby like he had been
eating and it was on a nearby bench. Now, this
locker room where he worked from it was like some
distance from the factory, and it was nothing of value.

(02:06:34):
And then in other words, that for somebody to break
in or we're gonna take this. He's a night watchman,
and his the few things he had that they were untouched.
So there's a one of the detectives. He says, Look,
all the windows of the founder were unlocked, and anyone
could have come in there. Now, on three occasions during

(02:06:57):
the past week, somebody I tried to break into the foundry.
And they're saying, but we don't think it was for robbery.
And each time Fort the guy that that guy, he
blocked him. He wouldn't let him in. Now I don't
know what was he heard, did hear a noise or whatever.
So anyway, the day after this guy dies, Fort dies,

(02:07:20):
this thing about a mysterious Italian religious cult gets into
the investigation and his wife and I guess people around
him saying, look, he belonged to this cult, and he
had a bible that was written all in Italian, and
he was continued he would carry this bible around with him.
He was continuously reading from it. But after they discover
his body, it's gone, it's disappeared. And they questioned two

(02:07:45):
of his older sons, when was twenty one, that one
was eighteen. They themselves say, look, our dad joined this
organization is about seven years ago. But he would refuse
to tell any of us, his wife, any of us,
his children, any of their secret rights to anybody. And
they kept telling him, hey, we want you to get
out of that. They were Catholic, and eventually the authorities

(02:08:10):
find out that there's like five other members of the
cult that lived in Lansdale, this is where this happened,
and that they were very very ultra secretive, but that
they believed in faith healing as one of their principles,
and that one other beliefs was that you couldn't take
medicine of any type, no matter how ill you were.

(02:08:35):
The police also find out, I owe there was another
one that there was a man that tried to come
in to the plant trying to say to tell them
I need to use the phone. So why they wanted
to go in there, was it to get him? What
was the reason? And yeah, and of course the corner says, yeah, no,
he died from strangulation. And the police arrived at the
conclusion that this guy wanted to leave the cult and

(02:09:01):
you know, they didn't want them to leave, and that
maybe the secrets of the cult were in that Bible.
And what happened. Oh, by the way, they didn't have
a church they would meet, is that they would rotate
the meeting place to the homes of each of the members.
In other words, this week or next week or whatever,
it's your so and so's house. So they would rotate.

(02:09:21):
They didn't have like a church or a certain location.
They would just rotate. Now, finally they start suspecting this
one guy because of the peculiar knots that they had
done for when they for when they tied him up.
And at that point, believe it or not, remember this
took place like three weeks after Norman Bechtel has been killed.

(02:09:44):
And remember at Norman Bechtel, they're thinking, oh, there's there's
this a cult angle to it, you know something. So
they're saying, oh, this guy belongs to a strange cult,
and Norman bechetell's you know, so they're thinking, man, is
there something some cult or a cult? Hety, what's going on? Now?
All of a sudden, this guy Samuel Fort. The investigation

(02:10:06):
takes a turn because the police say, look, you know
who murdered him. It was the husband and the son
of a woman who are all members of the religious
cult that Fort was having a love affair with. Right
because they said that the belt that was used to
tie Ford's hands were traced to the woman's husband, and

(02:10:29):
the strips that bound his feet to the tailoring shop
where the Sun worked. Now this league checked us out.
It comes from missus Fort, who tells police, look, I
suspected of my husband being unfaithful to me for the
past six months. She tells him, quote, he was always
going to the home of another member of the cult.

(02:10:51):
Many times his friend was not at home and his
wife was there alone. He always told me he was
going there to pray, but that was not the only
reason end quote. She also said that her husband had
been threatened because he wanted to abandon the cult and
return to the Catholic Church, and as a matter of fact,

(02:11:11):
she ch had to give her a statement Italian and
her son was the one that interpreted now at the end, Ultimately,
even though they had all these clues or motives, I
guess they the corner determines that, hey, he died as

(02:11:32):
a result. In other words, they look at it as
a result of a murder or a suicide, even that
it was found that his hands were bound so tightly
it couldn't have been impossible for him vies. In other words,
there was a bunch of surrounding things that pointed to
this man was killed, but they ruled it like as
a suicide somehow. Four months after, his wife submits a

(02:11:54):
claim for compensation to the foundry company where he works for,
and a couple of years later, you're having a hearing
regarding this compensation. She wents. She says, look, you guys
owe my family because my husband died and he's working
in the companies saying no, he died by suicide and
we're not responsible for that. It fades, It fades from

(02:12:18):
the uh from the story, which leads me to believe
that probably they paid her off and they just said okay,
like even now, like when they have a gag woard,
like we're gonna give you money, but shut up. You
can't say anything because it just it just fades. But
my point being that around this time there was a
lot of weird occult slash religious beliefs going on way

(02:12:45):
outside the whatever people's okay, what was going on in
their life, because even now they say, like years after
the murder, if you look back at this of this
thing with Norman Tell, the coroner's actions were very suspect.
He was really brief and when they had the Corners inquest,

(02:13:12):
he had police on guard. He didn't allow any the
public in. He only had six witnesses, and he says, quote,
there's no use wasting time over this. We're not going
to spend hours when there is not any testimony that
means anything, and we're not going to put on a
circus for the benefit of morbid curious people. End quote.
The inquest lasted only twenty minutes. They didn't disclose any

(02:13:35):
clues and the verdict given was that Bechtade died of
staboos at the handsback person or person's unknown. All right,
months like like three or four months after this murder.
The Stokes mansion of the estate where he was found
dead on the grounds, which was known as Lonoak. They
demolished it even though he had stood and occupied for years,

(02:13:59):
since theono was usually traveling abroad. So in other words,
this old house that was usually empty because the owners
they all had money, this air they were always traveling,
was empty all of a sudden after years and years
that had been standing there mostly vacant. Oh, we got
to demolish it. Now. Was it coincidental that Bechla grown
up on a farm near Boyer Town where powow was

(02:14:22):
common The men and I deny any belief from Powell magic,
by the way, but that doesn't mean anything. Now. What
was not released to the public even during the nineteen
thirty seven arrest of the attackers when they were, you know,
trying Jordan, was that Bechel was involved in several love

(02:14:43):
affairs and they were attempting to blackmail as well as
Robin since he was known to carry money with him
at all times, which goes back and remember when they
say love affairs, they just didn't specify who he was
having the affairs with. Apparently, like I said, because of

(02:15:06):
what he was meeting. This guy calls for over there
and they all they've been drinking. They needed money and
they thought, oh, we'll tell him, hey, you either give
us money or we're going to say who you are
out here to meet, and maybe he said no, I'm
not going to give any money. And it went downhill
from there again that his family matter said, look, don't

(02:15:26):
let any of this come out. This is horrible for
the rest of our family. And he's dead, and they
paid off who they had to. But again we come
right back to what is always if you're going to
set somebody up with the hopes of blackmailing him to
get some quick money for him from him because you

(02:15:49):
want to keep on drinking or whatever. Remember this guy again,
I don't care what the family said. I do believe
this thing that he did carry money around with him,
all right, and he was no he was he came
from a wealthy family. He was well known. That they're
gonna carve up his face with all these different diagrams,
stab him a certain way around his heart, and then

(02:16:15):
even partially put out his right eye. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (02:16:19):
And and.

Speaker 2 (02:16:22):
That whoever did it had gloves, because not one fingerprint
was found in that car which had blood in it.
And you could think you touch something, you're killing the guy.
You're trying to get out of the car. You're dumping
the body. No fingerprints, So yeah, and then a few

(02:16:42):
years later the guy gets acquitted. The Supreme Court of
Pennsylvania gives him another trial and gets a I guess
I can't remember but for lack of basically because remember
at the end of the day, the ones that they
blame was the dead guy Armstrong, who's dead one that
did it? And they were hanging out out there. What

(02:17:03):
do you think?

Speaker 3 (02:17:06):
What do you think?

Speaker 2 (02:17:06):
Who was was he? Really was this guy? Was he
a ritual killing or was it a mix of everything?
Good question? Huh were they all?

Speaker 3 (02:17:16):
Was?

Speaker 2 (02:17:16):
The story that they gave out was were they hired
as a hit team to take him out? Like what
Henry was saying by the family, who are saying this
guy is he's he's sinful, he's gonna embarrass the family
and god knows what else. Remember in the the other

(02:17:39):
family member member Bechetel. If you look at what they're saying, basically,
they killed her because she was involved and apparently looked
like she was in love with a Jewish guy. So
that like in other words, remember these are different times, folks.
When you like step outside the you know, what they say,
color outside the line. But it's not only that you're
gonna color outside the line. Remember, but these are different times.

(02:18:02):
Whatever you do is gonna make us all look bad.
You know. This is the time where people had long
memories and you disgraced your family. You know, if you
were a disgraceful family to begin with, who cares. But
you could tell this family was very well regarded, had
deep roots in the community. What was the motive? So anyway, guys,

(02:18:26):
Happy Halloween. Don't forget to sign up for my newsletter
on substack. Go to h Miami gos Chronicles dot com,
Mppelister dot com. You can find links to everything. I
will be back next year. I don't know if you
could tell. I sent Henry o'ave because he was losing
his voice. We've both been under the weather. Otherwise we
would do the live stream. But as a matter of fact,
this is the best I could do. But yeah, it's

(02:18:51):
been Yeah, it's been a crazy year. But I'll be
back next year with another hopefully live stream. But if not,
I'm definitely you'll see me at Marty Grot time. Let's
see what happens and trick or treat give me something
good to eat until next time.

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