The Price of Love: The Murder of Franklin Bradshaw Pt 1

All the money in the world can’t buy peace of mind. Family life, with its jealousies and rivalries, carries the same pressures no matter the size of the bank account—but when wealth is measured in millions, those pressures can twist into something far darker. Arguments over favoritism, inheritance, and control—the kind of disputes most families recognize in small ways—become battles with stakes that can determine the course of lives. And when greed collides with resentment, and morality is already thin on the ground, the results can be catastrophic. This week’s story is about what happens when the bonds of family are tested not by love, but by money. 

Sources:
Shana Alexander, “Nutcracker. Money, Madness, Murder: A Family Album”
Investigation Discovery's A Crime to Remember, S5E8, “Mother’s Little Helper”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, campers, Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true
crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney,
and we're here to tell you a true story that
is way stranger than fiction. Or roasting murderers and marshmallows
around the true crime campfire.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
All the money in the world can't buy peace of mind.
Family life, with its jealousies and rivalries, carries the same
pressures no matter the size of the bank account. But
when wealth is measured in millions, those pressures can twist
into something far darker. Arguments over favoritism, inheritance, and control,

(00:42):
the kind of disputes most families recognize in small ways,
become battles with stakes that can determine the course of lives.
And when greed collides with resentment and morality is already
thin on the ground, the results can be catastrophic. This
week story is about what happens when the bonds of
family are tested not by love but by money. This

(01:07):
is part one of the Price of Love. The murder
of Franklin Bradshaw.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
So I gotta preface this by saying that I just
had some dental work done, and I am currently the
proud owner of some temporary falses. So if I'm lisping
terribly this week, I apologize. It is temporary, So campers
for this one. We're in Salt Lake City, Utah. July
twenty third, nineteen seventy eight. The morning started just like

(01:46):
any other. Franklin Bradshaw was almost obsessively a creature of habit.
He got up at the crack of dawn, had a
lukewarm bath, did thirty one pushups, and had oatmeal and
evaporated milk for breakfast. Then Brown bagged a slice of
meat loaf for lunch and headed off for work in
his old Ford Courier truck. Even though it was a Sunday,

(02:08):
Frank was seventy six years old and he'd started slowing
down a little. It used to be one hundred push
ups before breakfast, and nowadays he usually took things easy
and got home around nine pm instead of eleven or
twelve like when he was younger. The Bradshaws had moved
into their house on Gilmour Drive forty years ago, and
since then Frank had started every morning Weekends included the

(02:30):
same way. Frank's wife, Bernice was vaguely aware of the
truck starting in the driveway around six forty five, but
she wasn't the early bird her husband was, and went
back to sleep. She was up and about at ten
am when the doorbell rang. Standing out there all somber
were a police officer, a Mormon elder, and Doug Steele,

(02:51):
the manager at the Bradshaw Auto Parts warehouse and Frank's
oldest friend. After Bernice invited them in, the elder asked
her to sit down and knelt be her. We've had
a tragic accident, he said. It concerns your husband. It
wasn't an accident. Though Frank was always the first to
the auto parts warehouse to open up and help out

(03:12):
any early customers who happened by, he was usually alone
there for the first hour or so on any given morning.
Sometime around seven thirty a m. He'd been shot twice
from behind, once in the back, once in the back
of the head. They were each individually fatal injuries, the
one in the head instantly so the killer had used

(03:34):
hollow point three fifty seven magnum ammunition around sometimes used
to kill bears. It had blown off the back of
Franklin's skull. It looked like a robbery. The cash register
sat open, and Frank's pockets had been pulled inside out.
His wallet, open and empty of cash, lay on the
ground beside him. There were no witnesses, no obvious clues.

(03:57):
The police had no idea who might have done this.
Bernice went with the police to the station house to
tell them about Frank and his habits, and like they
always do in murder cases, they asked about family. She
and Frank had three surviving children, all daughters, none of
whom were still in Utah, two were in New York,
and one was in Oregon. She was asked if Frank

(04:19):
had had any trouble with employees at his auto parts business,
but she refused to believe it, describing the employees as
all very, very fine, wonderful men. Franklin was, in fact
well liked by his employees. He was generous with everything
except money. The old guy could squeeze a dime till
it was one atom thick. The wages at Bradshaw Auto

(04:41):
Parts weren't great, but they had a good retirement plan.
If an employee's kid needed work, Frank would always give
them a chance, and if someone got sick, or pregnant.
Their job would always be waiting for him when they
were ready for it, which wasn't and still isn't true
of all employers, and Frank always had time to listen
to the people who worked for him. There was a
very familial atmosphere at the warehouse, which wasn't really a surprise.

(05:05):
Frank spent most of his life there, spent more time
with his employees than he did with his actual family,
and you can't really blame him because they were all
each in their own special way kind of nuts. Franklin
Bradshaw was born in nineteen o one in Lehigh, Utah,
the youngest son of a devout Mormon family. When he
was two years old, his parents followed a group of

(05:27):
particularly zealous Mormon polygamists up to Alberta and stayed there
for seven years before coming back to Lehigh. Despite the
sojourn to the wilderness, religion never really stuck with Frank.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
He was a smart kid and a great athlete. After
high school, his mom wanted him to go on a
Mormon mission, but at the same time, the football coach
at the University of Utah was telling him he was
a lock for the varsity team. This was an easy
choice for Frank. He wanted to play football. He promised
his mom he'd gone a mission after graduation, and she

(06:00):
was so happy she bought him a car. She died
of a heart attack in Frank's junior year, and as
far as we can tell, he never did go on
that mission. For the rest of his life, he kept
up the bare minimum of Mormon observance needed to keep
his family off his back. He certainly didn't go in
for the traditional ten percent tie to the church. It

(06:22):
was shortly after his mom's death that a fun loving
sophomore named Bernice Jewett set her sights on Frank and
went after him like a heat sinking missile. She had
both ulterior and emotional motives. In high school. She dated
her school's prize catch, a good looking jock and future
olympian named Arthur Tuck. This guy had gotten into Ripley's

(06:45):
believe it or not, by winning the Oregon State track
meet single handedly. He was the only competitor his high
school sent. When Bernice was fifteen and Arthur one year older,
they got engaged, but good looking jocks tend to be
pretty popular when they go off to college. One time,
on his way home to Oregon, Arthur stopped off in

(07:07):
Salt Lake to go hiking with Bernice. Her mom. Florence
was in the habit of looking through her husband's coat pockets,
so while the kids were out, she decided to have
a rummage through Arthur's too. In there, she found an
unmailed envelope addressed to another girl.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
Yeh, mister future Olympians A player yep.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
Mom of Florence steamed open the envelope to read the
letter inside, which man I love her. It was a
love letter Arthur had written to his other girl. Florence
copied out the letter, then resealed it in the envelope
and put it back in the coat pocket where she

(07:47):
found it. And because in her family, communication apparently wasn't
invented until sometime in the seventies, Florence put a copy
of the letter in Bernice's desk drawer, where she was
bound to find it. When she did, Bernice was heartbroken.
She locked herself in her room and cried for a

(08:08):
whole day before sending Arthur a note breaking things off.
She and her mom never spoke about it.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
Holy crap, that is bonkers. You didn't want to maybe
like talk to your daughter about what you found. Oh,
Heaven's no, that might be unpleasant. I do like that
she didn't bother giving the guy a chance to make
up some like bs lie before she dumped him, though, Like,
oh no, babe, that girl's my sister. We're just real
affectionate in my family. Like she's just like nope, we're done.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
Yeah. Like on one hand, like a mom's like a
like a sleuth, and on the other like she's the
most emotionally withdrawn mother I've ever heard of in my life,
like like without being like abusive, you're like here, let
me like plant this emotional time bomb somewhere in your

(08:57):
room for you to find. Honey, have you looked in
your desk drawer lately? No reason, no reason, just curious,
Oh my goodness. In college, Bernice was a fun loving
girl who was more interested in dancing than studying. In fact,

(09:18):
she was having so much fun that when her parents
decided to move to California, she was determined to stay
right where she was. This was nineteen twenty four in
one of the most conservative parts of the country. She
might be twenty years old, but there was no chance
of Bernice being allowed to stay in Utah without her
parents unless she was married.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Frank Bradshaw was good, looking, polite, and popular. His family
owned a bank. He seemed likely to be looking at
a pretty bright future. And remember this is a time
when it was incredibly hard for women to have any
kind of professional success of their own, so potential husband's
career prospects carried real weight. Went after him. But Frank

(10:02):
had a weird attitude toward college. He was there to
study well, study and play football, both of which he
pursued soberly and seriously. He didn't have much interest in
parties or girls. But Bernice was a live wire with
sparkling charisma and a high voltage smile. Even for a
semi ascetic like Frank, she was hard to resist, and

(10:24):
soon they were dating. She wanted more than just dating,
though she wanted to get married. Frank said he wanted
to finish school first. Bernie said they could keep on
studying after they were married. Frank said he wanted to
set up in business before he got married. Bernice said
he could marry her and still do that. She kept
on at him. Frank would later say that when Bernice

(10:44):
wanted something, she was like a dog, with a bone.
He gave in, and in October they drove down to
Ogden and got married by a Justice of the peace.
Then the newlyweds drove back to campus, where Frank dropped
Bernice off at her sorority house and went on to
his fraternity. The only people they told about the wedding
were Bernice's parents, so they'd let her stay in Utah

(11:05):
and didn't live together until after Frank graduated the next year.
So wow, how romantic right sounds like a great beginning
to a relationship. A dancing party girl pressuring a somber
jock into a quick marriage to make her own life easier.
These two were radically different people. We've all heard that

(11:26):
opposites attract, but in my experience, what they usually attract
is trouble. For the next four years, they moved around
the Western States, with Frank trying his hand at various
jobs before coming back to Salt Lake City, where he
started working for National Auto Parts. Frank was a smart guy.
It was obvious that cars were now a permanent and
growing part of American life. US auto sales more than

(11:50):
doubled in the nineteen twenties. Also, Salt Lake City sat
on one of the major east west routes. With a
lot of rough country all around, there was going to
be a lot of traffic and a lot of breakdowns,
and a lot of need for auto parts. He treated
his year working for National as an education, then took
the same step as so many successful entrepreneurs do. He

(12:11):
borrowed a big old chunk of cash from his wealthy
dad to start his own business. Provo forty miles south
didn't have an autoparts store yet, so that was where
he decided to set up. He and Bernice lived above
the store. Frank wanted to offer twenty four hour service,
and if someone rang the bell at three a m.
He'd hop out of bed and go help them. Some

(12:32):
of you might be thinking that nineteen twenty nine was
an unfortunate year to try to start a new business.
The Wall Street crash was just months away, with the
Great Depression right on its heels. In fact, Frank was lucky.
With titaned belts, people were less likely to buy new cars.
They tried to keep their old ones going as long
as possible instead, and that meant auto parts. It was

(12:55):
one of the very few industries to flourish during the depression.
It flourished even more during World War II, when car
factories were converted to make tanks and planes for the military.
There were no new cars to buy, so yet again,
people tried to keep the ones they already had running.
By the end of the war, Frank had paid off
all his business debts. Within a few years, he had

(13:16):
thirty one stores across the state. He was making a
lot of money, and like many such people, Frank hated
paying taxes. To lure his taxable income, he invested in
oil leases on federal land. This helped his short term
tax situation and ultimately would send Frank's wealth skyrocketing. By
the time of his death, he was probably the richest

(13:38):
man in Utah, and by today's measure, would almost certainly
have been a billionaire. But you would never know it.
The headquarters of Branshaw Auto Parts, where Frank spent most
of his life, was a shabby warehouse in Salt Lake,
a maze of parts boxes on cluttered ailes.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
He and Bernice still lived in the same nice but
mode to bedroom house they'd bought in nineteen thirty seven.
Frank got his clothes at the Army Navy surplus store.
He lived on oatmeal and meat loaf, and he drove
his cars until they fell apart. When he had to
visit his stores and other parts of the state, he
took the bus.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
Damn.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
It's easy to see him as a kind of skin flint,
and while there's some truth there, it's not quite the
whole story. He just had almost no interest in things
that made life more comfortable or pleasant. Bernice developed a
love for travel, touring the world on expensive cruises, and
Frank was happy to pay for them, but he didn't

(14:40):
go with her. Of course, that would mean missing work.
Even by the standards of his generation. Frank went to
extremes in keeping his wife in the dark about their finances.
Bernice was in her seventies before she had an epiphany
about the number of stores Frank owned and realized, hey,
we must be rich. After his death in nineteen seventy eight,

(15:02):
police asked her, was your husband a rich man? He
told me we were poor.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
Bernice said, oh wow.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Franklin Bradshaw was cremated and buried three days after his death.
Bernice's family wasn't Mormon, and she had no strong religious beliefs.
Frank's pious relatives were peeved about the cremation. The second
Coming is central to the LDS church, and Frank and
Bernice's oldest daughter, Marilyn, later said, whereas you don't have

(15:31):
to have a body to come back to, it's considered
definitely better if you do. Bernice didn't care. She'd been
shrugging off Mormon disapproval for most of her life. Back
in nineteen thirty eight, the Bradshaw's youngest child was born,
a surprise daughter named Francis. She had three elder siblings.

(15:53):
Robert was twelve, Marilyn was nine, and Elaine was seven.
Bernice had sent all three of them for pa and
tap dancing lessons, and all three of them were terrible
at it. The arrival of Francis meant there was another
girl to enter the annual Shirley Temple lookalike contest at
the movie theater, all of them in curled blonde wigs

(16:15):
and pink dresses. This was life before TV was invented.
To an outsider, this seemed like a happy, thriving young family,
but there were already cracks that would widen into huge
chasms over the years. Robert, already tall and strong at
twelve years old, had started having epileptic seizures. He and

(16:36):
Marylyn slept down in the basement and when he had
a seizure, she'd lay across him on the floor to
pin him down and stop him hurting himself. Oh wow,
his seizures were so severe he'd get bite injuries on
his tongue, bad enough that he had to get his
tongue trimmed. Yeah, to help with the scarring. Nine year

(16:57):
old Marilyn had already been pushed to the role of
second mother to her younger sisters, and now her older
brother had joined the party.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
Elaine had previously suffered from rheumatic fever, an inflammatory disease
that her parents thought would be remedied by a trip
to sunny San Diego. She'd soon have a relapse, be
confined to bed for two years, and have a permanently
damaged heart. Poor little thing. Frances was a difficult baby
who would sometimes scream all night until the rest of

(17:27):
her family gathered around and sang softly to her for
hours to try and calm her down. That is so sweet.
This family is a miss a miss okay, but that's
like one of the sweetest things I ever heard. Like
that image of the whole family gathered around the baby's crib,
singing to her. That's just lovely, isn't it. More or less,
this would be her relationship with their family for the

(17:48):
rest of her life. After Francis's birth, Bernice suffered what
she called a nervous breakdown, which was clearly postpartum depression.
She stayed in her bedroom for months. Mostly. The births
of their children had been a source of tension between
Frank and Bernice right from the start. When her labor
with Robert started, Frank drove Bernice to the hospital and

(18:10):
just left her there, deciding his time was better spent
helping out his parents than hanging around waiting for his
son to be born. Bernice was, of course furious, and Frank,
as was his habit, reacted to her anger by withdrawing
even further. For the next three birds, he wouldn't even
drive her to the hospital, instead calling up one of

(18:31):
his innumerable Bradshaw relatives to drive her there and then
back again with the baby. He didn't even have to
miss work. God forbid, right oof o, God Almighty. And
I mean, of course it's like the thirties or whatever,
But for the love of God, man, you could at
least be in the waiting room for her, like show
or you Care God Almighty. As she grew up, frances

(18:55):
was a Hellian at home and a model student at school,
which I think that's interesting when kids do that, because
that tells you they can control their behavior when they're
held accountable, right, Like, I think that's really interesting. When
Marilyn was left to watch her, she'd be perfectly peaceful
and happy. Then as soon as she heard their mom

(19:15):
coming home, she'd start crying and acting out and accuse
Marilyn of being mean to her, in a habit that would.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
Stick with her forever.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
Bernice always took Francis's word over anybody else's. Little Francis
needed to be the center of attention, especially from her mother,
and she was not subtle about getting it. If she
wanted something, she would literally throw herself on the floor
and kick and scream until she got it. If you
gave in to whatever she wanted, she'd always want more.

(19:43):
If you said no, she'd make your life a living hell.
And if you wanted anything from her, it had to
be transactional. In her junior year of high school, Francis's
grade slipped for the first time, and Franklin came into
her room for a rare chat. He was bare ever
at home and much preferred to leave any confrontations to Bernice.

(20:04):
Franklin had graduated at the top of his class, and
he insisted to Francis that she had the ability to
do the same. He was right about that, but Francis
wasn't going to do all that work for nothing. The
University of Utah might have been good enough for mom, dad,
and her two older sisters, but it wasn't going to
be good enough for Francis. She'd get the grades her
dad wanted, but only if he agreed to pay for

(20:25):
her to go to a blue chip women's college on
the East Coast. Franklin agreed, and as if by magic,
the grades immediately became near perfect. It looked very much
like the millionaire business tycoon had just gotten played by
his sixteen year old daughter, if nothing else, though, frank
Bradshaw stuck to his word, and when she was eighteen,

(20:47):
Francis headed east to Brynmar College. By then, two of
her siblings were mostly absent from the family narrative. Although
her physical health wasn't good, Elaine was the most clear
sighted of the Bradshaw fam by a mile. While she
was still young, she came to the conclusion that for
her own well being, she needed to keep her family
at arm's length, well preferably like two states worth of length.

(21:12):
She went to grad school in San Francisco, married a
fellow student, and lived a low key but politically engaged life.
Elaine had actually met Richard Nixon in nineteen fifty two,
and he creeped her out so bad that he pretty
much made a permanent stain on her politics. She and
her husband joined the anti Vietnam War movement and later

(21:32):
published their own magazine to expose corrupt local politicians. Francis,
a shitstirrer by nature, liked to shock visitors by saying,
my sister married a Communist, although her audience were like
Utah Republicans who probably thought JFK was a communist, So
by those standards, I guess she was right.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
Elaine sucked to the West Coast, barely communicated with her family,
and asked for absolutely nothing from her wealthy dad. Frank
didn't come to his daughter's wedding in California. Some sources
suggest this was because the wedding was at a Unitarian church,
and Elaine's new husband was Jewish, but those don't seem
like things Frank would care about, and he got along

(22:14):
fine with Elaine's husband afterward. More likely he just didn't
want to miss work. And here's the thing is, I
think if Elaine would have just said, like, we're gonna
have a carburetor there that you can cuddle with, like,
maybe he would have shown up. But you know, probably
not because there were no there was no paperwork to

(22:35):
fill out or whatever. From the age of twelve, Robert
had two or three seizures every year. It's not quite clear,
but it seems like his parents, both of them skeptical
about doctors, never actually had him diagnosed or treated during childhood.
The attacks usually happened at night. In Marilyn, who slept
in the basement like Robert, had to deal with them

(22:57):
years later in living in New York, any unexpected sound
at night still made her sit bolt upright in case
she had to help her brother.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
When World War II broke out, Robert, then seventeen years old,
enlisted a Navy officer training program that wasn't exactly a picnic,
and Robert seizures were usually precipitated by stress. Within sixty days,
he was given a medical discharge. It's unclear whether he
had an attack or if the Navy medics became aware

(23:26):
of his other problem, his increasing mental instability. After a
seizure started, Robert also started having occasional bouts of extreme agitation,
where he'd march around, waving his arms, yelling, working himself
into a fever pitch. His mental problems only got worse
as he got older, and when he was twenty, he
was committed to a mental hospital. He'd spend most of

(23:49):
the next eighteen years of his life in similar institutions,
suffering seizures every few days, and diagnosed as an incurable schizophrenic.

(24:23):
Neither of Robert's parents really ever grasped what was going
on with him, but Frank in particular was oblivious to
what schizophrenia was or mental illness in general. He mostly
blamed Robert's problems on Bernice, his over nervous mother. The
Bradshaws were a big letter writing family, with reams of
passive aggressive missives endlessly flying all over the continent, and

(24:47):
whenever Frank complained about Bernice to their kids, he always
called her over nervous.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
Well, kids, your mom's gone hysterical again.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
It certainly didn't take much to put Bernice into a tizzy,
but Frank was equally weird in the opposite direction. A
stoic as a log, Frank thought all Robert really needed
to cure his serious mental illness was to live in
an apartment away from his mother and go on regular
walks around the block, having man to man talks with
his father that had set him straight. Don't you know

(25:23):
that the cured schizophrenia, like in hallucinations is hanging out
with your dad? Wo Okay. His opinion on the right
medicine for Robert doesn't seem to have changed much, even
after nineteen fifty two when Robert had a frontal lobotomy. Ah,
he's fine. Just a few more chats with Dad in

(25:44):
the open air and he'll be right. His rein oh Man.
Robert died of a heart attack in nineteen sixty six,
with idiopathic epilepsy listed as a contributing cause. In nineteen
fifty six. Francis, now going by Frankie, arrived at brenn
Maar College in the fifties. The archetypical bren Maar student

(26:04):
was apparently smart, witty, chain smoking, and hard drinking, and
Frankie Bradshaw fit right in.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
Yeah, she was admired for her ability to hold her liquor,
although she was outshined there by one of her friends,
who was famous for being able to down seven martinis
in a row and still stay upright long enough to
sign back into the dorms, get to the bathroom to buke,
and pass out in the shower. Whooh, colege man.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
That doesn't even sound fun like it really.

Speaker 3 (26:36):
Doesn't, and yet you know I remember college. In fact,
Frankie quickly got herself a little drinking problem, which was
obvious to her classmates, but everyone in actual authority remained oblivious.
She was drunk most of the time. But apparently at
the time, bren Mar's motto might as well have been
seen no evil here, no evil, as long as it

(26:58):
didn't reach the point of scandal. The college didn't care
to know what their young women were doing. Our primary
source for this story is Shanna Alexander's book Nutcracker, Money, Madness, Murder,
and she spoke to one of Frances's classmates who told her,
you could screw all night in some guy's car nobody cared.
You could drink all night. It was not considered a

(27:19):
crime to be drunk if you could hold it just
so long as you got back to the dorm by
signing time. Nothing else mattered Diomme, obviously, Frankie kept the
reality of her college life a secret from her Utah parents.
They barely heard from her when she came back to
Salt Lake. She'd just sit there like a bored teenager

(27:39):
in front of the TV until it was time to
go back to school. She mostly just called her mom
when she needed money, and Bernice always gave it to her.
This was a trickle that would soon grow into an
unending flood of surreptitious checks and transfers that Bernice would
bundle Frankie's way whenever she asked for it. Her other
daughters did get anything like the amount of attention Bernice

(28:02):
gave to wild Frankie, who in many ways was the
most like herself and who brought some vicarious excitement into
Bernice's boring old Salt Lake life. After Frankie's sophomore year,
Bernice paid for her to spend the summer in a
ritzy New York hotel rather than come home at Gino's restaurant,
Frankie and a friend were picked up by a well

(28:23):
dressed Italian dude, who took them for a ride in
his Mercedes convertible, then back to his place for drinks.
Frankie guzzled booze till she passed out. She considered her
new Italian friend a gentleman because he refrained from assaulting
her while she was unconscious in his apartment.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
Huh huh, girl, raise your standards.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
Thank you for doing the bare minimum and not committing
a serious crime on me just because I'm drunk in
your house. Good God. The man who stepped over this
incredibly low bulk was Vittorio Gentile, who was Frankie's new
boyfriend and before long her first husband. Before the new

(29:07):
semester started, Frankie briefly went back to Utah, where she
had her mom pay for a trunkload of new clothes
that she had shipped to Brent Mahr. Then, when she
was back in New York, she went to Fifth Avenue
and spent thousands of dollars on clothes at Sex to
replace the ones she'd just bought in Utah. She charged
the purchases to her mom, and when Bernice got in

(29:29):
touch about them, Frankie said her sex clothes just didn't
fit and she was going to take him back, but
of course she never did. Taking something back was something
she was completely unwilling and possibly unable to consider a
little later in her life, she'd get frantic about an
eviction notice while wearing a pair of forty thousand dollars

(29:50):
diamond earrings, and if anybody suggested she's, you know, selom,
she'd look at them like they were completely insane. And
a little note here. When we said Bernice got in touch,
what happened was that she called Marilyn, who was living
and working in New York, and had Marylyn contact Frankie
because Mama just couldn't handle her special little princess being

(30:12):
mad at her.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
Poor Marilyn.

Speaker 3 (30:15):
For God's I know, right who the family fixer. I'm
that in my family too, I get it. Renmar was
full of high strung, high achievers. A lot of the
young women there were in near perpetual states of stress
and freak out, so you can kind of understand why
it went under the radar that Frankie, or more specifically,

(30:35):
Frankie's brain was in trouble.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
Just a couple of weeks after the new semester started,
Marilyn got a call telling her that her little sister
was in the infirmary. She'd said she wanted to kill herself.
She'd been using drugs, she'd stolen things from other women
in the dorm, and she'd forged checks whoa. The college
wanted her to get professional psychiatric help, but frank He refused,

(31:00):
so they wanted her family to get her off campus.
Frankie looked like a ticking time bomb, and when she blew,
Brindmar wanted no fallout to touch their precious reputation go.
Marilyn took Francis back to Salt Lake, and a psychiatrist
there wanted to commit her to a mental hospital, but
unless she went there voluntarily, which she would not, that

(31:23):
needed parental consent. Frank was away on business, and Bernice
just couldn't bring herself to do it. I'm sure she
was thinking about Robert. Once they'd committed him, he was
almost entirely institutionalized for the rest of his life. A
second psychiatrist agreed to treat Francis on an outpatient bassist

(31:44):
at least initially, but then he diagnosed her with psychopathic
personality disorder. He suggested her parents' hospitalizer, or at the
very least, let her face the criminal charges from her
recent actions, let her face some consequences for probably the
first time in her life. Frank and Bernice, surprise surprise,

(32:04):
chose their own solution. They did nothing at all when
her parents talked endlessly about what to do with Francis,
she was working hard on her own plan, get back
to New York for the world's oldest active daughterly rebellion,
getting married to a guy they wouldn't approve of yet again.

(32:24):
She bought a whole new wardrobe on her parents' credit
and stashed the clothes at the airport. She still needed
money for the flight. Though all the Bradshaw kids had
spent at least one summer working at the auto parts warehouse,
Francis was probably the smartest of them, and she was
definitely the sneakiest. A natural snoop, she'd discovered that her dad,

(32:47):
as part of a lifelong war with the evil Irs,
had a lot of his financial stock listed under his
children's names. All Francis had to do was fill out
some fraudulent documentation saying a stop certificate had been lost
and get a bank to issue a bond which she
could cash out. Francis wasn't the only born snoop in

(33:08):
the family. Bernice, who we know it runs in the family. Yeah,
found the bond in her purse, and Franklin, for once
in his life, blew his top. Apparently all it took
to make him really mad with somebody messing with his money.

Speaker 3 (33:28):
He's like Scrooge McDuck, go fun.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
He decided to give her what she wanted. He'd march
her down to the airport and fly her steel an
ass out of Salt Lake. Now remember this is right
after he'd been told his daughter had a serious mental illness.
But as we've seen, frank didn't really believe in those
Francis didn't have a reservation and the plane was fully

(33:54):
booked with Thanksgiving traffic, but she threw one of her
old school tantrums, shrieking I have to get on, I
have to get on. At least in the fifties, you
could embarrass American airlines into squeezing you on to a
supposedly full plane.

Speaker 3 (34:10):
Oh god, she's a proto Karen.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
Like, you can't give into those people. Airlines come on
hold the line like nowadays. You act like that, you
end up pepper spraying in cuffs and on the no
fly list. Yeah, can't have any fun anymore. Can't smoke,
can't can't, can't bring guns on the plane.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
They don't want you to join that mile High club anymore.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
That's a no, no, God, can't just walk on planes
anymore without tickets? What is this? A couple of weeks
after returning to New York, Francis called home to announce
her upcoming marriage to Victoria. A short, flashy Italian pearl
importer was nowhere on the Bradshaw's list of dream sons
in law, and Francis knew it. She was probably hoping

(34:57):
for some nice familial outrage.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah, but Bernice was in favor of the wedding, mainly
in the forlorn hope that with Vittorio looking after Francis,
Bernice wouldn't have to anymore bold plan. Let's see how
that works out for her. Vittorio anyway, had money, and
he taught Francis how to cook, which is nice, right.
There were at least the glimmerings of a normal domestic

(35:22):
life there. In January of nineteen fifty eight, they got
married in Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Frank didn't
come to this wedding either. Maybe he was still in
high dudgeon. More likely he yet again didn't want to
miss work. This man is this man has a sickness.
I'm sorry you missed two of your kid's weddings because
you don't want to miss work. That is Banana's. In

(35:46):
nineteen sixty Francis and Vittorio had two sons, Lorenzo in
February and Marco in December. Their marriage had started going
downhill pretty much as soon as the ceremony was over,
and the stresses of two difficult baby boys only made
things worse. Their brief pre marriage relationship had been based
on drinking and partying, which rapidly changed to drinking and fighting.

(36:09):
They were both violent, although there's no evidence to support
Francis's claims that Vittorio hit their kids. Doesn't mean it
didn't happen, but Francis never had any hesitation or qualms
about lyon when it suited her. In nineteen sixty three,
Vittorio came home to an empty apartment. Francis and the
kids were gone, and so was all the furniture. No

(36:30):
one has ever called Francis subtle. Across the bare walls,
she'd scrawled swastikas and Heyl Hitler and Heil Mussolini. Jesus Jones.
What a lunatic? Who does this? Unhinged? Just as when
she'd planned to flee Salt Lake, Francis had had a plan.

(36:52):
Movers and a cleaning woman were ready and waiting when
Vittorio left for work that morning, and by the end
of the day, she and the boys were in a
cramped tenth floor, one bedroom apartment on eighty ninth Street.
This is where the boy's first memories are from. Marco
remembers his mom holding him out of the window, tenth floor.
Remember to show him something down the street? Oh almighty.

(37:17):
Both boys remember a cat named Henry. Neither of them
ever remembered Vittorio hitting them, but they remembered that when
they spilled Francis's perfume on her bed, she beat them
both bloody. The separation from Vittorio started and remained viciously
on Francis's part. Although Vittorio still said he wanted a reconciliation,

(37:38):
Francis said he was a drunk and added that he
was allergic to sex. That must have touched a nerve,
because Vittorio then claimed he was forced to start work
at seven thirty am just so he could come home
at mid morning every day and you know, give it
to his horny wife. A judge called them both immature

(37:59):
and selfish, which was nice. Agreed their divorce took four
years and was messy and one sided. Francis, the billionaire's daughter,
was determined to squeeze as much alimony out of Vittorio
as she could, in large part just to stick it
to him, but also because the one solid thing she
inherited from her dad was an obsession about getting everything

(38:23):
she could out of a deal. All Francis had to
do was conjure up images of her and the boys
living on the street or my god in Harlem, and
Bernice would hand over whatever money Francis needed for lawyers, whatever,
even if she had to sell her own family heirlooms
and beloved furniture, even if she had to start sneaking
checks and bank transfers behind Frank's back. The money didn't

(38:47):
win her any lasting peace with Francis, though Frank was
always tough in business and unwilling to confront his family,
but this time he tried to give Francis an ultimatum,
delivered via a letter in which he, as usual, misspelled
her name. Imagine your own dad not being able to

(39:07):
remember how to spell your damn name. Aye, yeah, yay yieh.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
Frances had three choices, get a job, go back to Vittorio,
or move back to Utah with the boys. If she didn't,
he'd not only cut off her funds, he'd testify against
her in any divorce proceedings. Francis had long since learned
that her dad wouldn't follow through on his most apocalyptic threats,

(39:35):
but she was furious anyway, and rattled off two letters
to her dad. She couldn't go to work, she wrote,
without abandoning her children, and she wasn't going to go
back to her husband, who was dangerous and mentally ill
pot kettle, but you know who knows. When she was mad,
Francis wasn't much for logical thought. In the same sentence,

(39:56):
she said she couldn't bring the boys to Utah because
that would take them away from their father. They're dangerous,
mentally ill, father.

Speaker 3 (40:06):
Good God, keepe it together, Lord and mercy.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
She went after Frank for not coming to her wedding
and said he didn't care about his grandchildren. Then she
said Frank had beat her, which is the first time
anyone had mentioned that, and it was a prelude to
her next bit. If Frank came to testify against her,
she'd have New York cops arrest him. She blamed her
mom for spreading malicious gossip about her, and like a

(40:32):
mad empress, threatened to banish her.

Speaker 3 (40:36):
I want to use that sometime, you know, like lady
at the D and B pisses me off. I banish
you dor dash guy forgets my ketchup boom banished.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
I like that you're just using it for like random
like annoyances. Why not people in your life, like your
like cousin or whatever, you know, Like, yeah, I guess
that makes sense, though, people that you're nut you'll never
see again. Yeah, leave, I want you out of my sight.
As usual, Francis saved her real fury for her mom

(41:10):
and a third letter, Bernice's visits made her want to vomit.
She wrote, how nice it would be to have a
mother who actually cared about her. All Bernice knew to
do was try to buy her affection. You say I'm
a bad mother. I thank god my sons aren't helplessly
emotionally crippled schizophrenics locked up for life in a mental hospital.

Speaker 3 (41:32):
Geez, Louise nuclear.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
The letter ended in a way that really makes you
wonder what was going through Frances's head. Even thirteen years
before Frank's death, most fathers wouldn't talk or act the
way Dad does, even if their daughter was a murderous interesting. Yeah,
when Frank got home, Bernice was a sobbing mess. Frank

(41:57):
wrote Francis another letter in his somber know it all way.
Your mother is a very nervous, high strung person. Of course,
one third to two thirds of all mothers are. How
do you know you hang out with car parts all day.

(42:23):
It is up to the children to understand those nervous traits.
I'm I'm like dunking on on Frank a little bit,
but honestly, like, I would genuinely like to hang out
with him a little bit. I think he seems like
he'd be fun to talk to, Like, I just want
to know his worldview. I don't think he's a bad guy.
I just want to know everything about him.

Speaker 3 (42:44):
Yeah, I think he was just very focused on one
aspect of life.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah and yeah, I mean he he built an empire,
and I think, especially in those days, that was the
expectation for the man. So he said, here you go,
here's all the money I made, be gone, you know
what I mean. And then he's like, what do you
mean emotional presence?

Speaker 3 (43:11):
Right?

Speaker 2 (43:12):
What is that?

Speaker 3 (43:14):
That's girl stuff exactly.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
So yeah, if it seems like I'm making fun of him,
I am a little bit, But like in the same
way i'd make fun of my grandpa. You know, my
grandpa's my grandpa. Actually, my grandpa has said one third
to two thirds of all mothers are nervous. And I
did say, what do you mean? But you know, our
girl Francis wasn't done. The next day, she called up

(43:39):
her mom just to say, missus Bradshaw, you are not
welcome in my house. I never want to see you.

Speaker 3 (43:45):
Again, Missus BRANCHA good God, that is.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
You don't even get a first name. You get addressed
by the last name.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
That cold.

Speaker 2 (43:54):
Oddly, this dried up Bernice's tears. Her crazy daughter needed
her now more than ever, she realized, and just like that,
the money flow started again.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
This was the pattern Bernice would get on at Frank
for not forcefully solving the Frances problem, but whenever he
tried to just put his foot down, Frances would react furiously.
Then Bernice would lose her nerve and bail her out again.
Neither parents seemed to recognize the pattern, but Frances certainly did.
As always, if she caused enough trouble, she'd got what

(44:29):
she wanted. Frank sent her a detailed accounting of the
money he'd cost her. Frances wrote back that she'd gotten
yet another eviction notice and they had no food, but
she'd let both herself and her children starve to death
before giving them up. There was no point bringing the
boys back to Utah. Victoria would just kidnap them back
to New York. I can say no more, she ended

(44:51):
her letter. My grief is too great and my tears
are too abundant. Despite her a great grief and abundant tears,
she managed to get in touch with Bernice, who was
in Miami about to leave on a package tour to
New Zealand. Nothing could move Bernice like Frances, admitting she
needed her, she ditched New Zealand and raced to New
York to pay the back rent and save Francis and

(45:13):
the boys from starvation. By nineteen sixty five, the boys,
now five years old, were in an odd situation. Little
Marco had just started at the Emerson School, a preppy
private school just off Fifth Avenue. Lorenzo wasn't at Emerson.
In fact, Lorenzo was rarely at home. Later, Marco remembered

(45:36):
this explanation from his mom. Mom said he was in
a mental hospital. She said he just went wronkers, had
a psychotic episode, lost contact with reality, started smashing his
head against the wall. He was institutionalized. When Lorenzo was
at home, Francis insisted Marco stay away from him. Lorenzo

(45:57):
was sick in the head, she said, and Marco might
catch it too. Lorenzo, in fact, had mostly been staying
with his aunt Marilyn and her husband just a few
blocks away, or had been out in Utah. Francis, though,
had decided she didn't want the boys spending too much
time together, that she didn't want to spend much time
with Lorenzo at all. God, that's so sad. After Francis

(46:21):
had finished thoroughly crushing Vittorio in the divorce proceedings, she
had Marco and Lorenzo legally changed to plain old Mark
and Larry, two strange boys with an even stranger mother.
One of them is going to shoot Franklin Bradshaw twice,
once in the back and once in the head. But
for that and the bizarre decade and a half that

(46:43):
led up to it, you're gonna have to wait till
next week. This one is a bangery. Also, stay tuned.
So that was a wild one, right, campers. You know
we'll have another one for you next week, but for now,
lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until
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(47:04):
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(47:26):
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