Falsely Accused

[00:00:00] Astonishing Legends Network. Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari. And I'm Ed Voccola. And this week we are talking about the monster that lurks at the very heart of our society.

[00:00:25] It's a creature that we actually designed to serve us, to ensure a fragile peace between neighbors and strangers, friends and enemies, the rich and the poor, the weak and the powerful. We carefully crafted this creature to punish the guilty. But the truth is, it is flawed. It's easily manipulated and capable of visiting immense violence upon the innocent. This brute is not the kind of horror that we usually discuss on this show. Is this a Robocop? Kind of.

[00:00:54] It is a cop in some ways. Oh jeez. It is not a demon, or a ghoul, or a zombie, or a werewolf, or a drug, or an accident that can tear you limb from limb. It is something that we call the justice system. Oh. It's a judge dread. Insert law and order sound here. No way, that's really a lot of money. And it is capable of thrusting almost anyone into a Kafkaesque nightmare from which there is no escape. Because the justice system is not always just.

[00:01:21] Sometimes you wake up and someone you've never met has decided that you are a criminal. By lunchtime, there's a detective at your door. By Friday, your face is on the news. And by next year, you are in a cage. Or an electric chair. And that is what we're talking about today. The slow motion nightmare of being innocent and being told over and over and over and over by the people who hold your very life and freedom in their hands that you are guilty. What are we? Scared. When are we?

[00:01:51] All the time. Join us. Join us. Join us. Now it is time for. Time for. Scared all the time. Before we start, I just want to take a quick second to say if you like the show, please go to patreon.com slash scared all the time to check out everything we have on offer over there. We've got a monthly live stream that we do. We've got button of the month club. We've got early release. We've got ad free. All kinds of stuff. If you guys sign up over at the Patreon, it really helps keep the lights on at the show.

[00:02:20] And I do not say that lightly. It really genuinely helps keep the lights on. So sign up over there if you haven't yet. And if you can't do that, that's all good. But if you could leave us a five star review on Spotify or Apple, head over, check us out on YouTube. Help us grow our channels. This show exists because of you, the listener. We try to involve you as much as we can. So we thank you. And with that, it's time to start the show. All right.

[00:02:46] So as far as fears that we've discussed on this show, I would say this one is probably the one that I've had the most genuine nightmares about. I'm having nightmares about you banging your hand on the table and that being in the recording. But do you have a nightmare about being wrong, like being wrongfully accused or whatever we're going to ultimately decide on? Yeah.

[00:03:10] Well, that's by the time this comes out, we'll have decided if we're calling this episode wrongfully accused, falsely accused, false imprisonment. There's a couple. I don't know which one is best for the SEO, but yes, I don't know if it's my general anxiety surrounding life or what, but I cannot tell you how many times I have woken up. I, well, I guess the cliche would be in a cold sweat. I don't know that I've ever woken up in a cold sweat, actually, but I've woken up for sure convinced that I was about to spend the rest of my life in prison for something that I didn't do.

[00:03:39] Sounds like you might have done something that you don't remember. Maybe. I don't know. I don't. I don't have that dream. My nightmares never cover the details, but I know in my nightmares that I've been booked for murders, hit and runs, bank robberies, and a bombing that I didn't commit. Sure. I've also had dreams of being hauled into court for stuff that's not an actual crime.

[00:04:01] Like I have a faint, fuzzy memory of a dream that I had where I was trying to draw something and I used the wrong color. And because I used the wrong color, I had to go on the run because I was going to get like put in jail. You were a child. I don't, I don't remember when I had this dream. I just, it's a faint memory. And I'm pretty sure this didn't actually happen. I don't think I ever had to leave the state. I don't think anyone's gone on the run for that. Because I drew in red and not green.

[00:04:27] I guess that's not so much a nightmare about a false accusation as it is maybe a nightmare about a stupid law. But whatever. I also think maybe, maybe my family, I don't know. My youngest sister, shout out Rachel. Criminal? No, not a criminal. But she shares this fear with me. I don't know if maybe one of us had it first and passed it to the other or if we just have the same Catholic guilt that follows us around.

[00:04:54] Like, you know, I do think in general most days of my life I have a voice in the back of my head that's like, well, you obviously fucked something up. It's not, I never had this problem. You don't have a guilty vulture looming over your shoulder at all times? The only dreams I have, we've discussed this not on the show but in our lives. The only dreams I have are anxiety dreams. You do have, yeah. The anxiety, I only dream. If I'm dreaming, it's an anxiety dream. Yep. Like, that's crazy but that's the truth.

[00:05:21] But the anxieties in the dream are never that I've been wrongfully accused of anything. Right. The anxieties are usually very parallel even if they're metaphors in the dream. They're all very parallel things going on in my life at that moment. Would you like to tell the listeners about the anxiety dream that you had last night? About the sinister test? I don't know what that was about and I don't know if it was because I knew we were recording and I couldn't fall asleep last night and I kept waking up every hour so I don't know if I was worried that I was going to be... We're drinking coffees in this.

[00:05:50] We're recording this at 8.30 in the morning. But we were out all night with Sarge from... Crypto Cocktail. Shout out Crypto Cocktail. Dave and Sarge. And the dream I had is that we needed to rent a school, a classroom in a school, like a dirty old school in Boston. And you... They were going to charge us $10 a day and you were fighting them on that rate.

[00:06:12] But we needed the classroom and presumably some students because Chris wanted to conduct a test called the sinister test. Which I think you're feeling guilty for things you're doing in my dreams. Maybe. I don't know what... And I don't know what the sinister test could possibly be. I know it was like a multiple choice bubble test. It was like a standardized test and you were explaining it to the woman. But the woman... And who's the woman? Just some woman who's like administrator there. She owns the dirty school.

[00:06:42] She owns the dirty school. And she kept being... I didn't have a shirt on. And I wasn't... I was in better shape in this dream than I am now. But she was like, I'm sorry, I can't. Your friend has no shirt on. And I said, we were running late. She said that to me. Yes. You don't have a shirt on. But I had a shirt on. I was just there and you had a shirt on. Okay. And then she... You kept trying to explain the sinister test to her. And then she was like, I'm sorry, I'm very distracted. And then she's like, you need to have a shirt on in the school. Around children.

[00:07:12] And then I was like, I didn't... I said, we were running late. Because we started the dream in a hotel. We're not living in this city at that time. We had to come here to conduct this test for the pod. Yeah. And she said they had a lost and found. And she gave me a wife beater. Okay. And I was like, okay, thanks. So you're looking sick, jacked, wife beater. Yeah. And you're... I'm trying to test children. Yeah. And you're like holding a stack of standardized tests that say sinister test. And to this day, it happened hours ago.

[00:07:42] I was sleeping. But to this day, I don't know what the sinister test was. But it certainly wasn't... Anything that we were going to go to jail for. Yeah. Well... Good. Well, maybe we hadn't yet. I didn't get to the end of the trip. They were open to every request you made was... It had a $10 fee. So... I think we might need to... We might need to actually... If we were doing the sinister test for the podcast, we might need to actually invent the sinister test and do it for the podcast. But I also think I...

[00:08:11] I partially have to blame, I think, maybe Hitchcock movies for my fear of being wrongfully accused. Okay. He's probably to thank for a lot of people's fears about a lot of things. But Hitchcock famously loved the wrong man trope. At least... I was trying to think when I was getting ready for the show, at least three of his movies that I can think of off the top of my head, The 39 Steps, about a guy accused of being a spy and on the run.

[00:08:39] The Wrong Man, Henry Fonda, innocent. Henry Fonda is one of the all-time great actors. So good. And I forget if it was Robbery. Wait, I don't like his kid, but I think he's great. Jane Fonda? I was thinking the boy one. Oh. Wait, who's the boy one? Exactly. Oh, what did he do? A million things. Easy Rider. Oh, wait. Hold on a second. Why is it hard to remember as one of the most famous actors of all time? I'm thinking of Dennis Hopper. He was also in that movie. Peter Fonda. Peter Fonda. Yeah. I'm not a Peter Fonda guy.

[00:09:08] Guys, early morning, 8.30 copies. I was going to cut all of us figuring it out. But no, I love, love, love, love Henry Fonda. Do not care for Peter Fonda. Just his performances or not. Oh, so nothing he actually did in real life. Oh, couldn't tell you what he did or anything like that. I just think that, like, I never was really into him. Like, I don't like Easy Rider. I don't like it. He would show up and stuff, and I'm like, yeah, I don't like Easy Rider either. Nor should you. It's fine. It's of the time, kind of.

[00:09:34] It's the same way that, like, I think kids, you know, 40 years from now are going to be like, what the fuck is Spring Breakers? I hate this movie. Like, I feel like there's a similar counterculture, coolness. Yeah. Anyway, 39 Steps, Wrong Man, North by Northwest. Sure. And there's one other, is it maybe Saboteur? Is it the man who knew too much? The man who knew too much, yeah, has got to be. Although I can't remember what that movie's about, but the title certainly sounds like.

[00:10:04] I think Doris Day is in it. And Saboteur, I'm pretty sure, is a guy who a boat gets blown up in a harbor. That movie's amazing. Yeah. I'm thinking of Lifeboat. Oh, yeah. That's also. There's no wrong. He's first in that. Anyway, he also had a whole run of films in the UK before he came to America, so it's possible there's even more. But I've always found it interesting that he was so, so Hitchcock passed his fear of

[00:10:32] false imprisonment onto the world because when he was a kid, he told the story, I think, too, in the interviews with Truffaut. I have that book over there. Yeah. Didn't read it, obviously. And who knows if it's true or not, because he was a storyteller. But he says that when he was like around five years old, he did something wrong and can't remember what it was. Or maybe I can't remember what it was, but he did something wrong. And his dad sent him to the local police station with a note pinned to his clothes that said

[00:11:01] to put him in a jail cell and tell him, this is what we do to naughty boys. And. Oh, my God. That's the sinister test. That's the sinister test. Yes. And Hitch said that it left him with a lifelong fear of police and prisons. I stole a piece of beef jerky when I was a child at a place I won't name now in case there's a statute of limitations on beef. I think you're okay. On one piece of like beef jerky. I think you're okay.

[00:11:30] And my dad, when we got in the car, was like, where'd you get that beef jerky? And I was like, I had it. And I obviously didn't have any beef jerky. And I remember he said some shit that was like, he's like, we can go back in there and I can do the whole thing where it's like my son took this and blah, blah, blah and embarrass you. He's like, or I can just tell you that like stealing is what shitty people do and we're not shitty people. So don't fucking do it again. And. That's pretty good. My.

[00:12:00] And I was real young and not saying that I never heard swears before, but I never heard swears directed at me that weren't in like anger. Like I, of course. Yeah. We're three rambunctious asshole kids. We've heard swears, but I'm saying I've never heard it like directed at me in such a way. This is a real. It was a core. Yeah. So it was a core memory for me and I didn't steal beef jerky ever again. I was like real, real little. Yeah. No, I mean, that's actually, I mean, sort of some people have called what Hitch's dad did

[00:12:28] sort of abusive, I think, I mean, this would have been what 1910s working class London. I feel like as far as punishments of that era go, this was probably on the, on the less abusive side of things. I mean, his dad knew how to write. So that's, they were living okay. We're going to get back to early 1900s England by the end of this episode. And, and boy, oh boy, what a, what a terrible place and time.

[00:12:58] But when most people our age, this is where I want to start. When most people our age hear the phrase falsely accused, wrongfully accused, their brain probably goes to the most high profile wrong man, or in this case, woman case in recent history, which is the story of Amanda Knox. We are. That's not where my brain went. But when you said the name. You thought Jeffrey Epstein. No. That poor innocent man.

[00:13:26] No, I, when you said Amanda Knox, now it came rushing back, but that was not top of mind at all. What was top of mind for you? I guess I should have asked. I felt like I was going to be put in a fucking Lizzie Borden situation. I thought you were going to ask me, what do you think? And I was, I was racking my brain, like wrongfully accused. It was that the Leslie Nielsen fucking parody movie of the fugitive. Like I was like trying to think of what people our age would think of for wrongfully accused. But I guess the Central Park Five, you know, popped in my head first. Yeah.

[00:13:55] I was, I, I, I had them on the list. That, that case was awful and, and fraught with, with much tension. Yeah. We didn't want to get into that. Hopefully. I felt like Amanda Knox is a good place to start. It's a good anchor point for a lot of people. See the lady who was in Italy? Lady who was in Italy. Yeah. And we're not going to take an exhaustive look at this case because a million people already have. But I think we would be committing a crime of podcasting to not at least, to at least we have to touch on it to start this episode. So for anyone who wasn't paying attention or possibly.

[00:14:25] Sounds like me. Like Ed, or this was long enough ago at this point that maybe some of our listeners were maybe not even born when this happened. On November 1st, 2007 in Perugia, Perugia, Italy, a 21 year old British exchange student named Meredith Kircher was found murdered in the apartment that she shared with three other young women. Her throat was slashed and she'd been sexually assaulted and all of Italy was scandalized. Within days, two things happened in parallel.

[00:14:53] First, the actual forensic evidence, which included bloody handprints, DNA and footprints, all pointed to a guy named Rudy Guide, who had been arrested recently for burglaries in the town of Perugia. I would even say that the evidence pointing to him is a bit of an understatement. His shit was all over the place in this house. Sure. It was the Rudy Guide show on the walls, on the floor. He wrote Rudy. He wrote I did. Rudy the Guido Guide was here.

[00:15:23] But as the cops started investigating and crawling the crime scene, Kircher's American roommate, who at the time was a 20 year old Amanda Knox, was outside the house and she started acting strangely. She was spotted kissing her boyfriend, doing cartwheels and practicing yoga outside while she waited for the cops to finish. Oh, so this act of crime scene. Yeah. Not things you do when your roommate's been murdered. Yeah, brutally murdered. Brutally murdered and you're just hanging out outside. This isn't fucking Bonnaroo.

[00:15:52] Bonnaroo. No. You know, one of the one of the things that I'm sure other people have looked into that I didn't feel was super pertinent here is what her explanation was for doing all of these things. Drugs. Just say drugs. Probably drugs. Just say drugs. Probably being young, nervous, scared, whatever. People, as we'll see throughout this episode, sometimes people act in ways that you don't expect them to act in bad situations. Sure.

[00:16:17] So her position as an American outsider acting weird is enough for Italian police to pull her in for an interrogation. Although much like points to interrogation here is a understatement. This was more akin to torture. It was 50 hours across five days. They interrogated her in Italian, which she didn't speak or she barely spoke.

[00:16:42] She had no lawyer and the cops repeatedly slapped her and told her that after every answer that she was lying. Like slapped her physically? Physically slapped her. Dude. Years later, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that- That's why they lost the war. They ruled that their behavior was so abusive that the country of Italy had to pay Amanda damages. I would. I would demand it. Yeah. Especially since America, baby. What do you mean?

[00:17:07] I'm just feels like shit gets resolved or shit gets escalated when there's an American involved in an international crime or thing. Yeah. Either we get the hostages back or we come for something after. Usually tends to be, it's like when you have a dual citizenship. Yeah. Seems to be from multiple people I've spoken to outside of our country. You're going to want that American embassy when shit goes down. Right.

[00:17:34] So what I'm saying is slapping around the American is probably not a good look for the country. No, and I don't know. You know, it doesn't seem like America swooped in at any point to be like we, you know, like they were playing by Italy's rules this whole time. Oh, yes. Nor was this a hostage situation or something with a state department when getting involved. This is a local fucking crime. Yeah. I'm just saying that when this becomes news. Yeah. You've slapped the wrong, unfortunately, nationality. Yeah. Because we have a very large global media circus. Yeah. That we bring everywhere we go.

[00:18:04] Yes. And that is part of what. And then a bunch of dick swinging as just being America. Right. Tends to be. Although in this case, the American media circus, I think, did not help. No, I'm not saying it helped. Media circuses rarely help. R.I.P. God bless Princess Diana. I was just saying that like America is just such a fucking elbows out bully. Yeah. That it's like pick and choose who you're going to beat up for 50 hours. Right. I think I should also maybe pause here while we're off on a bit of a tangent to say that

[00:18:32] forced confessions might be their own fear because. How many Netflix documentaries are going to watch where that happens? I mean, and again, I would. I think. Under duress. I know this is hard for people to wrap their head around. And maybe this is my Catholic guilt speaking again. But I think if I were in a situation, because again, this is an anxiety I've had being falsely accused and I've imagined this like I think if you if if the stakes were high and scary and

[00:19:01] weird enough and you brought me into a room and told me for hours and hours and hours, if not days, that I was definitely guilty of something. I don't know that I would like be brainwashed and convinced that I was. But I do feel like I would start to feel like, well, I must have done something. I mean, that's why you can't. Did I black out? Did I torture a confessor? So what? Because if I feel like if. Well, not even torture. No, I'm just saying that's a reason you can't. Yeah. Right. Right.

[00:19:30] Because you'll be like, oh, you're going to stop slapping me if I say I did it. Fine. I did it. Right. Right. And not even physically torture, but just like, you know, if if they berate you enough and and, you know, tear into you enough, like, I don't know, maybe it means I'm weak willed or I don't know. But I could see myself after a long enough, brutal enough interrogation being like, yeah, I guess I guess I did do it. But anyway, that is why one of our scared all the time rules is always ask for a lawyer. You've got to ask for that lawyer.

[00:19:59] You've got to get that lawyer. Does she not ask for a lawyer? We'll get to that in a second. All right, guys. Well, you know how it is over here at Scared All the Time. We are always talking about getting square. And yet we always seem to be a little bit further away from actually being square than we ever So it's nice that we're finally getting some sponsors that can maybe help us on our journey to squareness. And this week's sponsor is Lean.

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[00:21:27] So I'm not a legal expert here, a legal eagle, but I'm pretty sure any country with a common law, Western-style justice system has to allow you to have a lawyer before you answer any questions. What do you think? So if you're ever traveling, go into the country as an American citizen, as Ed said. I would also say learn the word for bathroom and learn the word for defense attorney because if you need one, you need to be able to ask for one. Just because you ask for one... I would ask for an interpreter. Well, that too.

[00:21:56] But just because you ask for one also doesn't mean the cops... I mean, they don't always let you get one easily in the States. Yeah. And doesn't mean they'll let you get one easily overseas. In Amanda's case, part of the issue here was that she was never even informed that she was a suspect. She was just told, we want to talk. And I'm sure at some point in the 50 hours and five days of interrogation... It started to feel like... She probably figured like, ooh. Because the police never just want to talk. And that's why... When was she picked up?

[00:22:25] Was it like the night of? No. That's a good question. Because it's not... There's sexual assault stuff. There's a bunch of shit it feels like you're not going to maybe get from just looking in the room at that moment. I mean, it was soon after they investigated... After they investigated the crime scene, they brought her in to talk to her. Well, the police never just want to talk. And that's one of the reasons... And I'm genuinely not being political here.

[00:22:52] But I would implore anybody with children, don't teach your kids to blindly trust cops. It's not that they're all out to get you. But to assume... I think we've all seen enough Netflix documentaries that to assume that you're safe because you're innocent is a bad idea. Always ask for a lawyer. Okay. You mean blindly trust cops when they've brought you in. Well, or even if... I think there's... Even before they bring you in.

[00:23:19] Even when they come knock on the door, if a cop came and knocked on my door... In this situation, this is a cop is talking to you. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I don't necessarily agree with the don't blindly trust cops blanket statement. Well, I'm not saying cross the street. I don't trust cops to have my best interest necessarily in mind if I've been accused or thought to have been accused of something. But what I'm saying is you don't even need... But I am going to... I have a healthy respect for cops in the sense that I don't want any trouble.

[00:23:49] Well, respect and not wanting trouble is one thing. But I'm saying like the way that I think a lot of people get in trouble is a cop comes to your door. A crime has been committed. You may not even know a crime has been committed. And they say, hey, can we ask you a couple of questions about something? Immediately right there. And this is why it's weird. But that just happened here. I have video footage of it. Somebody broke into the house behind my house. The guy jumped over and ran through our thing. And the cops came to my door. And they were like, you have a ring camera. Is it cool if we look through you? Like, can I see it?

[00:24:19] What if anyone ran by? Sure. And I wasn't like, let me call my lawyer or prove to me someone ran by. No, no, no. I know. I know. And that's... And I think that's why like in that case, that was totally fine. But I think there are situations sometimes where there's more going on than you know. And you just say the wrong thing. And all of a sudden, you know, you find yourself in a situation where somebody has decided that you look like a pretty good suspect for something. In this case, that...

[00:24:45] In that case, I would say instead of don't trust the cops, I would just maybe say a scared all-time rule is check yourself before you wreck yourself. Like, just be smart about... Like, just think two steps ahead if you can. Just think about, you know, am I going to get myself in hot water accidentally? It's best to just let the lawyers do the talk before me. I guess I would say, sure. If they come and knock on your door and say, hey, can we check your ring camera? You're probably fine.

[00:25:13] If a cop ever asks you to come in, they want to talk to you. That's where I would start thinking that maybe it's time to get a lawyer involved. Yes, they're asking you to come to a police station. Well, right. But they don't always say... Like, they don't come to you and say, hey, you're a suspect in a murder. You want to come down? They're like, you know, come on down. We just... We got to clear... We got to make sure a couple things or whatever. Like, the minute that starts... If I'm going to a second location, I don't think... There you go. I don't think I'm... Well, first, never go to a second location if you can... Period. Period. But yeah.

[00:25:42] Anyway, my fear that my own brain would turn on me in a intense interrogation situation is exactly what happened to Amanda. According to an article I found on InvestigativeTV.com... You know it's good TV. The cops started lying to her. They claimed, quote, We know you are at your house. We have irrefutable proof. Knox was put in a position of trying to make sense of that. She said, that doesn't make any sense to me.

[00:26:11] I have no memory of being at my house. Knox said she then started doubting her own memories, and her self-doubt became so strong that when the cops typed up a confession, she signed it. She said, I just did exactly what the police told me to do. I was exhausted. I was confused. I didn't know even really what I was signing. Her confession named her boss a Congolese bar owner named Patrick Lumumba as the killer. Congolese bar owner in Italy, not in the Congo. He's from the Congo in Italy.

[00:26:41] Yeah. That gets her in even more trouble because Lumumba had an airtight alibi. Wait, so in her thing she signed, she said, My boss killed my roommate? Yes. She said that her boss did it. Part of the theory that the cops were building here that we'll get to... There's no way she came to that conclusion on her own, unless my boss was always being creepy around my roommate. Part of what the cops were building to here that we'll get into a little bit more in a minute is that what happened to Meredith was some sort of like sex game gone wrong

[00:27:09] because there had part of what... That she had dated the bartender? No, just part of the weird mythos that started to grow around Amanda Knox was that her and these three female roommates and her boyfriend, that there was a bunch of partner swapping and sex stuff going on. And in a very kind of virgin whore society like in Italy, that was a very scandalous thing.

[00:27:38] And so part of the case they were building was like, What men were you bringing around? Who were you having sex with? Who was Meredith jealous of? And like all that kind of stuff. So I don't know exactly... Again, we're not doing the full deep dive. I don't know exactly why they thought that her boss was involved. But that was... Racism? This is a country that gladly jumped on board with fascism. I would not be surprised. With both hands. I would not be surprised if that had something to do with it. But anyway, Amanda naming her boss in her confession actually got her in even more trouble because...

[00:28:08] No kidding. Her Lumumba had an airtight alibi. So they went to the bar. Even if he didn't, don't be putting other people's names in your signed confession. Well, and I'm also curious. Again, I'm not sure. Like you just brought up. Straight up. I don't... But like what you just said, I don't know if she just signed what the cops wrote. I don't know if the cops put his name in there. And she ended up taking the fall for that. Well, yeah. I mean, who knows? But that's why, you know, to quote an old Jerry Seinfeld bit from a stand-up. If kids are too young to remember what and it not... They don't know who Jerry Seinfeld is. No, no.

[00:28:37] They're not going to know what checks are or how you write checks. Yeah. But he's like, that's why you put the long line after the number. He's like, that way so someone can't write in and a million dollars too. Yeah. So you got to... Whatever the long line of her situation here is, you got to make sure that people can't write in and Mutombo too. Well, they talked to everyone else who worked at the bar and everybody said, yeah, no, no. He was here all night. He couldn't have done it.

[00:29:01] So the court then charged and convicted Amanda Knox of slander for falsely accusing him in court. And this is crazy. To this day, even though, as I think most people are listening to this, spoiler alert, she's been cleared of this murder. She is actually still convicted of slander against Patrick Lumumba in Italy. So she still is a convicted criminal in Italy of this particular piece. And the fucked up thing, even if she was tricked into doing that, I think that's fair.

[00:29:30] I think it's fair because it's like, I don't know. It's fucked. It is. It's fucked up. But I also just feel like... I mean, listen, that person... I don't think you can drop charges. I think that's a made up thing for television. Like, if your boyfriend beats you up and, you know, you're afraid of him. So you're like, I want to... I'm actually don't want to press charges. But if there's evidence and the cops have it or blah, blah, blah, they actually... That's up to the district attorney or something. Like, it's up to whomever would like to press those charges regardless.

[00:29:59] And so even if that guy was like, oh, she got whatever, it might still just be up to the whatever the district attorney of Italy type of thing city would be, who will still just follow through on those charges. Because it's out of her hands, maybe. And his as well. That was local prosecutor Giuliano Manini, who really made Amanda Knox's life a living hell. He has since admitted that he was operating on not much more than a, quote, gut feeling. I don't like what I'm hearing.

[00:30:26] But he was convinced that Amanda and her boyfriend at the time, the guy she was kissing on outside the house, this guy Rafael Solacito, that these two killed Meredith during some sort of like wicked sex game. Also, he posits that Rudy Guede was involved too. But now, who is Rudy? And how does he... Why is he in the house? Rudy! What? Rudy was a burglar. Unrelated to the sex games of this man's imagination. Exactly. Who's...

[00:30:55] Rudy is the guy who they found all of this DNA, bloody handprints, footprints inside. The only forensic evidence that was ever found that connected a person to this crime. But he's just a man of happenstance. Like, there happened to have been a burglary happening whilst... But I thought Amanda wasn't home originally. Well, yeah. That's... The stories here kind of were all over the place. So I'm saying, like, there's a version which has been laid out to me and the cops where

[00:31:25] presumably this house is more than one bedroom. Amanda and fucking Ricky Salami, whatever his name was... We'll go with Ricky Salami. Ricky Salami, the boyfriend, they're canoodling in her bedroom whilst a burglar breaks in and also kills a woman. And then discover the body. And then, like, presumably, the cops come and she decides it's the time to continue with Ricky Salami and some cartwheeling.

[00:31:50] I mean, that's about as sensible of a case as the cops ever really put together here. I'm just trying to figure out how everyone's home, you know? Basically, the only person... All that really matters, because we're not doing a deep dive into this case, all that really matters is that the forensics say that Rudy Guide was definitely there and involved. Giuliano Menini has a gut feeling that Amanda and Raphael were also involved. And so he put forward a number of theories about why they all may have been there, even

[00:32:19] though there's never any evidence that Amanda was there or not. And we kind of get to this a little bit later. But Menini is still convinced that, yes, Amanda, even though she's been cleared of this crime, she was there and involved somehow, but he doesn't know how. He can't prove it. Well, it's... The prosecution's fucking job is to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt. And I don't know that there's ever been... You know, Amanda has been cleared of all guilt.

[00:32:48] I don't know that there was ever like an airtight alibi that she was somewhere else. Okay. Anyway, as recently as 2016, in a documentary that reexamines the case, Menini was still leaning into this theory. He said, I have to remind you that her, Amanda's, behavior was completely inexplicable, totally irrational. Amanda was a girl that was very uninhibited. She would bring boys home. And hearing Meredith's friends, if you could imagine a girl different from Amanda in every

[00:33:17] imaginable way, it would have been Meredith. But being promiscuous and acting weird is not what's on trial here. No, but, you know, this is, again, this is Italy. The same reason this asshole 20,000 years later is still sticking to his story. They're a prideful, misogynistic, racist bunch. Racist bunch, yeah. The motives put forth by the prosecution were all over the place. From the motive that Amanda was in competition with Meredith over who was the, quote, alpha female of the house. Is that a thing?

[00:33:47] I don't know. They invented it, I guess. I'm surprised they were willing to admit that a lady could be alpha. Yeah, yeah. Two, one motive was that there were mounting tensions over cleanliness and lifestyle differences because Amanda was like a mess and a crazy lady. I didn't know killing your roommate was an option for that or else I'd be down a bunch of roommates for that move. Anyway, it almost doesn't really matter what motive the prosecution put forward because

[00:34:14] once this Mussolini train of justice left the station, absolutely nobody could stop it. Oh my God. Nox and Ricky Salami are convicted in 2009. Salam. They're convicted of the crime in 2009. They're quitted in 2011. They are reconvicted. Slippery Salami. He got out of it. He did. He's reconvicted in 2014 so that slippery Salami is- It dried up. Slipped back in the casing. Okay.

[00:34:40] And then they were finally fully exonerated in 2015 by the Italian Supreme Court which wrote a report using phrases like, quote, sensational investigative failures and, quote, guilty omissions by the prosecution. Which are phrases you really never want to see connected to a court case. Or if you're them, you definitely want to see connected to a court case. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amanda and Ricky Slam each ultimately spent four years in prison for a crime that everyone

[00:35:09] with eyes could basically see that they didn't commit. No, but wait. When does fucking Guido come in? Well, Guido was always in the background because he was- But I'm saying, was he ever- Yes. A suspect? Was he ever convicted? Yes, yes, yes. Okay. We'll get to that in a second. This was a weird little detail about this case. Amanda Knox and Menini, the prosecutor, have struck up sort of like a weird friendship after all of this. The prosecutor and Amanda Knox. Yeah.

[00:35:37] They regularly exchange greeting cards and personal life updates. Like I said earlier, the prosecutor, Menini, insists that she was present at the scene of the crime. He says, quote, Amanda has changed a lot and I think I can say that I know her. We have different ideas about the trial that involved us. Yeah. It seemed like that was very publicly you had different ideas. But now I have a good opinion of her. Cool. Is that going to buy her four years back? No, not at all. In a foreign prison?

[00:36:06] For Knox's part, the friendship with Menini is a way, she says, of defanging a person who was a boogeyman in her life for so long. She says, quote, whether directly or indirectly, he kept being a presence in my life because he was the one who portrayed me as this girl gone wild who out of the blue murdered her roommate. My goal was to understand him. There was this deep curiosity in me to try to understand the person who decided that I

[00:36:31] was a dangerous person who deserved to spend the most years of my life in prison. And this is really just the tip. They got married? No, no, they didn't. Okay. Like I said, this is all really just the tip of the iceberg. Oh, yeah. I'm sure there's 30 documentaries called like A Hard Knock's Life or something that will tell you more than we're going to do. Yeah. And like I sort of said earlier, too.

[00:37:01] You'll probably use people's real names. They're not like Guido the Guinea and fucking Ricky Salami. The tabloids were as guilty here as the prosecution when it came to portraying Amanda as this dangerous, sexy harlot. And the case really featured no shortage of racist and sexist assumptions and accusations that all kind of added up to this over. And it makes headlines. Yeah, it made headlines.

[00:37:25] Rudy Guede, as you were asking for his part, he was convicted, sentenced to 30 years in prison that was then reduced to 16. And he served 13 years with an early release granted in November 2021. Is that because they couldn't tie him to the sexual assault and throat slitting of a woman? I feel like you shouldn't get 13 years for that. He served the final year of his sentence, too, via social services and community service.

[00:37:53] So the final year of his reduced, reduced 13 years was served through community service. All right. Any Italian vigilantes will listen. Find this guy. I mean, we didn't say that. No. Yeah. Let's not. Legally, we're not encouraging anyone to find anybody. But here's the thing that really struck me when I was prepping for this episode. Because of the media surrounding Amanda Knox, she's sort of treated as the modern poster child for false accusations.

[00:38:20] And the feeling I think a lot of people have is that she's this unique miscarriage of justice, that this case is so special because this never happens. But unfortunately, cases like Amanda's happen all over the world and way more often than we would like to think. Now, because I can hear some people probably screaming at the podcast already, and Ed, you are maybe even thinking this. Yes.

[00:38:47] The common law system we have in many Western countries is better than the alternatives. I wasn't thinking anything. Okay. I agree with that statement, probably. By common law, I just mean the adversarial defense versus prosecution in front of a jury system. Okay. Those are the cases we're mostly going to be looking at in this episode. Obviously, in countries with dictators or religious courts, there are plenty of people who also find themselves imprisoned or dead for things that they didn't do. Probably at higher frequency.

[00:39:16] Probably at a higher frequency. But I think one of the things that's really uncomfortable for us is that our system, the Western system, is built on the promise of equality and fairness. I mean, they have that statue. They do. Probably building that statue was the last time I thought about it, but yeah. And if you're in a country run by a dictator, maybe it's a little more expected. But in the West, these things aren't supposed to happen. We have this fairness and justice. We get to the truth.

[00:39:43] Really, the fact that these things aren't supposed to happen, but they do, the horror there actually reminds me a little bit of our episode about waking up during surgery, where it's like, we have access to all this incredible medicine, but that doesn't mean that things can't go wrong and that when they do go wrong, the suffering isn't unimaginable. The Innocence Project, a nonprofit that's been working since 1992 to use DNA evidence to claw innocent people out of American prisons, has freed more than 250 people in that time,

[00:40:13] which breaks down to about seven people per year, which, make no mistake, is an incredible victory. But it fails, I think, to illustrate how widespread the problem of false accusations and convictions really is. Because you hear, oh, they free seven people a year. Okay, we've made some mistakes, but that's not... Six kids are killing their parents a week. That's true. If you haven't listened to kids who kill their parents... I mean, the numbers are not as impressive as the kids who kill their parents numbers. The scale becomes a little clearer when you look at it this way.

[00:40:43] They have eight people working there for free. Kind of. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what the numbers of who works there, but the Innocence Project, I'm pulling all these numbers from their website. They only take cases in which newly discovered or re-examined DNA evidence could prove the prisoner's innocence. Okay, so they don't... They're not... They don't have the resources to fail a lot at this. No. So let's go with our best foot forward on cases that we actually can maybe help. Right.

[00:41:09] That are very clear, black and white, you know, we have the DNA or we don't have... This was not available when you were tried. Now it is. So narrowing that window means that they only could even theoretically take on about 5% to 10% of convictions, which is about how many people... The number of cases that hinge on this DNA evidence. Narrowing the window to just those cases, they still receive somewhere between 6,000 to 8,000

[00:41:38] letters per year. Okay. For people who are saying, my case hinged on DNA evidence, you guys could get me out. Now, of course, it's unlikely that every single person writing those letters is innocent. No, my mom is a big... Have you tried just writing to Steven Spielberg? You know what I mean? Like, so... Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there is an element of like, you know, 100% of the shots you don't take, you miss or whatever. So yeah, just write to the Innocence Project.

[00:42:04] But basically what we're looking at is they've received 6,000 to 8,000 a year, 65,000 letters since 1992. So you got to look at that and go, of those 65,000 letters... We have three interns and two unpaid full-time employees. Well, are there really only 250 innocent people in that pile? Yeah, no. That's why I think it's probably a infrastructural... Like, we don't have enough help and money and who knows what.

[00:42:33] That's 65,000... That's 250 people freed of 65,000 requests of 5 to 10% of convictions. So the other 90% of convictions where the DNA evidence wouldn't help, there's still innocent people there too who can't even... Private prisons. Private prisons. Yeah. We have... I think we're the most convicted nation on the earth or something like that. Like, there's more people in prison here than per capita or something. Yeah, per capita, we have more people in prison than anywhere else on earth.

[00:43:02] So yeah, it actually... It seems like there's maybe a reason to not find people innocent if they can help it. But all of this is why I'm putting a link in the show notes so that you can donate to The Innocence Project. We're going to donate to The Innocence Project in the show's name. And if you feel so inclined either already or by the end of the episode, I would encourage you to donate to The Innocence Project. I will say I'm fine with donating to The Innocence Project, but this is a little bit like when

[00:43:30] I would bring my friend with me to ask my parents if he can sleep over for the night. This is the first I'm hearing of it, but I am very comfortable donating to The Innocence Project. What's even scarier than just being falsely accused and ending up in prison and begging The Innocence Project to help you get out is that not everyone who's falsely accused gets a long life sentence that they can cross their fingers.

[00:43:58] That I can do appeal and appeal and appeal and appeal and appeal. Some of these innocent people end up on fucking death row. Which does, I think a lot of those people do get to appeal and appeal and appeal and appeal for a long time. I don't know if it's like a Jewish burial or something where it's like they got to be in the ground tomorrow or something. Have a window that's closing. I don't know. Death row, I know how you're anti death penalty. I was pro death penalty only if the person is so objectively guilty.

[00:44:24] But now in the world of AI and like deep fake ability, it's like now it seems things are less cut and dry for me because it's going to be harder to tell the difference. Get this. In 2014, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took a statistical look at death row inmates in the United States between 1973 and 2004. Their conservative estimate was that at least 4.1% of people sentenced to death in America are factually innocent.

[00:44:53] Since 1973, more than 1600 people have been executed in the United States. So the state has murdered around 65 people for something they didn't do. Well, that's why I was cut and dry. You need to be cut and dry. You can't, there can't be anything that's like hinging at anything in my version. Some people should just be erased. But what would be cut? And so that's where I'm getting at. What would be cut and dry? Like if you find a guy wearing his victim's skin? Yeah. Yeah. That's a pretty good example.

[00:45:20] In that same span of time, the Death Penalty Information Center has documented over 200 death row exonerations. So they put the ratio like this. For every eight people we've executed in the modern era, one other person was sentenced to die that was found innocent before we got around to killing them, which feels like way too many people that were... But it's better than finding out after we got around to killing them. Well, sure. Yeah, it is.

[00:45:47] But, you know, I think it's all a strong argument that, you know, the idea that the state should take lives is a difficult pill for me to swallow. But these mistakes... I mean, the thing I would say that the death penalty, I don't see it acting as the deterrent we'd hope it would be because I guess we're not the next day just killing people. But I'm saying...

[00:46:16] So if it's not actively deterring crime, then I don't really see the benefit of it. Right. Other than if you've got someone who's cut and dry and you just want to erase that person, then erase a person, I guess. But I don't see that it's... I don't see that like people erasure is... Like I don't see the net benefit of it. But I will say this, the only thing I'll give you is that I would love to read a 1970s like paperback pulp series called The People Eraser.

[00:46:46] I would definitely read that book. So these mistakes, though, also aren't new. They're as old as courts themselves may be older. Well, definitely older. I guess before courts, if you were falsely accused... You're getting stoned either way. What happened to you basically came down to how fast you could run. Exactly. Which is why, in case I keep any of what I said in, it's got to be...

[00:47:11] There can be no shadow of doubt and not through trickery of great legal Perry Mason minds. I mean, hey, man, we're... Everyone was standing right there. Everyone was standing right there. Let's just erase this person. Stories of false accusations and wrongful convictions are, unfortunately, the story of human justice. One of the earliest cases I could find tracks, as it so often does on this show, back to ancient Greece.

[00:47:40] The birthplace of democracy, the land of philosophers, and people who were just as likely to make mistakes in matters regarding life and death as we are today. As part of their complex and sophisticated society, the Greeks employed a board of 10 treasurers known as the Helenotamii. These men were the most senior, most trusted bean counters in the Greek-speaking world and oversaw the funds and taxes that were paid by members of the Athenian Empire as tribute to the empire.

[00:48:10] While not an easy job, because from the research I did, it sounds like just like people who do this work today, the payments came in from all over, sometimes partial, sometimes late. You had to go track it down. It was otherwise a pretty boring and safe job most of the time. Can't be that safe. I mean, money is not on a computer. Well, it wasn't this time because in 440 BC, these financial masterminds made a clerical error that would cost them their lives.

[00:48:36] Somewhere around that time, 440 BC, there was an audit of the books, and the audit appeared to show that the Helenotamii had skimmed money. The Greeks, in their wisdom, arrested and tried these guys one by one and found all 10 of them guilty. They were each put to death, except this last guy, Sosius, and that's because at some point in all of this, someone rechecked the math. And it turns out there was no money missing at all.

[00:49:06] Oh, no. They were missing a... Now they're missing nine accountants. They were missing a bead on the abacus. Basically, yeah. Someone slipped the bead the wrong way, and nine people died. So the Helenotamii had done nothing wrong, as I'm sure they each probably loudly proclaimed to the court before they were killed. Our only source for this story is that this guy, Antiphon, mentioned it in a courtroom speech he wrote for someone else's murder trial. Okay.

[00:49:37] Which I think we touched on these courtroom speeches that people gave. Yeah, Cicero. Yeah. It was in Rome, but still. Yeah. We have another Cicero story coming up here in a minute. I think he was Roman. I don't know. But yeah. So we may not have the whole story here. We don't have a ton of surviving information about these guys, but... It must have been a famous enough event that he was able to use it in his argument. Yeah. That it was understood that people know who the fuck I'm talking about. Yeah.

[00:49:59] And I thought it was just an interesting place to start with the history of false accusations, because it's a documented case in ancient history of people going, you're guilty, you're guilty. And them going, what are you talking about? No, I'm not. And really, back then, there was not much of a way out of it. I'm glad for Socius' sake that somebody rechecked the math.

[00:50:25] I don't know whose job that was, but luckily, that person was better at it than these 10 guys. Well, I just don't. Or Socius, the birthplace of Sociopath. Yeah. Socius was better at making the argument that someone should recheck it than the previous nine people, I guess. So yeah, the masterminds of the Greek system killed nine guys who really didn't deserve it. But how about the Romans? Romans. Those guys seem to have a good thing going.

[00:50:51] How would they fare 360 years later when faced with a case that featured accusations even more sinister? Wait, what year was the first one? 440 BC. I thought it was 360 BC. I'm like, are we doing Jesus? No, no, no, no, no, no. Okay. Although I guess, yeah, he would be a pretty famous falsely accused guy. No, the Romans, 360 years later, were faced with a case that was even more sinister than a ripoff. Sinister test.

[00:51:20] This actually ties into our last episode, or not our last episode, but a few episodes ago about kids who kill their parents. Because the case in question here involves a man named Sextus Rossius who is accused of killing his father. But let's back up a little. There are actually two Sextuses involved here. Sick. So awesome that we're doing this on No Sleep. Yeah. Extremely confusing. Also, it sounds like the guy who tried to try Amanda Knox may have used the same exact sentence.

[00:51:49] Yeah. There are two Sextuses involved here. Sextus the Junior and Sextus the Senior. Okay. Though back then they were just Sextus Rossius and Sextus Rossius. And I can't believe anybody was able to build a functioning society in a world where you could just name two people the same thing. But in any case, Sextus Senior was a very wealthy man who was stabbed to death on the streets of Rome while walking home from a dinner one night in 81 BC. Hate to hear it. Suspicion fell on Sextus Junior.

[00:52:19] That's not where I would have gone. And he was, where would you have gone? He was walking home? Yeah. Who do you think? I figured just somebody stabbed him like he was a robbery. You know what I mean? Like it was a, like he was held up. Well. When you hear that someone was like coming home from work and they were killed and like their wallet taken, you don't immediately go like I bet their son did it. Well, his wallet wasn't taken. Well, they said he was rich. His property was. We'll get to that in a second. Oh, geez.

[00:52:45] Sextus Junior was formally accused of patricide in court not long after. Now, Sextus Junior claimed he had nothing to do with the death of his father. If you haven't listened to kids who kill their parents, you should go do that. And you should learn about the Roman punishment for killing your mother or your father. Oh, yeah. So you understand that Sextus Junior was facing the sack. Oh, shit, dude. And the sack is mean as hell. So in a desperate attempt to escape the sack, Sextus hired Cicero. Okay.

[00:53:14] At the time, a fresh-faced 26-year-old lawyer. He would go on. Middle-aged. Yeah. He would go on to become one of the most famous legal minds in history and a heavy hitter in Roman politics, partially because of the outcome of this trial. You know, that's how fucking what's his head? Julius Caesar started in the court system. And he would defend much to the chagrin, I feel like, of other people in the courts and all this other shit. So basically, the Romans would go and take your place.

[00:53:44] And they'd be like, you're part of the empire now. You have to give us like, we instill a governor. And you pay like this guy taxes, essentially. And the governor was almost always a piece of shit. Right. And I think that was like Julius Caesar's wasn't called Julius Caesar at the time. But I'm saying like, I think that was his. He defended people from those places who had gripes or grievances with their new landlords or new installed governors. Yeah.

[00:54:11] And which is apparently an unpopular thing to do. Yes. In, you know, Rome. Yeah. And so that's like, so he was like, his early career was like, he's fucking for the people. Yeah. He's one of us. Well, and Cicero faced a similar. But he was young. I'm saying young like this. In his 20s. Cicero faced a similar sticky wicket with this murder trial because it was also a political minefield.

[00:54:37] At the time, Rome was under the thumb of a dictator named Sulla. Sulla was bad news from the beginning. He was a general who took power by marching on Rome. He oversaw the massacre of 6,000 prisoners of war and initiated public lists of individuals deemed enemies of the state who were then brutally hunted down and killed. Yeah. You're supposed to leave that army outside of the walls.

[00:54:59] Over 520 victims were formally listed and thousands others were likely murdered from this, what was known as a proscription list. So that's all important because it was very curious that the Rossius family estates were added to the proscription list by a man named Lucius Cornelius Chrysogonus, who was a powerful freedman or slave who'd been freed and was loyal to Sulla, the dictator.

[00:55:29] Okay. So Sextus Senior is killed. I will say this about ancient Rome. It does seem interesting that I might be misremembering this, but it did feel like one of those societies that we kind of didn't get again for a long, long time where it was like the only place, it seems like, where you have stories that was like born a slave, ended up owning half of downtown Rome. Yeah.

[00:55:55] It's like, or like born a slave, has a talent in baking, ended up making the fucking wedding cake for the, like it's, there was a weirdly a way to move up. Sure. Yeah. In that society where like you just simply wouldn't see in like medieval feudal societies and shit. Yeah. Where like born a slave, slave for life, born a farmer, farmer for life. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. You run into characters like this guy who was like freed slave, who's super powerful. Yeah.

[00:56:23] And this guy, this guy flexed his muscles because Sextus Senior is killed and then Chrysogonus adds his estate to this list of property that can be claimed by the state. Okay. And then wouldn't you know who bought the estate? At pennies on the dollar. At pennies on the dollar. Chrysogonus. And by, we actually know the numbers. Why is he in trouble for that? We, well.

[00:56:53] The guy wanted his house back. It's his family's house back. No, it's not his family's house. Oh, I thought the son bought it back. No. No. The guy who accused the son bought it for pennies on the dollar. Yes. That's worse. Yeah. You want to hire a lawyer then. And we know the numbers. It was worth nearly 6 million sesterces, which I guess was their coin at the time. Or whatever, yeah. And Chrysogonus snapped it up for around 2,000. Dude, that's like the TikTok sale. That's insane. Yeah. There's a lot of, seems like corruption there too.

[00:57:22] But I'm saying like, that is a real devaluation of something we all knew was worth more. Yeah. So according to Cicero, within nine days of Sextus Senior being killed, Chrysogonus had purchased the property, placed a relative of Sextus' named Titus Rocious Magnus in charge of the property. Okay. And had Sextus Junior evicted. Okay. But there was a member of his family who made out like a bandit. Yeah. He's in charge of the property. Cousin, basically. And there were actually two.

[00:57:52] So Sextus gets evicted and flees. Chrysogonus, Titus Magnus, and a third man, confusingly also named Titus Rocious Capito. I think there was like, I was reading something. There was like a thing where everyone had the same name. Yeah. Like for real, it was like a normal thing so that people knew what lineage you were or whatever. But it's a stupid way to do it. I think they basically just like kind of weave sort of flipped first names and last names where like, you know, your family lineage is now named by your last name.

[00:58:21] And I think they were doing it by first and middle names. I mean, who knows what they were doing? Who knows? What these three motherfuckers got up to though was they banded together. They went to court and accused Sextus of murdering his father. Yeah. And so then they all made out like bandits. Yes. Add to that the fact that Sextus Jr. was not even in Rome the night of the murder. Things start to look pretty suspicious. Yeah. But if you can get him in the sack fast enough, which is why I said it's got to be open and

[00:58:50] shut case for the for murdering. These guys ran to murder the next day. That's a problem. He's in a real bind. The problem for Cicero was because Chrysogonus was Sulla's boy. He couldn't just walk into court and be like, this guy did it. This guy orchestrated this murder. The guy who's running Rome is his buddy. Yeah. Because then Cicero himself might not survive the trial. Sure.

[00:59:15] So according to a summary of the case that I found on Stories of Antiquity, Cicero suggested that Sextus Jr. neither wanted to nor had the opportunity to kill his father and that he did not have the, quote, depraved and vicious nature to carry out such an act. He brings up like 30 witnesses to like character witnesses to testify that he's a fucking spineless little bitch. Yeah. He's like, this is getting mean on like a 30th witness. He's like, this is what's going to save your life. Shut up.

[00:59:46] The prosecutor, although this was a little confusing because some places I found said that the prosecutor used this argument and then other places said that Cicero used this argument. But at some point, one side, I believe the prosecution brought up a qui bono argument or the who benefits argument. I didn't even know what that, okay. Qui bono is a legal phrase that means who benefits. It's a way of looking at- So pro bono means no one? For free. Yeah, for free is all I think of. Yeah.

[01:00:13] Sonny bono didn't live long enough to find out what it meant. The prosecution's argument seems to have been that if the upstanding trio of Chrysogenes, Capito, and Magnus had not stepped in, that Sextus Jr. would have walked away with the spoils of his father's estate. So his argument was, look who was to benefit. It's a great deal. And these guys, thank God for them coming around to make sure that that didn't happen.

[01:00:42] But in a defense known as the pro-Roscio- The Rashomon defense where 18 different people saw 18 different things he did. In a defense known as the pro-Roscio-Merino defense that we have, it survived in its entirety. Cicero shredded that argument by pointing out that no, Chrysogenes benefits a lot more since he's currently sitting on six million sesterces of stolen property.

[01:01:09] And he also took great pains to make sure that his argument didn't implicate the dictator Sulla at all. He called Sulla a most illustrious and valiant citizen and let the question of acquittal of Sextus Jr. Quote, rest with Sulla himself. A conviction was a threat to the noble institutions that Sulla was attempting to restore.

[01:01:33] And so he had to find Sextus Roshius not guilty and therefore accept that Chrysogenes had acted wrongly. You know, what did you even take over this place by force for if not to- Be a just man. To be a just man. So yeah, there's no evidence that charges were brought against either of these other three guys. Who kept the house? Sextus Jr. Well, I'll get that in a second. So there's no evidence that charges were brought against these three guys.

[01:02:02] No record exists of Chrysogenes after the trial. So he may have angered Sulla by participating in this. There's also no evidence of what happened to Sextus Jr. after the trial. Some, I would say most of the historians that I looked at for this thought that he would have reinherited his land, but there's no evidence one way or the other. We do know that- That very house is where Amanda Knox was renting. Yeah. Bum, bum, bum.

[01:02:31] We do know that Cicero, after this case was over, left Rome to what he said was to tour Greece for his health, which may have been a Roman way of saying, I'm going to lay low for a bit. Yeah. Like you've pissed off some people. And then Sulla died two years later. And so Cicero was able to return and become the famous man that he did.

[01:02:55] So normally this would be the point where we would take a finer look at our fear as it changes and evolves throughout history. But we're going to take a massive jump from the Roman forum to the modern era. Okay. There are plenty of cases of false accusations in between, not to mention the entire Salem witch trials that could fit in here. Yeah. But the details of the modern cases that I want to cover are so wild and unbelievable

[01:03:24] and infuriating. That's why this episode's not been fun so far because it's the infuriating part. Like, I hate hearing about people who get fucking fucked over. Yeah. I hate it. That's why it's a real fear. Yeah. The first case that I want to talk about is known to, I think, most people of our generation basically as a punchline. OJ Simpson. OJ Simpson. Well, that too. Clearly the most falsely accused man in history. Ed, when I say dingo, you say- Oh, ate my baby.

[01:03:54] Ate my baby. Do you know where that saying comes from or why we think of it? Australia? It does come from Australia. A woman, I assume, I think it's a lady. Yeah. Not I assume, but women would have, just say I think it was a lady and her kid is gone and accused the dingo of making sure that happened. And I think- Make you sure it happened. I think it was. The dingo has the responsibility. I think the dingo did eat the baby or at least took the baby.

[01:04:25] Do you know what we- The baby was dingo- Dingo. Erased by a dingo. Do you know why we think of it as a joke? Because I didn't know this. I don't know why it's thought of as a joke, but I do know that it seemingly exists in the same weird place in cultural history as when you look into the person who burnt their legs with McDonald's coffee. It actually, they did deserve the money. The money, yeah.

[01:04:53] I think this is in tandem with that, where it was like one of those, upon further inspection, these should never have been part of monologues. Yes. The reason it entered the American lexicon though, and I didn't know this, is that there is an episode of Seinfeld. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what made it a popular, the dingo ate my baby came from that episode of Seinfeld. Well, Double Dip came from Seinfeld, yada, yada, yada comes from Seinfeld. Yeah.

[01:05:22] Seinfeld is responsible for like an insane number of ubiquitous in culture things. Yes. It's pretty wild. It's funny though, I'll put the clip in the show notes and you know, famously, I've never watched that much Seinfeld and it's something that I do want to start from the beginning someday. My parents, when I was growing up- It's the best show I ever made. That's what I hear. I don't know why it's not higher on lists. I've never been a big sitcom guy. It was one of the- My parents never watched sitcoms and they thought that like Friends and Seinfeld were

[01:05:52] like dangerous to society. Friends was fine. Seinfeld's unbelievable. You could- Rewatching parts of one and all of the other a million times, Seinfeld's just mind-bogglingly good and loving it when I was young. It's a thing where upon rewatch, you're like, oh, it's the one with that in it, or it's the one with this in it, or that's the episode- Famously how Friends episodes were named. Well, that's what their title, but they're- Yeah. Fuck them.

[01:06:20] The thing is, is that I bring it up because- I have so many reasons I hate Friends. Yeah. I bring it up though is when rewatching, the number of times I was truly blown away by the fact that sometimes when I think that, oh, that's the one with this, that's a B story in the same episode that has a equally, that's the one with. Right, right, right.

[01:06:47] Like, there are episodes where you think of them, each thing is so iconic that they must have been their own episodes. Right. But sometimes too iconic, that's the one with- Right. Is in one fucking episode. Yeah. Jesus Christ. I can go all, there's probably 10, 20, 30 billion podcasts about Seinfeld, but it's just, it's just mind-boggling. Yeah. Do I think they deserved all the money they got? No. I think that the fact that all these deals were closed and never opened again to the

[01:07:15] remainder of people making television shows, that's a loss. That's a bummer. But holy shit, is it good? Anyway- You fucked up, man. I'm not only about Seinfeld the whole rest of the episode now. If you watch the clip, it is just funny. Is Elaine Bennis says it? Elaine says it, yeah. But it's something that if you watch it now and you weren't alive at the time, like when you watch the clip, it barely makes sense. You're like, why is, what? What is she, like, what the fuck? Dingo 8 May Baby, what is she talking about? Well, it was a news.

[01:07:44] Yeah, at the time it was, but if you watched it now, you'd be like, why is this even a joke? I don't understand what's happening. Well, I think because, I mean, we're also going to talk about that episode that Jerry was dating a 17-year-old in real life. Yeah. Like, it's better to talk about other things than do this. Anyway, at the time that the episode aired, Elaine's line was a reference to something that had been in the news, the tragic tale of Lindy Chamberlain. So come with me, listener. Back to August 17th, 1980.

[01:08:12] The Australian outback at Uluru, at a place formerly known as Ayers Rock, which is this, I'd never heard of it before, but it is this massive sandstone monolith right in the center of the country. Okay. In land that is about- In the center of the country. Yeah. It's about- There's nothing inhabitable in the center of the country, right? It's inhospitable, uninhabitable, but it's beautiful. The rock itself, the best way I can describe it is that it almost just looks like a big lump in the carpet of the earth. Okay.

[01:08:42] Like it just sort of rises up and it's huge. And one of the reasons it's famous is because when the sun sets, it lights up like all these different colors. It's beautiful. But it's at this place in the middle of the summer that a Seventh-day Adventist pastor named Michael Chamberlain and his wife Lindy go camping with their three children. One of their three children is a nine-week-old baby girl named Azaria, which- That seems young. Yeah. You could not have paid me to take Felix camping at nine weeks old. At nine weeks old-

[01:09:11] In the center, on the center of the sun, like on the surface of the sun. In the middle. Yeah. Babies have to feed every two hours. They sleep a lot, but they also wake up a lot. Yes, but this is their third kid. Yeah, it is their third kid. They threw it in a backpack and said, funny? Yeah. I don't, I think all the things you dealt with, I think by the third kid, you don't give a shit. And the numbers and supply, just, I don't know why you would. But anyway- Well, why does their religion matter? Well, we'll get to that in a minute. Okay.

[01:09:38] According to an article on FamousTrials.com, quote, Lindy, cradling Azaria in her arms, explored a formation called Fertility Cave. Just outside the cave, she looked up uneasily to see a dingo staring at her. She would later tell a detective that she had the feeling the wild dog was, quote, casing the baby. In any case, didn't bother her that much because around eight o'clock that night, Lindy puts

[01:10:04] Azaria down in the tent and heads back to the campfire to join the adults. Ten minutes later, she hears the baby screaming. She rushes to the tent and sees the dingo coming out, dragging something behind it, and Azaria is gone. Lindy lets out a scream that would eventually become one of the most mocked lines in history, a dingo's got my baby. Even knowing it's a misnomer, the one we all know is not actually the thing she said. Right. Well, she did. I think she did actually say. Later, a dingo ate my baby.

[01:10:34] Well, she said a dingo's got my baby. But I'm saying. In the moment. I think a dingo ate my baby. Yes. Is the one we all know. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm saying in the way that everybody misquotes like Star Wars. Luke. Luke, I'm your father. That's not what he says. Do they misquote or is it a Mandela effect? I don't. The only person who would know is upstairs. I don't fucking memorize. God. Three other campers heard her scream. A woman named Sally Lowe had seen a dingo lurking just a few feet behind her near the

[01:11:03] trash bins only minutes earlier. There were dingo tracks all around and inside the tent. There were drag marks in the sand. And even the chief ranger at Aluru, a guy named Derek Roth, had been writing desperate letters to the government for two years, begging them to deal with the aggressive dingoes. And yet there was a tourist who was doing cartwheels nearby and that person was arrested for the baby. Yeah. For taking the baby.

[01:11:36] We should pause for a second here, I think, to cover what exactly a dingo is. Because outside of this specific case, the idea that dingoes are dangerous is... And dingo is not their species. I think it's maybe just what you call a wild dog? Well, no. Based on what you're saying? So you... Do you know what a dingo... You know what a dingo is. It's basically a wild dog. It's a wild dog. Yeah. It looks sort of like a coyote, fox, wolf hybrid. It's cute. But I don't know what I'm saying. If you went to the Museum of History...

[01:12:06] Or if you went to the Museum of Natural History in Australia and they have a bunch of like stuffed animals, would one say dingo? Or is dingo a colloquial term for kind of a wild, rough wolf? No, it is. The scientific name for a dingo is Canis lupus dingo. Okay. So it's a fucking dingo, I'm saying. It's a dingo. It's not like... It does sound like something you call a stupid person or something like that fucking dingo. Yeah, I'm just saying that.

[01:12:33] I didn't know if it was colloquial or if it was just like any wild dog that's untethered would be like fucking dingoes around here or whatever. I'm sure there's some, you know, crossover... I don't care. I don't know what this matters. I just wanted to know if it's called a dingo. It is called a dingo. Okay. They are cute. I also think coyotes are cute and everyone has to remind me not to go near them when I see them walking around the neighborhood. And that's sort of what happened here. According to Wikipedia, tourists in parts of Australia found dingoes cute as well.

[01:13:00] And quote, the tourism industry on the island encouraged people to approach dingoes without caution. And such encounters basically became expected by tourists. People lost their caution when dealing with dingoes more and more frequently. And the number of reported interactions, they call them, increased. I think I do wonder if it's something where it's like, ah, we just need to train the dingoes

[01:13:26] to be comfortable with people versus shooting all the dingoes. Well, yeah. A scientist named Bradley Smith, who had been researching wild dog behavior at the Central Queensland University, put it simply in 2013 when he said the problem is with humans and not with the dingoes. Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying. These people's ideas, like, well, trade them to just be comfortable with humans. Dogs, the dingo dogs who were called aggressive were simply behaving naturally.

[01:13:54] Some research actually says that the dingo problem they were having is similar to the problem campers in the States have with bears. Quote, bears are fucking no joke that we did that eaten alive. Grizzlies? Yeah. Get me out of the woods. It is assumed, quote, that dingoes might have started to regard human food sources like garbage cans, leftovers, handouts, whatever, as part of their territory. And that attacks on humans occurred because the dingoes then see humans as competitors to, quote, you know, their food.

[01:14:22] And they want to protect their food sources. And we do know, actually, in this case, just moments before the dingo snatched the baby, Michael, the dad, was entertaining his son Aiden by tossing crusts of bread to a dingo that came towards the camp. And Lindy actually said, you shouldn't encourage them. Okay. You think they're still together? I don't know. I didn't say that led to a bunch of arguments once their baby was dragged off.

[01:14:50] Back to Derek Ruff for a minute. He must have seen these warning signs. Maybe the dingoes were having food scarcity problems or they were particularly irritated by the presence of people in their territory. But whatever the case, one of them snatched his area on that tragic night. And in February 1981, the initial inquest found that Azaria had been taken by a dingo. It was an open and shut case.

[01:15:17] But the local cops did not like this explanation. One of them, John Lincoln, said a dingo attack like this, quote, never happened before. That's a fact you can't beat. Never, ever happened. He also scoffed at the possibility that a dog could lug a 10-pound baby over hundreds of yards. To prove his point, he filled a pail with 10 pounds of sand and challenged other officers

[01:15:46] to see if they could hold it in their mouth. That's not... We're not built the same as a... This guy's an idiot. This is some real... I mean, reading this, I was imagining super troopers. Yeah, I know. I mean, like, come on, man. You can't drag this. Farva, dude. This is a fucking Farva dude right here. Yeah, exactly. It's a Farva thing. So, John Lincoln was just like... He's just a fucking asshole and an idiot. Asshole idiot who... Also, dingo attacks had happened before. A million percent. This is just...

[01:16:14] They didn't get their best and brightest in the center of Australia's police force. Yeah. And there's... So, as with most of the cases we're talking about today, this... The actual sprawl of this case is crazy and long and so much shit happened. Also, I have noticed there's a common denominator. Yeah. It's a person in a position of power, whether it's the prosecutor or a law enforcement person who is obstinate to the point of...

[01:16:44] Most people can't understand their judgment. Yeah. Yeah. To get these people railroaded to begin with. Yeah. Someone who's, you know, my gut told me this and no matter what happens, I'm not going to believe it. Yeah. However long it takes or a person who's just like, this lady's clearly lying because I'm a flathead who can't understand anything and I'm... But I also have a badge. So, I'm allowed to fucking... Yeah. You know, say this person needs to go to jail for...

[01:17:13] I don't know what they did with their baby, but a dingo didn't take it. Yeah. There's... So, there's a bunch of things that happened that led to what happened next. But essentially, you had a bunch of cops who felt there's no way this could be accurate. Another investigator who came into the case, Detective Sergeant Graham Charlwood, his eyebrows shot up when he read notes in the initial report that cleared Lindy of wrongdoing. There was a note in there, for instance...

[01:17:40] The report that cleared her or the report that he saw that he had an issue with that would later get her cleared? No. The report that... The initial inquest that said, we interviewed everybody, open shut case, the dingo took the baby. Oh. There were some notes in that case file that made Graham Charlwood's Aussie eyebrows shoot up off his head. One of those notes was that when Lindy brought Azaria in for a medical checkup recently prior to... Prior to the event. Yeah.

[01:18:09] The baby was dressed in all black. The exam... What does that mean? The examining doctor is said to have been curious enough about the name Azaria to look it up in a dictionary of names and discovered that it meant... It's an angel's name. Sacrifice in the wilderness. I'm... I'm... Is it... Did you look it up yourself? It doesn't mean sacrifice in the wilderness. It means whom God aids or helped by God. Yes. I thought like it's probably like a zero or some shit like... Oh, like... Yeah.

[01:18:38] Like that fucking angel or something from Dogma. Yeah. No. So basically you have one group of cops who think that dingoes are super cool and can't carry buckets of sand in their mouth or whatever. And then this other cop who... You can see where this is going. It becomes almost a satanic panic kind of thing. He starts sniffing around this thing that looks vaguely... All of this has felt satanic panic, by the way. Every one of these has felt like a moral panic. Like every... Yeah.

[01:19:05] Every one of these have had something that says this person is not of moral fortitude, whether it's like Amanda Knox is a slut or fucking... Right. Like each person has had something that had to do with their own view of morality that let them put all 10 toes in the ground that you're not going to change my mind on this. Well, and that's part of where... So here it's like we got this devil baby and a lady who's a demon.

[01:19:34] That's part of where the Seventh-day Adventist thing starts to become important because I don't really know much about Seventh-day Adventists, but I do know from researching this case that at the time, there were less than 40,000 Seventh-day Adventists in Australia. And so it was considered this sort of like suspicious religion. No one really knew what to make of it. And so the newspaper stories that grew out of a lot of these cop rumors were nuts. Like obviously there were headlines that the Chamberlains might have killed their baby

[01:20:04] as some kind of a ritual sacrifice. The news also reported... And it was at like a fucking cave of fertility. The fertility cave. The cave of fertility. Yeah, it was nearby. It seems like she had three kids. I don't think fertility was the problem. I don't think so. But I'm saying that the fact that it has like a weird name like that for like could play up the sacrifice. There were also rumors that got reported on that the Chamberlains were linked to the Jonestown, the mass suicide that had happened a few years earlier, that somehow the Seventh-day

[01:20:31] Adventist church was involved in that and that the Chamberlains were also somehow involved in that. Was Jonestown in Australia? No, Jonestown was in Guyana. Yeah. But I think... I'm saying like that's not even... Oh, you're just saying that they might have been perpetrated by people of the same religious... Yes. They're trying to make that comparison. Yes. Okay, got you, got you, got you. And it didn't help that Lindy Chamberlain herself, sort of like Amanda Knox, was... Acting weird. Yeah, she was acting weird. She was soft-spoken. She didn't cry.

[01:20:59] She wore black to a press conference and that was, you know, the satanic... I think it's all they had at their house. The baby was dressed in black. She's grieving. But also... Wearing black to me is not that weird, but people saw it as like a satanic... I'm just saying that like it's come up twice pre and post baby disappearance. I'm just saying that maybe black was on sale that year and they bought a bunch. She also said some admittedly weird things. Like when they, the cops asked... She's like, I don't even like my baby, but I didn't want to see it dragged away by a dingo. The cops asked if she would go under hypnosis.

[01:21:28] Stop it. You can't with this. That's such satanic panic shit. It is. Her reply was, the church wouldn't allow it and I wouldn't do it. God slew Saul for that. Do you know Saul and the witch of Endor? Endor! In this case, Endor is not a Star Wars reference. Okay. It was a place in the Bible. I'm sure it's where he got it. It's probably where he got it. Yeah. So no, the cops didn't know Saul and the witch of Endor, but it sounded real spooky. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:21:56] Anyway, all of these suspicions pressured the magistrate and coroner, this guy Dennis Barrett, to conduct what... So they had the body of the baby? No. Okay. So what's the coroner doing? What the fuck is this person's task then? They... He was leading the inquest into the death. Because they had some of the baby's clothes that were ripped and torn. Okay. Okay. His black hood. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had her... And pendant.

[01:22:22] His conclusion that he announced in front of television cameras was that Azaria, quote, met her death when attacked by a wild dingo whilst asleep in her family's tent. Neither of the parents were in any degree whatsoever responsible for her death. But there were a number of oddities concerning Azaria's clothing that convinced Barrett that, quote, the body of Azaria was taken from the possession of the dingo and disposed of by an unknown method by a person or person's name unknown.

[01:22:52] You're saying that the baby was for sure taken by a dog, but then someone found the baby and dumped it somewhere else. Something like that. Then put a bunch of dingo bites in the clothes to say... So this person's saying there was like a weird cover up, like, yes, her story is true, but it doesn't end there. And I think... I think my interpretation of this is that Dennis Barrett at this point was under a good deal of political pressure and was trying to find a way... Get this out of the news. Finish this up. Wrap it up.

[01:23:21] Just like, yeah, they're innocent, but I don't know. Someone buried the baby and something happened and whatever. Let's just move on. But... That would only lead to further questions, Dennis. Only led to further questions. So that question of who these person or persons unknown might have been fanned the flames. And after finding what they called, quote, copious amounts of blood in the Chamberlain's car, the state ended up charging Lindy with murder and charging her husband, Michael, as an accessory after the fact.

[01:23:50] This is where I'm going to cut through a whole bunch of crazy case building. Basically, their theory was that Lindy slit her daughter's throat with nail scissors in the front seat of the car. A theory which was roundly rejected by many of the witnesses who were at the camp that night and some of whom, again, saw the dingo. Take the baby. The prosecution could also never really put forth a motive, again, for why Lindy would do this. Why would you do this? Why would you do it in a car where there'd be blood everywhere?

[01:24:18] Some vague gestures at sacrifices and Satanism. But they did manage to... That's what they always say. You know, if you're going to sacrifice your baby, make sure it's in a Chevy or something. Why, again, like the car, there's like nothing even... There's no pomp and circumstance that you would think a sacrifice would require. Yeah. Just in a passenger seat. They did manage to construct a wildly convoluted forensic case that essentially boiled down to two things.

[01:24:45] One is that most of his area's clothes had been found except for a white jacket that they insisted could only have been removed by a human. That doesn't... That to me seems even... Because there's no bite marks? Well, because they couldn't find this white jacket. And so part... At one point, the theory was that the white jacket must have been used to like clean up the crime scene and it had blood on it and then it was disposed of somewhere. Based on this family's fashion history, there's no way they even owned a white jacket.

[01:25:12] Well, it was on the baby when she disappeared and they never found it. So basically, the prosecution was like, we couldn't find it. We found everything else. Like they don't have little shovels. There's no way they can bury it. Yes, they absolutely can because dogs bury bones. Yeah, yes. And two, the prosecution had this big claim that they found all this fetal blood, they called it, just sprayed everywhere under the dashboard of the car. This argument worked.

[01:25:38] On October 29th, 1982, Lindy was convicted of murder and sentenced to life with hard labor. She was pregnant at the time. So the fertility cave worked. Worked, yeah. So there was some magic in this story. She did. She actually gave birth to her fourth child behind bars. Her husband, Michael, received a suspended sentence as an accessory to murder. Public sentiment turned over the course of this case.

[01:26:05] I don't know what the fuck was up with Australia, but by the time this woman was convicted. On Halloween almost. People were literally like applauding. The state? The state. People in bars. It was like people were glued to their TVs. I mean, she... There is an interview with her on the news that that quote comes from. The dingo ate the baby. Yeah, like the exasperated... I don't remember how it's used in Seinfeld now because it's been a while since I've seen that episode.

[01:26:29] But I think the dingo ate my baby is the like exasperated like no one's listening to me. The dingo ate my baby. And I think that that became the cultural meme at the time. I do not know why they would vilify this woman other than I think there's like Commonwealth countries. They have like that tall poppy syndrome bullshit, right? Like where they don't like anyone who's too rich or too popular or too...

[01:26:58] Like where America, we look up to that. Where other countries, they want to cut it down. Yeah. And so maybe it was just like get this lady off the fucking news. I don't know. They really didn't like her. Someone even invented a card game called Dingo Ate the Baby, which I found is still for sale on the Upper Deck Cards website. Huh. If you want to know the description, it's this. Dingo Ate the Baby is a fast-paced game for two to five players lasting 20 to 30 minutes. The goal each day is to collect enough cards within your ranch

[01:27:26] in an attempt to reach the total value needed for that day without going over. This seems simple enough, but other players will attempt to sabotage your ranch using animals, babies, sunlight, and darkness to scare, chase, overpopulate, and even eat things within your ranch. I... what? Bullet Point. Designed by industry legend Mike Elliott, Dingo Ate the Baby is a brilliant variation on rock, paper, scissors. Babies scaring elephants, elephants stomping lions, lions eating dingoes, and of course, dingoes eating babies. Stop it.

[01:27:56] This is... you can go buy this right now. We don't have it. We have to donate the money to the... Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, Innocence Project. We had to buy Dingo Ate the Baby with that same money. Part of the reason that this was also fresh in the minds of people in the early 90s is that in 1986, and here's the good news, a tourist... Well, this isn't the good news. A tourist named David Brett fell to his death while climbing Aluru. But while police were searching the scrub below Aluru,

[01:28:24] looking, ironically enough, for bones of his that dingoes might have dragged away, because that's what dingoes do. They find the white jacket? They found a tiny bloodstained jacket near a dingo layer. It was Azaria's, the exact piece of clothing the prosecution said could never have been removed by an animal. Mm-hmm. But it was real, and it had been removed, and it was sitting in front of the dingo layer for years. And all that baby blood that the cops found in the car... Yeah, the fetal blood.

[01:28:51] It was not from a baby, and it was not even blood. It was paint emulsion. The tests that had been conducted on this substance were just incredibly poorly done. I'm sorry. Did DuPont fill your baby with blood? We have to ask everybody. Did your baby have DuPont in it? And yeah. So between those two pieces of information, which the baby blood thing had come out... Wait, so this was 80 she got? This was 86. No, no. She was convicted in 80? She was convicted in 82.

[01:29:20] Okay, so she's four years. Yeah. Four years breaking rocks. Yep. But then she was out within five days. Her convictions... Yeah, I would fucking hope so. Her convictions were quashed in 1988. Thank God, by the way, anyone could have been like, this is such an embarrassment for us just to get rid of the jacket. Oh, yeah. Thank God someone actually was like, hey, we found the jacket. Yeah. And not, you know, the thin blue line of it all or something where it's going to be like, just fucking get rid of it.

[01:29:50] We didn't, you know, we don't want to look like idiots. She was given $1.3 million in compensation. Oh, man. It sucks to be in Australia. In America, that would be like $200 million. Yeah. Well, in 1992, that was... It's true. We didn't have like billionaires until like a day ago. We did, but I mean, it's not... You watch a movie from just 10 years ago and like the highest... Every super duper rich character in it is worth like $100 million. Yeah. It's still...

[01:30:16] So she got paid, but it took until 2012, 32 years for a final inquest to finally issue a corrected death certificate saying that a dingo killed Azaria. Yeah. So it was a long road to justice. And I had to talk about this case because even though it's a crazy fucking thing and it's not the true nightmare of just someone being like, you know, I think this person killed their kid or whatever.

[01:30:45] It's basically what happened. They were just like... And the fact that the first inquest was like, yeah, dingo ate the baby. Everybody saw the dingo eat the baby. There's footprints of the dingo where it ate the baby. Like, dingo ate the baby. And then some fucking idiot was like... Yeah. You had that idiot cop and then you had just a bumbling attorney type person who for whatever reason under political pressure said something extra stupid, added that extra step that was completely unnecessary.

[01:31:13] And that's where I could feel like my stomach... I can put myself in those shoes and feel my stomach sinking of like... That's because you don't walk through life every single day. We should be, but we don't walk through life every single day being like... Oh, how much of my life can be ruined because other people are fucking idiots? Like, just truly human error. And like, it took me a long time to realize like, I'm not the smartest person by a fucking stretch.

[01:31:40] But like, I meet people every single day where I'm like, are you actively reminding yourself to breathe with each breath? Yeah. Like, there are fucking people I meet where I'm like, Jesus Christ. Well... How do you... How do you get through the day? That's part of... And that's when I realized like, kids... Most adults are fucking idiots. Yeah. So, don't do anything in adults says. Yeah. I mean, it's just... Or your boss, your job. I've worked for people who were dumb as shit.

[01:32:05] The fact that these people that we look to is like being the arbiters of justice are clearly so motivated by their own impulses and instincts and just drive forward on this stuff that if you're Lindy Chamberlain, you're sitting there going, what the fuck did I do to God or the universe that like every, you know, every time one of these motherfuckers opens their mouth, you're like, that's not... It's just not what happened. And they're like, yeah, it did. The state says it did. And that's what's going to happen now. Did you ever see The Net? Sandra Bullock? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[01:32:34] That to me is a top fear. I might be a scared all the time watch along at some point. It's a ridiculous film that only the beginning where she goes to pizza.net to order a pizza. Oh, yeah. Wild first shot too, like from like satellite shop. Anyway, the, hey, I'm a person and they're like, actually, I just erased that you ever existed. Yeah. Is fucking terrifying, but it also must feel a little bit like that same feeling must go

[01:33:01] into I must be crazy because everyone is saying I did this or everyone is and I'm not. Yeah. Must be the same level of Sandra Bullock being like, I've lived at 123 Banana Street my entire life. This is my social security number and this is that. And then pulling up the computer to be like, ma'am, you didn't. Yeah. But also you're wanted by the FBI for a bunch of heinous crimes were arresting you. And it was like, no, just someone changed the computer thing. I did none of those things. Yeah. But like that to me is so, so scary. Yeah.

[01:33:31] Well, in 1995 when that movie came out. And you thought that could actually happen. People were like, fuck. All right. We're going to wrap things up with the case that I find the most disturbing because it doesn't have anything to do with. It's a fruit fly in here. That's fucking bothering me. I find that disturbing. It doesn't have anything to do with the media dogpiling on an innocent person.

[01:34:01] It wasn't an ancient accounting error. It wasn't confused cops bumbling around the outback. It's probably the least likely to happen in a this could happen to you way. But it is the most fucked up in a I can't believe this actually happened way. So this takes us back to Notting Hill in 1949. So not the Hugh Grant version of Notting Hill. This was more Rotting Hill. 1949? 1949. England? England.

[01:34:31] Bombed out England. Timothy Evans was a 24-year-old Welsh truck driver who couldn't read or write living in the top floor apartment at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill. One description I read of 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill in 1949 describes it as such, quote, each unit consisted of only two rooms and shared interior stairways and hallways. There was no indoor plumbing.

[01:34:59] All residents shared a wash house in the small, unruly backyard, which contained a sink and copper for heating water with an outdoor toilet beside it. The flats were illuminated by coal gas fed into the units by jets in the wall. Okay, two things. All of this was written in the ad. Unfortunately, you could not read how bad the situation was when he agreed to move in here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two. It's me looking for apartments.

[01:35:27] Jets in the walls, man, that just, like I told you, I was watching a silent film from like 1912 or something where they had a gas heater that had like a hose coming out of the wall that you can swap the hose out for other types of accessories, like other appliances could also use that gas hose. And it was just like, what a different time. Yeah. But this was 40 years after that almost. So you'd think they'd be beyond that.

[01:35:53] No, this was a bleak post-war working class neighborhood. And Timothy Evans was a bleak post-war working class guy. He had a learning disability, a bit of a drinking problem, which today I imagine we would probably call a severe drinking problem. Yeah. And he constantly fought with his wife, Beryl, over their lack of money. They had a one-year-old daughter named Geraldine and Beryl was pregnant with their second child.

[01:36:18] Their neighbor downstairs was a quiet, balding, soft-spoken man named John Reginald Holiday Christie. What's his hair situation have to do with anything? He was a post office clerk and a former wartime special constable. He'd been in some minor legal trouble decades earlier for theft and assault, but he went by Reg. And like most guys who go by Reg, seemed pretty cool. Okay. In reality, though, Reg Christie was a serial killer.

[01:36:46] He'd already murdered and buried two women. Ruth First. I'll tell you right now, if you're, I don't know where he's killing them, but if you're dragging bodies places, it's best to not be on the top floor. So the first floor for Reg makes sense. First floor for Reg makes sense. His first two murders, Ruth First. They're prostitutes, right? I don't know if they were prostitutes, but Ruth First, actually her last name is F-U-E-R-S-T. I don't know if that's pronounced first, but she was first.

[01:37:16] And Muriel Eady in the garden at 10 Rillington Place. And he'd done this during the Blitz, which I'm sure was an incredible time to be an active serial killer. Sure. If you're not familiar with the Blitz, the Germans bombed London for like 60 days in a row, so you could probably get away with pretty much anything you fucking wanted. Yeah. People were otherwise occupied. Yeah. Anyway, the Evans, Timothy and Beryl had no idea about Reg and his proclivities.

[01:37:45] Yeah, they usually don't tell people. No. And when Beryl found out she was pregnant again with this second child. When they don't have any money and they're climbing up and down 18 flights of stairs. They were desperate for help. Abortion was illegal in the UK. Illegal. But good old Reg was ever the helpful neighbor. And he claimed that he'd had some medical training from the Great War, World War I, which he was a veteran of, and offered to perform a discreet abortion procedure on Beryl. And they agreed to let him help.

[01:38:15] On November 8th, Timothy Evans came home to find Christy waiting on the stairs of the apartment with a horrific story. The procedure had failed and Beryl was dead. He took Timothy upstairs. Christy is Reg? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, Reg Christy. Okay. Timothy came home to find Reg Christy waiting on the stairs with a horrific story. The procedure had failed and Beryl was dead. Reg took Timothy upstairs and showed him Beryl's body on the bed. Geraldine was still in a crib nearby alive.

[01:38:45] And Reg told Timothy that he needed to run because if anyone ever found out that this abortion had happened and that Beryl had died, they would both rot in prison. So we're going to... You and I are on the run. Unlikely partnership. No. Timothy, you're on the run. And Reg told him, I'll take care of everything. You get out of town for a while. Okay. So what he meant was, you know, I'll bury the body. You get out of town. Whatever. Okay.

[01:39:13] So Timothy left Geraldine behind because Reg said that he would... I forget exactly who he said he was going to give him to, but there was a plan for Geraldine. He left Geraldine behind and ran to stay with relatives in Wales. After a couple of weeks of being in Wales, Timothy's guilty conscience, I guess, got to him. He walked into a police station in Wales and blurted out, I have disposed of my wife.

[01:39:39] When the detective incredulously asked what he meant, Timothy replied, I have put her down the drain. Okay. There's a cop working there being like, you can't put a person down the drain. Well, by drain, he did. He meant like a sewer drain, not like the sink. I don't know, but I don't know how incredulous the cops there were, just like in Australia. This is the same Commonwealth. That's true. That's true. So he's just a guy who's like, tell that guy to get out of here. I have... You can't... Oh, I have a sack of pennies and I'll show you. It's a shape of a woman. Yeah. We can't get this down the drain.

[01:40:09] Well, Timothy told the police which drain he put her down and they went to go recover her body, but didn't find anything. No, rats took her. Clearly, Timothy wasn't telling the truth. Again, he was not... He had a learning disability. He was not a fully functioning guy. I kind of imagine him almost like that guy from Making a Murderer. The nephew? Yeah. Or no, the guy who was actually arrested. The guy who was actually arrested. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was slow.

[01:40:38] The nephew had a tough go of it too. Yeah. Brandon something. Massey? Yeah, yeah. Brandon Massey. So anyway, clearly, Timothy wasn't telling the truth about what happened to his wife or where she was. Not clearly. He just didn't know. But to the cops, they're like, this guy's wasting our time. Well, the cops were like, why did you come into the police station and say you've disposed of your wife and told us to go look at a drain where she isn't? What's going on? Where's your wife? And at that point, he said, well, this is what actually happened. And he gave up Reg. He gave up Reg. That's rude.

[01:41:07] Reg did you a favor. Well, Reg was about to undo that favor real quick. Because when the police searched 10 Rillington Place, they found the bodies of Beryl and Geraldine hidden in the back wash house. Both of them had been strangled. Geraldine's the baby. Geraldine's the baby. And so, but also this guy, he's not maybe bright enough to have realized that the abortion procedure does not include like bruising around the neck and stuff. He wouldn't have noticed. I don't think he noticed. Exactly. No.

[01:41:35] What the investigators managed to somehow completely missed was a human thigh bone that Reg Christie was using to hold up his garden fence. That's not like Ed Gein shit right there. And they didn't put two and two together about the fact that local kids, a few months, I believe it was, earlier, had found a human skull in a nearby lot and turned it into the police. And that skull belonged to Muriel Eddy, who was one of his first victims.

[01:42:04] Extra surprising to me is no one was like, hey, our apartment building stinks. Oh, yeah. Fucking stinks. There's a dead baby and woman who have been on the first floor for a while. That's how bad. In a non-AC. Rotting Hill smell. Rotting Hill. Shit, dude. So the cops didn't piece any of that together, but they did focus on Timothy, who was illiterate, terrified, and gave multiple wandering confessions that all conflicted with each other.

[01:42:33] He eventually signed a confession that historians now believe was manufactured by the police. Yeah, you know, don't ever sign it. That's the thing. Yeah, that's the real problem there. But he retracted everything before trial and pointed the finger exactly where it belonged at Reg. Said, this guy did it. The last time I saw my daughter alive was with him. Bah, bah, bah. The trial opened in January 1950. And the article that I read said, under British law at the time, Timothy was only charged with

[01:43:01] the murder of Geraldine, which seems odd. But I don't know. Britain in the 50s, maybe it was legal to kill your wife. I think it might have been. But also, it might have something to do with like, well, she died doing something that was illegal. So maybe it negates her existence. I don't know. You know what I mean? It wasn't like, listen, this friendly neighbor tried to, we'll add a abortion to his crimes. Right.

[01:43:28] And like, a botched abortion is not the same as killing a woman, apparently. I could see that being a thing in the eyes of the law. Right. Weirdly. Right. Yeah. According to a legal article I found online, quote, Timothy took the stand in his own defense and was the only witness called by the defense. He denied killing Beryl and Geraldine and further testified that he only became aware of his daughter's death when he was told about it by the police, which he also said is part of

[01:43:56] why he confessed, because once he found out his daughter was dead, he didn't care about anything anymore and just confessed. He was not great on the stand. People normally aren't. And yeah, and he was not a guy primed to do well on the stand. And things would get so much worse for him when the prosecution called their star witness Reg Christie. Are we even allowed? I mean, I guess. Right. But like, it seems like if it's the defendant and the plaintiff are the witnesses.

[01:44:24] I know you put your hand up and you say, I'm going to tell the truth. I don't know how often people when they get in that stand actually do. And like, at the end of the day, you could still lie. I just don't know why we would. It just seems weird that if your only witnesses are the two people whose names are on the fucking document. I mean, Reg was a World War One vet. He was professional, older. He was an ex-cop. He was considered very respectable. I don't know why he was living in this slum that apparently there.

[01:44:51] Because 20 years earlier, he was convicted of a bunch of shit. Remember? Well, right. But that was before he went to war. Anyway, the cops in this case trusted this guy. They put him on the stand and, you know, it's his word against... There are rotting corpses in his apartment. I think you lost the opportunity to be an upstanding citizen, even if you just said you found them there. Well, they weren't in his apartment. They were in the back. So... Like the yard? Yeah.

[01:45:21] They were like in the shed in the back is where he put the bodies. Does he have access to the shed? Probably. Well, there you go. I don't believe a word you fucking say now. It took the jury 35 minutes to decide that Timothy Evans deserved the death sentence. He was executed at Pentonville Prison on March 9th, 1950 at 25 years old and died swearing he was innocent. Meanwhile, Reg Christie went right back to 10 Rillington Place and turned it into a slaughterhouse.

[01:45:50] By 1952, he'd strangled his own wife, Ethel, and hid her under the floorboards. Well, now it's like double indemnity shit or whatever. Like not double indemnity. Like now it's like double jeopardy shit where it's like, no, because he wasn't the one convicted of the crime. Well, right. He was also only accused of murdering. Well, he wasn't. Yeah, he wasn't accused. So if he had gotten off for the crime, then he can do it with like immunity or whatever. But over the next few months, he murdered three more women, Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson,

[01:46:18] and Hectorina McLennan by gassing them. I assume with the jets in the apartment. Oh yeah, maybe. Maybe. And stuffing their bodies into a kitchen alcove that he wallpapered over. In March 1953, he moved out, didn't take the bodies with him. A rat dies in your wall. Yeah. And it's a fucking problem. I'm telling you, this is how bad I think this area probably smells. I think, yeah, just industrial. Yeah. He moved out, didn't take the bodies with him.

[01:46:46] And the new tenant decided to peel back the wallpaper and he found the three women's bodies. I think there's an alcove back here. Yeah. He found the three bodies. I was told. This place had an alcove. In this hidden alcove. Chrissy was caught and confessed to everything, including Beryl Evans' murder, although he never admitted to killing Geraldine. And he was hanged on July 15th, 1953. So this guy got a quick trial. He moved out in March 1953 and was hanged on July 15th.

[01:47:16] Well, it sounds like our boy, the Welsh dude, also got a quick trial, unfortunately. It seems like these people, there was no sleep for the hangman in this town. No, no, no, no. But also 1950, we hang in people? Yep. In 1950 something? 53, yeah. Like we're, the space race is happening. No, it's not true. It's 5057. But close enough. It seems late. Yeah. Let's see.

[01:47:44] When was the last person hanged? The last judicial hanging in the United States took place on January 25th, 1996. Something tells me it's not New England. In Delaware. That's close though. Yeah. Delaware. Yeah. They had the news. Being the smallest state wasn't enough for you? You had to have another thing? Well, Reg Christie had eight things, eight kills. To his name.

[01:48:12] Including Ethel Barrow and Geraldine. And then four of these other murders only happened because Timothy Evans had already been killed for the crime that he didn't commit and everybody assumed open and shut case. I think they should add Timothy to his kill list. True. Yeah. I mean, it is literally like a serial killer. That's why this case is so insane to me. A serial killer got a man convicted. Innocent man. Yeah. An innocent man convicted for crimes that he committed and got away with it.

[01:48:40] And so I think you should add Timothy to his body count. Yeah, I agree. The Evans case eventually became a cornerstone of the movement to end the death penalty in Britain. And alongside a bunch of cases. It served as strong proof of why an irreversible punishment like the death penalty is a disaster when you allow it to be part of a system. Gotta be open shut. Gotta be open shut. The UK suspended the death penalty in 1965.

[01:49:10] Abolished it in 1969. And Timothy Evans was granted a royal pardon in 1966. Didn't help him. No. Couple years too late to help Timothy Evans. And also didn't leave anyone behind. The whole family was obliterated. So the bloodline ends there. So who is this for? Yeah. Like what grandchild was like, my grandfather is finally exonerated. I guess it was sort of the state like just trying to do right by him. Performative. Performative bullshit. Yeah.

[01:49:38] But we've been performing for a long time here on this episode. I think it's about time we hit the fear tier. Ed, where do you place being falsely accused on your fear tier? Unlike you, which is to say that I definitely did something and now I dream about it every fucking night. I still, I guess you have to place it at like an eight minimum. Yeah. Because you're only not falsely accused until you are. Yeah. And so it's like, it's not, I don't even think that I can do anything.

[01:50:06] I don't even know if I can live my life in such a way where I can avoid it. Like what the fuck was a friend of a friend just recently on Instagram had posted a story of like, uh, or they were on a podcast or something talking about how the, the cafe they, they write at and work at all the time, like all the time. They're always in there. Uh, DM'd them on Instagram to accuse them of stealing a book from their like little library thing they have in the cafe. Holy shit.

[01:50:36] And he was like, yeah, I didn't steal the book. And they were like, don't come back. Well then eventually it was like, well, someone who works here said it, they saw you leave. And then the, the, it was a cookbook or something, something like, like not even the light, it was like a price of property to the, to the cafe. And he was like, well, I didn't or whatever. And then I guess later, uh, the, the, another person from that account, the official like

[01:51:03] cafe account DM to them to be like, Hey, we looked at the security footage. And I think what happened was the guy who took the book, you were walking by them at the exact moment they took the book. Oh shit. And so it's, it's literally is a little bit of a bigger gentleman. And so it's like, he may have like a fully eclipse that person. So the book went missing. They looked up. They didn't see that person. They just saw you leaving the ding-a-ling of the bell. And now you're getting DMS being like, give us back our book.

[01:51:31] Then this is not death penalty, but this is certainly a person who was just living their life. Yeah. And all of a sudden, even if it's as minor as an insanely small as this, it's just like, Hey, I'm being accused of stealing. Yeah. Like, like finger pointedly. We saw, there's a person here who saw you leave and then look down and the book was gone. Yeah. And so that's why I say it has to be an ape because this person was just living their life at a place that they go to all the time. Yeah.

[01:52:00] And, and that's all it takes. And if there is a particularly gut feeling type prosecutor. Or if there was no security camera where they were able to see that you walk by at the same moment. Yeah. It can come for anybody. It's just the witness. It can come for anybody at any time. We, I did some mock trial thing in high school and there was, they did something where like they had someone come into the room and like tell us something. We didn't know this person. It was just like, Hey, we have an announcement. And then they left or whatever.

[01:52:27] And then like 15 minutes later they were like, Hey, what color shirt was that guy wearing? And whatever. And then like half the fucking class got it wrong. Half the class fully was under the impression he had glasses. Yeah. And then they had the guy come back and we didn't know it was like part of a little trap. Right. And the guy, and it was like, Oh, he didn't have glasses. It was like a, um, not a purple shirt. Like the things that people remembered. Right. And we were like 20 witnesses in the class at that moment. Yeah. And it was like, fuck, I don't, I would never believe a witness testimony.

[01:52:57] Not even because they're lying. They just misremember. And that's what I'm saying. This kid, this, if there wasn't a security camera footage for this guy, uh, it's just that witness testimony. If I saw him take the book. Well, you know what that was that they did to you in school? The Psy-Up. The sinister test. Oh shit. Sinister test. Ladies and gentlemen, we bring it back around for you every time. If you're driving, look in the backseat of your car right now. Boo. Um, yeah, I put it in eight. False accusations are very scary to me.

[01:53:23] Our system is not prepared to, uh, deal with them particularly well. And by the way, to the point we were making the second story or third, whatever, the ancient story, it re false acquisition acquisitions, false acquisitions. It's called stealing. Yeah. Uh, false accusations, whatever, uh, even easier if you can get two friends in on it. Yeah. So it's like three people said you did this. Yeah. When you never did. Yeah.

[01:53:52] Is even crazier because it's like, well, three people said it. So like the guy who said, oh, he wanted to kill his dad to take the house. There was three people on the other bench. Yeah. All of them lying. Yeah. And, and good on Cicero for making sure they didn't get away with it. Cicero is a real one, dude. Every time that guy comes up in this pod, who knows if anything in ancient history is even real, but like it's fun. It's all Harry Potter probably. Yeah. But he's great. But anyway, you were saying it's an eight for you. It's an eight for me. It's very, it's very frightening.

[01:54:22] It can happen to anyone for any reason. And I just hope that it never does. So until next time, I falsely accuse you of being a terrible host. He's pointing at me. If you can't, if you're watching, he's not saying it to the person who's listening. Oh, that's true. But you might be. And give it a shot. You might be a terrible host. Ed's do you have a false accusation for me? No, you're great. Thank you, Ed. You're great. And I would never accuse you. I would never accuse you more than your own mind is.

[01:54:51] It sounds like with these dreams. I'm tortured enough. Until next time, I'm Chris Cullari. And I'm Ed Ficola. The show is Scared All the Time. We'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Scared All the Time is co-produced by Chris Killary and Ed Ficola. Written by Chris Killary. Edited by Ed Ficola. Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew. And Mr. Disclaimer is... And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You can get all kinds of cool shit in return.

[01:55:21] Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access, and inclusive merch. So go sign up for our Patreon at ScaredAllTheTimePodcast.com. Don't worry. All scaredy cats welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. We are in this together. Together. Together. Together. Together.