Speaker 1: Hello, Did you just butt dial me? Because I have
Speaker 1: on my call display that a call from your number
Speaker 1: but got my numbers blocked. That's how I know it's you.
Speaker 1: You're the only person I know with a block number.
Speaker 2: Is it where we have to go today?
Speaker 3: Wait?
Speaker 1: A couple of days ago, I think it was like
Speaker 1: yesterday morning. Were you thinking about me?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: I just thought that would be weird because I was
Speaker 1: thinking about you, and I thought, huh, wouldn't it be
Speaker 1: funny if she was thinking about me at the same time?
Speaker 1: Shut from Gimblet Media. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight.
Speaker 1: Today's episode the first in a two part series, Barbara
Speaker 1: Part one. Barbara shut right after the break. Hello, Becky, Hi,
Speaker 1: this is Becky, my mother in law. Last April, at
Speaker 1: the start of the pandemic, my wife Emily told me
Speaker 1: that her mom had a mystery to solve. Phoner. Emily
Speaker 1: said immediately it was all very dramatic. How are you?
Speaker 1: I'm fine, Becky, it should be said, is not the
Speaker 1: dramatic type. There's a famous story about how while making
Speaker 1: brunch for the family, her oven caught fire and as
Speaker 1: everyone ran around phoning nine to one one searching for
Speaker 1: the instruction manual to the fire extinguisher. Becky sat at
Speaker 1: the dining room table silently, eating fruit salad. So while
Speaker 1: Becky may not have a flare for the dramatic, her
Speaker 1: daughter does. There's no time to waste.
Speaker 3: Emily said, these events happened fifty two years ago. By
Speaker 3: the way, so wait a second.
Speaker 1: Emily said that they have like She was like, you
Speaker 1: better pounce on this.
Speaker 3: There were new revelations today.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see.
Speaker 3: Okay, how about an hour or two hours ago? Yeah,
Speaker 3: did she tell you anything about it?
Speaker 1: She told me nothing. She should just call just call
Speaker 1: my mother.
Speaker 3: Okay, you want to hear this story from the beginning.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's a good place to start.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to help out with CEO's homeschooling just a
Speaker 3: little bit.
Speaker 1: THEO is my nephew and Becky's grandson. Last April, his
Speaker 1: school shut down because of COVID, so Becky stepped into
Speaker 1: tutorim over zoom.
Speaker 3: So THEO.
Speaker 2: Do you know what the word biography means? Biography is
Speaker 2: a book written by the person that it's about.
Speaker 1: No, yes, if I wrote a book. Becky and THEO
Speaker 1: met weekly, and for each lesson she gave him a
Speaker 1: small homework assigned.
Speaker 3: So the first assignment was to write a description you know,
Speaker 3: a person, a place, to thing, just you know, a
Speaker 3: couple paragraph descriptions.
Speaker 1: THEO and Becky each did the assignment and then shared
Speaker 1: their essays. THEO wrote about a World Cup soccer game,
Speaker 1: and Becky, what.
Speaker 3: Popped into my head was this friendship that I had
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty eight, before you were born.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty eight, Becky was nineteen years old. She
Speaker 1: lived in smalltown Minnesota and had never been out of
Speaker 1: the country. She wanted to see Europe, so she linked
Speaker 1: up with a work abroad program that got her a
Speaker 1: job at a commercial laundromat in Copenhagen.
Speaker 3: But it was kind of lonely because there was a
Speaker 3: language barrier and there was no one else my age,
Speaker 3: so it was kind of lonely. And then the third
Speaker 3: week another American girl came.
Speaker 1: What is her name?
Speaker 3: Barbara shut.
Speaker 1: My wife, Emily says that when she was growing up,
Speaker 1: about once a year, Becky would remove the pictures above
Speaker 1: the living room couch and project slides from Copenhagen. Emily
Speaker 1: called this Becky Time a journey back to when Becky
Speaker 1: was Becky not Mom, And right there with Becky. Hovering
Speaker 1: above the couch was Barbara Shut. Becky and Barbara Shut
Speaker 1: on a park bench eating sandwiches, Becky and Barbara Shut
Speaker 1: partying in a room full of young Danes. Do you
Speaker 1: have it in front of you, the thing that you.
Speaker 3: Write my story? Yeah? I do.
Speaker 1: Would you feel comfortable reading it?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Here it is Looking for adventure. In the summer
Speaker 3: of nineteen sixty eight, I found a job in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Speaker 3: The first two weeks were lonely, but when a new
Speaker 3: worker started the factory, everything changed. Her name was Barbara Shut.
Speaker 3: She was thin and wiry, with short, dark hair and
Speaker 3: big eye. She was twenty one years old and had
Speaker 3: just graduated from college. She was rich. Her mother was
Speaker 3: a doctor and her father a retired college professor. Because
Speaker 3: her mother was a doctor, she loved dispensing medical advice,
Speaker 3: whether it was asked for or not. The only advice
Speaker 3: that stuck with me was how to pop a ZiT
Speaker 3: with a razor blade, something she did regularly. She loved checkers,
Speaker 3: and when she couldn't find a checker set in all
Speaker 3: of Copenhagen, she made the board in pieces out of cardboard.
Speaker 3: I hated checkers, but in the way that rich girls
Speaker 3: who are doted on by their parents can be. She
Speaker 3: was very persuasive. Barbara always knew what she wanted, so
Speaker 3: we played checkers. She bought a bike as soon as
Speaker 3: she arrived and rode all over Copenhagen. She only managed
Speaker 3: to persuade me to ride with her once, though I
Speaker 3: was terrified of the traffic. We spent a lovely Saturday
Speaker 3: biking all over the city until the bike she had
Speaker 3: borrowed for me gave out. For eight hours each weekday,
Speaker 3: we were at the same table folding bath powels. It
Speaker 3: was a boring, mind numbing job, but I loved it
Speaker 3: because we had so much fun. We had silly nicknames
Speaker 3: for all the other workers. We sang to the pop
Speaker 3: music coming over the loudspeaker. We laughed our way through
Speaker 3: each day. As the time in Copenhagen was coming to
Speaker 3: an end, we were excitedly planning our next adventure. Barbara,
Speaker 3: who loved horses more than anything in the world, was
Speaker 3: going to a fancy riding cap in England. I left first,
Speaker 3: riding the train across Italy, Austria, Switzerland. I missed the laughter,
Speaker 3: the singing along to Winchester Cathedral a dozen times a day,
Speaker 3: our endless checker games. She was my best friend. But
Speaker 3: it wasn't forever.
Speaker 1: That's lovely, Becky. It wasn't forever, Becky says, because at
Speaker 1: the end of the summer, in spite of their closeness, we.
Speaker 3: Never exchanged any information, anything, phone numbers or anything.
Speaker 1: Why do you think that was?
Speaker 3: I think it was because we we didn't. Our lives
Speaker 3: seemed so different.
Speaker 1: Becky was from Waconia, Minnesota, population two thousand. Barbara was
Speaker 1: from Cincinnati. Her parents were professionals. They had four cars,
Speaker 1: five TVs, a horse. But Becky wasn't envious of Barbara's
Speaker 1: material possessions. What she did envy, though, was Barbara's close
Speaker 1: relationship with her dad. Becky had lost her own father
Speaker 1: a few years earlier.
Speaker 3: She was very close to her father. She talked about
Speaker 3: him a lot. She just was so in love with
Speaker 3: her father, and he wrote her these long, beautiful letters
Speaker 3: every single day.
Speaker 1: When Becky left for Copenhagen, she was still feeling grief
Speaker 1: over her father's death. For Becky, those letters had to
Speaker 1: have seemed every bit as magical as Tivoli guard lit
Speaker 1: up at night.
Speaker 3: So I was writing about her, and I thought, you know,
Speaker 3: in all these years, I've never tried to find out
Speaker 3: what happened to her, and so I googled her and
Speaker 3: I found her immediately. It's easy to find people who are.
Speaker 1: Dead, and she is dead, which brings us to the mystery.
Speaker 1: Becky stumbled upon.
Speaker 3: She died in twenty twelve at age sixty seven, and
Speaker 3: I read the obituary and I thought, wait a minute.
Speaker 1: Becky's sadness over the death of her long lost friend
Speaker 1: was suddenly overshadowed by another feeling confusion. The more Becky read,
Speaker 1: the more the obituary seemed to contradict everything Barbara had
Speaker 1: told her that summer. There was no mention of growing
Speaker 1: up in Cincinnati, no mention of her doctor mother, and
Speaker 1: most of.
Speaker 3: All, there is no mention of a father whatsoever. You know,
Speaker 3: it had the people that preceded her in death no father,
Speaker 3: the people who survived her no father, And there is
Speaker 3: no mention of a father. And that is what she
Speaker 3: talked about constantly. She was and I'm reading this to
Speaker 3: you now from the obituary. She was raised at the
Speaker 3: Galileean Children's Home near Corbyn Kentucky, where she also attended
Speaker 3: primary school and had numerous friends. Does that sound too
Speaker 3: like she was raised there? I mean it says raised.
Speaker 3: Does that mean orphanage? To me, it sounded like orphanage.
Speaker 3: So it doesn't sound like anything I knew about her.
Speaker 3: My thought was, wait what? I was kind of stunned
Speaker 3: when I read this. The details were so different from
Speaker 3: what I would have expected. Then I started thinking, well,
Speaker 3: I'm stupid. Why didn't I figure out if she was
Speaker 3: so rich, why was she working this menial job she
Speaker 3: could have probably afforded to. Yeah, yeah, I think that
Speaker 3: what she had told me was mostly fiction. I don't
Speaker 3: know how I should think about it. Yeah, was she
Speaker 3: just playing me for a stap? I mean, why if
Speaker 3: that's it, it's a cruel thing to do.
Speaker 1: If you were able to find somebody who is still
Speaker 1: around who can speak about her and tell you about her, like,
Speaker 1: what would you want to know?
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, I want to know the truth.
Speaker 3: You know, what was her life? If it wasn't what
Speaker 3: she was telling me it was, what was it and
Speaker 3: why was she telling me the things that she was
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: At the bottom of the online obituary is a comments
Speaker 1: section where several people have posted short notes about Barbara.
Speaker 1: Becky figures there must be someone among them who knows
Speaker 1: the truth. If only some brave soul would reach out
Speaker 1: and ask, some brave soul other than Becky.
Speaker 3: I would never, in a million years do it, Jonathan,
Speaker 3: how well do you know me?
Speaker 1: Becky doesn't like to make a scene, and if there
Speaker 1: is a scene, that's when she reaches for the fruit
Speaker 1: salad I want.
Speaker 3: But okay, else to get it?
Speaker 1: Sure? Sure shirt? You know if at any points you're
Speaker 1: made uncomfortable and need to hide behind my skirts, I'm
Speaker 1: very happy to supply the skirts.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I need skirts.
Speaker 1: A biography is a book that someone else has written
Speaker 1: about another person. Yes, if an obituary is a kind
Speaker 1: of biography, then an online obituary is a collaborative one.
Speaker 1: People leave comments that exist as windows onto a life.
Speaker 1: But the comments on Barbara's obituary page contain no stories
Speaker 1: or anecdotes, nothing to shed light on who she really was.
Speaker 1: There is one comment, though, that feels like a lead.
Speaker 1: It's from a guy who would have known Barbara around
Speaker 1: the same time Becky did. He says they were good
Speaker 1: friends from college. His name is Chris. I have questions
Speaker 1: for Chris, so I send him an email telling him
Speaker 1: about Becky inter connection to Barbara. But after about a
Speaker 1: week without any response, I dial a telephone number I
Speaker 1: find online. Someone picks up on the fourth ring, and
Speaker 1: what ensues is one of the stranger conversations I've ever had.
Speaker 1: Is this Chris? I ask yes? Chris says, I sent
Speaker 1: you an email last week? Do I have the right person? Yes?
Speaker 1: He says, I got your name from Barbara's obituary page.
Speaker 1: I say yes. He says, Chris isn't what you'd call chatty.
Speaker 1: When I ask a question, he replies with only yes
Speaker 1: or no. When I ask if he can elaborate, he bristles.
Speaker 1: I won't give you things, he says, but I will
Speaker 1: verify what things are true or not true. There's a
Speaker 1: deep throat quality to the interview. For whatever reason, Chris
Speaker 1: has cast me as the intrepid journalist, himself the shadowy source.
Speaker 1: In fact, when I ask Chris if I can record
Speaker 1: him for broadcast, he brings up Watergate and threatens legal action.
Speaker 1: But in spite of that, there were moments when Chris
Speaker 1: seems eager to talk, like this is the call he's
Speaker 1: been waiting, eating by the phone four for fifty years.
Speaker 1: In the end, Chris and I talk for over an
Speaker 1: hour and a half during that time, and almost in
Speaker 1: spite of himself, he reveals details about Barbara's life that
Speaker 1: are precise and top of mind like. At one point,
Speaker 1: in response to a question about Barbara's childhood, Chris points
Speaker 1: me to a nineteen forty's issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
Speaker 1: It features an article about the Galileian Children's Home. The
Speaker 1: Galilean Children's Home, he says, is the orphanage in Kentucky
Speaker 1: where Barbara was raised. So it seems the obituary was right.
Speaker 1: Contrary to what Barbara told Becky and Copenhagen, she was
Speaker 1: actually an orphan. She had no fancy home, no doting father.
Speaker 1: I'm not looking forward to telling my mother in law
Speaker 1: that her friend Barbara lied to her. But then Chris
Speaker 1: tell me something else. At the age of seventeen, Barbara
Speaker 1: was adopted by a couple named Charles and Jane Shutt.
Speaker 1: The Shots were wealthy, They lived in Cincinnati and had
Speaker 1: a horse. Her adopted mother was a doctor, and her
Speaker 1: adopted father, who Chris tells me Barbara was very close
Speaker 1: with was a college dean. Those were the parents that
Speaker 1: Barbara always talked about in Copenhagen, her adopted parents. So
Speaker 1: while the story from the obituary is true, the story
Speaker 1: Barbara told Becky is also true. I asked Chris if
Speaker 1: he knows why Barbara's adopted family wasn't mentioned in her obituary,
Speaker 1: not that I would talk about. Chris says, would you
Speaker 1: say that Barbara's life after the adoption was a happy one?
Speaker 1: I ask until she graduated from college, Chris says, And
Speaker 1: what happened around graduation? I ask that I won't discuss.
Speaker 1: Chris says, I feel like he's baiting me, but I've
Speaker 1: no idea why or for what. Whenever any of this
Speaker 1: stuff happens, Chris continues, you have to ask yourself what's
Speaker 1: in the public domain and what isn't. You could look
Speaker 1: up legal information about Barbara, he says. He pauses, Well,
Speaker 1: this part I can tell you because it's in the
Speaker 1: public domain. In May of nineteen sixty nine, Chris says,
Speaker 1: Barbara killed her mother. For a few moments, we sit
Speaker 1: in silence, Chris waiting for me to react, Me not
Speaker 1: knowing how to her adopted mother. I finally ask that
Speaker 1: is correct. Chris says, how is the murder committed? I ask, gunn.
Speaker 1: Chris says, do you know the circumstances? I ask, And
Speaker 1: this next part, Chris says like he's proud. I knew
Speaker 1: some of the details that the police never knew.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: After hanging up with Chris, I try to unpack what
Speaker 1: I just heard with my producer Stevie. Oh my I can't. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was not expecting that, Like, it just froze me. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I don't know that I even want to share that
Speaker 5: with Becky. I have to admit that when my mother
Speaker 5: in law tasked me with looking into Barbara's obituary, I
Speaker 5: assumed I discover the story of a fabulous someone from
Speaker 5: humble origins who thought Europe a good place to reinvent herself,
Speaker 5: if only for a summer. I never thought murder would
Speaker 5: be an my report, and now that it is, a
Speaker 5: part of me feels protective of Becky. Her summer with
Speaker 5: Barbara is a memory she cherishes. I don't want to
Speaker 5: compromise that. But at the same time, I know Becky
Speaker 5: is someone who flips to the end of novels because
Speaker 5: she just can't wait to know what happens. She's curious,
Speaker 5: and so am I. So I start digging. Over the
Speaker 5: next several days, I'm buried in news clippings with headlines
Speaker 5: like this woman doctor found slain in her office home.
Speaker 5: At the time, the trial of.
Speaker 1: Barbara shut for the murder of her adopted mother Jane
Speaker 1: dominated Cincinnati headlines. And just a quick warning, some of
Speaker 1: the details I'm about to share are disturbing. The newspapers
Speaker 1: describe the murder in gruesome, nearly pornographic detail. Her almost
Speaker 1: nude body was found lying face down, says one article,
Speaker 1: a full blown blood path says another. As well as
Speaker 1: being shot, Jane was also beaten with a fireplace poker,
Speaker 1: struck seventeen times in total. Just a few days ago,
Speaker 1: I'd thought of Barbara as my mother in law's European
Speaker 1: summer friend, with whom she gossiped and rode bikes. Now
Speaker 1: I was reading about her violently beating her mother to death.
Speaker 1: It's like their two different women. In the photos I've
Speaker 1: seen of her, Barbara is striking, and the papers couldn't
Speaker 1: get enough of the mysterious twenty three year old who's
Speaker 1: referred to as Slender olive skinned, elfin faced, pixie faced,
Speaker 1: and gammon faced. One headline, rather than referring to the
Speaker 1: trial as a murder trial, refers to it as a
Speaker 1: waifs trial. The newspapers carry descriptions of Barbara's hairstyle and clothes.
Speaker 1: On her first day in court, The Cincinnati Inquirer calls
Speaker 1: her dress quote fashionably short, but not mini mini. It's
Speaker 1: almost like Barbara is a movie star. From the papers,
Speaker 1: I learned that Barbara had initially confessed to the police,
Speaker 1: but recanted her confession a few days later. Why would
Speaker 1: someone admit to a crime only to take it back immediately?
Speaker 1: To find out, I contact the Hamilton County Court in
Speaker 1: Ohio and request the trial transcript. What I receive is
Speaker 1: a document over twelve hundred typewritten pages long. From it,
Speaker 1: I learned that the prosecution's case was mostly built on
Speaker 1: Barbara's confession, which told the following story. On the morning
Speaker 1: of May twenty fifth, nineteen sixty nine, Jane told her
Speaker 1: that she and Barbara's adopted father, Charles, were separating and
Speaker 1: it was time for Barbara to go out on her own.
Speaker 1: An argument ensued. Barbara grabbed a gun from her father's
Speaker 1: dresser and shot Jane. She then dragged her down two
Speaker 1: flights of stairs to the basement, where she beat her
Speaker 1: to death with the poker. If she was alive, Barbara
Speaker 1: explained in her confession, she was going to tell everybody
Speaker 1: and I was going to be in a jam. The
Speaker 1: defense's case, on the other hand, was built around the
Speaker 1: fact Barbara later recanted her confession. Barbara maintained her innocence
Speaker 1: throughout the trial, claiming the confession was given under false pretenses.
Speaker 1: According to her lawyers, Barbara was horseback riding that morning
Speaker 1: and came home to find Jane dead at the bottom
Speaker 1: of the basement stairs. I was thinking that Daddy had
Speaker 1: done it, Barbara testified on the stand. She feared Charles
Speaker 1: had committed the murder, and so she confessed in order
Speaker 1: to protect him. I was going to do anything that
Speaker 1: I possibly could to take the guilt off him. Barbara
Speaker 1: said anything. This meant cleaning up the crime scene and
Speaker 1: disposing of the gun in the Ohio River. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until later that she learned her father was innocent. During
Speaker 1: the investigation, police found blood on Barbara's riding boots and
Speaker 1: gunpowder as a jew on her hands. Also Barbara had
Speaker 1: no defensible alibi. She was found guilty and sentenced to
Speaker 1: life in prison for murder in the first degree.
Speaker 2: I hope my voice is okay. You know, we're very
Speaker 2: froggy around here because the allergies. I'll sound like Demi Moore.
Speaker 1: Late one Friday evening, my mother in law, Becky, and
Speaker 1: I meet up in here Den. I've been looking into
Speaker 1: Barbara's life, and I'll just get in front of it
Speaker 1: by saying that some of it is shocking. Really, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing is in the end, I think generally
Speaker 1: the things that she told you are true. And I
Speaker 1: begin with the information Becky had asked for. I tell
Speaker 1: her that Barbara had not played her for a sab
Speaker 1: so she grew up an orphan. She was adopted by
Speaker 1: a wealthy family three months. But then I tell her
Speaker 1: the other stuff I learned. In May of nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: Barbara murdered her adopted mother, Jane.
Speaker 4: Yeah really, yeah, yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I last saw her in August of sixty eight, so
Speaker 2: this was, you know, nine months later.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Becky says that in Copenhagen she never saw any
Speaker 1: evidence of violence or temper.
Speaker 2: Boy, I never saw that would have been in her
Speaker 2: I can't wrap my head around it. I don't know
Speaker 2: what to think of it. What should I think about that?
Speaker 2: I thought she was a really nice person. We had
Speaker 2: so much fun together.
Speaker 1: In fact, the time Barbara and Becky shared in Copenhagen
Speaker 1: came up in the court transcript. Barbara's lawyer asked her
Speaker 1: about her trip to Denmark and the work she did
Speaker 1: at the laundromat. Reading it, I half expected my mother
Speaker 1: in law's name to appear, but Barbara doesn't mention Becky.
Speaker 1: But while Becky's name doesn't make an appearance, another familiar
Speaker 1: name does, someone I'd spoken to just weeks earlier, Barbara's
Speaker 1: old college friend, Chris Chris, who wouldn't let me record
Speaker 1: our call. A week into Barbara's trial, Chris is called
Speaker 1: to the stand for questioning. Were you in the vicinity
Speaker 1: of one twenty two Glenn Mary in Cincinnati? The defense asks,
Speaker 1: on the morning of May twenty fifth, nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: I respectfully declined to answer that question, Chris responds, taking
Speaker 1: the fifth. Did you kill doctor Jane Shott? They ask again?
Speaker 1: Chris takes the fifth. Chris and I spoke for an
Speaker 1: hour and a half, and at no point did he
Speaker 1: ever say anything about being questioned as a suspect. What
Speaker 1: the hell was going on? Was this why Chris had
Speaker 1: been so cagy with me? Was this connected to what
Speaker 1: he knew that the police never knew? Becky wonders too,
Speaker 1: What does Chris have to do with all of this?
Speaker 2: What did he have to say that he didn't feel
Speaker 2: he could say because it would be incriminating. Why did
Speaker 2: he do that? Does he know something that nobody else knows?
Speaker 4: I respectfully declined to answer that question, for the answer
Speaker 4: that question might incriminate me in this jurisdiction or any
Speaker 4: other jurisdiction in the United States.
Speaker 1: This is Chris reciting the Fifth Amendment for me, now,
Speaker 1: fifty two years later, I remember it today. A month
Speaker 1: after our first conversation, I received an email from Chris
Speaker 1: that I didn't know what to make of. In it,
Speaker 1: he told me he now wanted to talk to me,
Speaker 1: and if that wasn't surprising enough, he also said I
Speaker 1: could record the conversation. I think maybe we could achieve more,
Speaker 1: he wrote, if you're still interested, Hey, Chris, I'm.
Speaker 4: Glad we finally made contact.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, I asked Chris My burning question,
Speaker 1: why did he take the stand?
Speaker 4: It was to protect Barbara, and it was suggested to
Speaker 4: me by Bernard Gilday Junior, who was her attorney. Gil
Speaker 4: Day said they needed another suspect. It didn't have to
Speaker 4: be somebody who actually did.
Speaker 1: The effect Barbara's lawyers were looking to achieve was exactly
Speaker 1: the one it had on me. Chris pleading the fifth
Speaker 1: raised suspicion with all the evidence against Barbara, Gilday was
Speaker 1: just hoping to cast a shadow of doubt. So her lawyer,
Speaker 1: Gilday was just looking to sort of to muddy things somehow.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and have a second suspect.
Speaker 1: But why would Chris, Barbara's college friend, implicate himself in
Speaker 1: a murder trial. It turns out that while they were
Speaker 1: friends in college, they weren't just friends.
Speaker 4: We were engaged. She sat right in front of me
Speaker 4: in the German class in the summer of sixty seven,
Speaker 4: and one time I made a joke or something and
Speaker 4: she turned around and smiled at me, and that's when
Speaker 4: I started talking to her. That was the beginning, and
Speaker 4: it went pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: The end came pretty quickly too. Chris was going away
Speaker 1: to California for graduate school, and the relationship would be
Speaker 1: long distance. They began to picker. The enormity of the
Speaker 1: commitment started getting to them, so just a few months
Speaker 1: after they were engaged, and well before Jane's murder, they
Speaker 1: called it off. But Chris's feelings for Barbara endured. It
Speaker 1: was something her lawyers took advantage of when they asked
Speaker 1: him to testify.
Speaker 4: It's just a strange thing, what you'll do to help someone.
Speaker 1: It was a desperate, if not legally questionable move, but
Speaker 1: the defense didn't have much Chris was never taken seriously
Speaker 1: as a suspect. In fact, the judge ended up telling
Speaker 1: the jury to disregard his testimony altogether, claiming it had
Speaker 1: no real bearing on the case. And today, if you
Speaker 1: ask Chris if he thinks Barbara was guilty, he's unequivocal.
Speaker 1: This is the part he learned later that the police
Speaker 1: never knew.
Speaker 4: She had purchased a gun in Richmond, Kentucky, and she
Speaker 4: went over to some woods and she practiced with a gun,
Speaker 4: so she knew she was going to use it because
Speaker 4: she practiced with it.
Speaker 1: I'm unable to verify if Barbara bought the gun, but
Speaker 1: it is true that when her adopted father, Charles, took
Speaker 1: the stand during the trial. He testified that he'd never
Speaker 1: owned a gun or kept one in the dresser where
Speaker 1: Barbara claimed to have found it. After the trial, Barbara
Speaker 1: was sent to a women's prison in Marysville, Ohio to
Speaker 1: serve her sentence, and Chris says he visited a few times,
Speaker 1: but most of their contact was by mail. He kept
Speaker 1: Barbara's letters and sends me a photo of one. It's
Speaker 1: written on prison stationery, and most of it is pretty mundane.
Speaker 1: But what strikes me is how Barbara records the date
Speaker 1: rather than the day, month, and year. She instead writes
Speaker 1: Mother's Day. Chris also tells me that Barbara was given
Speaker 1: a wide berth at Marysville.
Speaker 4: She was favored by Miss Wheeler, the superintendent. For example,
Speaker 4: Miss Wheeler loved Ohio state football, and she would invite
Speaker 4: Barbara only of all the prisoners to come over and
Speaker 4: watch the game. No other prisoner could go into Miss
Speaker 4: Wheeler's house.
Speaker 1: In that he sees Barbara's special talent for manipulation. In prison,
Speaker 1: Chris says Barbara was somehow allowed to keep a camera
Speaker 1: and even a small dog, and she was paroled after
Speaker 1: fifteen years, five years earlier than the minimum stipulated by
Speaker 1: her sentence. It's all part of a bigger pattern, he says,
Speaker 1: like how his parents put up half the money for
Speaker 1: Barbara's bail.
Speaker 4: She used people. Okay, she could get me to do things.
Speaker 4: I drove her weekly to her horse riding lessons, I
Speaker 4: bought her presence, I started smoking with her. She had
Speaker 4: this feeling of entitlement. I think I would say that
Speaker 4: was part of her character.
Speaker 3: Hmm.
Speaker 4: She wanted to get her away.
Speaker 1: My mind returns to what Becky said about being with
Speaker 1: Barbara and Copenhagen, the checkers game she was forced to play,
Speaker 1: the bike ride she had to take. In nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: Chris got married and he and Barbara fell out of touch.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty four, Barbara moved to Columbus, Ohio after
Speaker 1: being paroled. Then in nineteen ninety one, Chris's marriage ended.
Speaker 1: He didn't wait long before reaching back out to Barbara
Speaker 1: and beginning a correspondence, why do you think you reached
Speaker 1: out to her after all those years apart?
Speaker 4: Curious and I still had strong feelings for her.
Speaker 1: Talking to Chris on the phone fifty years later, it
Speaker 1: still feels like Barbara exerts a strange force. Chris tells
Speaker 1: me about this one day in nineteen ninety one, when
Speaker 1: he was passing through Columbus on his way to visit
Speaker 1: family in Cleveland. The way Chris describes it, it almost sounds
Speaker 1: like his car started driving itself.
Speaker 4: I had my daughter with me, and Barbara had sent
Speaker 4: me a picture of her, a little Toyota or Mazda
Speaker 4: whatever she had, with a flower on the antenna. And
Speaker 4: I remember stopping and looking at the house and telling
Speaker 4: my daughter, who was maybe thirteen at the time, I said,
Speaker 4: that's Barbara's car, and this is where she's living, and
Speaker 4: I'll never forget. My daughter said to me, Daddy, are
Speaker 4: you going to go in and see her? And I said, no,
Speaker 4: I just want to know that she's okay.
Speaker 1: Hearing the story, I can't help but wonder if the
Speaker 1: real reason Chris changed his mind about speaking with me
Speaker 1: was simply because he longed for someone with whom to
Speaker 1: share Barbara stories. When I asked Chris if, in the
Speaker 1: years after Barbara committed the murder, he'd never heard her
Speaker 1: express remorse, Chris says no, But then he tells me
Speaker 1: one more story from Barbara's life after prison.
Speaker 4: She was cutting the grass, wet grass, and wet grass
Speaker 4: sticks to the bottom of where the blade is and
Speaker 4: you have to clean it out. So she stopped the engine,
Speaker 4: but she didn't disconnect the wire to the sparks blog,
Speaker 4: and she moved the blade to get all the grass out,
Speaker 4: and the motor started and so two of her fingers
Speaker 4: were cut off. And later, at some point she said
Speaker 4: she thought it was punishment for killing her mother. She
Speaker 4: didn't say it as bluntly as that, but that's what
Speaker 4: she was saying.
Speaker 2: What started this all was the obituary. Yeah, And although
Speaker 2: everything in it was accurate, it sure didn't tell the
Speaker 2: whole story.
Speaker 1: Which is what Becky wonders about now, the whole story,
Speaker 1: because while the evidence against Barbara is overwhelming, neither Becky
Speaker 1: nor I are convinced by the motive the prosecution presented.
Speaker 1: Why would be told to move out cause the three
Speaker 1: year old college graduate to fly into a murderous rage. Plus,
Speaker 1: if Chris is to be believed, Barbara had been planning
Speaker 1: the murder for months, what was her motivation before Becky
Speaker 1: met her in Copenhagen, before Charles and Jane adopted her
Speaker 1: Barbara Shutt was a girl named Barbara Wilson. Barbara Wilson
Speaker 1: was born in Kentucky, raised in an orphanage. Who was
Speaker 1: this girl the shots ushered into their home at the
Speaker 1: age of seventeen? And why did you kill Jane?
Speaker 2: There's so many questions I still have, so maybe some
Speaker 2: of those questions you'll find answers to.
Speaker 1: On the next episode of Heavyweight.
Speaker 3: When you want to solve the murder, you discover the
Speaker 3: secrets that spawned it.
Speaker 1: I set out to unlock some secrets.
Speaker 2: The story we got was that she had no family,
Speaker 2: and it wasn't even true.
Speaker 1: What's this place called Galilee's Children's Home? Galilean Children's Home?
Speaker 1: I searched for the Kentucky orphanage where Barbara was raised.
Speaker 5: There's a kid's size book right there.
Speaker 1: And the kids now grown who were raised there with her.
Speaker 3: I try to forget the bad ones.
Speaker 1: There were bad ones.
Speaker 4: Well, from the outside it look like candy and cookies.
Speaker 1: What was going on in the inside was far from that.
Speaker 1: Part two is out now. It's available only on Spotify.
Speaker 1: Go there right now and search Heavyweight to listen to
Speaker 1: the conclusion. This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Stevie Lane,
Speaker 1: along with Me, Jonathan Goldstein, and Moheey mcgauker. Our senior
Speaker 1: producer is Khaleila Holt. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg,
Speaker 1: Brendan Klinkenberg, Mitch Hansen, Fia Ben and Justin mcgoldrich, j T. Townsend,
Speaker 1: Rachel Strom, Mark Bartlett, Jason Alexander at the Hamilton County
Speaker 1: Clerk of Courts, and Jackie Cohen. Bobby Lord mixed the
Speaker 1: episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson,
Speaker 1: Blue Dot Session and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can
Speaker 1: be found on our website, Gimletmedia dot com slash Heavyweight.
Speaker 1: Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans courtesy of
Speaker 1: Epitaph Records. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight. We're always
Speaker 1: looking for new stories, so email us at Heavyweight at
Speaker 1: gimletmedia dot com. Part two of this episode is available
Speaker 1: right now only on Spotify. We'll be back with new
Speaker 1: episodes after Thanksgiving, exclusively on Spotify