Speaker 1: Pushkin. There's a place in our world where the known
Speaker 1: things go, A corridor of the mind. Along the walls,
Speaker 1: shelves stucked with proof, and all around a clutter of clues.
Speaker 1: Here's a photograph of a corpse. Paste it onto the
Speaker 1: page of a moldering leather bound album. Here a teetering
Speaker 1: stack of newspapers tied with twine. Oh, and this, this
Speaker 1: is very good. A detective's notebook smells like tobacco. And
Speaker 1: look over here on this oak stand a medieval manuscript
Speaker 1: writing so tiny it looks like an army of ants.
Speaker 1: And down hidden, Oh, as he roll under the shelf
Speaker 1: a glass bottle blue as indigo. This place stores the
Speaker 1: facts that matter, and matters of fact. It's all that
Speaker 1: stands between reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. It
Speaker 1: lies in a time between now and then. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the Last Archive, A place I like to go to
Speaker 1: figure out how we know what we know, how we
Speaker 1: used to know things, and why it seems sometimes lately
Speaker 1: as if we don't know anything at all. I'm the
Speaker 1: historian Jilla Bore stepped through the door to an unfinished grave.
Speaker 1: The body was found face down early in the morning
Speaker 1: of May fourth, nineteen nineteen, A rainy morning, a Sunday
Speaker 1: in springtime, a century ago, in a little park in
Speaker 1: the center of Barry Vermont, a quarry town known as
Speaker 1: the Granite City, Young Harold Jackson was out for a
Speaker 1: walk before breakfast when he came across the body and
Speaker 1: rushed off to find a policeman. Boficer. There's a naked
Speaker 1: dead woman in a vaked lot near the Bustle Hotel.
Speaker 1: Dead woman, you say. The body lay pale, an animal
Speaker 1: against the dark, wet grass, a kill, like something hunted,
Speaker 1: a fox in a trap, prey like something caught, a
Speaker 1: fish on a hook, tied up like something about to
Speaker 1: be roasted, a bird on a spit. Her hands were
Speaker 1: tied behind her back. Her mouth was gagged, her neck
Speaker 1: was garreted. She was naked, stripped of everything but her
Speaker 1: gray blue silk stockings, her laced leather shoes, her yellow
Speaker 1: kid gloves. Her clothes lay rumpled in a pile. Her
Speaker 1: eyeglasses were caught in her hair. The policeman hurried toward
Speaker 1: the body. A crowd began to gather. People on their
Speaker 1: way to church wearing their Sunday hats and bonnets, stopped
Speaker 1: and stared, as if they were a spur of the moment, mourners.
Speaker 1: How could do such a Why do all murder mysteries
Speaker 1: start this way? Fiction, non fiction, true crime, pulp fiction, magazines, movies, podcasts,
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter where you come across them. A dead woman,
Speaker 1: a beautiful woman, a young woman killed viciously, found naked, exposed,
Speaker 1: dead and doubly silent, not just killed, but gagged, And
Speaker 1: we stare and stare and stare. This murder really happened.
Speaker 1: The recordings from the scene we reenacted ourselves, but everything
Speaker 1: here really happened. Who was she? Who killed her? Good questions?
Speaker 1: I want to answer those questions. But I've also got
Speaker 1: bigger questions about the history of knowledge and evidence, questions
Speaker 1: important to ask in our muddle headed, fake news, post
Speaker 1: truth world. On this season of The Last Archive, I'm
Speaker 1: going to try to solve a crazy big who done it?
Speaker 1: Who killed truth? I love nothing more than an investigation,
Speaker 1: but you have to have a plan. The place to
Speaker 1: start looking for answers to really big questions is with
Speaker 1: something small. If you want to understand biology, you start
Speaker 1: with a cell, or not even a cell, A chromosome
Speaker 1: or not even a chromosome, a nucleotide history works the
Speaker 1: same way to answer question and about the history of evidence.
Speaker 1: You don't start with philosophy. You start with a single
Speaker 1: mystery on a particular day, and not even that, but
Speaker 1: with one tiny clue, gray blue silk stocking, say, or
Speaker 1: a white linen handkerchief, just the kind of things you
Speaker 1: can find in the last archive. The dead body that
Speaker 1: a crowd had gathered around in Barry, Vermont on a
Speaker 1: Sunday morning in nineteen nineteen. Everyone wanted to turn it,
Speaker 1: turn her into a set of facts, a body of evidence.
Speaker 1: They came by ones and twos. The chief of police,
Speaker 1: the deputy chief, the attorney general, two doctors, a reporter,
Speaker 1: and a photographer. The photograph was how I came across
Speaker 1: this case. I found it in an archive. I held
Speaker 1: it in my hands. It made my head hurt, It
Speaker 1: broke my heart. It had been pasted into a leather
Speaker 1: bound album, pasted almost lovingly, an ancient photo album of
Speaker 1: murdered bodies, nearly all of them were women. But this
Speaker 1: photograph was somehow the worst, the saddest, the cruelest. I
Speaker 1: saw that photograph and I needed to know more, a
Speaker 1: lot more, silenced women bother me. They really bother me.
Speaker 1: I needed to know who she was and what happened
Speaker 1: to her. I wanted to hear her speak. There are
Speaker 1: methods when you conduct a historical investigation steps. Here's what
Speaker 1: I like to do. I like to start with the
Speaker 1: easy stuff. Find out first what everyone knew about whatever
Speaker 1: it is you're interested in. Then think about all the
Speaker 1: stuff that was so obvious to people that they didn't
Speaker 1: even notice it at the time. They took it for
Speaker 1: granted and didn't quite see it anymore. Then find out
Speaker 1: the stuff that only a few people knew. And then, finally,
Speaker 1: and this is the best part, and it only happens
Speaker 1: if you're doing your work right, find out the stuff
Speaker 1: that no one knew. Step one, How do you find
Speaker 1: out what everyone knew? And Berry, Vermont in nineteen nineteen
Speaker 1: the newspaper. So I went to the library and took
Speaker 1: up old issues of this town's main paper, the Buried
Speaker 1: Daily Times. One thing everyone knew. It had been a
Speaker 1: lot of death and barry in the last year the
Speaker 1: pandemic influenza Spanish flu hit. It hit Berry very hard,
Speaker 1: partly because the man who worked in the quarry for
Speaker 1: years had very weak lungs. Schools had closed for months,
Speaker 1: and about the only public events being held were funerals.
Speaker 1: The misery had only just begun to end. The quarantine
Speaker 1: had only been lifted a few months before this body
Speaker 1: was found murdered more senseless death. Anyway, I dug up
Speaker 1: the Barry paper. When I read a newspaper like that,
Speaker 1: I can pretty much hear the reporter talking to me
Speaker 1: in my head, and just the way reporters talk then,
Speaker 1: or at least the way I imagine it. I listen
Speaker 1: for what's weird, and here it's what's weird. Starting with
Speaker 1: this very first story, the reporter for the Very Daily
Speaker 1: Times crammed in the details, detail after detail after detail,
Speaker 1: Very Daily Times, Monday, May fifth, nineteen nineteen, woman was
Speaker 1: strangled and naked. Body left and garden off Main Street.
Speaker 1: Between the fence and the body was a small patch
Speaker 1: of tall grass which did not appear to be trampled,
Speaker 1: but the dirt between the body and the hat, on
Speaker 1: a northerly line seemed to have been disturbed slightly, as
Speaker 1: if it might have been done by dragging some object.
Speaker 1: While the grass still further northerly and under a loose
Speaker 1: wire fence, was somewhat flattened it by the trampling of feet,
Speaker 1: or by the dragging of an object over or through
Speaker 1: the fence. He was writing a style of true crime
Speaker 1: that's familiar now, so familiar that it sounds old fashioned.
Speaker 1: But back then it was new. It really only begun
Speaker 1: a few decades earlier. In the eighteen eighties. The public
Speaker 1: wanted details, and newspapers gave them every last clue, as
Speaker 1: if readers too might solve the murder. Coming within the
Speaker 1: perspective of the camera were the woman's clothing, partly under
Speaker 1: the body, perhaps lying some eight feet away and perhaps
Speaker 1: not discernible in the picture. A pocketbook lying about eighteen
Speaker 1: feet on the opposite side of the body from the hat,
Speaker 1: and her gold watch, the ladder of which had in
Speaker 1: the meantime been picked up. The watch was still running.
Speaker 1: The watch was still running, and it was inscribed with
Speaker 1: three initials l PC. This, by the end of the
Speaker 1: day led the police to her name, Lucina Courser Broadwell.
Speaker 1: Her maiden name was Lucina Phillips Courser LPC twenty nine,
Speaker 1: one hundred and ten pounds, five ft three. Her husband,
Speaker 1: Harry Broadwell, was a carpenter. They had three children, Doris eight,
Speaker 1: Hildred seven, and Wendell, who was only five. Finally, hours
Speaker 1: after the body was found, a horse hitched to a
Speaker 1: wagon carried her to an undertaker's. That afternoon, two doctors
Speaker 1: drove to the undertakers to conduct an autopsy. The word
Speaker 1: autopsy auto plus opsy means something you see with your
Speaker 1: own eyes, the evidence of your senses. This, too, was
Speaker 1: mostly new pathologists gathering evidence and conducting that autopsy in Fermont.
Speaker 1: They were trying to get the dead body to speak.
Speaker 1: In a century on, that's what I'm doing. Historians are
Speaker 1: coroners too. A lot of things, a lot more things
Speaker 1: than murders. Used to be mysteries. A mystery for centuries
Speaker 1: meant what God knows and we do not but must believe,
Speaker 1: the mystery of the origins of life, the mystery of
Speaker 1: what happens to you after you die. After a while,
Speaker 1: the mystery began yielding to the fact as the elemental
Speaker 1: unit of knowledge, as if knowledge is made up of facts,
Speaker 1: the way a body is made up of atoms, or
Speaker 1: electricity is made up of electrons. I took a while.
Speaker 1: This process was slow, but people eventually got fact mad.
Speaker 1: They believed they had discovered a universe of truth. You
Speaker 1: can see that even in how people understood the causes
Speaker 1: of death centuries ago. Starting the late fifteen hundreds, during
Speaker 1: the Age of Mystery, authorities began writing up a special
Speaker 1: document for every death, something called a bill of mortality.
Speaker 1: On a bill of mortality, you could be said to
Speaker 1: have died of lots of different things. What all of
Speaker 1: them to me have a kind of poetry of breach,
Speaker 1: of blasted, of cramp, of each, of a lethargy of fight.
Speaker 1: I love that list. People do die of these things,
Speaker 1: of fright, grief, and misery. The way we think now
Speaker 1: about death comes not from the ancient bills of mortality,
Speaker 1: from the Age of Mystery, but from the modern death certificate,
Speaker 1: from the age of facts. The pathologist who examined Lucine A.
Speaker 1: Broadwell's body in nineteen nineteen, he was looking for a
Speaker 1: cause of death, a fact. He found bruises on her
Speaker 1: hips and thighs, and he also found seamen. And then
Speaker 1: the medical examiner used all this evidence to fill out
Speaker 1: a certificate of death. He had a list to choose from,
Speaker 1: taken from the International List of Causes of Death. You
Speaker 1: could die of all sort to things on that list,
Speaker 1: but unfortunately there's no poetry to it. Number one eighty
Speaker 1: two homicide by firearms. One three homicide by cutting or
Speaker 1: piercing instruments. In the age of mystery, if I'd been
Speaker 1: writing Lucina Broadwell's bill of mortality, I'd have written down
Speaker 1: two things she died of, oh being savaged and of terror.
Speaker 1: But instead the medical examiner wrote something else on her
Speaker 1: death certificate. Number one hundred eighty four homicide by strangulation.
Speaker 1: Her throat had been crushed. But who killed Lucina Broadwell.
Speaker 1: Most people in Barry figured her husband, Harry, had done it.
Speaker 1: He'd been arrested before for beating her he wants cut
Speaker 1: her with a razor. But Harry had an alibi. He'd
Speaker 1: been out drinking, and he had some witnesses to at
Speaker 1: least for part of the night. He'd been at a dance,
Speaker 1: and then he knocked on a friend's door late at
Speaker 1: night and gotten him to make him an egg sandwich.
Speaker 1: The chief suspect had an alibi, and the police had
Speaker 1: no other suspects. They were stumped, so they made a decision.
Speaker 1: What they needed was a detective, a private detective. This,
Speaker 1: after all was the golden age of detective fiction, the
Speaker 1: age of Hercule Pirot and Charley Chan and Lord Peter
Speaker 1: Whimsy and Barry. Though they didn't have any private detectives,
Speaker 1: but they knew one, so they put in a call
Speaker 1: to Boston to the offices of James R. Wood Wood
Speaker 1: Detective Agency James R. Wood Junior speaking. This agency would
Speaker 1: correspondence in all parts of the world. Is prepared to
Speaker 1: undertake all legitimate detective business for co operations, companies or individuals.
Speaker 1: Male and female operatives furnished. James R. Wood was head
Speaker 1: of the first detective agency in New England. It had
Speaker 1: been founded by his father in eighteen seventy, nine years
Speaker 1: before the fictional Sherlock Holmes solved his first mystery. Wood
Speaker 1: wore a thin mustache, owl's eye, spectacles and an impeccably
Speaker 1: knotted tie. He smoked a pipe. I mean, of course,
Speaker 1: he smoked a pipe. His specialty was rural murder. Like
Speaker 1: the Broadwell case. It was a complete mystery which had
Speaker 1: baffled the authorities. He took the sleeper train up from Boston,
Speaker 1: smoking his pipe, pondering the evidence. Wood was thirty nine
Speaker 1: at the time and he was also his own Watson.
Speaker 1: He wrote chronicles of his cases James R. Wood's detective notebook.
Speaker 1: That's the gold mine. Most of the stuff you're going
Speaker 1: to hear from him, the stuff comes straight out of
Speaker 1: the pages of his notebook. The case I'm about to
Speaker 1: relate to you has been considered throughout New England as
Speaker 1: one of the strongest circumstantial cases ever tried. James R.
Speaker 1: Wood was not a modest man, but his account of
Speaker 1: the case is pretty thorough. He got to town just
Speaker 1: before Lucie A. Broadwell was to be buried days after
Speaker 1: the murder. He went first to the Broadwell house and
Speaker 1: inspected the body. He interviewed Harry Broadwell, and then he
Speaker 1: wrote four words in his notebook satisfied the husband innocent? Okay,
Speaker 1: but why Harry would seem to have been the most
Speaker 1: likely suspect and even though he had an alibi, it
Speaker 1: was hardly air tight, especially since nobody knew exactly when
Speaker 1: in the night his wife had been murdered. That was
Speaker 1: one of the first things that didn't quite make sense
Speaker 1: to me when I started reading about this case, that is,
Speaker 1: reading James Wood's account. After first seeing the photograph of
Speaker 1: Lucien A. Broadwell's dead body, but would like the Barry.
Speaker 1: Police just wasn't interested in Harry Broadwell, even though they
Speaker 1: knew that he had beaten his wife. A century ago,
Speaker 1: men could hit their wives and even rape them without
Speaker 1: much of any consequence, so would dismiss the idea of
Speaker 1: Harry as a suspect. Instead, he started looking for a
Speaker 1: very particular kind of fact. He started looking for a clue.
Speaker 1: A clue used to mean a ball of yarn or thread.
Speaker 1: The word kept that meaning in English for hundreds of years,
Speaker 1: and then people started using the word clue to describe
Speaker 1: the yarn you'd use if you were stuck in a maze.
Speaker 1: If you enter a maze, a really good idea is
Speaker 1: to unravel a ball of yarn to mark your way,
Speaker 1: since you can find your way back out. So clue
Speaker 1: started to mean a thing you would use to find
Speaker 1: your way out of a maze. And here's another reason
Speaker 1: we use the word clue this way. A lot of
Speaker 1: murder victims are women, and their clothes are often torn,
Speaker 1: so there were lots of clues at the scenes of crimes,
Speaker 1: actual not figurative threads trailing from torn items of women's clothing.
Speaker 1: Wood wrote about the stuff in his notes on Lucine
Speaker 1: a Broadwell. Tied around her neck was her torn shirtwaist
Speaker 1: with the knots in the shirtwaist secured by a man's
Speaker 1: handkerchief with a sail as knot. After a while, clues
Speaker 1: started to mean anything you could find at the scene
Speaker 1: of a crime and follow to solve a mystery. But
Speaker 1: still the best clues tended to be bits of clothes.
Speaker 1: During the day, we had ascertained that the handkerchief belonged
Speaker 1: to Eddie Barrow. We identified it by the landry mark.
Speaker 1: A man's handkerchief with a laundry mark on it. That
Speaker 1: is a pretty good clue. I'd led to a man
Speaker 1: named Eddie Barrow, a drifter. Wood's operatives tracked him down.
Speaker 1: Barrow had lent his handkerchief to someone else, he said,
Speaker 1: a fellow by the name of George Long, a lanky,
Speaker 1: wiry Canadian. But what did George Long have to do
Speaker 1: with Lucina Broadwell. Wood thought he knew mister Broadwell was
Speaker 1: suspicious that his wife was spotty. Sporty meant that you
Speaker 1: slept around. They had been considerable family trouble and had
Speaker 1: told Broadwell that they had seen his wife coming out
Speaker 1: of the Pocket house at the lower end of Main
Speaker 1: Street on more than one occasion. Aha. Another big clue
Speaker 1: for James Wood. Missus Parker's house was sort of the
Speaker 1: town brothel. She'd hosts men who came to town to
Speaker 1: work in the quarries. She'd matched them up with sporty
Speaker 1: women from Barry, including Lucina Broadwell and a friend of
Speaker 1: hers named Grace Grimes. Wood followed his trail of clues
Speaker 1: all the way to Grace Grimes's house, where she told
Speaker 1: him that Lucina had written her a letter on the
Speaker 1: very day she died. In the first part of the letter,
Speaker 1: Missus Broadwell explained about having been down to Missus Parker's
Speaker 1: house several times, of having met a lodger there by
Speaker 1: the name of George, that George and she had been
Speaker 1: quite friendly, that George talked about buying an automobile, that
Speaker 1: George had asked her to go to California with him,
Speaker 1: That she, Missus Broadwell, had decided that George was full
Speaker 1: of hot air, that he was no good, and that
Speaker 1: she was not going to see him again. That the
Speaker 1: second part of the written on Saturday, red I've received
Speaker 1: a call from Missus Parker, and she wants me to
Speaker 1: come down tonight and meet George again. Most everything our
Speaker 1: actors say in this podcast is taken from historical documents.
Speaker 1: We know they said this stuff, But this little bit
Speaker 1: of Lucia Broadwell, this is not that. This is what
Speaker 1: James Wood wrote down from what Grace Grimes told him
Speaker 1: that she remembered from a letter Lucia Broadwell had written
Speaker 1: to her that Grimes had destroyed. I'm sick and tired
Speaker 1: of the whole bunch. However, I'll go down tonight and
Speaker 1: I'll tell Missus Parker what I think of her, and
Speaker 1: I'll ditch George as I know he is full of
Speaker 1: hot air and has no money, and as a bluff
Speaker 1: would believed he had found his man. George Long was
Speaker 1: a drifter in love, and Lucina Broadwell had lost patience
Speaker 1: with him. He'd been fun for a while, but she
Speaker 1: planned to break up with him because he was full
Speaker 1: of hot air and he was a bluff. A liar.
Speaker 1: Put this new insight into the miss of Broadwell's murder.
Speaker 1: Wood headed back to Vermont. It all started with the
Speaker 1: laundry mark on that white handkerchief. Wood loved this clue.
Speaker 1: He loved it so much that he titled his account
Speaker 1: of the case The Clue of the White Handkerchief. Wood
Speaker 1: knew he was now near the end of the maze.
Speaker 1: On Sunday morning, May eleventh, he invited George Long to
Speaker 1: meet him at the hotel Barry, a big, elegant Victorian,
Speaker 1: and then he and the deputy sheriff kept Long at
Speaker 1: that hotel, questioning him for four days. They submitted him
Speaker 1: to an ordeal, a very ancient sort of ordeal. In
Speaker 1: the age of mystery, no one could know could truly
Speaker 1: know the guilt of another person. Only God could know.
Speaker 1: The point of a trial was to find a way
Speaker 1: for God to reveal someone's guilt. These tests were called
Speaker 1: trials by ordeal. One kind was the ordeal of the corpse,
Speaker 1: where you'd be found guilty if the murdered corpse bled
Speaker 1: when you touched it. The Pope banned trial by ordeal
Speaker 1: in the year twelve fifteen, But that year twelve fifteen
Speaker 1: something else happened. In Magna Carta, the King of England
Speaker 1: established the right to a trial by jury. So just
Speaker 1: hold on it and think about that for a minute.
Speaker 1: The end of trial by ordeal and the beginning of
Speaker 1: trial by jury took judgment out of the hands of
Speaker 1: God and placed it into the hands of men. But
Speaker 1: still the age of mystery lingered. I've come across American
Speaker 1: cases from as late as eighteen ninety four where the
Speaker 1: suspects were subjected to the ordeal of the corpse, told
Speaker 1: to approach or murdered body to see if it would
Speaker 1: bleed again. And something very much like that happened in
Speaker 1: that hotel room in Berry, Vermont in nineteen nineteen, when
Speaker 1: Detective James R. Wood questioned his suspect, George Long, in
Speaker 1: that hotel room. Wood tried for hours at a time
Speaker 1: to get Long to confess. Long admitted to knowing Lucina
Speaker 1: Broadwell and even having dinner with her on the night
Speaker 1: of her death in missus Parker's house. He admitted two
Speaker 1: that he'd had sex with her that night, but he
Speaker 1: insisted he hadn't killed her, and then, desperate for evidence,
Speaker 1: would had submitted Long to a series of what I
Speaker 1: think you can fairly call ordeals, those old tests of
Speaker 1: truth from the age of mystery. One day, Wood handed
Speaker 1: Long two pieces of rope, and he asked them to
Speaker 1: tie them together. Long you've been lying to me. I
Speaker 1: want you to tell me the truth about it. Tie
Speaker 1: a square knot. A square knot is about the only
Speaker 1: knot I know how to tie. A square knot happened
Speaker 1: to be the type of knot the murderer had used
Speaker 1: to tie up Lucina Broadwell. Could it be a clue? Later,
Speaker 1: Wood took out the photographs of Lucina Broadwell's dead body
Speaker 1: and made Long look at them, subjecting him to a
Speaker 1: kind of ordeal of the photograph. While Long looked at
Speaker 1: the photographs, Wood opened a box containing the clothes that
Speaker 1: had been found next to the body, and then carefully,
Speaker 1: one by one, he draped them over the railing at
Speaker 1: the foot of the brass bed in the hotel room.
Speaker 1: After Long finished looking at the photographs, he got out
Speaker 1: of his chair and stepped over to the bedrail to
Speaker 1: look at the clothes, and made as if we were
Speaker 1: about to pick them up. Suddenly, there in that hotel
Speaker 1: turned interrogation room, Wood interrupted him. Look out, George, you
Speaker 1: get your hands all covered with blood. There isn't a
Speaker 1: goddamn bit of blood on these clothes. Wood figured he'd
Speaker 1: nailed him. Lucian A. Broadwell had been strangled. She hadn't bled.
Speaker 1: But if George Long hadn't been there, if he wasn't
Speaker 1: the murderer, how did he know there wouldn't be blood
Speaker 1: on those clothes? Like I said, Wood question Long for days,
Speaker 1: the ordeal of the rope, the ordeal of the photograph,
Speaker 1: the ordeal of the clothes, And then at the end
Speaker 1: of those four days, the police charged George Long with
Speaker 1: first degree murder. This case was going to a trial
Speaker 1: by jury. It began on a Friday in autumn, the
Speaker 1: leaves falling to the ground, rustling in the wind, at
Speaker 1: the Washington County Courthouse in Montpelier, Vermont. The courthouse was
Speaker 1: packed with spectators, and there were seven reporters there too,
Speaker 1: including four from big city papers in Boston. The story
Speaker 1: was front page news all over New England. Oiay oiay.
Speaker 1: George Long sat next to his lawyer, who planned a
Speaker 1: question Harry Broadwell's alibi and to point out that it
Speaker 1: was Broadwell, not Long, who had a motive to kill
Speaker 1: Lucina Broadwell. The prosecution had a difficult case to make,
Speaker 1: after all, there were no witnesses to the crime, but
Speaker 1: the prosecution hoped to prove that Long had raped Lucina
Speaker 1: Broadwell and then strangled her. Quite why, it was harder
Speaker 1: to say. And when Long took the stand, he denied everything,
Speaker 1: including everything he'd told James Wood in that hotel room.
Speaker 1: You knew missus Broadwell, didn't you? No? I didn't you
Speaker 1: say you never spoke with missus Broadwell, No, sir. It
Speaker 1: went on like this. Then ten days into the trial,
Speaker 1: the prosecution did something really interesting. Now called to the
Speaker 1: stand James Wood Junior. Long had just testified under oath
Speaker 1: that he'd never met Lucina Broadwell. Perfect. The prosecution must
Speaker 1: have thought, we've caught him lying, because when Wood had
Speaker 1: questioned him, Long had admitted not only that he knew Broadwell,
Speaker 1: but they did had dinner with her, even that he'd
Speaker 1: had sex with her on the night of the murder.
Speaker 1: The prosecution could have asked Wood to tell the jury
Speaker 1: what Long had said, but it wanted something better, and
Speaker 1: wanted the court to admit as evidence the entire transcript
Speaker 1: of Wood's interrogation. To this scheme, Long's lawyer objected. He
Speaker 1: said that Wood and the deputy sheriff had essentially kept
Speaker 1: Long as their prisoner for four days and four long
Speaker 1: nights in the hotel. Berry not arresting him, just grilling him,
Speaker 1: which of course was against the law. Well, all that time,
Speaker 1: from Sunday until the next Thursday, mister Long was kept
Speaker 1: in close confinement up there in that hotel by you
Speaker 1: or some other officers. Wasn't me, No, sir, what sir? No, sir,
Speaker 1: You were pumping him. You were some of your associates
Speaker 1: all the time, No, sir, weren't you? No, sir? Didn't
Speaker 1: you wake him up in the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: out of a sound sleep and pump him about this murder?
Speaker 1: I did not? Do you know who did? No? Sir.
Speaker 1: Long's lawyers cross examination relied on a bigger point about evidence.
Speaker 1: There are rules. They're old, change all the time, but
Speaker 1: there are rules, and the prosecution had broken a bunch
Speaker 1: of them, mainly because of the circumstances under which Wood
Speaker 1: had questioned Long. Another judge might have disallowed as evidence
Speaker 1: the transcript of James Wood's interrogation of George Long, but
Speaker 1: this judge allowed it, and so the entire transcript of
Speaker 1: Wood's interrogation was read to the jury so that the
Speaker 1: jury could imagine that they too were sitting in that
Speaker 1: room in the hotel. Berry watching Wood give Long the
Speaker 1: third degree. Long's lawyer, in his closing argument, pleaded with
Speaker 1: the jury to ignore all of it. I say and
Speaker 1: submit you, gentlemen, that under the evidence there must be
Speaker 1: a doubt. But the prosecution said the case was open
Speaker 1: and shut. And the prosecutor and his closing argument was
Speaker 1: very good. He talked about the rope of evidence that
Speaker 1: tied this case together. And as he walked around the courtroom,
Speaker 1: he held in his hands a rope which he tied
Speaker 1: and untied, tied and untied, as if he had George
Speaker 1: Long all roped up. The jury deliberated for less than
Speaker 1: a day, party fun on a charge of second degree murder.
Speaker 1: We find the defendant guilty as charged. All right. The
Speaker 1: judge sentenced Long to life in prison, and Barry Vermont declared,
Speaker 1: mystery solved facts one the day. But to me, either
Speaker 1: something was missing or else something had gone terribly wrong.
Speaker 1: Long might have done it, sure, but on what evidence,
Speaker 1: said the jury actually convicted him. I couldn't see it.
Speaker 1: Somewhere along the line, I must have missed something, some
Speaker 1: stray fact, some clue. Here's what you do when your
Speaker 1: investigation reaches a dead end. You do it all over again.
Speaker 1: So I went back and I looked at that super
Speaker 1: creepy photograph again, the one where Luciena Dwell looks like
Speaker 1: a hunted animal, tied and about to be roasted on
Speaker 1: a spit. And then I looked at the newspaper stories again,
Speaker 1: and I read Wood's notes again. And then I noticed
Speaker 1: something I hadn't noticed before. I noticed that when Wood
Speaker 1: first took the stand, the prosecution read a statement into
Speaker 1: the record, but in the newspaper the contents of that
Speaker 1: statement just got a passing mention. You'd think it would
Speaker 1: have been summarized in full by that very Daily Times reporter,
Speaker 1: poured over by. The reporter had been so eager to
Speaker 1: report every last fact gathered at the scene of the crime,
Speaker 1: But nope, he had only this to say. Much of
Speaker 1: the statement has to do with facts that cannot appear
Speaker 1: in print. Why what facts were unprintable? Then I figured
Speaker 1: whatever the newspaper didn't print I might still survive in
Speaker 1: the original trial transcripts. Those would be stored far away,
Speaker 1: deep in Vermont's state archives. There should be more cows.
Speaker 1: Landscape would be well, it's not a visual media. We
Speaker 1: could just say there it cows. It's mostly cows here.
Speaker 1: That's my son. Since this is a show about truth,
Speaker 1: I should just stay for the record. There were no
Speaker 1: cows in sight, so just ignore my son and ignore
Speaker 1: me and ignore to my producer Ben on the right,
Speaker 1: that's some arrowloom wild cows. Okay, cows, Look at brand.
Speaker 1: I don't get that one. The trial records were waiting
Speaker 1: for us in a low slung building on the side
Speaker 1: of Root two in Montpelier. I've got some of the
Speaker 1: boxes pulled. Few of them have changed their box numbers
Speaker 1: because we would reprocessed them, so I should be all
Speaker 1: set free. You too. That's reference artivist Marisa Dobrick, and
Speaker 1: she'd pulled out a big box full of George Long's
Speaker 1: trial record, bound in giant books. The record runs to
Speaker 1: more than twelve hundred pages, so we can kind of
Speaker 1: get a whole piece of the puzzle this way, I
Speaker 1: see it is when you're doing a court case, you're
Speaker 1: looking at pieces of a puzzle. I drive past or
Speaker 1: murderacing every day? Do you really think of her? Just
Speaker 1: about every day? The trial records had actually been misfiled,
Speaker 1: and it had been lost for a very long time
Speaker 1: until this amazing archivist Gregory Sandford, the man who'd hired Marissa,
Speaker 1: found them after I'd emailed him with a few questions.
Speaker 1: There's almost nothing as thrilling as finding something you've been
Speaker 1: looking for for a really long time. So you open
Speaker 1: that one box and all of a sudden there are
Speaker 1: two or three volumes and saying, wow, this is it.
Speaker 1: Anybody should research at any point, because there's that moment
Speaker 1: of discovery that it's like, wow, you know this is cool,
Speaker 1: and it is cool, it's super cool. But it takes
Speaker 1: a long time to read through trial transcripts, and I
Speaker 1: noticed there was a lot in them that hadn't made
Speaker 1: it into the very daily times. Okay, first thing to report.
Speaker 1: There was so much hanky panky going on in this
Speaker 1: little granite city, especially at Missus Parker's house, that brothel
Speaker 1: where George Long had met Lucina Broadwell. A great many
Speaker 1: of the hundred witnesses who marched to the stand during
Speaker 1: the trial were asked about the goings on at Missus
Speaker 1: Parker's house. That stuff was scandalous, but it wasn't entirely unprintable.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of pages into the trial transcript I finally found
Speaker 1: the part of the testimony that the very Daily Times
Speaker 1: could not print something that George Long had told James
Speaker 1: Wood about the Knight of Lucina Broadwell's death. Go ahead, yes,
Speaker 1: go ahead. And we was in the room then a
Speaker 1: while and came out. Were you intimate with her there? Yeah?
Speaker 1: But before become an intimate did she get any money
Speaker 1: from you? No, sir? Did you remove a close her skirt,
Speaker 1: just skirt, just her skirt and a hat, yeah, and
Speaker 1: her hat and gloves and gloves. Now on that occasion
Speaker 1: when you were intimate with her, is that the occasion
Speaker 1: you told me about once you used some sort of preventative.
Speaker 1: She used a blue tablet. I have a bottle in
Speaker 1: my room over there. Now I can't tell the name
Speaker 1: of the tablet, but there's a blue wash that comes
Speaker 1: in an oblong bottle or a three cornered bottle. Those
Speaker 1: blue tablets or the blue liquid in that oblong bottle
Speaker 1: that must have been a concoction made from a plant
Speaker 1: called blue koosh, a perennial with blueberries. Who's the sort
Speaker 1: of thing you'd take Before birth control was legal, it
Speaker 1: was advertised as aiding menstruation. This part of the interrogation
Speaker 1: transcript was unprintable because legally, it was obscene. That is,
Speaker 1: it violated the terms of the eighteen seventy three Comstock Act,
Speaker 1: a federal law that prohibited the printing of any information
Speaker 1: relating to, among other things, the prevention of conception or
Speaker 1: for causing unlawful abortion. The newspapers could say that lucian
Speaker 1: A Broadwell's stomach had veal and bread in it when
Speaker 1: they opened her up. They could talk about the bruises
Speaker 1: on her thighs, but they couldn't mention her alleged use
Speaker 1: of birth control that was illegal. Is that something you gava? Yes,
Speaker 1: I had them sitting there in the dresser, and I
Speaker 1: had them in my pocket that night. None of the
Speaker 1: evidence used to convict George Long had ever been very good,
Speaker 1: but in the end it hadn't really mattered. George Long
Speaker 1: had provided a married woman and mother of three with
Speaker 1: birth control in order to have sex with her without
Speaker 1: fear of pregnancy and discovery by her husband, and then
Speaker 1: he lied about it. These on principal facts were reason
Speaker 1: enough for the jurors, a jury of twelve men, to convict.
Speaker 1: That evidence cinched the case. Not the clue of the
Speaker 1: white handkerchief, but the clue of the blue bottle up
Speaker 1: in on Pelio. In the state archives. Some people think
Speaker 1: Lucia broadwell spirit has never found dressed. Berry's got a
Speaker 1: feel into it. It's weighted with history, and I mean
Speaker 1: I think that sometimes you can feel that. That's Marisa
Speaker 1: Dobrick again, reference archivist for the State of Vermont. All
Speaker 1: I can say honestly is I feel like she haunts it.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure I believe in ghosts myself, but I
Speaker 1: find her stories so haunting that every day I drive
Speaker 1: past it. I don't think any good answers were given.
Speaker 1: I think she's still there. I do. I don't think
Speaker 1: they found him that place. I mean, you can go there.
Speaker 1: You can go to the parking lot. Lucina Broadwell has
Speaker 1: been dead and buried for a hundred years. I never
Speaker 1: really got her to speak, but I did want to guess,
Speaker 1: to pay my respects, I decided to go find that
Speaker 1: unfinished grave, the place where she'd been first found naked,
Speaker 1: bound and gag. So my producer Ben and my son
Speaker 1: Simon and I piled into my subaru and headed twenty
Speaker 1: minutes south on Vermont sixty two to barry to the
Speaker 1: scene of the crime. Like Maurica said, there's a parking
Speaker 1: lot there. Now. We brought with us a stack of photographs,
Speaker 1: that terrible photograph of Luciena Broadwell's corpse and then all
Speaker 1: the other forensic photographs shots of the scene. It looks
Speaker 1: really different there now, So it took a lot of
Speaker 1: looking to find the exact spot. There's like the garden,
Speaker 1: then there's a road. Here's this street right here, and
Speaker 1: then there's a garden a little way as a road,
Speaker 1: and then this curb and then the fence again. So
Speaker 1: that parking lot really is the former garden man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're pretty sure that we found the spot, and so
Speaker 1: we just stood there a moment of silence for her.
Speaker 1: Standing there, During that long moment of silence, my mind wandered.
Speaker 1: Jurors are known as finders of facts, but for a
Speaker 1: very long time women couldn't serve on juries. Only men
Speaker 1: then could decide what was true and what wasn't true.
Speaker 1: Who killed truth? Standing there on the spot where James R.
Speaker 1: Wood had once stood, I thought about his sister, maud
Speaker 1: Wood Park. She hadn't joined the family business, the Wood
Speaker 1: Detective Agency instead. In nineteen nineteen, the year Lucia Broadwell
Speaker 1: was murdered, Maudwood Park, who was arguably the most influential
Speaker 1: woman in American politics, was leading the fight for women's
Speaker 1: suffrage as a congressional lobbyist in Washington, and she hadn't
Speaker 1: stopped after women finally got the right to vote with
Speaker 1: the Nineteenth Amendment. After its ratification in nineteen twenty, women
Speaker 1: like Maudwood Park went on to fight for the right
Speaker 1: of women to serve on juries. That fight's date by
Speaker 1: state took a really long time. In Vermont, women didn't
Speaker 1: get to serve on juries to decide on matters of
Speaker 1: fact until nineteen forty three. That same year, Moudwoodpark started
Speaker 1: collecting documents chronicling women's history. Like me, she couldn't stand
Speaker 1: the idea of silenced women, so she created her own archive,
Speaker 1: an archive of women's history, the Sleasanter Library on the
Speaker 1: History of Women in America. Lately, libraries like that archives
Speaker 1: have been busy digitizing their records. A few years back,
Speaker 1: the library that holds the records of the Wood Detective
Speaker 1: Agency digitize them. They lived at James Wood's notebook and
Speaker 1: his leather bound photo album out of boxes and plays
Speaker 1: them gently in scanners, and then they uploaded them to
Speaker 1: the Internet. If today you do a Google search for
Speaker 1: Lucyna Broadwell, a photograph of her dead, bo pale and
Speaker 1: animal might float to the surface of the ocean of
Speaker 1: the Internet. That's how most of us find evidence these days,
Speaker 1: not by way of mysteries and ordeals, facts and clues,
Speaker 1: juries and rules, but searches and data. Why does it
Speaker 1: seem lately as if it's hard to know anything at
Speaker 1: all because of the nature of this search Lucino Broadwell,
Speaker 1: like every other search result, she will have been ripped
Speaker 1: from her context and stripped bare of her history. She
Speaker 1: will be faceless and factless. True crime. Here in the
Speaker 1: Last Archive, we've got all kinds of records, shelved, stacked, filed,
Speaker 1: sprawling all over the floor, photographs, ledgers, facebook posts, fingerprints.
Speaker 1: This season we'll be pawing through all this stuff to
Speaker 1: find out what happened to knowledge and truth and maybe
Speaker 1: even what to do about it. Stick around the doors
Speaker 1: always unlocked. The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane,
Speaker 1: mckibbon and Bennette of Haafrey. Our editor is Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrell is
Speaker 1: our Engineer, fact checking by Emy Gaines, original music by
Speaker 1: Matthias Bosse and John Evans of Selwagen Symfinette. Many of
Speaker 1: our sound effects are from har Janette Junior and the
Speaker 1: star Ganette Foundation. Our full approoved players are Barlow, Adamson,
Speaker 1: Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becka A. Lewis,
Speaker 1: and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The last archive is brought to
Speaker 1: you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in
Speaker 1: the American Repertory Theater, to Emily Shulman at Harvard Law School,
Speaker 1: to Vicki Merrick Atlantic Public Media, and to Alex Allenson
Speaker 1: and the Bridge Sound in stage and at Pushkin. To
Speaker 1: Heather Fane, Maya Caney, Carl Migliori, Emily Roostick, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham,
Speaker 1: Henrietta Riley, Oliver Ruskin Kutz and Emily Spector. I'm Jill
Speaker 1: Lapoor