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Lore Episode 31: Lost and Found (Transcript) - 4th April 2016

tw: murder, gore, blood, human remains, cannibalism

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

Teenagers have a tendency to get up to mischief when they’re bored, that’s as true today as it ever has been. So, when four teenage boys found themselves with a spring afternoon on their hands, they did what any English lad might have done in 1943 – they went poaching. They were only hunting birds’ nests, really. It was April and spring meant nests full of eggs, so they went exploring in their area of Stourbridge, there in the midlands of England. Over the course of that afternoon, their search brought them to a private park known as Hegley Woods, and that’s where they saw the tree. It was a massive elm with an overgrown trunk that looked more like a hedgehog than a plant, with thin, whispy branches that stuck out toward the sky. Locals called it the “Wych Elm”. It was strong, it was climbable, and most importantly it was perfect for nesting, so one of the boys scaled up the side. When he reached the top and began to look for nests, he found something entirely different – a skull was staring up at him from the hollow centre of the tree. The boy assumed it was from an animal and plucked it free from the branches. That’s when he noticed how large it was, and the patches of hair that were still attached to it – human hair. The grisly discovery kicked off one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in modern England. Beneath the skull, lodged in the hollow centre of the tree, was a complete skeleton. It belonged to a young woman of unknown origin and unknown identity. No one stepped forward to claim the body, no killer was ever found, but the public fell in love, and named her, and to this day people still wonder: who put Bella in the wych tree? Humans, you see, are fascinated by dead bodies. They’re the centrepiece of countless mystery stories and a vivid reminder of our own mortality. We can see that fascination in both the innocent wonder of films like Stand by Me and the gruesome realism of CSI. Real life, though, is more complex, it’s more dark than we’d care to admit, and while the odds are good that most people won’t ever stumble upon a dead body, it’s a lot more common than you’d expect. Corpses should be hard to come by, but unfortunately that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m Aaron Mahnke and this is Lore.

In February of 2013, a number of guests at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles called down to the front desk to complain about the water in their rooms. Some described how their shower would run black before clearing up, others complained of the odd taste and odour, and that age-old compaint that we all know and love, poor water pressure, popped up time and time again. So, the maintenance crew was sent up to the roof where the hotel kept water tanks used to supply the rooms, and it’s one of the tanks that they discovered a body. A human body, no less, and it had been there for weeks. It turned out to be a missing woman named Elisa Lam. Her parents had reported her missing in early February, but she had been seen last there in the hotel on the 31st of January, and it had been her decomposing body that had been altering the hotel’s water supply. Finding bodies in unusual places isn’t a new thing, though, and it’s not uncommon, either. In January of 1984, three students from Columbia University were walking home to their dorm when they passed an old carpet, rolled up and discarded on the side of the street. Now, like a lot of you, I’ve been to college, so I think we can all agree that curbside discoveries are frequently wonderful. A random desk, or that ugly couch that’s way too comfortable to be ignored. So, it’s hard to blame these three students for bringing the rug home. When they unrolled it, though, they found a body inside. The man, roughly 20 years old, had been shot to death, as was evident from the bullet holes in his forehead. Needless to say, they didn’t keep the rug and the police were brought in to do a full investigation. In December of 1982, staff were called to a room in a hotel in New Burgen, New Jersey. Occupants complained of a powerful odour in the room, and they weren’t the first. For a number of days leading up to the call, each guest had complained of the same thing, and it seemed to be getting worse. The motel staff finally discovered why: it was the body of Gary Smith, who had been killed by his autotheft partners and stuffed beneath the bed in the room. They had poisoned his hamburger then strangled him when waiting got too hard, and finally hid the evidence beneath the mattress.

In 2011, Abbeville National Bank in Louisiana began renovations to their second floor, an area they had used for storage for decades. Running between the storage area and the active bank facilities was a chimney, and it was just inside the first floor fireplace where workers discovered a few small bones. Climbing inside the fireplace and looking up, they found the source. A body, now little more than a skeleton, had been lodged in the flue. Dental records connected the skeleton to a man reported missing 27 years earlier, in 1984. The man had a criminal record and had been in trouble with the law shortly before his disappearance. Police can’t prove why he was in the chimney, but given the proximity to the bank I feel its safe to guess that he’d been trying to rob it, Santa Claus style. In November of 2011, Russian police raided the home of a historian named Anatoly Moskvin. Inside, they found 29 life-sized dolls, all women, all dressed in fancy clothing. But they weren’t dolls at all. Moskvin, it turns out, was a graverobber with a fetish. For years, the historian had been visiting cemeteries all over western Russia, as many as 750 by some counts, and occasionally brought home corpses that “interested” him. All were females between the ages of 15 and 30, and all had been dead for a very long time. It seems, if we’re to believe the newspapers and media outlets, that stumbling upon a corpse isn’t as rare a thing as we might expect. Maybe it’s a product of the times – with more and more people on the planet, I suppose the odds keep going up that we’ll eventually open a wall or dig a garden bed and find a body. But some bodies are intentionally harder to find. Some killers go to great lengths to hide the evidence of their dirty deeds, and that’s really the core of these stories, isn’t it? Because hiding a body is about more than just making an object disappear. It’s about concealing a crime and escaping the consequences. The trouble is, when those hidden bodies are found, their stories often reveal the greatest horrors of all.

She wasn’t always known as Kate Webster. Sure, when she gave birth to her son in 1874, that was the surname she passed on to him. She claimed to have married a sailor named Webster, but he had died. A decade earlier, though, she had been someone else entirely. Kate Webster had been born Katherine Lawler to a poor family in a small, Irish village in 1849. While most children might have helped out at home or perhaps played with toys, Katherine grew up fast. She spent her childhood learning to pickpocket, and judging by the way the rest of her life played out, it’s a skill she’d been born with. At the age of 15 she was caught and imprisoned for a short time, but by 17, she managed to steal enough money to secure herself passage on a boat to England. But she didn’t use her journey as a chance to make a fresh start. No, Katherine Lawler just kept upping her game. Within a year of arriving in Liverpool, she was caught stealing and sentenced to four years in prison. Once released, she found work cleaning houses in London, as well as working as a prostitute – and then she became pregnant. The father, according to Kate, was a man she called “Mr. Strong”. He’d been her friend, her lover, and her partner in crime for many months, but when he learnt of the pregnancy he abandoned her. Her son, John Webster, was born in April of 1874, and those who knew her couldn’t help but wonder: would this help Kate change her ways? The answer, it turns out, was a clear and obvious no.

Rather than seek reform, Kate simply evolved. She would rent a room in a boarding house and once there, she would begin to sell off the furnishings in her room. When everything was gone, she’d move on and repeat the crime elsewhere. Another thing she repeated, sadly, was prison time. In 1875, while her son John was only a year old, Kate began serving an 18 month term in Wandsworth Prison there in London. It was one of the many stints in police custody, even though she moved around a lot and used various aliases to disguise herself. And all the while, her friend, Sarah Crease, helped by watching and caring for young John. Some think Sarah was an enabler, that she gave Kate the freedom to live her life of crime without the burden of parenthood, but others view Sarah as a hopeful friend. She saw a young boy who needed looking after and she did her best to help out. She also tried to get Kate a real, honest job, something that had the potential to turn the woman’s life around.

In 1879, Sarah’s employer asked if there was someone who could do some house cleaning for a friend of hers, a woman named Julia Martha Thomas. Mrs. Thomas lived in the Richmond area of London, she was a widow in her mid-50s, and had a reputation for being a little strict and prone to anger. But it was a job, and Sarah immidiately suggested Kate Webster. The relationship between Webster and Mrs. Thomas began cordially enough, but quickly devolved into daily arguments. Webster claimed that Mrs. Thomas would follow her around and criticise her work, while Mrs. Thomas claimed Webster came to work drunk most of the time. Needless to say, it wasn’t a match made in heaven, but the two women tried hard to make it work. After a little over a month, Julia Thomas decided it was time to cut Webster loose. Kate, to her credit, tried to change. She begged for just a few more days of employment and, for some unknown reason, Thomas agreed to the terms, but the relationship was eating at her like an ulser, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She thought that Kate was stealing from her, but she didn’t have proof yet, and she feared for her life. On March 2nd of 1879, Mrs. Thomas showed up at church clearly upset. She’d just had another argument with Webster, and it had shaken her deeply. Her friends claimed that Thomas seemed distracted and agitated, and she left early to go attend to matters at home. But Kate was waiting for her there, and this time, they would trade more than angry words.

Julia Thomas thought the house was empty, but went searching for Kate Webster anyway. They had unfinished business, and it was time Kate found some place else to work. It was settled – as far as she was concerned, at least. While Thomas was upstairs in the hallway, Webster stepped out of a dark room and attacked her employer. The two women struggled for a moment, and then Kate gave the older woman a shove. Thomas stumbled down the staircase where she slammed into the floor below. Her skull now fractured and bloody, she began to scream where she lay. Kate was immidiately concerned that the neighbours might hear. There was a busy pub right next door, and if someone happened to hear the shouting, Kate was sure to be discovered and arrested. Launching herself down the stairs, she sat upon the injured woman’s chest and began to squeeze her throat with both hands. She wanted the screaming to stop. She needed it to stop, and after a few tense moments, it did. Julia Thomas lay dead on the floor of her own home, and Kate Webster had graduated from theft to murder in the course of just a few heartbeats. But Kate was stronger than her fears, and she knew she had to act fast. She grabbed a razor, a meat saw and a carving knife and set about cutting Thomas’ body into pieces. Later Webster would admit that, while she believed she had always had a strong stomach, this work in particular tested her limits. There had just been so much blood, she later told the police. Webster put the pieces into a large copper kettle and then boiled them in an attempt to reduce them to a more managable state. It was essentially rendering, a process where meat is cooked until the fat and protein separate. Witnesses would later come forward and talk of the stench coming from the home, but no one complained at the time. This was London in the late 19th century, perhaps people were just a little more forgiving of odd odours back then.

When the boiling was complete, Webster fished out each part from the remaining lard and placed them all into a box she found in the home – most of it, that is. She couldn’t seem to fit the head and one of the feet, so she had to get creative. She tossed the foot into a local trash heap, but the head was more problematic. In the end, she found a Gladstone bag, something like an old physician’s handbag, and stashed the head inside there. And then she cleaned the house, removing as much of the evidence as she could that something horrible had taken place there. It took her two full days to do it, but when she was finished, she put on a dress from her employer’s wardrobe and went to the pub next door to meet a friend for drinks. This friend, a Mrs. Porter, later told police that Webster arrived at the pub carrying a large, black bag. She kept it with her almost the entire evening, as if it contained something very valuable to her. Oddly, though, Webster excused herself from the table at one point, and when she returned a short while later, the bag was gone. Webster’s next order of business was to get rid of the box that contained what remained of Mrs. Thomas, so she enlisted the help of Mrs. Porter’s son to carry it out of the house and to nearby Barns Bridge. He carried the heavy box all the way to the bridge, and then she sent him home, claiming that a friend was on the way to meet her there. This boy would later tell police that, as he was walking away, he heard a large splash. It was as if something heavy had been tossed into the river. Webster had disposed of the body, and I can’t help but wonder if she perhaps sighed with relief when the box finally dipped beneath the surface of the Thames and vanished from sight. The following day, though, things got more complicated. Unware that the box containing Mrs. Thomas had actually floated to the surface and drifted to shore over night, Kate Webster dug in deeper. She took on the identity of her former employer while beginning to sell off all the items in the house. Old habits die hard, apparently. And it was about this time, according to a later witness, that Webster stepped outside and spoke to a pair of neighbourhood boys. She had two bowls in her hand, and they were steaming hot. She told them it was lard – from a pig, she added – and they were welcome to have it for free, if they wanted it. The boys ate two bowls each.

While the police were investigating the discovery of the box full of body parts, they had no clues that might point them to the killer responsible. It even took them a bit of time to figure out that the parts were actually human rather than butcher cast-offs, but even then, all they could be sure of was that the victim had been a middle-aged woman. Kate Webster, meanwhile, was making money hand over fist. She sold off the smaller items first – the jewellery, the knick-knacks, even her victim’s gold teeth – and then began to spread word that the furniture was for sale as well. And that lead to an agreement with a local man, who arrived on March 9th with a small group of men to help him carry the items out of the house. A neighbour woman saw the activity and approached one of the remaining men. “Who ordered the removal of these items?” she asked him. The man simply turned and pointed to Kate Webster, who stood on the front steps of the house. “She did,” he replied, “Mrs. Thomas.” When the police finally arrived, they entered the house and immidiately found signs of something tragic: a charred finger bone in the fireplace, bloodstains on the floor, splatters of grease – or lard – around the copper kettle. But the one thing they wanted to find, a killer, was nowhere to be seen. Kate Webster had skipped town. In the end, the authorities tracked her down in Ireland. She’d taken her son and made her way back to her hometown as fast as she could. When she arrived, she did so while still wearing clothing and jewellery taken from Mrs. Thomas. But her stay there was short-lived – the local police chief, the man who 15 years earlier had put her in jail for the first time, recognised her in the bulletin from Scotland Yard and quickly took her into custody. Everything after that moved quickly. Webster was transported back to England, and at every train stop between Liverpool and London, crowds gathered to jeer and shout at her. By March 30th, she had been formally charged with murder.

Of course, she tried to lie her way out of it. This was the woman who had changed her name dozens of times to outsmart the police, who had moved into room after room and sold off the possessions inside. She was a thief and a liar, so it was only natural for her to try and talk her away out of this too. First, she blamed the murder on Henry Porter, the husband of her friend from the pub, but when his alibi held up she shifted the blame to the man who had come to buy the furniture from the Thomas house. He too was easily dismissed. When it appeared that she wouldn’t be able to squirm out from under the charge of murder, she took credit for the crime, but claimed that she only did it because others told her to. In the end, none of it worked. The formal trial began on July 2nd of 1879, and just six days later, the jury declared her guilty. The judge, a man named Justice Denman, sentenced her to be executed. Yes, Judge Justice – I can’t make these things up. When asked if there was any reason why she should not be executed, Webster told the judge yes, insisting that she was in fact pregnant. A new jury of women were gathered together along with a physician, and after examining Webster they declared that the pregnancy, like everything else the woman had said, was also a lie. She returned to Wandsworth Prison, where she had served time before working for Mrs. Thomas, and it was there that she wrote her formal confession. She described all of the details of the murder, right down to how she burned the internal organs to get rid of them, how she chose her tools, and even how she removed the head. On July 29th, Kate Webster stepped onto the platform inside the prison’s execution chamber, a building that was ironically nicknamed “The Cold Meatshed”. A governer announced the time, a priest administered last rights, and then she was guided onto the trapdoors with a sack over her head. Afterward, she was buried in an unmarked grave, right there at the prison. The records of Wandsworth Prison contain the names of 134 people who were executed over the span of 110 years. Kate Webster was the only woman on that list.

It’s hard to nail down the real reason behind our fascination with death, but it’s safe to at least make a guess. Death puts our mortality on display. No matter how hard we try to avoid it as a topic, to ignore its slow, steady approach from the distance, we can’t seem to get away from it. Whether we want it or not, death will come for us all one day, and the dead body stands as that singular, visceral reminder of our death. In the horror movies, it’s the clue that’s dropped into our laps early on in the film. It highlights the danger our heroes find themselves in, it represents what’s at stake, what could happen if they fail and the true power of the killer. When the London police pulled the box containing the remains of a women from the cold waters of the Thames, they didn’t know a lot, but they did know one thing. There was a killer in London, and whoever it was needed to be stopped. Thankfully, they managed to do just that, but in a wild twist of irony, the body of Julia Thomas has been lost. It might have been a result of the way evidence was handled in the late 19th century, or the state of decay when the remains were found. Whatever the reason, there’s no grave for Julia Thomas, no tombstone with her name etched into the surface. Her body was lost, and then found, and then finally lost again. Well, most of it. As luck would have it, the neighbourhood where her house once stood has gone through some renevation. In October of 2010, a wealthy London homeowner was having an addition built in his backyard, when the work crew unearthed something small and white. It was a skull. The teeth were missing, but there was a fracture at the back of the head, and after doing a bit more research, investigators determined that the structure that once stood in the homeowner’s backyard was a stable – a stable behind the pub that stood next door to Julia Thomas. Her body might be lost forever into the pages of history, but the head that Kate Webster had tried so hard to get rid of has finally been recovered. Oh, and the wealthy homeowner who stumbled upon the skull? None other than English naturalist, Sir David Attenborough.

[Closing statements]

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