My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 422 - I Wish You Hadn’t Told Me That
Episode Date: April 4, 2024This week, Georgia covers serial killer Sean Vincent Gillis and Karen tells the story of Victorian era murderer Kate Webster. For our sources and show notes, visit www.myfavoritemurder.com/episodes. L...earn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Hello!
And welcome to my favorite murder
That's Georgia Hardstark
That is Karen Kilgareff
And we're about to podcast at you
That's right, I've been in the backyard just now
What? Trying to make friends with the crows in my neighborhood.
Oh.
Yeah. We got a big bag of peanuts,
and we've been shaking them at them
and throwing them and leaving them.
And I think it's happening.
I think my dream, I think they know us now.
Are you going to train them to go find money for you
and bring it back to a drawer in your office?
Bring me shiny things, yeah.
Like that's my dream to be friends with like crows.
So I think it's working.
You're making it happen.
Yeah, what's up with you?
How am I celebrating the spring equinox?
I mean, it was such a pretty day today.
Like light breeze, bright skies, real nice,
real spring is here kind of vibe outside today.
Definitely, definitely springy.
It feels positive.
Yeah.
Are you ready to like have a new season of your life?
To self tan?
Are you ready to go to the tanning beds every day?
Is that what we're doing now?
Is that the new trend?
Yeah, that's our new thing.
To get deeply tanned by April 30.
I don't know how will spring be different. I guess I'll leave my house more.
Oh, that's the key.
That's a good challenge.
Do you try to leave your house like once a day to like run an errand or like?
I have to walk those dogs.
Oh, OK. That's good. That's positive.
I yeah, that's definitely helped me. It is.
It can make it kind of fun.
Like you're just walking around and like, what's up here. Yeah, what's going on over here
It's helped me that like I can't take a nap because it's like well
It's a half an hour until cookies walk so stay awake
My naps are two hours by the way, some people could do a half an hour nap and they're like fine for the day
They're like not me. Yeah, so just stay awake
For cookie powering through. Yep.
Dogs obligate us to participate in this thing called life. That's what I got one. Yeah. Cats
like beg us not to. Cats are like, I don't care what you do. I hope you die soon. I did. I have
been walking Mo in on a leash and a harness outside in our backyard a little bit. And what's the result of that? What's happening there?
Nothing yet. Fleas? No, no fleas yet.
Oh, just to like, so he can get out there, but you don't have to risk him getting eaten by a coyote.
Yeah. Oh my God. There was like so many coyotes over the weekend in our neighborhood. There's
always coyotes here. So yeah, just because he wants to go outside. He's such a bad boy.
He needs some energy, like, you know, expended. So we take him outside now or I take him outside now.
You should get him one of those like horse training octagons where you run him in a circle.
That's a great idea. Right? Just keep on building things on your property for mode to experience
nature inside of. I mean, what else is there to buy when you don't have children?
Right? Exactly. Just fill it up.
The coyotes are serious, though.
I told you the story of the one that was walking up to my back sliding glass door.
I was just like, sir, we can't be doing this.
He's going to start knocking.
You should start trying to be friends with him.
I'll be friends with crows.
He's going to be like, oh, hey,
I want to know if you needed your windows cleaned
or it's like, what?
Hey, can I crash on your couch tonight?
Whose friend are you?
Get away from my door.
Get out of here.
I have a TV show.
Let's hear about it.
Oh, I have one too.
Recommend.
Okay.
Maybe it's the same.
What if it's the same?
Is it Diara from Detroit?
No.
Okay. Diara, D-I-A-R-R-A from Detroit.
It's on BET.
It is so perfect for us.
This incredible actress, writer, comedian,
Diara Kilpatrick, it's her show.
The premise is she has a one night stand
and gets ghosted by this dude.
And then puts it together that the dude is the kid
who got kidnapped in the 90s.
The like five-year-old kid who got kidnapped in the 90s.
And some things happen to him and she has to track him down
and I'll find him.
Like he's like the most, you know, America's most wanted,
like, unsolved mysteries kid.
Right.
And she has to go find him.
That's hilarious. But it's also like, it's reallyself mystery's kid. Right. And she has to go find him. That's hilarious.
But it's also like, it's really dark.
It's really funny.
It's very much like search party was.
Yeah, that's the first thing it made me think of.
Yeah.
That's funny.
It's got those vibes.
It's so good.
Like, it's just really fucking good.
That sounds like a very cool show.
I want to see that.
I hate just trying to hunt down a missing child
that she hooked up with. like, it's, that
sounds gross.
That's not what I meant, but it's really good.
At one time missing child.
Yes.
We get it.
But also the passion with which people go about being a citizen sleuths for dating.
Yeah.
Like it, you don't have to save it up for true crime.
That's just what people are doing these days
when they're trying to figure out what their situationship is,
where they are, and why they won't speak to them anymore.
Like just tell me, just how,
and she's going through a bad divorce.
So she's a little like not doing well on the love front.
Unstable.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's ugly.
It's ugly.
Tough.
Oh, that sounds amazing.
Diarra from Detroit.
What about you?
What do you have?
Mine is, it's a TV show called Renegade Now,
and it's about a woman, and she is like,
I think she's Irish.
Anyhow, she becomes a highway woman.
So it's like, she's a highway robber in like the 1700s.
It's Orla from Dairy Girls. I love Orla. So that
actress, Louisa Harland, is a completely different person, which obviously we know she's not Orla.
Right. But she is Orla. I know. It's all we know her as. And all of a sudden she is this badass
woman who's gone off to find her own fortune.
Her family thinks she's dead.
And she has a run in with some bad guys on the highway
and suddenly has like super powers,
but she doesn't know why.
So no man can kill her.
Like real super powers, like sci-fi super.
Yeah, you gotta see it.
Oh my God.
And they have all these like special effects.
When I saw the trailer, I was like put on playlist.
I was, I don't think I'd ever put anything on a playlist.
And I was like, save for the playlist or whatever.
It's really great and girl powery.
And then just kind of like very well done.
What's it called?
It's called Renegade Now.
Renegade Now.
And if I'm not mistaken, it not the super power part.
I think they blew that part up, obviously. But I think
it's based on a true story.
Yeah. It sounds like Annie Oakley-ish, right? It's based on a true supernatural story.
Yeah. It's based on a story of superheroes. You would think that in the first couple articles
about it, it would say-
Based on.
So- Yeah. So yeah, so maybe not.
Probably not.
Maybe what do they say?
Like culled from real events.
Yeah, but even then that seems not appropriate here.
But anyway, it's just like, it's fun.
And it's like watching Orla leave Derry
and go off and like become a great actress.
Like fulfill her destiny.
It's wonderful.
Okay, I love it.
Do we have any corrections corners?
Wait, you said a town wrong last week.
Oh yeah.
Or a state or something like that.
I don't remember.
Sorry.
That's, that's, I didn't mean to call you out, but that is you're correct.
That is right.
That is Corrections Courtney now.
I bet I've never been there.
And it seemed right to me.
You know those capitals when they're just the initials like that make me panic.
Me too.
Yeah, I feel like you have the same thing where it's like all of a sudden it's like,
I don't know is this South Dakota?
Yeah.
Is it Missouri or is it Michigan?
I'm married to a Michigander.
I should fucking know and I don't.
Yeah, you have a little bit of a bias.
Like I think I want it to be Michigan.
Yeah.
But what if it's just incorrect?
Like North Dakota and Nebraska?
Like come on.
Actually those are obvious.
Oh, do you want to brag about the news that Amy Poehler said that this was her favorite podcast?
That's wild.
So tell the people.
Well, they had this podcast conference
that they have every year called Podcast Movement.
Although sometimes I like to call it podcast uprising,
because it sounds a little bit sinister,
you have to admit.
I like that.
Yeah.
It's like, let's all the podcasters get together
and start some shit.
But anyway, she was a keynote speaker, if I'm not mistaken.
And in her keynote speech, she said that this was her favorite podcast.
And I didn't know about it until the next day.
And then Aaron Brown told me and showed me the Instagram post.
And I kind of sat there for a second and then I got like choked up because.
No, it's weird. It's crazy.
It's Amy Poehler.
We obviously adore her and have for a long time.
Yeah. She's one of the greats.
Yeah, she's one of the greats and has one of the best gifts
there will ever be, which is her at the Oscars
with her sweatshirt on, throwing up produces.
It's so funny.
That's the first thing I thought of when I heard that.
I was just like, her?
It was great.
So thank you, Amy Poehler.
You're our favorite too.
Yeah.
You're our favorite podcast too.
In this podcast called Life.
Oh my God.
Life is one big podcast, really.
It really is.
Okay.
Well, speaking of podcasts, we have a podcast network,
even.
Yeah.
It's called Exactly Right Media.
Hey, here are some updates.
Well, the first one is that the fourth episode of Butterfly
King is available right now.
Hosts CJ and Becky are back at the Verona Palace
in Sofia, Bulgaria, where a new piece of evidence
allows yet another suspect to slither into the frame.
Follow the show wherever you like to listen so you don't miss an episode.
Such a good show. And more exciting True Crime podcast news, episode one of Tenfold More
Wicked's 11th freaking season is here. Kate Winkler Dawson, the queen of true crime podcasting,
heads to Portsmouth, Rhode Island to investigate the
death of a puritanical pioneer who mysteriously died in the town that she founded.
You guys have to listen.
History, murder.
What more do you want?
Truly.
On That's Messed Up, Kara and Lisa cover Missing Pieces, which is an S-viewed episode from
season 13 in 2011.
You can go to thatsmessuplive.com for Lisa's live comedy
tour dates. She is performing at clubs and colleges all around the country and she is
so truly hilarious. You have to see Lisa Traeger live. If you have not yet, please go support
her live. You will not be sorry you did it.
And the newest episode of MFM Animated by Nick Terry
is now playing on the exactly right YouTube channel.
So please subscribe to that.
The episode's called Emotional Support Oxen
and comes from episode 254 from December
of all the way back in 2020.
And it's from a live show too.
I love that he's just like pulling.
You never know where he's gonna go, you know. I love that he's just like pulling. You never know where he's going to go.
You know, I love that.
It's great.
Also just so you know, we've restocked the MFM store with two popular tote bags that
sold out over the holidays.
So if you wanted to buy the SSD GM tote bag or the still life skull tote bag, go onto
that website, which is myfavoritemurder.com and go shopping.
I feel like we have such a tote bag audience.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Because it's like, oh, are you going to the library to get books?
Are you going to a farmer's market to get your weekly produce?
It's like, we're such tote bag people.
We're tote bag people, that's for sure.
Did your dad subscribe to PBS at one point in the 90s and now you have a
tote bag to prove it? That's right, you have that one New Yorker bag that everyone including me
has that has like the monster and the, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah, you're like,
oh, that person's smart. Cool. Does Bloomingdale's make tote bags out of their small, medium and large
bag design? I wonder. They must. They should. And then the one that's like the takeout food bag
that says like, thank you, thank you, thank you,
but they made it into a tote bag.
Oh, smart.
Genius.
So good.
What else could they do?
My favorite murder tote bags.
Hey.
Hey, there we go.
That wasn't planned.
No, it wasn't.
Cause I was actually like,
let's think of five new good tote bags
that are like the thank you, thank you, thank you tote bag.
What could it be?
What about a tote bag that looks like a shiny garbage bag
with the yellow pull at the top?
And is scented with like Febreze?
It has a really strong lemon scent
that you're trying to get away from all the time.
I hate it to like cover up
whatever weird shit you have in there because you've got to get away from all the time. Oh, I hate it to like cover up whatever weird shit you have in there
because you've got to like throw your banana away
from Friday and then snap Tuesday.
And your gym shoes are in there.
Ew.
Ew, Mrs. Febreze is here.
I always think I'm gonna like be a tote bag
like workout person and be really good at it.
And then I find like the socks from three months ago
in the back of my car and the tote bag that I was like,
this is the new tote bag.
It's gonna make me who I am.
And in a way it does,
because when you find that tote bag so many months later
and you look inside,
there's like little pieces of paper at the bottom
or like an old calendar or something.
Earplugs, I find a lot of earplugs.
And you're like, wait, where'd I get these?
Oh, that flight.
Oh, I took this to this game.
Oh, this.
And you like piece your life backwards
through what's like old pennies and a piece of gum.
Or the weirdest thing when you find a face mask
in your coat or whatever.
Oh yeah.
From fucking, from the pandemic.
And you're like, I haven't worn this in a while.
Deep pandemic, but people are still getting COVID.
So you can slap it right back on.
Go, go ahead.
My cousin just got it.
And I was just like, oh yeah.
Shut up.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
I don't want to do that.
I don't want that.
I know me either.
Oh, well.
That's right. You know what that means?
That means it's time to start our stories.
Ding dong.
When Karen yells, oh well, and kind of panicked, like nervous.
I mean, we have a platform, but we can't cure COVID.
And that is the issue.
You guys, we tried.
You know we tried.
Hey, Georgia, have you ever heard of the Google Misery
Index?
Oh, god, no.
What is it?
It's basically our collective search history.
And it shows how we've all been feeling throughout the year.
And during spring, there are a lot of questions
about depression and anxiety.
Oh, you may tell me about it.
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Goodbye.
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Goodbye.
Are you first this week?
Yes, I am.
Because as I promised you today, I'm going to be covering part two of the butchers
of the bayou. Don't look excited and clap because this guy is a pure piece of shit.
I'm sorry to clap because I am not clapping for the serial killer or for his actions.
Of course.
But it is so satisfying to get a part two when you really enjoyed a part one.
On this show, especially
where there's a lot of dangling part twos that never come to be on my part as well.
We're always like, we should do that later. And then we don't. And you turned around and
did it.
Those dangling part twos. We can't have those. We can't have those.
Now that spring has sprung, let's not do that anymore.
You know what I miss? Andondra, can you please remind me
that I miss this is when I used to do episodes of like three stories of like handwritten notes
that turned into clues or whatever. Remember I used to do that when I couldn't find a full story
and I was panicking and it was the day of our recording in our in my apartment and I didn't
know what to do. Absolutely. No, those were good for you. It was like a medley episode.
With a theme.
Here's some examples of.
Exactly.
Those are easy too.
Okay, let's do that.
Stop on air producing.
This is episode number what?
500 and...
422, okay.
So that means back when we left off in episode 420,
Baton Rouge police had just apprehended serial killer
Derek Todd Lee. That was in May of 2003, right?
With Lee behind bars, police are sure that they've finally gotten
the monster responsible for all the murders that took place
in the area between 1992 and 2003.
And they're kind of like bragging, like,
hey, we're heroes, hey, we found,
we finally found this guy, you know,
applauding themselves, right?
Yeah.
However, DNA and other evidence links Derek Todd Lee
to only seven of the murders they're investigating
and to the police's surprise and horror,
at least another six murders that they thought
he had committed were not a DNA match to him.
Wow.
Wait, how many murders were there?
Well, so there was like 60-some missing and murdered women
in that time period in Baton Rouge, or the area.
So they were thinking that he had committed like 10-plus
murders, but a whole six of them don't match up to him.
Haurifying.
Terrifying.
So, then just five months later,
after he had been apprehended in October of 2003,
a group of ATV riders are on a ride through a remote wooded area
when they come across the body of a 45-year-old woman.
She's a mother of three. her name is Johnny Mae Williams.
And she's also a sex worker.
And this butcher targeted sex workers
in the area for sure.
Her cause of death is determined to have been
from blunt force trauma, both of her...
This is, like, this is classic, psychotic, fucked-up-it-ness.
Like, nothing special about him, except it was all happening
at the same time in this one area.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Like, just a psychopath.
He had cut her hands off post-mortem.
Hmm.
And this discovery confirms the police's worst fear.
There is another serial killer in Baton Rouge,
and he's still on the loose.
Yeah.
So let's go all the way back to 1994.
On the morning of March 21st, 1994,
police respond to a call at St. James Place,
which is a retirement home in Baton Rouge.
They enter the private apartment of 81-year-old retiree Anne
Bryan to find that her throat had been slashed
and she had been stabbed about 50 times.
And just like that, no leads, case goes cold.
There's nothing for them to go on.
Awful.
Five years later, on January 4, 1999,
the body of a 29 year old sex worker
named Catherine Hall is found at the end of a dead end street near construction site.
And her body is laid right beneath a dead end sign, almost like this killer's fucking with the
police. She's left naked, there are ligature marks on her neck indicating she's been strangled and she's covered
in deliberate lacerations.
So this killer likes to do post-mortem cutting.
It's very sick.
By the lack of blood at the scene,
police suspect the cuts were made post-mortem,
perhaps in a different location before being dumped
at this construction site.
It's a horrifying scene made even more disturbing
by the sick joke of the body being placed
beneath the dead end sign.
But police find hair on the body believed
to have belonged to the killer.
But because Catherine was a sex worker
with a criminal background, her murder
receives little media or police attention.
It's like when
Derek Todd Lee was attacking all these LSU students and local women who weren't in the
sex work occupation got so much attention, but these, these women are throwaway to the
police. So they're not getting as much attention in the media.
Also there's that piece that sometimes is true, not always, that there's just no one
to fight for if a sex worker is in a situation where they are, you know, say just like cut
off from their family or because they're on drugs or because whatever.
Like that idea that these people, these murderers are preying on the people that have the least
backing, the least like anybody that will fight for them.
Totally, absolutely.
I think that's part of it, right?
Is like, they just want to kill.
And so they find the most vulnerable victims they can,
who have nobody, no resources at all.
It's terrible.
Okay, but then a third murder occurs in the spring of 1999 and he gets much more
buzz because the victim is the wife of a local attorney. And it's almost like if he hadn't
murdered this woman, I wonder how much longer he would have gotten under the radar.
He would have green rivered his way through.
Exactly.
Right? I mean, that's, it's such a, yeah. Yeah.
So, Hardy Schmidt, she's 52, it's May of 1999 and little does she know that a man has been
stalking her for the last three weeks, driving around and trying to find her during her morning
jogs.
And at about 5.30 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, May 30th, 1999, he finds her jogging along
Quail Run Drive
in Baton Rouge, and it's a safe neighborhood. She lives in a good community. I think she
lives in a gated community. So, this is so fucking awful. Get ready. A man drives up
behind Hardy. He hits her with his car. It sends her flying into the ditch alongside
the road. We've had these stories before where like someone hits a kid
with a fucking bike to incapacity.
It just, I don't stop thinking about that.
Yeah.
He gets out, zip ties her around the neck
and forces her into the car and drives away with her.
He takes her to a park nearby where he rapes her
and as soon as he's finished, he uses a zip tie to strangle her to death.
Two days later, on April 2, 1999, a bicyclist riding along a Bayou bike trail off of Highway 61 in St. James Parish spots Hardy's body.
She's been dumped roughly 35 miles away from where she was last seen.
Like the victim before her, she's left naked,
her body's mutilated.
And despite the extra efforts from police,
the few leads they have bring them no closer
to finding the culprit.
The case again goes cold and the community
is now living in fear of another attack.
I mean, just imagine thinking you live
in a safe neighborhood and something like that happening. Right.
And it's already been happening, whether it's the students
or whatever.
It's almost like there's something out there
that won't be stopped.
That's so creepy.
Yeah.
Like, he got caught, but you're not safe yet, you know?
Yeah.
It's still happening.
The killing spree continues for the next two years, 1999
and 2000, claiming the lives of
another three women.
First is the murder of 36-year-old Joyce Williams, who was killed on November 12, 1999.
It's a really gruesome murder and sticks out in police minds because the killer had severed
Joyce's leg post-mortem.
Like, what kind of sick fuck does something like this? The next murder is of 52-year-old Lillian Robinson
in January of 2000.
Her naked body is dumped in a local fishing hole,
and a fisherman eventually finds her body.
And then one month later, in February of 2000,
the third victim in this string of murders
is 38-year-old Marilyn Nevels,
killed in late October of 2000.
Her body is discarded in
the Mississippi River and discovered on Halloween day in the year 2000. So as the murders continue
for the next three years, the people of Baton Rouge are paralyzed with fear. So these murders
are happening that I just told you about concurrent with Derek Todd Lee's murder. This is right
before he's caught. So he's finally caught. And then
the murder, the first murder I told you about, Johnny May Williams happens. So with Derek
Toddly behind bars and several cold cases left unsolved, police start looking for similarities
between the recent murder of Johnny May Williams that happened right after Derek Toddly was
arrested, and murders from the past 10 years that don't connect to him.
In their investigation, they noticed that in addition
to her hands being cut off, Johnny also has a marking
on her neck indicating a ligature was used to strangle
her, much like the 1999 murder of Catherine Hall.
And what's also similar to Catherine Hall's death
is that a hair was found on the body of Johnny May Williams
that didn't belong to her.
So the hair is stored as evidence
in hopes that maybe one day they can lead,
the hair can lead to the killer.
This is, you know, before DNA was used
to actually like match people.
They were just like, this could hopefully potentially
help in the future.
Like 1999, some of our listeners weren't alive yet.
I don't wanna talk about that right now, Georgia.
I'm just saying they don't know what, like the fact that DNA...
I don't care.
It wasn't a given.
I know. They live in a world where the internet, DNA...
Phones, cell phones.
Cell phones were always from history, always existed.
Which sounds awful. You guys are at a disadvantage and we acknowledge that, history, always existed. Which sounds awful.
You guys are at a disadvantage and we acknowledge that.
It sucks.
But then going the other way.
I mean phones and the internet.
Phones and the internet.
But they must think of us in our childhood and go, that's the most pathetic thing I've
ever heard about.
How boring are they?
How did you do this?
How did you write one paper? I went to like Easter, whatever, my mom's birthday lunch with my family yesterday.
And my now 14 year old nephew Micah could not be more of a sullentine who, when he's not on his phone, looks so miserable.
Like you're almost like, get on your phone, please.
You're bumming everyone out. It's the old junior high slash freshman year of high school.
Oh, you wanted me to be a bright, shiny, magical child?
Well, a load of good that did me.
So watch this, now we're going in reverse.
He hasn't figured out how to fake it
like the rest of us do.
We all wanna be that sullen teen.
I wanna be on my phone too.
But he's the only one that gets to be. Like he only has about a year or so more of this before it
gets real old. So it's like, do it while you can. Like go to El Coyote and like eat your food and
laugh at the jokes. Like you don't have to. But parents jokes are so painful when you're 14.
Everything it's just like being there is awful. It's humiliating. It is. It is. And you see somebody your age and then they see your family and you're like, oh my God,
I'm don't tell anyone you saw me here.
I'm the only person with a family and they're so embarrassing except Auntie Georgia and Uncle
Vince who are the coolest fucking people in the world. Okay. So then fast forward, like that's
1999 when they're like, maybe this hair will lead to something.
Fast forward to February 27, 2004.
So five years later, the body of 43 year old Donna Bennett Johnston is found in a drainage
canal by two people just walking their dog.
And it's just three blocks away from her own house where she's found.
And like Catherine Hall and Jami Mae Williams, she's found nude
with post-mortem cuts on her body. And the police realized there's a good chance that these three
murders are connected. So in March of 2004, Captain Brian White of the Baton Rouge Police
Department leads the task force investigating the unsolved murders. They're like, oh, where? That
there's another serial killer out there. He has his forensics team search the site where Donna Bennett Johnson's body was discovered.
And like with both Catherine Hall and Johnny Mae Williams, DNA is again found at the scene
believed to belong to the murderer. So then on March 13th, 2004, police analyzed the hairs
found on all three of the victims' bodies. all those profiles turn out to be the same.
So police now know they are looking
for a lone white male who's responsible for all three
murders.
But here, OK, so forensics, it's like, it's amazing.
It solves everything, right?
But the key break in the case comes
from a member of the forensic team who notices, this
is detective work, a tire track left in a moist part of the road near where Donna Bennett
Johnston's body was found.
He takes a photo impression of this simple tire track and goes to a local car dealership
and he compares the tire
treads until he finds a match. Wow. The tire brand it's a good year Aqua Tread
3, you know your favorite brand of tires. Oh I love a lot of good years but the
Aqua Tread 3 is excellent for my lifestyle. It was sold to about a
hundred people in the Baton Rouge area. This is so crazy.
Okay, investigators do track down two men.
Like they start going through the list
of people who had bought it.
They find these two men who owned these tires
and they appear suspicious.
It's a father and son and they live together.
And they admit to knowing one of the victims.
And I just don't understand this.
Her purse is even found at their home.
It's not them. They check her DNA. I don't understand this. Her purse is even found at their home. It's not them.
They check her DNA.
I don't understand the story.
Like it's, you can't find details online.
It's like, what?
Well, but also it's like, if this is a small town
in this part of Baton Rouge or this specific area
or whatever, it's like that is the truth of coincidence
that sometimes does happen, sometimes.
Maybe they found her purse while walking their dog or whatever,
but they also knew her because it's a small town.
Like, I just don't have an explanation why the purse was there,
but it's not them, 100%.
Right, it's like the most suspicious thing
that can be found in their home, and it's not them. Wow.
Well, thank God for DNA because, you know,
five, 10 years earlier, they would have absolutely
been arrested and prosecuted for this.
Right.
Well, but again, that would have been-
Circumstantial evidence?
Yeah, so may not have held up in court.
Those are those moments where we always get frustrated
as the laymen reading these stories over and over
where it's like, how did they not go to jail or whatever?
Yeah, but what are the chances?
But that's just it.
It's like the law allows for those chances
and says those chances do exist in reality.
So you can't just have circumstantial evidence.
Yeah, okay.
But then if you're gonna argue that,
like what if they had violent criminal backgrounds?
That's why you don't hit people.
I told you this.
I'll stop.
You've got to stop hitting people in public.
That's my favorite though.
Okay, so that lead is ruled out.
So Captain White's task force split up the remaining tire owners list
and painstakingly question each one,
hoping to find their killer.
Finally, one of the officers, Detective Todd Morris,
interviews someone who during questioning,
puts himself at the scene of the crime
on the night of the murder.
That man is Sean Vincent Gillis.
And obviously I said his middle name, so he is a serial killer.
Right.
People ask that all the time, like,
isn't it crazy that they have three names?
And the answer is no.
They use the middle name so that random Sean Gillis guys
from Utah or whatever aren't like attacked on Facebook
for being a serial killer.
Yes, exactly.
The one thing that might be able to delineate you
from somebody else is the name Lee.
Right.
Fingers crossed.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So let me tell you a little about Sean Pinsonkillas.
He's a lifelong resident of Baton Rouge.
He's born June 24, 1962.
So what is that?
A Leo?
Cancer. June 24? Is that a Gemini is that? A Leo? Cancer.
June 24th. Is that a Gemini?
No, thank you. It's not. He's not one of us.
No, thank you.
No, thank you. We don't want that. Shortly after he's born, his father bails on the family.
All the same shit you hear. He racks up a DUI, numerous traffic citations, cannabis
possession, and a contempt of court charge. By the 90s, when Sean is in his late 20s, early 30s,
he gets work as a computer programmer,
but his drinking and drug use become too much of a problem
and he loses his job.
So he's just kind of like a loser flake.
He looks like a Jeffrey Dahmer type.
He's got the mustache and the glasses
and the nerdy haircut and just kind of,
you know, he looks like Ned Flanders.
Oh, wow.
But also it sounds like if he could get,
I could not get a job as a computer programmer.
Like that's not easy.
He must've been smart in some ways.
So he had a serious like personality disorder basically.
Yeah, and it's like, he had no violent criminal history.
So it is just kind of out of the blue.
And so in 1994, he also has a girlfriend,
a long time like girlfriend.
They always do.
They always do.
He starts dating a young single mother named Terry
and Terry works the midnight shift
at a local convenience store,
which just happens to be located across the street
from St. James Place, the retirement home where
81-year-old Ann Bryan lived before her murder in March 1994. So he was just sitting there
staking out the place. So he's brought in for questioning, he's calm and nonchalant.
And in the documentary, Butchers of the Bayou on A&E, they show some of his interview and I mean, like cool as
a cucumber. Like almost like this is a card game. They're all playing, drinking beers
or whatever. It's like not a big deal to him.
Lizard person.
Lizard. Yeah. So he admits to knowing Johnny May Williams and says she's even been inside
his house and his car before. Police proceed to question Sean for four hours and he just lets
it happen. As time wears on, they're confident that this is their killer, but they lack a confession
or any hard evidence against him. And so they're forced to let him go, but they do manage to get
a DNA swab before they release him. And he just, he just gives it up. Yeah. Hmm. So then police covertly surveil Sean at his home
because they're like, we need to keep an eye on this guy.
It's clearly him.
Then the DNA results come back.
And it's a perfect match for the Hares found
at three crime scenes, those of Catherine Hall,
Johnny Mae Williams, and Donna Bennett Johnson.
Thank God they're keeping an eye on him.
And so as soon as it comes in positive,
before the sun comes up on April 29th, 2004, a SWAT
team forces their way inside Sean's home and places him under arrest for the first degree
murders of Catherine Halt, Johnny Mae Williams, and Donna Bennett Johnston.
Police search his house where he lives with his longtime girlfriend and her teenage daughter, who, like, gets along great with Sean.
They thought he was a normal dude.
They find in the house knives and hacksaw blades
suspected to have been used as murder weapons,
several heavy-duty zip ties,
and a collection of true crime books
detailing other murders.
They even find a belt that belonged
to Donna Bennett Johnston, and an earring in the trunk of his car that belonged to Donovan at Johnston and an earring
in the trunk of his car that belonged to another one of his victims along with blood in the trunk's
interior. And even the kitchen floor baseboards are confiscated by police as forensic show they
are saturated with blood residue, meaning he had murdered at least one of his victims in his own home
when his girlfriend and her daughter were out of town.
Wow.
Yeah.
But perhaps the most horrifying things they found
were postmortem photos of his victims stored
on his computer and digital cameras.
They had tons of images.
He also looked into Derek Todd Lee's murders.
So he was like, he felt competitive
against the other serial killer who was killing
in Baton Rouge at the same time as him.
And when Derek Todd Lee got one murderer over him,
he went out and killed so that he could,
like, he felt like a competition.
Oh, my God.
This guy, I mean, it's, yeah.
So as soon as the police described the evidence against him,
Sean Vincent Gillis confesses to eight murders in total
in vivid gruesome details, like casually.
Captain Brian White said,
once that floodgate was open, you just couldn't stop him.
Quote, he wanted to tell you every detail of everyone. Like, who was it, you just couldn't stop him. Quote, he wanted to tell you every detail of every one.
Like, who's a gay?
In total, there are more than 34 hours of Gillis
speaking to the police.
34 hours.
Wow.
However, because he asked for an attorney
during the interview at one point,
his detailed confessions were inadmissible during trial.
So even though Sean confesses his guilt,
even throwing in a guilty plea in 2007
for the second degree murder of his victim, Joyce Williams,
he still goes to trial for the three first degree
murder charges beginning in July of 2008.
Despite his open confession to all eight of his murders,
there's only hard evidence enough to convict him of the three he's initially charged with. When it comes time for his
sentencing, the jury can't agree on whether or not he deserves a death
penalty. Remember, they couldn't listen to his confessions, his like casual
confessions, so they only had this information. They wind up deadlocked and
the judge sentences Sean to three consecutive life sentences in July of 2008.
Shawn is taken to the Louisiana State Penitentiary
where he remains today.
And that is the story of the other butcher of the bayou,
Shawn Vincent Gillis.
The main sources used in today's story include,
again, the four-part A&E documentary,
Butchers of the Bayou,
episode three of season
two of the investigation discovery series, The Devil You Know, and an article from Oxygen
by Joe Jemionovitch and the other sources are listed in the show notes.
Oh, just a, I so regret clapping. I so regret clapping.
I know what you meant. It's like when we're doing live shows
and they clap when we say who we're doing,
like, you know, it's that thing.
Yeah, it's just like, oh, I want the other shoe
to finally drop and I want to know the rest of this story
because it was a true cliffhanger, but-
That's this podcast.
That's this whole podcast is,
I wish you hadn't told me that.
Right.
That actually should be the name of this podcast.
Wow. Incredible. And to be not only a policeman in Baton Rouge at this time,
but just to be an average citizen that makes the huge mistake of taking a walk by the river or
anything. What a scary, awful thing.
Goodbye, I would move immediately.
Not that there's anywhere safe because look, listen.
No, I mean, it would seem like it's all around you
at that point.
Yeah.
Good Lord.
Oh, well, good job.
Thank you.
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Goodbye.
All right.
Let's take a hard left.
Not only away from the Bayou and America,
but back in time to a little place I like to go
when I'm feeling blue called Victorian England.
Yeah, the smells, the smells.
The smells. Oh my God. I am following some mud lurkers on TikTok.
So good.
And I think it's a woman because it looks like a woman's hand that picked it up. The
other day was just this close up on, you know how the gravel, it's gravel, but then you
look at it and you're like, there's a penny. There's a ring.
There's a, it's like chock full of stuff.
I read a thing that was like, when you look at the gravel,
that nature doesn't have perfect shapes.
So when you're looking at a bed of rocks or whatever,
look for the perfect circle,
because that doesn't exist in nature.
So like, you have to focus your eyes on that.
Or unfocus your eyes on that. Right. You know what I mean? Kind of like, you have to focus your eyes on that or unfocus your eyes on that.
Right. You know what I mean? Kind of like you have to get what you're looking out for. Well, this lady in that very way where
you can tell she knows the tricks, reaches out and moves some rocks and then picks up
this little blue ceramic bird. And like, I don't know why I started crying. I was like, wait,
what? That was just under there.
And it was like underneath and kind of like hidden.
Some Victorian child's tea set toy.
A Victorian child's opium pipe
that they loved so much as an eight year old.
They loved it.
It was their pay for 12 hours of work in the factory.
Oh, the jolly old days.
The times.
So we're going back now to Victorian England.
So here's a quote from NPR describing London
in this period of time to set the scene.
Quote, London was infamously filthy.
It had choking, sooty fogs.
The Thames River was thick with human sewage, and the streets
were covered with mud.
Gross.
So, yeah, there you go.
These days, mudlarking is a much cleaner event than I bet it would have been back in the
day.
This is also a period during British history where the public is very concerned about crime.
The income gap between rich and poor is stratospheric, theft and vandalism are up
from previous decades, and the newspapers and tabloids run headline after headline,
detailing grisly sensational murders taking place across the nation.
But before Jack the Ripper terrorized Whitechapel, there was another Victorian murderer who stunned,
horrified, and transfixed the
British public. So much so that a sculpture of her was put on display at Madame Tussaud's
wax museum before she was ever convicted. Her! Of her crimes. This is the story of murderer
Kate Webster. Fuck. So the sources used today are from a 1925 book called The Trial of
Kate Webster edited by Elliot O'Donnell, the murderpedia page for Kathryn Webster,
Shout Out to Murderpedia, Still Going Strong After Eight Long Years, and the
book Victorian Murders by Jan Bondeson. And Jan Jan Bondison, that name might sound familiar
to you and I because he was heavily cited
in the boy Edward Jones packet.
The little creep that snuck into the palace.
That was a classic.
The greasy little creep.
And the rest of the sources are in our show notes.
Come back with me now.
The story begins in 1849 when Catherine, who will end up going by Kate Lawler, is born
in a small remote Irish village.
We don't know much about her childhood except that she comes from a farming family.
And although the Lawlers belong to the lower class, they're described as, quote, respectable
people.
But little Kate's trying to change all that.
She is described as having a very intense appearance.
That makes some-
What does that mean for a child?
I think I'm gonna show you, but it's so funny.
Like I wish there were obviously back then,
and especially for poor people, there was no pictures.
Yeah, there was no nothing.
That was back when you had to like pose for 15 minutes for a picture.
But this was a little girl who was so creepy looking that she put people on edge.
Oh, honey.
That can't go well for the beginning of your life.
I don't think it makes you love the world.
No.
Go to our Instagram if you want to see it.
Now this, I'm just showing you, this is the wax figure that was at Madame Tussauds.
Okay, yeah.
There's like a Willem Dafoe aspect to it.
It's a look into the hypnotic eye.
There's that vibe.
They went heavy on the eyeshadow
and there might be some,
what's that cheek thing called that you get
when you get your cheeks hollowed out?
Oh, the buckle fat removal.
Buckle fat removal.
She may have gotten that.
No, no.
But also she has the thing where her irises don't go.
There's white on the bottom of her eyes.
And she probably, if she gets mad, there's white on the top of her eyes, which move away
from that area if you ever experienced that in the real world.
Okay, so imagine that as a child,
those eyes would be like three times larger.
Oh dear, oh dear.
She didn't stand a chance.
Oh, okay.
They say she has a quote,
particularly sinister face with dark gleaming,
with dark gleaming and slightly oblique eyes.
Hurtful.
End quote.
Or maybe they're just on edge
because Kate indiscriminately pickpockets and steals
and is constantly in trouble with the law.
A hill among us.
Truly.
But she, it feels to me like she has a very young sociopath
or psychopathic vibe about her
where she's just kind of like, you know what, fuck all y'all.
And she's a big liar. And she lies either to get what she wants or to get out of things
she doesn't want to be happening, to get away with things. When she is later asked about her childhood,
Kate will often claim that she married a man named Captain Webster in her early teens and that they had four children who,
along with the captain, all died by the time she was 15 years old.
What the fuck?
Now, given the math, most historians think this is probably a made-up story,
and that Kate simply wanted to get a new last name
to distance herself from her long childhood criminal record,
while at the same time garnering sympathy for being a bereaved
wife and mother. And it's such an implausible story when you hear it, but then it's like,
it kind of is a credit to probably how convincing she was that as insane as that story was,
it stuck around.
Yeah.
Because she probably made a couple people believe it. Elliot O'Donnell, who edited the
1925 book, Trial of Kate Webster, has said, quote,
she was astonishingly self-possessed,
had a wonderful control of her facial expression and had extraordinary
aptitude for grasping situations and getting out of difficulties.
Sociopath.
Got it. Yep.
So Marin left me this note, note to Karen,
on the point about Kate's alleged dead husband and children,
it's not technically impossible to have four kids by the age of 50.
Yeah, you know what? I don't think anyone was shocked by that
because it was like everyone at 15.
Back then?
Yeah, you're an old maid at like 20.
Yeah, you're a child bride at 12 and you're washed up by the time you're 20.
But there's just no evidence to support it.
So, so when Kate is 15 years old, she's arrested on larceny charges and sent to
prison in Wexford, Ireland.
It's unclear how much time she spends behind bars there, but when she's released,
she goes right back to stealing by 1867.
She's in her late teens and she's stolen enough money to buy a one-way
ticket out of town. Her family are completely worn out by her and her eyes and her constant
arrests and her scandals. So I almost made Georgia spit on her microphone. So they encourage
her to move to Liverpool for a fresh start. And so she does.
Beautiful Liverpool.
Just go start again in one of the most forgiving
and refreshing cities in all of England, Liverpool.
You love mud, right?
Cause I've got a place for you.
And Marin then notes at this time,
Ireland is a part of the UK.
Ah, okay.
Just FYI. So once in Liverpool,
Kate falls in with other street criminals and before long, she is once again in trouble with
the law. In 1868, just before her 20th birthday, she's caught stealing. This time she's convicted
and she's sentenced to four years in prison. When she gets out from that stint, she finds herself under constant surveillance
from the Liverpool police. So she decides to ditch Liverpool and head down to London,
where she cycles through her first round of fake names, Kate Webb, Kate Gibbons, etc.
Surprisingly, Kate's first few years in London are actually very quiet. She later claims
that she was doing her best to keep on the straight and narrow during this period. But she pops back up on the radar in 1873 when she's around
24 years old. And that's after she moves into a home in Hammersmith and becomes friendly
with a family named the Porter's. They live next door. And Kate tells the Porter's she's
a domestic worker who's currently out of a job. For obvious reasons, she doesn't bring up her criminal past.
So Kate then begins a relationship with a man who lives in Kingston.
And after becoming pregnant with this man's child, she moves in with him.
We don't know much about this man or about the baby, including their names.
And Kate herself only identifies the child's father as Strong or sometimes as Mitchell,
and no one knows if those are last names or nicknames or anything.
What if your nickname was Mitchell?
Or Strong.
Your nickname's Mitchell.
Mitchell.
But this boyfriend is described as a shady character who, according to Kate,
eventually walks out on this family. When Strong leaves her, Kate says she has no choice but to start stealing again, saying,
quote, I became very impoverished, forsaken by him and committed crimes for the purpose
of supporting myself and my child, end quote.
Which of course, very common in Victorian England.
Things were bad as was it NPR at the very beginning said is a rough town and everyone's
just trying to get by.
The book The Five about the five confirmed victims of Jack the Ripper talks so much.
I mean the workhouses.
You just had no chance.
If you slipped under that kind of like speeding train of poverty in England, you were done.
And the cycle of like, and very understandable cycle
of drinking to like, to get rid of the stress,
drinking after an 18 hour day in the steel mill
or wherever the hell.
It was just, yeah, people got eaten up.
And so it's very, I love that book. So the five is by Haley Rubenhold
Yes, great book. Please read it
So on March 4th 1875
When Kate's 26 years old she's picked up by the police once again
And this time she's handed an impressive 36 larceny charges and she's sentenced to 18 months in prison
and then in February of 18 months in prison.
And then in February of 1877, just after she gets out of prison from that stint,
I don't know that many synonyms for stint.
Stint sounds good.
Stint's pretty good.
She is arrested again and sentenced to another 12 months behind bars, all for theft.
And so Kate and Strong are now both out of the picture. So the couple's
young son is raised by a woman named Sarah Kreese, who met the couple while they were
living in Kingston. So Sarah and Kate aren't friends, but Sarah sees Kate struggling and
feels really sorry for her. And in 1878, when Kate has served out her latest sentence, Sarah
tries to set her up with a legitimate job.
At first, she invites Kate to come along with her on her own cleaning gigs, because she's, you know, somebody's maid.
And then she asks her employer, a woman named Miss Loader, if Kate can cover a few shifts for her here and there.
Miss Loader eventually takes a liking to Kate and connects her with a friend that's looking for a full-time live-in maid.
That woman's name is Julia Martha Thomas.
So clearly Kate's like, I gotta get it together.
I have a kid, I'm in London, like I can't be in jail all the time.
And so it seemed like she was like, I'm going to be a ladies maid like so many people are.
So Julia Thomas is in her mid fifties.
She has outlived two husbands and she lives alone in a semi-detached apartment
in a large stone villa in Richmond, which is in southwest London.
This is far from the hustle and bustle of the city center.
Julia's home is surrounded by gardens.
It's on a relatively quiet street with just a few houses and one business nearby.
It's the pub next door and it's called the hole in the wall.
So according to the people who knew her, Julia has an interesting personality.
You know what that means.
She's described as, quote, distinctly eccentric and, quote, easily roused to wrath.
And despite being middle class, she reportedly likes to present herself
as being very rich by wearing lots of jewelry and fine silk dresses.
If you put them all on at once you look really rich all your jewelry.
Yeah and then you act real eccentric.
Real roused to what was it roused to anger what was it?
Roused to wrath.
That means she'd like the bitch like to fight.
Yeah Julia's out in these streets with her fine silk dress.
It's suspected Julia Thomas hires Kate simply because it sounds aristocratic to have a maid.
It's not clear that she actually needs one.
Another thing about Julia, she's reportedly very, very rude to the people that she hires
to work in her home. When Kate starts her maid
duties in early February of 1879, she seems to get along with Julia well. So for several
days, Kate doesn't say anything negative about her boss, only that she's grateful for the
opportunity to work. But then somehow everything goes sour very quickly. And by the end of
her first week, Kate says,
quote, at first I thought her a nice old lady and I hoped I might be comfortable and happy
with her, but I found her very trying and she used to do many things to annoy me during
my work.
When I finished my work in my rooms, she would go over it again after me and point out places
where she said I did not clean, showing evidence of a nasty spirit towards me.
So according to people who've written about this case, Julia's nitpicky attitude towards
Kate results in Kate being very chilly, if not outwardly hostile toward her boss.
In fact, it's said that by the end of Kate's first week on the job, Julia is afraid of
her maid and because of this, she fires her.
Okay.
Which is, you know, fair's fair. It's like, you're kind of acting like an
asshole and then the person that you hired doesn't like that. And then you're
like, Oh no, I don't like this. So then you're like, okay, this whole thing
isn't working out. It's how it is sometimes. But Julia doesn't want any
trouble. So she tells Kate that she can
keep living in her house and continue working for her until the end of the month and makes
Kate's official last day, Friday, February 28th. She doesn't feel great about this arrangement
that she has concocted. She's already super uncomfortable living with Kate. According
to Elliot O'Donnell, quote, Miss Thomas tried her
hardest to get someone to stay with her. She asked several members of the church she attended and on
their refusing, eventually succeeded in getting a lady and her daughter to lodge with her for a
fortnight. What do you think happened in those couple days? Like something someone snapped.
Like intense fighting. Probably Julia, the lady of the house,
thought she could kind of do what she wanted.
And she came up with Kate who was like,
no, no, no, I do what I want.
Yeah, and they butted heads.
And they seriously butted heads.
And maybe like Kate at that point was so kind of street worn
that she went street real fast. And Julia was like, Kate at that point was so kind of street worn
that she went street real fast and Julia was like, I thought that was it.
But she's used to people like cow towing to her probably,
Julia.
Probably because if you think about that
like British politeness thing,
where like you don't raise your voice
and it's like, it's super crazy to raise your voice.
Especially though someone rich and
you know aristocratic and pretending to be your boss. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think it's very
interesting though. I'm reading a lot into Julia not being able to get anybody to come and stay at
her house. Yeah. Yeah. They're like, Julia, no. Yeah. They're like, you are the most high maintenance
and you know, I go there and you're going to yell at me. Yeah. You yell at the main. Yeah.'re like, Juliet, no. Yeah, they're like, you are the most high maintenance and now I go there and you're gonna yell at me.
Like you yell at the maid.
Yeah, or like you always panic about something.
Yeah, so eventually Friday the 28th rolls around
and as planned, the mother and daughter leave,
like they said, you got me for two weeks, that's it.
Or a fortnight.
But not Kate, Kate asks if she can keep boarding there
through the weekend, complaining that it's too hard to find short-term lodging on a Friday or a Saturday.
She says she'll have a much better shot at leasing a new place at the start of the next week,
when there's less demand, more vacancies. It's unclear if Julia feels sorry for Kate,
or if she's just afraid of her, either way she agrees to let Kate stay through the weekend.
she's just afraid of her, either way she agrees to let Kate stay through the weekend. Not good.
So finally, it's Sunday, Kate's last day working and in the house.
Even though the two women don't like each other, they both know they don't like each
other, Kate's just carrying out her normal duties that day, everything seems to be fine.
Except, as part of their work agreement, Julia always
gives Kate Sunday afternoon off on the condition that Kate has to return in the early afternoon
so she can help Julia get dressed for evening church services. But not today, as you would
imagine as I would also do. I'm not coming back to fucking help you on my last day of
work. I'm done. You can't fire me more.
You can't fire me. I quit. So Kate is next door at the hole in the wall. Oh,
drinking at that pub. Got it. Easy to find. She getting drunk, chatting up the other patrons.
She is not concerned about the time when she finally does decide she's ready to go.
She stumbles back over to Julia's house.
Julia has not left for church yet, and Julia is furious.
She wastes no time reprimanding Kate for keeping her waiting.
But at this point, as we well know, Kate's not having it because she's drunk.
According to Julia herself, who would later confide
in her fellow church members, quote, Kate flew into a terrible passion. Kate becomes
absolutely enraged and hurls every insult and curse word in the book at Julia. This
absolutely freaks Julia out, so she gets dressed by herself and then just runs out of the house and runs to church.
Mm hmm.
Surprisingly, after the service, Julia heads straight home.
And as far as we know, she doesn't make any attempt to have somebody come back to the house with her.
So all those church people who were talking about it afterwards, like,
she didn't go around and go, will you please come back with me and help me get this crazy maid out of my house?
I wonder why.
Well, it says on this piece of paper, maybe Julia thought that Kate would have calmed down by then.
Or even better, that she would have just taken her shit and gotten out.
Right. That was the end of it. Yeah.
She could have been in a full fantasy of like, that's over.
And that was it. She yelled, we're done.
But when Julia does arrive home, she finds neither seemed to be the case.
And here's what happened next.
According to Kate Webster herself, quote,
upon her return from church before the usual hour,
Mrs. Thomas came in and went upstairs.
I went up after her and we had an argument
which ripened into a quarrel,
which I didn't realize quarrel was one above argument.
Yeah. Apparently it is. Yeah. Which ripened into a quarrel, which I didn't realize quarrel was one above argument, apparently it is. Which ripened into a quarrel, and in the height of my anger and rage,
I threw her from the top of the stairs to the ground floor. She had a very heavy fall. I felt
that she was seriously injured and I became agitated at what had occurred, lost all control
of myself, and to prevent her screaming and getting me into trouble,
I caught her by the throat,
and in the struggle, she was choked,
and I threw her on the floor.
She was choked.
No, no, you choked her.
To death.
Julia Morgan is dead, Kate Webster killed her.
Wow.
So Kate, of course, immediately starts covering her tracks.
In my least favorite way, these true crime stories always have.
If you do not like grisly things, you're going to want to dip for about a minute and a half.
You shouldn't have listened to my story either.
Yeah, exactly.
If you're still upset from George's story, it gets worse.
Is there a post trigger warning?
Is that a thing?
Yeah, does those help at all? Kate proceeds to dismember Julia's body,
boil her limbs and torso on the kitchen stove
and burn her organs in the oven.
She would later say her goal was to shrink the remains
so they'd be easier to get rid of.
She cleans up all the blood around the home
from dismembering her boss in her own home.
And then she puts Julia's remains into a big wooden box
and everything fit except for one of Julia's feet
and her head.
So she keeps those outside this box.
Oh my God.
It's a big wooden box that's incredibly heavy.
And Kate realizes that she's going to have to move it,
but she needs more time to figure out
how she's going to do that.
So she just closes it up and like kind of like,
she doesn't put it aside because it's really heavy,
but just like that's going to go there for a while.
She has snapped in a big way.
And then she takes Julia's foot,
her severed foot to a nearby garbage dump
and tosses it onto the garbage heap,
which is so Victorian England, or at least the way I shouldn't say that because there'll
be a thousand historians being like, actually, no, it wasn't.
But I picture that you walk down the street and there's like, there's old kind of falling
down houses and antique stores and stuff.
And then just to the left, there would just be a big like three story pile of garbage.
Yeah, heaps of garbage everywhere.
Heaps of garbage here and there.
Yeah.
They hadn't learned yet to put it outside the city limits.
Right, into the Thames.
Yeah.
Where we can now dig it up.
Where we can mudlark the fuck out of it now.
Exactly, exactly.
Then she puts Julia's head into a large handbag.
I think I was talking about all the other stuff
because it just gets worse, of course.
She puts Julia's head into a large handbag,
a bag that witnesses will later report seeing Kate
leave Julia's home with.
It's gruesome, it's horrible, and it is, you know,
it's a part of all of these stories that we get to
and then we go, why did we start out on this journey
in the first place?
But I think we do it for this reason,
to talk about what is this escalation
that Kate just experienced between lifelong larceny
of just like, I just want what I want when I want it
to the serious, gruesome murder and dissection of her boss.
Like that's so, so extreme.
Like to have that in you, it's like,
how have you had that in you your whole life?
And it comes out now.
And it's scary to think like that there are people out there
who do have that capability in them.
And is it all of us that,
because is that also a human capability?
If some of the humans can do it,
do all the humans have the capability?
I mean, I think that's what's so fascinating. One of the things that's so fascinating about true
crime is like, is that in all of us? Or is that nature nurture or circumstance or what?
I just don't think when they get to the problem solving point, which to me is the point of no return, where they're like,
I'm going to cut up a body. I can't ever go there. Do you remember the movie Shallow Grave?
No. It was like a huge 90s movie. It was so good. And it's, they have to kill a roommate.
And then they cut the body up. And I'm like, in the movie, I was just like no no well can we go even further back
and that her solution for having shoved this person down the stairs and not wanting to
get in trouble for that was to then kill them like that's where I'm like no no no no like
that's not that's not how you don't get in trouble for hurting someone well and also
doesn't it sound like part of a lie
where it was like, the truth is she snapped and went berserk.
Yeah.
And then in retrospect, she was like, well, it's her fault
that I did that because she was going to tell on me by screaming
because I was killing her.
I had to.
Like, what are you talking about?
She made me.
She made me.
Yeah.
OK. Was any of that worth the trouble?
I'm not sure.
We solved it.
We solved human experiences.
We know why women listen to true crime now.
This is incredible.
So two days after Kate Webster kills Julia Thomas, Kate decides to pay a visit to her old neighbors in Hammersmith, the Porter's. She hasn't seen them in several years and she hasn't stayed in touch. So the
Porter's, who last knew Kate as a down on her luck domestic worker, are shocked to see
her at their door in a nice silk dress, wearing lots of jewelry.
I bet.
Kate wastes no time telling Henry Porter, the patriarch of the family, that her name
is now Kate Thomas, claiming that she's been married and widowed since she's seen them,
since she's lived in Hammersmith.
She also claims to have recently inherited a house in Richmond from an aunt who just
passed away.
And it's through this inheritance that Kate says she ended up with a bunch of furniture
that she has no need for.
So she asks Henry if he might know anyone who'd be interested in buying it. So according to Elliot O'Donnell,
Kate's scheme is obvious here. She wants to make cash by selling Julia's belongings to
people who don't live in Richmond and have no way of connecting them back to Julia because
at this point, Julia is just dead and missing, but
she hasn't been like reported missing by anybody.
And I guess luckily for Kate, Henry Porter agrees to set her up with someone who might
be interested in buying those things.
And then Kate asks the Porters for one more favor.
She needs help dropping off a box in Richmond.
She claims it's a gift for a
friend, but it's way too heavy for her to carry herself. So Henry's son, Robert Porter, kindly
offers to help her. After returning to Richmond with Kate and picking up this very heavy box,
Robert carries it all the way to a bench in the middle of Richmond Bridge, where Kate says she
will be meeting her friend.
And at this point, it's well into the evening, it's very dark outside. But instead of asking
Robert to sit with her while she waits, Kate asks for some privacy and tells Robert to
walk to the end of the bridge. And when she's done with her meeting, she'll come find him.
Before Robert can even make it to the end of the bridge, he hears a big splash
in the water, turns around, looks back toward the middle of the bridge. And even though
it's dark, he can see Kate leaning against the bridge and the box is now gone. He's pretty
sure that Kate just threw the box into the river. Yeah. A little time passes, Kate meets
back up with Robert at the end of the bridge. She no longer has the box.
She tells him that her friend stopped by to pick it up.
Robert decides he's not going to confront Kate about this.
He just decides he's going to commit the whole thing to memory and talk about it to someone else.
So meanwhile, Kate is living out of Julia's apartment, wearing Julia's clothing and her jewelry,
and basically trying to sell anything
that she doesn't wanna keep for herself.
Get ready if you're squeamish.
This includes the gold bridge work from Julia's teeth,
which Kate has pulled from her decapitated skull.
Oh, what?
So we're talking about just someone who does not care.
Yeah, like a huge...
Sociopath?
Yeah, a disconnect from reality and human emotions.
And kind of just all business.
It's very like, I need to get mine.
Yeah, here it is.
And here it is.
So the morning after the suspicious bridge activity, Kate's heavy wooden box is spotted
under the Richmond Bridge.
An unsuspecting man opens it up and finds dismembered body parts inside and immediately
alerts officers at the nearby Barnes police station.
So these officers look through the box
and they basically, they can tell that the victim
is a female, they think that all of these body parts
belong to one person, but because there is no head,
they have no idea who it is and they don't know
how to identify the person.
So it soon becomes the talk of the town
and newspapers are of course flooded with information about the so-called Barnes mystery.
So back in Hammersmith, Robert Porter sees all this newspaper coverage and gets a very bad feeling.
So he goes and tells his father about that night with Kate on the bridge and how he felt certain that she had lied about meeting a friend to hand off this gift. And instead,
he thinks that she's the one that dumped that big box filled with body parts that the police
and the newspapers are now describing. Before Henry Porter heard any of this from his son,
he had connected Kate with a furniture broker named John Church. And John ultimately agreed
to buy multiple pieces of furniture and clothing from Kate. But once
he brought the items home, he begins to look through them and he becomes very unsettled.
He finds a diary belonging to someone named Julia Martha Thomas, as well as a mail that's
addressed to Julia Thomas. And he suspects that he's been sold stolen goods. So he calls
up Henry to tell him that. And
that's perfect timing because Henry tells John about the barns mystery that they saw
on the paper and his son's unnerving story. So all three men decide it's time to go to
the police. So up until this point, Julia's neighbors have been watching as all of her
belongings have been carried out of her apartment, and they have been growing concerned.
It's reported that one of them even approaches Kate directly
and asks her what's going on,
but it's not until the police finally visit Julia's home
that the terrifying reality hits.
Upon entering, they discover charred bones,
an ax, and a razor believed to have been used
to dismember Julia's body.
So now police are looking for Kate Webster,
but suddenly she's nowhere to be found.
On March 23rd, several weeks after the murder,
Kate's description is finally printed in all the newspapers
in connection with the Barnes mystery.
So of course it becomes like it's all the headlines.
Kate realizes now for sure that the police
are looking for her, but she has a plan. it becomes like it's all the headlines. Kate realizes now for sure that the police
are looking for her, but she has a plan.
So she takes the money that she's been making
from selling the furniture and the clothing,
and she picks up her young son
and high tails it to Ireland.
But she is tracked down by British police
because investigators assumed
that she'd be trying to head back home.
Plus with Kate taking her son with her,
she's instantly identifiable.
So on March 30th, Kate Webster is arrested
and charged with Julia Thomas' murder.
So, of course, this trial is a media sensation,
and the line between fact and fiction becomes incredibly fuzzy.
One particularly creepy and very persistent rumor is that Kate
tried to sell off rendered fat from Julia's body. There's even a quote attributed to the owner of
the hole in the wall saying quote, a day or two after the murder, Kate went around amongst the
neighbors offering for sale two jars of fat, which she declared to be the best drip. And quote, Oh my God.
The story almost certainly isn't true.
But basically, it added to Kate being branded as the female Sweeney Todd.
Yeah, I think it's true.
I'm on the jury and I think it's true.
I wouldn't doubt it only because if she's pulling gold plates out of a decapitated head,
why is that going any further?
She's done all these horrible things to the body.
Totally.
Why wouldn't she?
She's not like a mastermind because she left letters inside of the furniture she's selling.
She's not like, no, she's just doing her thing.
Yeah, she's just doing it. Okay, so alongside the nonstop and over the top newspaper headlines, publishers are also
churning out so-called souvenir booklets recounting Kate's life, crimes, and eventual execution.
Soon street ballads and street poems are written documenting this case.
But the cherry on top of the sensational coverage comes when Madame Tussaud
immediately gets to work creating a wax version of Kate. And on Easter Sunday, 1879,
it's put on display at Baker Street and people flock to see the murderess's wax likeness up close.
Creepy. So that's the picture we're going gonna put on Instagram for you guys of this creepy picture
I showed George at the beginning.
It really is, I mean, they would have to make it creepy
or they would just be making a wax figure of a lady.
Absolutely.
But meanwhile, over at the Old Bailey,
Kate's trial is the hottest ticket in town.
In fact, the future King of Sweden
makes the long trek to London to watch the proceedings.
Right arena. Right, a lot of fuss is made about what Kate looks like, but that also has to do with her
Irish heritage coming into play and the racism about Irish people at the time. As Jan Bondeson
writes in the book Victorian Murders, quote, she's described as not merely savage, savage
and shocking, but the grimmest of grim personalities,
a character so uniquely sinister and barbaric as to be hardly human.
So that's basically, that's Jan quoting the papers at the time.
And then he says, her appearance and behavior were seen as key signs of her inherently criminal
nature.
Her callous lying in court caused revulsion. The anti-Irish
sentiments of the time were also fueled by her crime. The denigration of Kate Webster was part
of the public perception of the Irish as innately criminal. Damn. Yeah, the Irish weren't liked at
the time. So even though the verdict is all but decided in the court of public opinion,
the actual criminal case against Kate Webster is very weak.
As Kate's trial drags on, police still haven't found a head that matches the dismembered
remains that they have.
Well, they have other heads, but they can't match it up.
That's troubling.
Probably.
Yeah.
What the prosecution does have though is a lot of circumstantial evidence against Kate,
but Kate is claiming she's innocent, which is the most psychopathic thing to do, right?
I didn't do any of this.
I'll describe to you in detail how I did it.
I didn't do it.
So on July 8th, just six days after the trial began, the jury hands down their verdict,
Kate Webster is guilty.
When asked if she had anything to say before the court, Kate once again denies killing Julia and then she drops a bombshell.
Out of the blue, she now claims to be pregnant.
At first, this sends shockwaves to the British public.
It's yet again, another sharp turn in a rapidly unfolding real life mystery.
But Kate's pregnancy claims are soon
dismissed as yet another one of her lies. A few weeks later on the night before her scheduled
execution, Kate finally confesses her guilt to a lawyer and to her presiding priest.
And the next morning, July 29th, 1879, Kate Webster is hanged to death in a shed,
not in view of the public on the property of
Wandsworth prison and her last words are quote Lord have mercy upon me
End quote. Wow. She was 30 years old
It is not clear whatever happened to her son
I think her son like at that point was probably hopefully Sarah crease took him under her wing
But now we're going to fast forward.
Here's a little addendum to this story
that I think you're going to enjoy.
We're going to fast forward 128 years to 2007.
And this is when British national treasure
and naturalist Sir David Attenborough
just so happens to own the property adjacent
to Julia Thomas's old apartment.
After all these years, the Hole in the Wall pub to own the property adjacent to Julia Thomas's old apartment.
After all these years, the Hole-in-the-Wall pub is still standing next door, but it has
fallen on hard times, and by 2009, the pub is shuttered.
So David Attenborough buys the property with the hopes of converting it into an outdoor
space complete with a greenhouse and an orchard.
By 2010, Attenborough hires contractors to carry out the remodeling plan, and that October,
just in time for Halloween, workers are breaking up the pub's foundation when they find a human
skull.
What?
Because of the Hole in the Walls association with Kate Webster, the skull is immediately
suspected to be Julia's missing head from all those years ago. Because of the Hole in the Walls association with Kate Webster, the skull is immediately suspected
to be Julia's missing head from all those years ago. I have chills. According to Jan Bondeson,
quote, carbon dating indicated that the skull was dated between 1650 and 1880, but it had been
deposited on the top of a layer of Victorian tiles. This skull had fracture marks consistent
with Kate Webster's account of throwing Mrs. Thomas
down the stairs and was found to have low collagen levels
consistent with being boiled.
It entirely lacked teeth, something that is of importance
since we know that Kate Webster stole Mrs. Thomas's snappers,
which is from this quote, I'm not saying snappers.
From 2009. Oh my God.
Which contained a gold plate to have them sold. In July 2011, the coroner concluded that the skull
was indeed that of Mrs. Thomas. David Attenborough.
Right? Yeah.
And so with that, with David Attenborough's remodel,
that little mystery that was still left over
from this horrible murder was solved.
And that is the story of the Victorian era murder
of Julia Martha Thomas by Kate Webster.
Wait, so she like put it in the rafters?
Like, what's the story there?
Behind some tiles?
Like, what does that mean?
They don't specify, I'm not sure.
But it sounds like it was,
if they were down breaking up the foundation,
she may have figured out a way to bury it
or put it like in the basement somewhere.
Yeah, like she knew the little crawl spaces
and crevices and this bar she used to go to all the time.
Oh my God.
Yeah. Isn't my God. Yeah.
Isn't that crazy?
Yeah.
Wow. That was wild.
Like that is a book that's so interesting.
So interesting.
So crazy.
What was the book called that's about that?
I'll tell you.
Well, there's, of course there's Murderpedia.
Don't forget.
Sure. The book Murderpedia.
The book from 1925 is called Trial of Kate Webster.
And then the Jan Bondeson book is Victorian Murders.
So that's where he kind of doesn't, it's like an anthology.
Yeah.
Is that the right word?
He goes over a bunch of different stuff that happened.
I can hear the parrots, the literal parrots screaming
in the trees outside of my fucking house now,
which means that this episode is over.
That's our goodbye music.
We have parrots in the neighborhood.
They're like literal green parrots.
It's such a trip that have escaped from their end.
They scream their fucking heads off.
They're like, stop podcasting.
You're driving us insane.
And if you're gonna give the crows peanuts,
you have to give peanuts to us too.
It's only fair.
Yeah, but they're like, we want crackers.
So let's change this shit up.
I'll do crackers.
Throw more good stuff.
Listen, if you wanna be my friend,
you can have any snack you want.
Any snack there is.
Well, thanks listener for listening.
You're good at it.
We appreciate you using your senses to be here with us.
It's hard in today's world.
It's a slog, Jesus.
We just got one of your full on senses
for like an hour and what looks to be an hour and a half.
That is generous.
And you got a bunch of hours.
It may not feel like it, but you did.
Yeah, you did.
You know what, listeners?
Stay sexy.
And don't get murdered.
Goodbye.
Elvis, do you want a cookie?
Ah.
This has been an Exactly Right production. Our senior producer is Alejandra Keck.
Our managing producer is Hannah Kyle Creighton.
Our editor is Aristotle Acevedo.
This episode was mixed by Liana Squillace.
Our researchers are Maren McClashen and Ali Elkin.
Email your hometowns to MyFavoriteMurder at gmail.com.
Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at My Favoriteder and Twitter at MyFaveMurder.
Goodbye.