True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 339: Dead on the Trail: The Potomac Murder
Aired: 2023-12-11
Duration: 01:37:57


=== Sickly December (04:48) ===

[00:00:00]  A December to remember.
[00:00:02]  This one?
[00:00:03]  Yeah.
[00:00:04]  And everyone before and after this.
[00:00:06]  What did you do last December?
[00:00:07]  You don't know.
[00:00:07]  It was a December to remember.
[00:00:09]  I do know.
[00:00:10]  I feel like I get sick every December.
[00:00:13]  And February, March.
[00:00:16]  Yeah, I get sick a lot, Liz.
[00:00:17]  I get sick a lot.
[00:00:18]  Let's talk about it.
[00:00:19]  Let's put it on the table.
[00:00:20]  I get sick a lot.
[00:00:21]  I know.
[00:00:21]  Should I die, do you think?
[00:00:23]  No, it just makes me worried for you.
[00:00:24]  Worried that what's going to happen?
[00:00:25]  That I'll live?
[00:00:27]  No, that you're like not taking care of yourself and you keep getting sick.
[00:00:30]  I need greater control over the podcast and your personal lives because to me, like sometimes what greater control.
[00:00:41]  Because to me, sometimes what makes me sick is stress.
[00:00:45]  And it's stressful having to worry about people like arguing with me.
[00:00:51]  So that seems like actually what you need to do is let go and have less control so you don't feel so stressed out.
[00:00:55]  I need to be able to let go, but in order to do that, say you have an eight-year-old son, right?
[00:01:00]  Uh-huh.
[00:01:01]  Well.
[00:01:02]  Okay.
[00:01:02]  Say, all right, yeah.
[00:01:03]  Well, yeah, me.
[00:01:04]  Say that I'm your eight-year-old son.
[00:01:06]  Actually, you probably would have killed me by now, but say that somehow I evaded your clutches.
[00:01:10]  Your clutches.
[00:01:12]  And I don't mean her handbag she swings at me because she does that.
[00:01:15]  Would you be like, hey, you're eight, time to go?
[00:01:18]  No, you'd wait till he was 30, 40, something like that.
[00:01:20]  What are you talking about?
[00:01:21]  I'm saying that I need...
[00:01:23]  I think you should take the vitamins I gave you.
[00:01:25]  I did take the vitamins you gave me.
[00:01:28]  And then I stopped.
[00:01:29]  And now you're sick.
[00:01:52]  Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not sick, but I've been a little sick.
[00:01:56]  I've been so sleepy all week.
[00:01:57]  That's part of being sick.
[00:01:58]  I know, but I haven't felt, I've been describing this to you every day.
[00:02:01]  I haven't felt sick.
[00:02:03]  I've just been so tired.
[00:02:04]  I like can't get up.
[00:02:06]  Something wrong with me.
[00:02:07]  I think you might be sick.
[00:02:08]  I think I'm sick.
[00:02:09]  Maybe I'm depressed.
[00:02:10]  Oh, no.
[00:02:11]  Maybe.
[00:02:12]  I don't know.
[00:02:12]  Well, that is a form of sickness.
[00:02:14]  That's facts, though.
[00:02:15]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:16]  Hello.
[00:02:17]  My name is Brains.
[00:02:19]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:19]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky right over there.
[00:02:23]  Hello.
[00:02:23]  And this is Truan on.
[00:02:25]  Hello.
[00:02:26]  Good, good, good.
[00:02:27]  I wish you'd give me a hello.
[00:02:29]  Like, that's, that's, that's scared, too.
[00:02:31]  Hello.
[00:02:32]  Okay, that's too scared.
[00:02:33]  That scared me.
[00:02:34]  Yeah, that scared me too.
[00:02:35]  Hello.
[00:02:36]  I'm not sick.
[00:02:37]  I'll give you a cough just for once.
[00:02:39]  You like that one?
[00:02:41]  No, I don't like that.
[00:02:42]  That'd be so weird if that's how you coughed.
[00:02:44]  I will say this.
[00:02:45]  We're going to do a free ad right now.
[00:02:47]  We're going to do a free ad right now because a free ad.
[00:02:50]  A free ad.
[00:02:50]  We're not charging the people we're advertising for for the ad.
[00:02:53]  They don't even know we're doing it.
[00:02:55]  That motherfucking mustard bath that you many moons ago to me that you know what?
[00:03:02]  A lot, I love that prescribed, but a lot of people have come up and been like, thank you so much for that recommendation.
[00:03:07]  The Dr. Singha mustard bath.
[00:03:09]  Yeah, singha.
[00:03:10]  Singha.
[00:03:11]  Let me take this.
[00:03:12]  And these aren't classic.
[00:03:15]  I, two nights in a row, went into a scalding hot bath filled with Dr. Singha's.
[00:03:22]  Really?
[00:03:23]  Yes.
[00:03:23]  You did it?
[00:03:24]  I did it.
[00:03:24]  I always do it.
[00:03:25]  This is my second thing I've gone through of it.
[00:03:28]  Do you get the big one?
[00:03:29]  I don't know.
[00:03:29]  What's big?
[00:03:30]  It's like the tall one.
[00:03:31]  There's like short one and tall.
[00:03:32]  I have to fit in the little shelf by my pretty price per unit.
[00:03:36]  Neither of them are pretty big for me.
[00:03:38]  Okay.
[00:03:38]  But I put it in there and I got really hot and sweaty for about 20 minutes.
[00:03:46]  That's right.
[00:03:46]  Didn't help that I was 20 minutes is good.
[00:03:48]  Wow, you were pro.
[00:03:49]  20 minutes.
[00:03:50]  Yeah, 20 minutes.
[00:03:51]  And then I took a cold shower.
[00:03:54]  You know what?
[00:03:54]  Honestly, I take a kind of regular warm, like not warm, but.
[00:03:58]  Did you wait for the bath to go all the way down?
[00:04:01]  Or did you?
[00:04:02]  I did.
[00:04:02]  Or did you like, because sometimes I like, I'm too cold and like, I'm like both too hot and too cold.
[00:04:07]  And so I like preempt the full draining.
[00:04:09]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:09]  But then I'm like waiting in water, which is weird.
[00:04:11]  Yeah, it's weird.
[00:04:12]  And the water is kind of yellow because it's not because of pee, ladies and gentlemen, because of the bath.
[00:04:18]  And then I wash it off and then I went right into bed.
[00:04:20]  I didn't fall asleep for you.
[00:04:21]  Go right in your cozies.
[00:04:22]  But I did go right into bed.
[00:04:24]  And I'll tell you, two nights in a row and I feel okay.
[00:04:26]  Yeah, it's great.
[00:04:27]  I feel okay.
[00:04:27]  Did you sweat?
[00:04:28]  Yeah, I sweat.
[00:04:29]  I sweat.
[00:04:30]  I sweat and swat like a motherfucker.
[00:04:32]  Yeah, I stop saying motherfucker.
[00:04:34]  I sweat like a I sweat like a little man.
[00:04:37]  Yeah.
[00:04:37]  Is what I did.
[00:04:38]  And you got good sleep.
[00:04:40]  No.
[00:04:40]  I did get good sleep last night, though.
[00:04:42]  I haven't got a good sleep in like two weeks.
[00:04:43]  But I meant from the mustard bath.
[00:04:45]  From the mutton.
[00:04:46]  I wake up.
[00:04:48]  Okay, for the moment.

=== True Crime Obsessed (07:15) ===

[00:04:49]  For the listeners though.
[00:04:49]  Truthfully, I wake up at 6 a.m. in full sheer terror every day.
[00:04:53]  And no matter what time I go to sleep, which is usually I fall asleep at three after lying in bed reading for hours.
[00:05:00]  Yeah, that's our next project.
[00:05:01]  Neither here nor there.
[00:05:02]  What are we talking about today?
[00:05:03]  We're talking about a beautiful dead woman.
[00:05:05]  And no, we should do what now.
[00:05:08]  We've got our, this is our true crime, true crimes episode.
[00:05:12]  Wait, wait, wait.
[00:05:12]  You didn't do the true crime thing.
[00:05:14]  Liz, the true crime podcast, the number one podcast on Patreon is riven with drama.
[00:05:19]  It's riven with drama.
[00:05:20]  I've tried to figure it out multiple times.
[00:05:22]  Is it called True Crime Obsessed?
[00:05:24]  Yes.
[00:05:24]  Where they go like, wow.
[00:05:26]  TCO.
[00:05:27]  We fuck.
[00:05:27]  TCO, did you just call it by its abbreviation?
[00:05:30]  The number one podcast.
[00:05:32]  That can't be trusted.
[00:05:33]  Which, by the way, they are our, that's Bizarro Liz Embrace.
[00:05:36]  It can't be.
[00:05:37]  They are.
[00:05:38]  That can't be.
[00:05:39]  It has to be like, what's that dude?
[00:05:40]  The comedian guy who got like Tim Dylan or Shane Gillis or something.
[00:05:45]  He's the highest.
[00:05:45]  There's no way it's them.
[00:05:47]  I think, I mean, for a long time, they were the number one.
[00:05:49]  The number one.
[00:05:50]  True Crime Obsessed.
[00:05:50]  Yeah, and they have their own little festivals where they and they have a network.
[00:05:55]  The obsessed network.
[00:05:56]  Obsessed network of all true crime shows?
[00:05:59]  I don't know.
[00:06:00]  I don't know.
[00:06:00]  There were like allegations that I don't understand.
[00:06:03]  There were acronyms being thrown around I've never heard of and a lot of very concerned members of the cover?
[00:06:13]  Sorry.
[00:06:14]  Hold the fuck up.
[00:06:16]  They cover true crime shows?
[00:06:19]  Yeah, it's a little unclear to me.
[00:06:22]  I don't understand.
[00:06:23]  I think it's like a both and.
[00:06:25]  Because this says— Because there's only so many corners.
[00:06:27]  Episode by episode coverage.
[00:06:28]  There's never enough crimes.
[00:06:29]  Episode by episode coverage of Cereal, The Staircase, The Jinx Making a Murder, and Lorena.
[00:06:33]  No, I think so they cover the true.
[00:06:35]  So they're obsessed with true crime, like the shows, but then also the stories underneath the shows.
[00:06:42]  Wait, there's no way these guys have.
[00:06:45]  But anyways, I think they've definitely been.
[00:06:47]  Yeah, there's some like knives in the back.
[00:06:49]  People are scrambling.
[00:06:51]  Profiles have been deleted.
[00:06:53]  Accounts have been silenced.
[00:06:56]  Still, I cannot make heads or tails of it, but I do know that these are, this is Bizarre Oliz and Brace.
[00:07:02]  And they were the inspiration for when we did the photo shoot as true crime people.
[00:07:05]  Oh, these are, the Reddit is not, I mean, our Reddit is a damn disgrace, but this one is crazier.
[00:07:12]  This is all sad.
[00:07:15]  I think some people, from what I remember, some people were alleging that they like didn't like the way they covered true crime too.
[00:07:24]  Like they were like, you're like a little too into it.
[00:07:26]  And I'm like, well, isn't that everyone involved in all of this?
[00:07:31]  Everyone involved in all of this.
[00:07:32]  Like Glass Houses.
[00:07:34]  You're listening to it.
[00:07:35]  Yeah.
[00:07:36]  You're listening to a show called True Crime Obsessed by two people going, waking the soy face.
[00:07:40]  Yeah.
[00:07:41]  And we're the bizarre version of them.
[00:07:43]  What face do we make?
[00:07:45]  The, I don't know.
[00:07:46]  What's opposite of soy?
[00:07:47]  Red meat.
[00:07:48]  Red meat is obsessed with constipated face.
[00:07:51]  Red meat face doesn't sound right.
[00:07:53]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:54]  But fuck.
[00:07:55]  Anyways.
[00:07:55]  We're doing a cool.
[00:07:57]  We're doing a true crime obsessed this episode.
[00:07:59]  Yeah.
[00:07:59]  We're talking about a beautiful, beautiful dead woman.
[00:08:06]  Yeah, who's murdered.
[00:08:07]  Who's murdered?
[00:08:08]  And people are like, damn, she's hot, even though she's dead.
[00:08:12]  Fire.
[00:08:13]  That's actually something that people say in this very case.
[00:08:15]  I'm talking about.
[00:08:16]  She's dead.
[00:08:17]  Yeah.
[00:08:17]  Oh, yeah.
[00:08:18]  Okay.
[00:08:19]  Yeah.
[00:08:19]  People who saw the dead body.
[00:08:21]  Yeah.
[00:08:22]  They're like, damn, that's a pretty woman.
[00:08:23]  It's okay to think a dead person's hot.
[00:08:26]  Yeah, but if you're the police officer showing up at the crime scene.
[00:08:29]  I'm saying it's okay to think someone from a long time ago is hot.
[00:08:32]  Yeah, of course.
[00:08:33]  Or they're a ghost.
[00:08:34]  Maybe you're a ghost person.
[00:08:35]  That's true.
[00:08:36]  Well, ghosts, if they think the scary movie too tackled this.
[00:08:39]  I never saw that.
[00:08:41]  There's a ghost that had sex.
[00:08:43]  I feel like parody movies really fell off.
[00:08:45]  Yeah.
[00:08:46]  It's a genre.
[00:08:47]  They're always bad.
[00:08:49]  Yeah, it's just never good.
[00:08:50]  It's a gimmick.
[00:08:51]  And that gimmick's going to run out real quick.
[00:08:53]  You don't need it with somebody.
[00:08:53]  I gotta say another thing.
[00:08:55]  Okay, hit me with it.
[00:08:56]  I don't think that that was a substantial enough cultural moment to warrant Haley Bieber's Halloween costume choice.
[00:09:05]  What was her Halloween costume choice?
[00:09:07]  The from the movie Scary Movie, where Denise Richards is like top, is like in a wet t-shirt or whatever, but it's like on the cover of the poster.
[00:09:17]  So it's like even more like, what are you doing?
[00:09:20]  All these Instagram girls are running out of movies to like redo the photo shoot of.
[00:09:25]  Yeah, I know your hatred of Instagram girls, Halloween.
[00:09:29]  No, because I'm just like, it's not a costume.
[00:09:31]  Like you're doing.
[00:09:32]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:33]  You're just, you're doing, you're LARPing.
[00:09:35]  Everything is LARP, and I understand everything is LARP now.
[00:09:37]  It's just a dress-up.
[00:09:38]  It's a sketch.
[00:09:39]  No, it's role-playing.
[00:09:40]  Everyone is just doing, like, you're trying to, you're doing cosplay.
[00:09:44]  Like, it's cosplay versus being in a costume of something.
[00:09:47]  And everything is cosplay now.
[00:09:49]  I understand, which believe me, that's true in an episode.
[00:09:52]  But I'm sick of it.
[00:09:54]  Just be a pumpkin.
[00:09:55]  Or like cosplay.
[00:09:56]  Be an idea.
[00:09:57]  Be something that isn't like, I'm this actual thing from this other thing, and I look exactly like that.
[00:10:02]  I know, I know what you're saying.
[00:10:03]  Well, you're talking to someone who goes as both either Austin Powers or Dracula every year and when is both of those are ideas though.
[00:10:08]  And they are your interpretation of this.
[00:10:10]  They are my interpretation of this.
[00:10:11]  I will say this: free Halloween costume for basically anybody, hopefully everybody for next year.
[00:10:17]  So what's scarier than an adult?
[00:10:19]  An adult baby.
[00:10:21]  Yeah.
[00:10:21]  So absolutely.
[00:10:22]  It's right there.
[00:10:22]  I was supposed to say it.
[00:10:23]  A full, free costume idea.
[00:10:25]  Light blue t-shirt, little shorter sleeves to show you that you're like, what are those called when they're like short sleeves, but shorter?
[00:10:31]  Yeah.
[00:10:32]  Short.
[00:10:32]  Short sleeves.
[00:10:33]  Cap sleeves.
[00:10:34]  Cap sleeves.
[00:10:34]  Cap sleeves?
[00:10:35]  Yeah.
[00:10:36]  Blue or onesie or whatever.
[00:10:38]  And then bam, dipee.
[00:10:41]  Yeah, dipe it up.
[00:10:42]  And then hit with a binky.
[00:10:43]  You did this?
[00:10:44]  I was an adult baby.
[00:10:45]  Oh, I called it man-child.
[00:10:47]  I wore that.
[00:10:48]  No, but for Halloween, not for like the whole year.
[00:10:50]  Yeah, for Halloween.
[00:10:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:52]  When did you do this?
[00:10:52]  I bought, this was when I lived in Philly, I bought Transformers like onesie from the children's, and it was very small on me.
[00:11:00]  So, but you just never brought this up?
[00:11:02]  There's pictures of it.
[00:11:03]  But you've never brought this up in the probably 10,000 times we talk about adult babies on this?
[00:11:08]  You just are like.
[00:11:09]  I was saving it.
[00:11:10]  Saving it for what?
[00:11:11]  For now.
[00:11:12]  I'd like to see this.
[00:11:13]  You know what I said?
[00:11:14]  This is sort of adjacent or orthogonal, as people like to say, to the adult baby, which is my idea for the Halloween costume that I still stand by.
[00:11:22]  And I've said this before, but I'll say it again, is the mayor.
[00:11:26]  The mayor.
[00:11:26]  And you just get a, you wear a tuxedo, get a top hat, and you wear a sash that says the mayor.
[00:11:30]  I'll tell you what I did about eight years ago in the basement of vacation San Francisco for New Year's Eve.
[00:11:36]  So I'd make a little money and sell alcohol at this basement show.
[00:11:41]  I set up Brace Belden's New Year's baby Brace Belden's liquor play pin.
[00:11:48]  And I sold it.
[00:11:50]  Your fucking Wonder Emporium?
[00:11:52]  I was a liquor play pen and I sold liquor and I made a ton of money.
[00:11:57]  I don't drink anymore.
[00:11:58]  And so it was pure profit.
[00:12:00]  It wasn't like one of those people.
[00:12:02]  It was liquor that you just had at home and you're like, I got a lot of people.

=== Making Money in San Francisco (15:00) ===

[00:12:04]  I put a liquor from the Bevmo on Vanessa and I sold it and I made a bunch of money.
[00:12:08]  But you just sold it for what?
[00:12:09]  Hat twice is what you made?
[00:12:10]  So much money.
[00:12:11]  Yeah.
[00:12:11]  Because captive audience, you're in a basement.
[00:12:14]  So people will be like, I will pay $30 for that beer.
[00:12:17]  No, but that is when I was KJ, when I did, when I did KJ, Sex Night 2 is what I called the KJ night.
[00:12:24]  I did, it's a completely free market.
[00:12:27]  And this is, I'm telling you this.
[00:12:28]  If you right now, if you need to hustle and make some money, become a karaoke jockey because people will pay any amount of money to go next.
[00:12:36]  Yeah, that's so true.
[00:12:37]  And if you just let people cut the line, if they pay you more money, you can get into a situation where you're making $100 in 10 minutes.
[00:12:44]  You're leaving my.
[00:12:45]  It's such a good idea.
[00:12:46]  Believe me, I want to do another karaoke night here.
[00:12:49]  Just to scale.
[00:12:49]  Side hustle.
[00:12:50]  Because it's people.
[00:12:51]  I just died.
[00:12:52]  I'm crazy.
[00:12:53]  I want to do a side hustle for charity.
[00:12:54]  For charity.
[00:12:55]  Okay, I'll do it for charity.
[00:12:57]  Side hustle.
[00:12:57]  KJ side hustle for charity.
[00:12:59]  I'll do whatever.
[00:13:00]  $100 cut the line and it goes to the Filipinos, I guess.
[00:13:08]  That's my money, too.
[00:13:11]  Yeah, yes.
[00:13:11]  Yeah.
[00:13:12]  It goes to the Filipinos.
[00:13:14]  See?
[00:13:15]  And I, yeah, yes, I'll do that.
[00:13:17]  I'll do that.
[00:13:18]  But I got to call it Sex Night 2 again.
[00:13:20]  Or Sex Night 3.
[00:13:21]  Actually, it would be Sex Night 3.
[00:13:22]  Yeah.
[00:13:23]  Sex Night 3.
[00:13:24]  We got a podcast.
[00:13:25]  We do.
[00:13:26]  And you know what?
[00:13:27]  It's coming up right now.
[00:13:27]  Wait, no, no, no.
[00:13:29]  No, before that.
[00:13:30]  Sorry, we're just excited to talk to each other because we have been working on other stuff for this.
[00:13:35]  The reason there hasn't been podcast episodes because we've been working on a different thing.
[00:13:38]  Yeah.
[00:13:39]  Which you will see.
[00:13:40]  Well, it's none of their business.
[00:13:41]  But it will be their business.
[00:13:42]  But not yet.
[00:13:43]  And that's what we're saying.
[00:13:44]  It's not your business yet, but when it's your business.
[00:13:47]  It needs to be your fucking business.
[00:13:48]  It needs to be your motherfucking business.
[00:13:50]  And not just your business, but your friends, family, co-workers, and I'm going to say it, your enemies.
[00:13:55]  Your enemies, because we have a product that's going to change the world.
[00:13:58]  It's going to change the world.
[00:13:58]  It's going to change the world.
[00:14:00]  It's going to bring a smile.
[00:14:01]  It's going to heal America.
[00:14:03]  And it might, you know, it's going to start conversation.
[00:14:06]  It might save your role.
[00:14:07]  We're here to start a conversation.
[00:14:10]  Yeah.
[00:14:11]  Facts.
[00:14:12]  And right now, we're going to have that with Devin O'Shea.
[00:14:25]  Wait, actually, Liz, I need you to...
[00:14:27]  You can't read with your butt.
[00:14:28]  I can see you getting into character here.
[00:14:30]  I am.
[00:14:30]  I am.
[00:14:31]  But Liz, I actually need you for this a little bit.
[00:14:33]  Oh, great.
[00:14:34]  Can you imitate the sounds of a woman taking her afternoon constitutional?
[00:14:40]  But I feel like I do that in silence.
[00:14:42]  Well, could you possibly, you know how?
[00:14:45]  Okay, so like kind of like overact it.
[00:14:47]  Overact it, yeah.
[00:14:48]  Okay, because I don't like, you know, I'm a subtle, my method is very subtle.
[00:15:01]  Hey, lady!
[00:15:05]  Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:15:08]  Well, ladies are gone now.
[00:15:09]  Ladies are unfortunately gone.
[00:15:11]  Welcome, gentlemen.
[00:15:13]  Come stand with me around the body of a dead woman, woman as photographed.
[00:15:22]  Fuck, let's try to get it.
[00:15:23]  That was horrible.
[00:15:24]  No, we're going to keep on going.
[00:15:26]  It's bad.
[00:15:27]  It's bad.
[00:15:27]  I was trying to get out there.
[00:15:29]  There is a famous photograph of the body of Mary Myers on the ground with a bunch of people kind of looking at her.
[00:15:36]  And I was going to say, please join us for that.
[00:15:38]  And then I was like, I feel weird about that.
[00:15:40]  It is a little morbid, but true crime is morbid in a way that people are aroused by.
[00:15:47]  But wait, what is that you hear?
[00:15:49]  Is there a second shooter?
[00:15:51]  No, there is a second guy.
[00:15:55]  His name is Devin Thomas O'Shea, an ethnic guest, as you can hear.
[00:16:02]  Been on the show several times from St. Louis, journalist published in The Nation, Slate, Jacobin, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
[00:16:11]  I don't give a shit.
[00:16:12]  You're with Truanon now.
[00:16:13]  Devin, welcome to the show.
[00:16:15]  Hell yeah.
[00:16:16]  Thank you for having me again.
[00:16:17]  We're so happy to have you on.
[00:16:19]  Now, you're here to talk about this new piece that you've written.
[00:16:23]  And I don't want to even spoil anything yet, although I'm sure we will in the intro that we haven't recorded yet, but after we do this interview.
[00:16:30]  But I just want to say right off the bat, which I already said before we started recording to you privately and to Bruce privately before that, that I enjoyed this piece so much.
[00:16:42]  I cannot wait for our listeners to read it.
[00:16:44]  They got to click on the link in the description.
[00:16:47]  Read this piece before you listen to the interview.
[00:16:50]  Maybe even.
[00:16:51]  You're going to get so engrossed.
[00:16:53]  It's so well written and totally enthralling.
[00:16:56]  And I was just completely absorbed in it.
[00:16:59]  You had me hook line and sinker.
[00:17:01]  Maybe I am a true crime gal because I couldn't get enough.
[00:17:06]  Thank you.
[00:17:07]  I really appreciate that.
[00:17:10]  Yeah, it's a story with a whole lot of facts in it, and there's a lot to get to.
[00:17:15]  But I'm glad to be part of the sort of the feminist episode of the JFK series.
[00:17:22]  Because it's about a week.
[00:17:23]  That's true.
[00:17:23]  Because here's the thing.
[00:17:25]  This is kind of JFK for girls.
[00:17:28]  It's kind of.
[00:17:29]  It's kind of JFK for girls.
[00:17:31]  It's JFK with a girl.
[00:17:34]  That's true.
[00:17:35]  Well, it was a girl in JFK, but this is more of a girl.
[00:17:38]  Yeah, not the wife.
[00:17:39]  This is more of a like, yeah, female lead, female.
[00:17:43]  JFK style stuff.
[00:17:45]  What are we talking about today, Dev?
[00:17:47]  We are talking about a mysteriously dead mistress of JFK.
[00:17:53]  So I think a little more interesting even than Jacqueline.
[00:17:56]  And I up front will say I'm not much of like a CIA or JFK guy, but Mary Pintratt's story is extremely interesting just in its own right, I think.
[00:18:10]  And you guys, had you heard of this before?
[00:18:13]  I hadn't, actually.
[00:18:15]  I had?
[00:18:16]  Yeah, I knew a little bit about this case.
[00:18:21]  It's always been sort of in the background of a lot of JFK stuff.
[00:18:27]  But JFK was famous for betting a lot of women.
[00:18:30]  And I want to get something out of the way right now.
[00:18:33]  JFK was ugly.
[00:18:35]  And I know that you're like thinking in your little ass Lena Del Rey-ass mindset, like, oh, no, he was so handsome.
[00:18:42]  I love a Boston man.
[00:18:44]  I'm telling you, look at a high-definition.
[00:18:46]  Is she a big JFK?
[00:18:48]  I don't know.
[00:18:48]  I feel like it's more Elvis.
[00:18:50]  But Elvis is JFK.
[00:18:52]  Wow.
[00:18:53]  Look at, look at, look at fact that look at a high-definition photograph of JFK's face and tell me that that man could not use maybe a little bit of lotion.
[00:19:04]  Yeah, the alcoholism was right on display.
[00:19:08]  Yeah, the bloating, the pock marks, the sweat, the sweatiness.
[00:19:12]  His voice very sweaty.
[00:19:13]  Well, and just the weak sperm from his anti-Semitic father.
[00:19:16]  I mean, it's just his, the guy, it's, I understand that photographs back then made everyone look fuzzy and thus kind of good looking, but I'm just telling you, look at a high-definition photograph.
[00:19:26]  On the contrary, Mary Pinchett was a smoking hot lady.
[00:19:34]  And I got to tell you, I mean, it is always, that is one of the things that, gonna be honest, first attracted me to this because her.
[00:19:41]  Well, yeah.
[00:19:42]  So you're kind of a true crime guy.
[00:19:44]  True crime guy, too.
[00:19:47]  No, I'm not, because I know what you're implying there, which is that I'm horny about a dead woman, which is kind of how I think of what were you thinking?
[00:19:54]  Oh, my.
[00:19:55]  That was what I was thinking.
[00:19:56]  Okay, but you did kind of say that.
[00:19:57]  I'm not horny for her.
[00:19:59]  I'm just acknowledging that she's beautiful.
[00:20:01]  Okay, but that's why I said you were kind of.
[00:20:03]  It's like a shade of it.
[00:20:04]  A soft shade that's appropriate and not problematic.
[00:20:08]  No, it's not.
[00:20:09]  But she was a beautiful blonde on the Georgetown, which means CIA government scene and a mistress of one JFK and was killed the day before my birthday, but many years before, on October 12th, 1963, which is almost a year after JFK himself was also shot in a grassy area.
[00:20:38]  Yes.
[00:20:40]  So, Devin, what happened?
[00:20:42]  How did she get killed?
[00:20:43]  What's going on?
[00:20:45]  Tell us about the murder on the town path.
[00:20:47]  Yeah, so this will be the definitely the true crime part, and then we get to get to the swinging 60s part.
[00:20:56]  But this towpath is sort of along a canal that runs along the Potomac, right?
[00:21:02]  And so to get to it from your Georgetown apartment, you're walking downhill.
[00:21:08]  The last person to see Mary Meyer alive that day is Polly Windsor, who is also a CIA wife, just like Mary Pinchott.
[00:21:18]  They're part of this Georgetown CIA wives extended universe.
[00:21:24]  And I used a bunch of different sources for this, but like Nina Burlay's book is very good about this.
[00:21:32]  And she notes that like Windsor also said goodbye, Mary.
[00:21:38]  And that was like the last thing anyone said to her.
[00:21:40]  And it's like, well, it's got so much import to it.
[00:21:44]  Yes.
[00:21:45]  Yeah.
[00:21:45]  I mean, Polly Wisner was Frank Wisner's wife.
[00:21:49]  Frank Wisner was a big-time bigwig at the CIA.
[00:21:53]  Who kind of cracked up later on.
[00:21:55]  Very much cracked up later on.
[00:21:56]  I think he got Logaria.
[00:21:59]  I can't remember if that was.
[00:22:00]  No, I'm going to say it.
[00:22:01]  Something you really don't hear much about these days.
[00:22:04]  But he went nuts a few years later.
[00:22:07]  He gets like, he goes, gets totally manic depressive.
[00:22:10]  And I think, I can't remember if he blows his brains out, but he kills himself.
[00:22:14]  I think it's 65.
[00:22:15]  Yeah, he does, I think, a shotgun to the head for him.
[00:22:19]  Classic Cobain style.
[00:22:21]  Cobain style.
[00:22:23]  Very popular amongst these, this set of CIA guys that we're talking about who are all sort of part of the beginning of the CIA.
[00:22:32]  So to get to some need-to-know stuff, Mary is walking with walking gloves.
[00:22:37]  She doesn't have a purse.
[00:22:40]  She does this towpath walk every single day around noon after she gets done painting in a painting studio.
[00:22:49]  And she's going down the towpath.
[00:22:51]  We know that a jogger passes her and that guy later comes up, but she goes a little bit further.
[00:22:59]  And then there is a mechanic from an ESO station who is servicing a Nash Rambler up on Canal Street.
[00:23:08]  So just to get like the lay of the land here, the canal path is low and the canal street is high.
[00:23:16]  And there's like a little retaining wall along Canal Street.
[00:23:19]  So Henry Wiggins says that he gets out of the truck to fix the Nash Rambler and immediately hears a gunshot.
[00:23:28]  He goes over to the retaining wall, looks down, and he sees a black man wearing a light jacket, dark slacks, a dark cap, and he's standing over the body of a white woman.
[00:23:42]  So it's a pretty bad scene.
[00:23:44]  There's two shots during that also.
[00:23:49]  So the cops arrive.
[00:23:52]  This area has never seen a crime except for like 10 years previous when there was like a mugging.
[00:24:01]  So, but the area around the Canal Path is also like a known spot for people to come fish or for drunks to hang out or like sometimes homeless people sleeping in the brush.
[00:24:14]  Yeah.
[00:24:14]  Yeah.
[00:24:15]  It's a classic riverbank situation.
[00:24:17]  You chill, you know, you chill there, have a couple of beers.
[00:24:19]  Certainly not what you're going to see in DC anymore.
[00:24:22]  No, no.
[00:24:23]  They made that illegal.
[00:24:24]  No.
[00:24:24]  I also note that like, I don't, I don't know a ton about DC geography, but we're talking about Georgetown, which is like west of the White House and is a very affluent area around Georgetown University.
[00:24:39]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:40]  It's especially at the time, it was like kind of the, I guess you could say like very bohemian for DC.
[00:24:46]  And by that, I mean like it was everyone just cheated on each other.
[00:24:50]  Yeah.
[00:24:51]  Because that's kind of what people mean when they say bohemian a lot.
[00:24:54]  Well, it was like upper middle class, like doing drugs.
[00:24:59]  People got some money there.
[00:25:00]  Being horny.
[00:25:02]  Because they were born and rich and their husbands worked in the CIA.
[00:25:06]  Exactly.
[00:25:06]  A lot of people who worked in various government agencies lived around there.
[00:25:11]  And there's sort of like a scene.
[00:25:13]  Very much a scene.
[00:25:14]  And that played a big part in JFK's presidency, too.
[00:25:18]  Like all the sort of like groups of Georgetown friends that he had, of which of which Mary Meyer was certainly a part.
[00:25:26]  Oh, yeah.
[00:25:27]  So also the cops are not far away from this area.
[00:25:30]  So they show up almost immediately and the DC police are there.
[00:25:34]  And of course, we also have to remember our DC history, which is that the District of Columbia doesn't have home rule.
[00:25:41]  And so Congress is in charge of the police, right?
[00:25:43]  Right.
[00:25:44]  This area is patrolled, but the cops show up and they get this statement from Wiggins and then they start searching around.
[00:25:53]  This is like a hard to escape area if you were going to do something like murder somebody and try to run away.
[00:26:02]  And they pull out around 1.15 p.m.
[00:26:05]  They pull, they find Ray Crump Jr.
[00:26:08]  Walking along the towpath and he is like soaking wet and he's got like a little wound in his hand and he says that he was there fishing and that he fell in the river and, as you do, and his fly was down.
[00:26:25]  And when asked about this to the officer, he says, you did that, as in when I was being arrested, you pulled my fly down.
[00:26:34]  So A lot of strange, this whole thing is full of like a lot of strange information, almost as if like there's a I don't know, an amount of strange information being placed all around it to make it hard to tell what Happened.
[00:26:50]  Well, the thing too about the phishing alibi is that there was no fishing pole actually found, and police, when they later searched Crump's house, they found his fishing pole there.
[00:26:59]  So we know for a fact that he was not fishing.
[00:27:02]  He was not fishing, that is for sure.

=== Troubled But Not Masterful (03:07) ===

[00:27:04]  I think the other thing that we will get to is that there's no gun found either.
[00:27:12]  And that this is also the 19 early 1960s DC.
[00:27:18]  And this is a black man who has been in trouble with the police before, who is now talking to a cop and explaining himself.
[00:27:27]  And if he's not guilty of it, then he's explaining to a cop, like, leave me alone.
[00:27:34]  You know, I'm going fishing or I was just in an accident and doesn't really even know that there's like a dead white lady very close by and an important one, actually.
[00:27:44]  So the AP photographer who's on the scene, as Brace mentioned, there's like this famous photograph of Mary.
[00:27:51]  She's, it's a very bloody scene.
[00:27:54]  Her like walking gloves are soaked in blood.
[00:27:57]  And that Peter Janney, another biographer of this case, points out, you know, very explicitly that this, that the coroner says that this was like a point-blank gunshot wound and that like Mary's eyes swelled up afterwards.
[00:28:13]  And it Jani is like, this looks exactly like a hit, you know?
[00:28:19]  Yeah, I mean, point blank is kind of crazy.
[00:28:21]  We were talking about that before we started recording.
[00:28:23]  Like straight to the eye and then the heart.
[00:28:25]  Like, yeah.
[00:28:27]  You got to be really not scared, like, no flinching.
[00:28:29]  It's, you know, right in the face.
[00:28:31]  Yeah, it really takes a lot to do something like that.
[00:28:34]  I mean, just even to gather up, I don't want to say the strength, but like to go up to somebody and then just, you know, shoot them twice immediately.
[00:28:40]  It definitely, I mean, I think that's one thing that everybody can kind of agree on, even if you think that Ray Crump 100% did it, is it like it has the appearance at least of a hit, of like a of a classic just like assassination, basically.
[00:28:55]  Yeah.
[00:28:56]  And I think, as you pointed out too, Bryce, before we started talking, I'm also of the opinion that like this could be an open and shut thing of just like Mary was in the wrong place at the wrong time in front of a guy who is unimaginably desperate, right?
[00:29:13]  Crump up until this point has gotten in trouble for petty larceny.
[00:29:18]  He's got domestic abuse issues.
[00:29:21]  He's definitely a drunk.
[00:29:23]  And some of the people that he's worked with on construction sites say, you know, that guy doesn't seem like he's all there.
[00:29:32]  And that kind of refers back to a point where Crump earlier in his life is mugged and gets like bludgeoned in the head.
[00:29:40]  So he's also sustained head trauma and is like subject to blackouts.
[00:29:45]  It's very we're dealing with here from everything I know about Crump with a classic kind of Lenny situation.
[00:29:53]  Right.
[00:29:54]  Sort of a simple guy who, I mean, that's that's I've I've on everything that I've consumed about this case before, it is always like there's always a fine point made that like Ray Crump was like was simple.
[00:30:09]  Like he was not, he was not a little touched.

=== British Spy Paranoia (07:59) ===

[00:30:12]  Yeah.
[00:30:12]  Or even I would say medium touched.
[00:30:15]  But yeah, he was not, we're not talking about like a master, a master criminal here or somebody who is really like, yeah, it's somebody who basically is just is troubled in more than one way.
[00:30:28]  Yeah.
[00:30:29]  And I think that's very apparent once we get to the trial of the DC black community's view of this case and like that Crump is seems like he's in over his head, like to say the least.
[00:30:46]  But there is like a weird sort of parallel thing, maybe we'll get into more that's just about like, this is in the heart of CIA land.
[00:30:54]  So whether or not Crump is guilty or not, like, and we'll talk about this too, Mary Meyer is definitely followed by lots of different intelligence agencies during different periods of her life.
[00:31:07]  So, you know, where was her tail at this point?
[00:31:11]  Did the tail just watch her run into Ray Crump and this just happened suddenly?
[00:31:16]  Who knows, you know?
[00:31:18]  Well, let's maybe talk about some of that actually right now and just say like, maybe we can talk just a little bit about who Mary is before we get into the trial of Ray.
[00:31:27]  I mean, one of the things that you begin the piece by talking about this sort of like artifact that kind of is like this very mysterious, very highly sought after, prized possession, which is Mary's diary.
[00:31:44]  And that letters and pages of this thing have long been rumored to have been kind of passed around and maybe got burned or maybe not got burned, maybe got destroyed, maybe didn't get destroyed.
[00:31:56]  And that everyone's kind of after this thing, including like right after her murder, which is a little confusing.
[00:32:03]  Yeah, I mean, the first I encountered of this case is I read a book about the CIA very like, I think when I was like 18 or something, and there was in sort of a section about Engleton talking about how he, which we'll get to in a second, but how he like one of his big things was like he was so paranoid, he like went and immediately stole her diary and put it in his safe for the rest of his life.
[00:32:25]  But the story is a little more complicated than that.
[00:32:28]  Yeah, a little bit.
[00:32:29]  But I mean, it's like the murder happens and then Ben Bradley, Washington Post editor, gets a phone call.
[00:32:38]  Some say it's Ann Truitt who's calling him, who's a friend of Mary Meyers and his.
[00:32:45]  But then Peter Janney says that it's actually his CIA dad who's calling him.
[00:32:50]  Anyway, somebody calls him and says, in case of an emergency, Mary wanted her friends to recover the diary.
[00:32:57]  And so Ben Bradley, who's her brother-in-law, and his wife go to Mary's house that night, and they happened upon James Jesus Angleton with a lockpicking kit and his wife, too.
[00:33:12]  Plus Cord Meyer is there, also another CIA guy.
[00:33:16]  It's crazy to bring your wife along to a lockpicking event.
[00:33:20]  When your dad, the lockpicks, you know?
[00:33:22]  It's kind of crazy, though.
[00:33:23]  It's like, hey, hey, babe, we got to go do this tonight.
[00:33:26]  Well, you got to remember, too, that these people are all in the same social circle, too.
[00:33:30]  So it's like, it's not like he's bringing his wife randomly along to like, hey, we're going to check out this East German fucking media person shit.
[00:33:37]  It's like, I'm taking my wife to this dead woman.
[00:33:40]  We know's house.
[00:33:41]  But yeah, that is always, there's a lot of confusion about that because there is, it's also been said that Ben Bradley was the one that alerted Engleton to the existence of the diary and that he might have given him the diary himself.
[00:33:58]  Yeah, there's like whatever happened at the garage that night seems almost incomprehensible now compared to like, there's just a million different stories.
[00:34:09]  But one of them is that Ben Bradley shows up, doesn't like that James Jesus Engleton is there and disputes with him over who's going to take the diary.
[00:34:18]  Engleton ends up with it and he says he's going to burn it.
[00:34:21]  But as Bray says, he held on to it for like a decade at least after that.
[00:34:29]  What are your takes on the James Jesus Angleton psychology?
[00:34:33]  Because this is the first I've encountered of him not being a super JFK head.
[00:34:41]  Engleton is, I think, one of the world's all-time.
[00:34:45]  They don't make him like that anymore.
[00:34:46]  He was crazy.
[00:34:47]  He's one of the greatest paranoia acts known to me.
[00:34:49]  Yeah.
[00:34:51]  He was sort of driven insane by the, well, there's a couple different stories of how this can go, but like he was a little bit driven insane by the Philby revelations and was eventually.
[00:35:06]  Can you explain that, Rook, just for a second?
[00:35:08]  Kim Philby, the Cambridge Five, were a group of upper class British guys who were recruited by Soviet intelligence as ideological agents and who many of them had like high-ranking roles in British government and British intelligence agencies.
[00:35:28]  Kim Philby was the most successful, and I gotta tell you, I was actually talking about him the other day with a friend, one of my heroes, because he just, he was just like totally unrepentant, like married a fascist woman, stuck to his guns, stuck to his guns, betrayed all of these fucking pigs, like who was working deep, undercover.
[00:35:50]  But unlike a lot of these people, didn't get lost in it.
[00:35:54]  And like he did, oh, he kind of got lost a little bit, but he got, you know, eventually the jig was up for these guys and he made it to Moscow and lived out the rest of his life, you know, as a high-ranking Soviet intelligence agent, but really retired.
[00:36:09]  But these revelations were pretty extraordinary for a lot of people, especially in American, well, in both British and American intelligence.
[00:36:17]  It really destroyed a lot of, I mean, British intelligence sucks.
[00:36:22]  Like MI6, MI5 were really bad, like just not as nearly as competent at their jobs as the Americans were.
[00:36:31]  But a guy like Engleton, who was already sort of this like aesthetic, kind of like paranoiac personality, events like this helped drive him into basically just like a mole hunting fervor.
[00:36:45]  And so he was sort of had the perfect psychology to be exploited by the KGB in this time because he was such a paranoid to begin with that he eventually just started really just like going on these, not purges necessarily, but like these really extensive, sometimes expensive internal spy hunts at the CIA.
[00:37:07]  That involved a lot of theater.
[00:37:09]  Yes.
[00:37:10]  Like really like he was, when you say lost in the sauce, I mean it was like he was kind of like tumbling through the looking glass over and over again.
[00:37:19]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:37:21]  And so there's a great book called Wilderness of Mirrors about Engleton too that I suggest anyone who is the perfect kind of term described.
[00:37:34]  Yeah, I mean, he is really emblematic of a lot of the like super Cold War paranoia, hysteria.
[00:37:41]  And he just, yeah, like a spy kind of till the end.
[00:37:44]  I mean, this woman he knows, knows his shot, and then he goes immediately to her house with lockpicking tools to take her diary and put it in a safe, you know, because he doesn't know when that information will come in handy.
[00:37:54]  So you're saying you would not want him to be like the godfather of your children?
[00:37:59]  I would say if I, he looks like the Grim Reaper.
[00:38:03]  Like he doesn't look like, or he's like a very, who's that motherfucker? Cormac McCarthy.
[00:38:07]  He looks like a Cormac McCarthy character or something.
[00:38:09]  Yeah, Slenderman.
[00:38:10]  He's the Slenderman.

=== Cormac McCarthy's Godfather (15:40) ===

[00:38:11]  Yeah.
[00:38:12]  He's the Slenderman.
[00:38:13]  I would not have him be godfather my children because I'm afraid that he would make a potion out of them.
[00:38:18]  Yeah.
[00:38:18]  I also think he would somehow like Godfather, he would take to be this other kind of like horror figure that he could assume of like a the new type of villain, the godfather.
[00:38:29]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:38:30]  But not like the movie, which hadn't been made yet.
[00:38:32]  No, no, true.
[00:38:33]  But he also a little, a little kind of slight for that role.
[00:38:37]  That's true.
[00:38:37]  Yeah, he's a he's a weird, wiry guy.
[00:38:40]  Um, and he also bragged to everybody that as soon as Cord Meyer and Mary Meyer got divorced, he's like, oh, I'm, I'm definitely gonna tap her phones and I'm definitely bugging her bedroom.
[00:38:52]  Yeah.
[00:38:52]  Like he said that to lots of different people.
[00:38:55]  And you mentioned that she had been followed for quite some time and that she herself had, you know, was afraid of the kind of surveillance that she was feeling.
[00:39:04]  She was feeling her own paranoia about it.
[00:39:06]  So this was a big presence.
[00:39:08]  Yeah.
[00:39:09]  There's like she, there's a couple instances of like getting home and there's somebody in the house or like you wake up and go downstairs and oh, the basement door is wide open and like just some she said to one of her friends, I don't know what they're looking for.
[00:39:26]  And so they were looking for this diary, which is like a great MacGuffin that ever since has driven everyone insane because like the counterculture picks this up later and is like, oh, every secret of the peace negotiations that were really happening is in that diary or the truth about the aliens is in the diary or it's a diary full of like the most embarrassing secrets in DC history or something like that.
[00:39:55]  I, yeah, it's, I, it's, we can't stress enough how much of a, yeah, you're really right on calling it a MacGuffin, a MacGuffin that her diary was, because it is this like thing that is like, could everyone's like, this could solve the case.
[00:40:10]  Right.
[00:40:10]  I mean, right.
[00:40:11]  Like, it's just in a very not just this case, like all cases.
[00:40:14]  Yeah.
[00:40:15]  It's like the QAnon, like, it'll have everything in it.
[00:40:18]  Bible.
[00:40:18]  It has, it very much serves the same function in a lot of ways as like looking for like a specific CIA document that's like, we're going to kill JFK.
[00:40:26]  Like it is, it is a, it is like very much like the, this, if, if this is found, like, and there's a certain, there is a, a part of this diary is the reason why she was killed.
[00:40:38]  Um, which I'm a little ambivalent about because we don't know what's in there.
[00:40:43]  I mean, we, there's been, there's been a lot of talk about what could be in there, uh, what might be in there, but we don't know exactly what is in there.
[00:40:51]  Um, I do, I will say, like, my gut instinct is I'm sure there is a lot of very embarrassing stuff for the Georgetown set in there, which includes everybody from the president or former president, but probably LBJ too, uh, and to various CIA figures.
[00:41:09]  I mean, this is a tight-knit and very horny community.
[00:41:16]  And the sort of secrets that could be in this thing could be very damaging for a lot of people.
[00:41:21]  Yeah, I think that's extremely true.
[00:41:25]  And that that is why I think Engleton was so keen to like, oh, blackmail.
[00:41:29]  It's a big book of blackmail, you know.
[00:41:32]  And the other weird thing now is that like people say that they have versions of the diary that get passed around and then somebody said it got burned again like in the 70s sometime.
[00:41:44]  Anyway, it's a whole rabbit hole.
[00:41:57]  So let's get back to R. Crump, which is, that's, it's a little weird to say it that way, but.
[00:42:03]  But because he has, you know, they put him on trial for the murder of Mary, but things kind of go a little bit awry for the prosecutors.
[00:42:14]  Yeah, the trial is really hard to understand also.
[00:42:18]  And I think that part of that is due to the fact that this is still Washington, D.C. in the early 60s.
[00:42:26]  And the crime that we've just described sounds like it was written by a Klansman, right?
[00:42:35]  It is like a berserk black man assaults a well-beloved white woman on a towpath.
[00:42:43]  Even some of the detectives are like, oh my God, she's so pretty when she's dead.
[00:42:47]  And that's weird.
[00:42:48]  Like, yeah.
[00:42:49]  Yeah, you don't want to be saying that.
[00:42:51]  Women are so much alive.
[00:42:54]  No contest, bro.
[00:42:56]  No contest.
[00:42:57]  It's no contest.
[00:42:58]  The trial itself is, it goes differently than you might think from that description, too, right?
[00:43:04]  Because like there is this sort of, I mean, DC, as anybody who's basically alive right now can tell you, like, there's always been this sort of like racial tension in D.C., where it's like, there's a huge black underclass in DC and then a lot of very wealthy, very powerful white people.
[00:43:23]  And this case basically saw those two worlds clash.
[00:43:26]  I mean, Ray Crump wasn't basically a construction worker who was like kind of, I would say, I don't know, marginally employed is the right word, but like, you know, he wasn't exactly like working at nine to five every day.
[00:43:38]  He was basically like a day laborer.
[00:43:40]  Yeah.
[00:43:41]  He's poor.
[00:43:41]  He's simple.
[00:43:42]  He's a drunk.
[00:43:44]  And any description of this, you'd be like, okay, this guy is fucking through.
[00:43:48]  And he's assigned a lawyer.
[00:43:50]  And then I believe someone from his family gets this woman, W. Roundtree, to represent him.
[00:43:56]  And she does a fucking, no pun intended, a killer job.
[00:44:01]  Yeah, W Roundtree is a true legend.
[00:44:04]  And like, From what I understand, one of the first civil rights attorneys and just is able to, like, especially in DC, but is able to read the zeitgeist of just like two-thirds of the jury is going to be black.
[00:44:20]  The stands during the trial are going to be full of Ray Crump Jr.'s mother's church congregation.
[00:44:28]  And Dovey Roundtree is like a black lawyer who, you know, suddenly the trial comes to mean so much more than.
[00:44:40]  And the other thing that I just like can't get over is that allegedly nobody knows that Mary Meyer is the ex-wife of a CIA guy or had anything to do with the president.
[00:44:51]  There's sort of like a strict no background information on the victim policy for this whole thing.
[00:44:58]  None of this is brought up at the trial.
[00:45:00]  No, it's like completely off record.
[00:45:05]  People had to know, though.
[00:45:06]  There's no way that seems like very obvious.
[00:45:12]  Well, I mean, yeah, it's, it's, you'd think like the maybe the judge would know.
[00:45:17]  Um, but, but yeah, it's, it is, it is interesting.
[00:45:20]  Like this stuff, her background was really not discussed much at the trial, um, if at all.
[00:45:26]  I mean, I'm not an expert on the trial by any means, but uh, it was really like it's sort of extraordinary how much the trial and really a sign of the of the times kind of changing too.
[00:45:37]  Um, not specifically in DC, but just in the in the country overall, um, is that this was able to, that they were able to, she was basically that W Roundtree was essentially able to use what would have previously been disadvantages almost as an advantage in arguing the case.
[00:45:55]  Um, and you know, it was, yeah, it was, I think, a, a, at least half black, maybe majority black jury.
[00:46:02]  Um, and uh, but with a, you know, a white, a white judge, a white prosecutor.
[00:46:07]  The prosecutor, I, I did, I was doing some reading about this yesterday, apparently chewed gum really loudly during the whole case, which annoyed people, understandably.
[00:46:20]  What, what, part of your brain thinks that is a good idea to do, just like smacking gum in your mouth the whole time, uh, especially if you're prosecuting somebody over the murder of a woman.
[00:46:32]  Yeah, that's crazy.
[00:46:35]  He was really strange.
[00:46:36]  There was another thing where like he was always threatening to bring in the bloody bark of the tree nearby to show it to the jury.
[00:46:44]  And that, like, everybody was like, What would that do?
[00:46:47]  I don't know.
[00:46:48]  That doesn't prove anything.
[00:46:49]  It's just a bloody tree bark slab.
[00:46:53]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:54]  So the trial finds Crumps to be innocent, that there's not enough evidence to convict him.
[00:47:03]  Again, they can't find the gun.
[00:47:05]  They drag the canal and drain it.
[00:47:07]  Still can't find the gun.
[00:47:09]  It's a very expensive process, and this is— And there's no residue on his hands, right?
[00:47:14]  So he, I mean, that seems very difficult to then kind of connect.
[00:47:19]  Yeah.
[00:47:20]  Well, yeah, and it's, it's, to be clear, he was found, he was found not guilty.
[00:47:24]  I mean, not exactly innocent, but he they, yeah, there was, there was very little, like, the evidence, the evidence against him was like extremely circumstantial.
[00:47:34]  And the, the witnesses brought up by the prosecution were just like destroyed by Roundtree.
[00:47:42]  I mean, she was really, she was really good at kind of just like humiliating, not humiliating them, but you know how lawyers do, like sort of like undercutting any credibility that they would have had with it with a couple of questions.
[00:47:56]  Yeah.
[00:47:57]  And Crump's story at this point also shifts to be, I was not at the Canal Path fishing.
[00:48:04]  I was down there with my girlfriend, who I don't want you all to find out about because my wife would be upset about that.
[00:48:11]  And then we were also drinking and I was supposed to be at work.
[00:48:14]  And, you know, you could sort of understand why this guy might lie to the police on first encountering them, perhaps.
[00:48:22]  Well, he had such a weird story because like, yeah, he's like, yeah, I was cheating on my wife with my girlfriend, which for those of you out there who cannot get laid, this is a alcoholic, initerate construction worker in the early 1960s.
[00:48:39]  What is your excuse?
[00:48:40]  And then he gets wasted and, after exhausted from passionate lovemaking, falls asleep and then falls into the river.
[00:48:51]  In my head, just like in a comical, like rolls down the...
[00:48:54]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:48:55]  Kind of like, into the river.
[00:48:58]  And when he wakes up, he's soaking wet and the girlfriend is gone.
[00:49:03]  Apparently there is a girlfriend, but she refuses to testify.
[00:49:07]  I mean, fair enough.
[00:49:08]  Which is also very weird.
[00:49:10]  And he loses a bunch of items of clothing, allegedly, that then they recover and return to him in the jail cell.
[00:49:18]  He says, you know, you've stacked the deck against me.
[00:49:21]  So I don't know.
[00:49:23]  That's a lot of very complicated evidence, I think.
[00:49:28]  But the other thing that we also have to keep in mind, which a lot of people who have written about this before point out, Ray Crump goes on to have an extremely violent life after this.
[00:49:39]  Also, he's burning down places of people who are his rivals.
[00:49:46]  He is abusing his wife.
[00:49:48]  He is accused of sexual assault of a 17-year-old later, but he's never prosecuted for any of these things.
[00:49:57]  It seems like he sort of falls off the law enforcement map after the trial because he just never really comes back up.
[00:50:06]  Well, unlike the trial, we should probably talk a little bit more specifically about Mary because wow, one.
[00:50:15]  Wow, wow, wow.
[00:50:17]  It's true.
[00:50:18]  She's beautiful, but also very fascinating background for this type.
[00:50:23]  I mean, very emblematic of this type of Georgetown set like we've been talking about.
[00:50:28]  Yeah, I think that she in her, it's good to emphasize how strange this social scene in Georgetown is.
[00:50:36]  There's like spray paint that happens after the Crump trial that says Meve coup, Mary.
[00:50:41]  And that means like bad shot or bad luck, which is just a very strange thing for that community, someone in that community to come down and like tag along with setting up like a small white cross for her.
[00:50:55]  It's like, oh, bad luck.
[00:50:57]  It seems very strange.
[00:50:59]  Yeah.
[00:51:00]  It all seems kind of out of a Whit Stillman movie, I gotta say.
[00:51:03]  Yeah, it's it's very, it's, I, that, it, to me, that's a votery of bohemian, rich, middle-class bohemian.
[00:51:10]  If I ever get smoked assholes, never write like, well, actually, it's kind of a cool thing to write, I guess, but like it is an asshole thing.
[00:51:17]  Well, there's a bit of shitting for it.
[00:51:20]  Yes.
[00:51:20]  So it's very odd if your so-called friend was the victim of a kind of random murder, which it seemed like everyone kind of half-believed.
[00:51:31]  And the whole thing is the, the, you know, obviously that, that, that, that phrase is written in French, but that attitude to me is very French too, like this sort of like shrugging, like, well, bad, bad luck, Mary.
[00:51:41]  You know what I mean?
[00:51:41]  It's like, better luck next time.
[00:51:43]  Yeah.
[00:51:43]  All right, asshole.
[00:51:44]  You know what I mean?
[00:51:45]  But I guess like people from the Georgetown set probably would have been very francophone to begin with, or francophilic to begin with.
[00:51:52]  And I don't mean, I'm not talking about the ages of their mistresses.
[00:51:56]  I just mean the attitude.
[00:51:58]  So let's talk about Mary a little bit because she is almost, she's like a perfect example of one of the Georgetown set because she was born a day after me.
[00:52:10]  So she was murdered a day before me, born a day after me, October 14th, 1920, in this very sort of like, I guess, bohemian family.
[00:52:20]  Yeah, they're the Pinchot family is very strange, especially her dad, who Amos Pinchot is like a key figure in the Progressive Party at like the turn of the century.
[00:52:34]  And he like funds the socialist magazine The Masses.
[00:52:39]  But he's not a worker.
[00:52:41]  He's like a landowning dude.
[00:52:43]  Yeah.
[00:52:45]  Mary grows up on like this estate called Gray Towers and it's like 100 acres and they've got their own waterfall and it's a stone chateau and Mary spends like her, like she becomes known, or the family has like a very permissive view towards nudity and so, like Mary ends up writing back naked a lot, which is cool.
[00:53:12]  Yeah I, it's that.
[00:53:14]  I think that would speech.
[00:53:16]  Speaking of fishing tackle, I think that would permanently disable me naked, that's something only a woman could do.
[00:53:25]  My freaking thing would be snapped.
[00:53:27]  I ride, laid back, I ride chill, like this, like I have like a, like you know what I'm talking about.
[00:53:32]  Like I just hold the hair, the hair of the horse, a little bit loosely through my fingers.
[00:53:37]  Um yeah, she had she, it's sort of this like very much like our East Coast royalty kind of people you know like raised on an estate.
[00:53:45]  You know these sort of like kind of intellectual but also wealthy landowning parents.

=== Speaking of World War II (05:18) ===

[00:53:52]  I mean, she is, she is definitely a daughter of this milieu.
[00:53:55]  Yeah, her mom also very connected to media, just like her husband will be.
[00:54:01]  Her mother Ruth, is a journalist for the Nation AND THE NEW Republic and, of course, Mary goes to Vassar, which is sort of, you know the progressive girls school of the time in that, like we think that ladies should also be good dinner companions as opposed to just like sort of wax dolls that sit next to us at dinner while we talk about dude stuff.
[00:54:29]  So Mary is also a very talented writer.
[00:54:32]  She writes a lot of short stories that are sort of like Sylvia Plath-esque about not being able to feel anything anymore.
[00:54:40]  She has an early journalism career and then like a social life in the Park Avenue cotillion dance scene where she meets her future husband, Cordmeyer.
[00:54:52]  So yeah, we need to talk about Cordmeyer a little bit.
[00:54:54]  First of all, Cord is such a like name that they guys were named back then.
[00:55:01]  You know what I'm saying.
[00:55:02]  Like guys are always named shit like Cord.
[00:55:04]  That's like a guy in an F. Scott Fitzgerald Book.
[00:55:07]  He looks like that too.
[00:55:08]  Well, and I believe the story of Mary intertwines with one of one of F. Scott's, I think his sister or something.
[00:55:16]  I don't know.
[00:55:16]  Also another kind of weird looking guy.
[00:55:19]  But Cordmeyer is such a, I mean, he is a fucking cliche in his phrase.
[00:55:26]  He hits like every cliche thing from this time period where you're like, Yale, check.
[00:55:31]  Scroll and key, check.
[00:55:32]  Writer for Atlantic Monthly, check.
[00:55:35]  United World Federalist, check.
[00:55:37]  Like it's like all of these just like, if you could, you got to look up a picture of this guy because he's got like a very Roger Sterling sort of classic, silver-haired, you know, big, big bulky glasses, you know, clearly like, you know, had very strong opinions about what he would call the Japs.
[00:55:58]  Yeah.
[00:55:58]  You know, you know the vibe.
[00:56:00]  Yeah, he, so he loses, I think, yeah, he loses an eye.
[00:56:05]  I always thought it was from some kind of, I thought it was a grenade accident, but I guess from a Japanese grenade in World War II, comes back and he's like, I'm a peace, peace pacifist guy.
[00:56:14]  And pacifism back then was like, there's nobody, there's like nobody who's a pacifist anymore.
[00:56:20]  I mean, it's just not really, I think people might instinctually be or whatever, but like pacifism as like something that like people strongly, strongly, strongly believed in was actually like fairly common back then.
[00:56:31]  Sure.
[00:56:32]  I mean, especially after World War II.
[00:56:34]  Yeah, in the interwar period, especially.
[00:56:36]  But, you know, he comes back from World War II as a pacifist.
[00:56:39]  He's like, I'm not, I'm not fucking with war anymore.
[00:56:41]  Well, the part of this too was that like, you know, this was also the UN was starting and there was this like, there was this among American, well, not just American, but among a lot of liberals, there was this idea that like the UN, which is so laughable now, is going to bring us into this like, this, this, it's basically world federalism, right?
[00:57:00]  Like, I mean, which is slightly different than just.
[00:57:03]  The one world globalist order.
[00:57:04]  They are literally one world globalist.
[00:57:06]  Yes.
[00:57:07]  Actually, legit a one world globalist.
[00:57:10]  And he's like, oh, this is going to be so fucking, you know, so amazing.
[00:57:13]  Then he goes to the UN, some UN conference, I believe in San Francisco, probably near UN Plaza, where I once overdosed on heroin.
[00:57:24]  But so the, it's true.
[00:57:28]  Well, in the Castillo there, in the bathroom.
[00:57:30]  But the, so, you know, he goes to San Francisco and it's like, you know, I don't know if it's actually the one in San Francisco, but he goes to one of these UN conferences before World War II ends.
[00:57:38]  And he's like, this actually sucks.
[00:57:40]  Like, I don't know.
[00:57:41]  Like, I have like kind of a negative view of that.
[00:57:43]  I don't really know if this is going to solve anything.
[00:57:47]  And, you know, he is like, also at the time, and I relate to this a lot, like a sex symbol.
[00:57:55]  Like, he's like a sexy young guy.
[00:57:57]  Young Cordmeyers, I'm actually going to Google it now because there's no way he was actually good looking because people thought like, young Cordmeyer.
[00:58:06]  He was all right.
[00:58:07]  He was pretty good looking.
[00:58:08]  I mean, look at it.
[00:58:09]  Yeah.
[00:58:10]  Like, he actually, you know who he kind of looks like?
[00:58:12]  He looks like a good looking Richard Hanenia.
[00:58:14]  Look at this.
[00:58:16]  He's crazy looking.
[00:58:18]  But he goes, you know, he's like, he's supposed to be.
[00:58:20]  Oh, he does.
[00:58:21]  He really does.
[00:58:21]  He's supposed to.
[00:58:23]  Yeah, and the same kind of like weird eye brow ridge.
[00:58:26]  Yeah.
[00:58:27]  But he He he's like a peace guy, but he's like not really kind of like losing faith in it as World War II comes to a close and as those goddamn Reds and those communists are taking over more and more territory.
[00:58:44]  Yeah, he's, I mean, I think also he uh, there's a lot of people who talk about how he smoked constantly and that like the smoke would curl up into his glass eye and he like wouldn't blink.
[00:58:57]  And that was just very unnerving for people who worked around him.
[00:59:01]  Strange levy.
[00:59:02]  Yeah, very strange levy.
[00:59:03]  Um, he and the world, United World Federalists almost sounds like a weird, like made-up thing.

=== Operation Mockingbird Revealed (04:35) ===

[00:59:10]  But like Ray said, he got really good at keeping communists out of that organization.
[00:59:15]  And then Alan Dulles was like, oh, you would be great for this new project I have.
[00:59:19]  It's called the CIA.
[00:59:23]  And Cord is like the perfect CIA dude.
[00:59:26]  He's, it's almost like a Shakespearean thing of like, I love peace so much that I have to spend the rest of my life excusing the most like genocidal interventions in other countries and like overthrowing the Guatemalan government and stuff like that.
[00:59:43]  I mean, yeah, his CIA resume, early CIA resume is, I mean, he was there for everything.
[00:59:49]  Oh, yeah.
[00:59:51]  Cord was part of the Office of Policy Coordination, and he was in charge of like propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action, including sabotage and anti-sabotage and demolition, all of this stuff, arming guerrilla groups, and all in favor of, you know, keeping communism out of South America, which wasn't even an issue, really.
[01:00:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:00:19]  The OPC is like what you think of when you think of the CIA in the Cold War.
[01:00:24]  It's like, that's the guys doing it.
[01:00:26]  Like, these aren't the guys just like staring at maps or whatever.
[01:00:29]  It's like, these are like, all right, we need to get, you know, as much, whatever, plastic explosives to whatever, you know, aspirational genocide air in, you know, Mozambique as we can immediately.
[01:00:44]  It's like, these are, these are the, like, these are the guys who are like movers and shakers.
[01:00:49]  Yeah.
[01:00:50]  Yeah.
[01:00:50]  They're who are talking directly to like the United Fruit Company too, like about land reform.
[01:00:57]  And this is also how Cord will meet James Jesus Engleton, obviously.
[01:01:03]  Yeah, also an office that was in charge of like getting visas for Nazis.
[01:01:09]  Pretty bad stuff in general.
[01:01:13]  Have you guys, you guys had heard of Operation Mockingbird before?
[01:01:18]  Yes, which it's Operation Mockingbird is so fascinating because, I mean, I think they sent us a memo about the name change, though.
[01:01:27]  Yeah.
[01:01:27]  Yeah.
[01:01:28]  Yeah, they did.
[01:01:29]  I mean, we work closely with it with the, well, what that became.
[01:01:31]  But no, Operation Mockingbird is strange because it looms so large, and I think a lot of people's worldviews.
[01:01:38]  And the core of it is absolutely true, but like the actual details of it, it's a lot like MKUltra in that respect.
[01:01:45]  Like the actual details on it are sort of ones that you have to piece together from like information that we do know.
[01:01:52]  Like, yeah, it's basically Operation Mockingbird was this like CIA plan, which they did do this, to like cultivate assets and disseminate information in ideological lines and whatever else, propaganda, through foreign and domestic media outlets.
[01:02:16]  And the CIA was excellent at this.
[01:02:21]  This was something, obviously, the CIA's charter states that it's not supposed to operate within the United States.
[01:02:29]  Duh, it does.
[01:02:30]  I mean, that's just like, that's like, I don't think a lot of people don't even know that because it's like, it's so, it has, we just, everybody knows that it does.
[01:02:37]  And there's instances of that happening.
[01:02:40]  But it was basically them really putting the recognizing the power of media and then harnessing that to the best of their abilities.
[01:02:48]  And they were pretty good at that.
[01:02:49]  And a lot of it was done, like you say, like from what we know and what you can piece together is that you see most of these sort of activities shows up in like surveillance.
[01:02:58]  There was like massive surveillance of almost every newsroom in the country, like broadcast and print.
[01:03:04]  That there were, yeah, the cultivation of assets, of course, through like, you know, people impersonating sources or being becoming sources, cultivating other sources, like basically turning the like journalist profession into its own wilderness of mirrors.
[01:03:21]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:03:22]  I mean, and Washington was so rife with this stuff, especially.
[01:03:26]  I mean, there's so many weird questions about how the way the Watergate was covered or Watergate in general.
[01:03:33]  And I think that like, you know, Bradley, whether it was an official part of Operation Mockingbird or not, I don't think he would even need to be.
[01:03:41]  He was just from this milieu to begin with.
[01:03:43]  So I don't know what information.
[01:03:45]  Or even know.

=== Michael's Drop: Guys Run, Jani Father Can't Believe (15:26) ===

[01:03:46]  Yeah.
[01:03:46]  Yeah.
[01:03:47]  You know what I mean?
[01:03:48]  Like there's just so many kind of, there's layers to it, as we like to say.
[01:03:53]  Yeah.
[01:03:54]  It's Ben Bradley is the one who's on the edge there because he vehemently denies being part of it and has this book called Catherine the Great about the Washington Post editor pulped basically when it's first published and they had to redact a bunch of stuff.
[01:04:11]  But in any case, you could see how Cordmeyer as like an Atlantic writer in the in for the United World Federalists, easy addition to the Mockingbird team.
[01:04:27]  So, you know, he's in the middle.
[01:04:30]  I think Cord is best understood as somebody who is also always threatening to just go become a regular journalist and like, quote unquote, quit the agency.
[01:04:39]  Yeah.
[01:04:40]  And that's also very funny because later when Mary starts sleeping with JFK, that's like the information that JFK sort of throws in Cord's face of like, oh, I know that you want to go be a journalist, huh?
[01:04:55]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:04:56]  Well, let's talk about that because that we've sort of been circling around that.
[01:05:00]  Let's talk about Mary and Jack, as I always like to call him.
[01:05:04]  So, I mean, yeah, Mary and Cord were married, but very typical of the time there was some cheating going on.
[01:05:14]  Well, I imagine there's lots of like lots of everyone's like doused in martinis, and they're just like angrily, drunkenly fighting with each other and then making up and then saying, No, you go sleep with the neighbor or, you know, like, yeah, it's just very like drunken and very what we would now call polyamorous, but really with just like the neighborhood, but then everyone also surveilling each other at the same time.
[01:05:39]  Unethical non-monogamy.
[01:05:41]  I can't believe this hasn't been like the basis for a show.
[01:05:43]  We should write this.
[01:05:45]  Just quit podcasting.
[01:05:46]  But like write it.
[01:05:47]  No, write it, but then never make it into anything.
[01:05:49]  Just like an exercise.
[01:05:51]  You just sell it.
[01:05:51]  It could be a creative exercise.
[01:05:53]  No, no, no, just for us.
[01:05:54]  Just to Hulu.
[01:05:56]  But so, yeah, that's a fantastic idea.
[01:05:59]  But they're married, but not just to each other.
[01:06:03]  And like, yeah, they're having sex during martini breaks.
[01:06:05]  And especially, I mean, Cord is a coxman, like all these motherfuckers.
[01:06:11]  And he's just in and out.
[01:06:12]  Everyone's fucking each other's wives and all that kind of shit.
[01:06:15]  I will say this.
[01:06:16]  I think one of the things that people like about George Smiley is he's the only intelligence agent who just isn't constantly cheating on his wife.
[01:06:26]  It's in fact quite the opposite.
[01:06:28]  But he, you know, they have this weird relationship.
[01:06:31]  They write in the margins of each other's diaries.
[01:06:34]  That's so crazy.
[01:06:35]  So fucking crazy.
[01:06:37]  Like commenting.
[01:06:38]  I would blow my motherfucking top if someone did that to me.
[01:06:44]  But it's like they both enjoyed it.
[01:06:46]  Yeah, there's something weird going on.
[01:06:48]  There's a weird, like, you know, I know, everyone's like hurting each other, but they have kids together.
[01:06:54]  And there is one nine-year-old boy named Michael who gets hit by a car, which I was always like, I wonder if there's something going on with that.
[01:07:04]  You know what I mean?
[01:07:05]  But gets hit by a car, and it's classic.
[01:07:08]  After that, things were never the same.
[01:07:11]  They, you know, it's that the kid dies and they start fighting quite a lot.
[01:07:17]  Yeah.
[01:07:18]  This is the divorce happens after Michael's death.
[01:07:23]  And this is kind of where another biographer of the Mary Meyer story comes in, which is Peter Janny, who lived near the Pinchot Meyer's house and used to play with Michael.
[01:07:35]  And in, you know, a lot of people have, including Brace, fallen in love with Mary Pinchot-Meyer.
[01:07:46]  And Jani is also in this camp, but starts his book about this.
[01:07:52]  This book is called Mary's Mosaic.
[01:07:55]  He starts it off by talking about Mary in the context of like his sexual awakening.
[01:08:02]  There's a quote here.
[01:08:04]  Should I go ahead and read that?
[01:08:05]  I would say absolutely go ahead and read that.
[01:08:09]  So this is from Jani.
[01:08:11]  Michael and I had been playing baseball in front of their house when Michael sent one of my pitches zooming off his bat and over the house.
[01:08:19]  I ran around the back in search of the ball and came upon Mary reading on a blanket.
[01:08:24]  She lay completely naked, her backside to the sun.
[01:08:27]  I was breathless.
[01:08:29]  She hadn't heard me coming, and I stood there for what seemed to me a very long time, caulking.
[01:08:34]  At the time, I had no words for the vision that I beheld, and I knew that beauty such as hers was something I longed to know better.
[01:08:42]  When Mary finally looked up and saw me, she wasn't embarrassed or upset or even startled.
[01:08:46]  She just smiled, letting me know that it was okay.
[01:08:50]  No sin had been committed.
[01:08:52]  Damn.
[01:08:53]  Very progressive.
[01:08:54]  I will say my sexual awakening came from the mother in the movie Problem Child 2.
[01:08:59]  And I say that with absolutely no, I'm not joking.
[01:09:04]  Really?
[01:09:04]  Yes, yes.
[01:09:06]  At my friend Awar's house.
[01:09:07]  We watched it when I was a kid.
[01:09:09]  How old were you?
[01:09:10]  I don't know, eight, nine or something.
[01:09:12]  But I was like, oh my God, she is.
[01:09:15]  My first erection was during that movie.
[01:09:18]  Okay, that's too much of a video.
[01:09:19]  I was just telling you.
[01:09:21]  But yeah, so, I mean, Jani's father is also in this milieu.
[01:09:26]  I mean, Jani's father is a CIA agent.
[01:09:30]  And Jani points to the idea that his father knows about Mary's death before it's even been announced in the newspapers or on the news as like a very critical part of his case.
[01:09:45]  Jani comes out with saying, you know, this was a CIA operation, as opposed to Nina Burley, who says, this is a unfortunate murder that happened to a CIA wife.
[01:09:57]  Yeah.
[01:09:58]  So here's the fun stuff is that Cord and Mary get divorced and then Mary dates another.
[01:10:06]  She's also a painter.
[01:10:07]  I mean, she is very creatively talented and sort of gets to like become this cool 60s, like independent lady after having kids.
[01:10:20]  She seems very sensual, I have to say.
[01:10:22]  No comment.
[01:10:25]  She does.
[01:10:25]  Yeah, she does.
[01:10:26]  Yeah, no, she does.
[01:10:26]  She's painting, naked.
[01:10:28]  She's very like of the body.
[01:10:30]  She seems to love like kind of like hedonistic, but also very like high-minded.
[01:10:36]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:10:36]  Very aware, self-aware.
[01:10:38]  It's funny how all this like kind of like free love, not free love, but like this sort of like freedom stuff is really so concentrated on like the East Coast upper classes during this period too.
[01:10:49]  I mean, the West Coast had its own like whatever beat thing, but like this like this like Harvard Gailey kind of like New England Northeast set has like their this like this such a specific culture too, where they like they all have to be like they're all wonderful artists and poets and we're all writers and like I think Cord Meyer was a frustrated novelist.
[01:11:09]  Well it all seems also very like I be it seems very influenced by psychoanalysis at the same time.
[01:11:18]  Yeah.
[01:11:18]  Which is very much you know focused on the body and you know you know these guys are on the couch too.
[01:11:24]  Oh yeah.
[01:11:24]  Absolutely.
[01:11:25]  Back of the back of the hand on the head saying, hey doc, I can't believe you.
[01:11:29]  And you know who's listening to those tapes?
[01:11:31]  Jesus, James Jesus, Angleton.
[01:11:33]  Also Jesus Christ.
[01:11:34]  Yes.
[01:11:34]  He's coming.
[01:11:35]  He's always everybody.
[01:11:36]  You know what I mean?
[01:11:38]  But yeah, I mean great NSA agent in the sky.
[01:11:41]  She becomes like this like this Georgetown painter, you know, like she takes up with this.
[01:11:47]  And I feel what little I know about this relationship makes me feel kind of bad for her.
[01:11:51]  But she takes up this relationship with Kenneth Noland, who is an abstract painter, who I believe actually never even really sees her work.
[01:12:00]  He's just like kind of, you know, hanging around.
[01:12:04]  Yeah.
[01:12:05]  They are both in like the DC color school, I think is the movement that they're part of.
[01:12:11]  But yeah, I also get that feeling that he never saw her art as like valid.
[01:12:16]  And I mean, Mary also becomes part of like what is later termed like a cell of women LSD gurus and is able to like get joints into the White House and like has this little female network within the Georgetown area, which is pretty cool.
[01:12:37]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:12:38]  I think we need to talk about that a little.
[01:12:40]  I think we should talk about the little drug stuff first and then maybe how she gets the rumors that she, as you so eloquently put it in talking to us earlier, smoked doinks with JFK.
[01:12:55]  So I hate Timothy Leary.
[01:12:59]  Yes.
[01:13:00]  We've made that clear on the podcast like a billion times.
[01:13:03]  Instead of breaking him out of prison, they should have actually Revolutionary should have built a worse prison to put him in that one.
[01:13:10]  Deeper prison.
[01:13:11]  They should have taken him to Angola or where they take him.
[01:13:13]  Not Angola.
[01:13:14]  They fucking took him to Algeria.
[01:13:17]  They should have taken him to Algeria and shot him there.
[01:13:20]  I hate Timothy Lear.
[01:13:21]  Yeah.
[01:13:22]  Yeah, he's a fucking liar and also he's a freak and I don't, I don't like what he was doing with all that kind of stuff.
[01:13:27]  Yeah, I don't trust him.
[01:13:28]  Get him out of here.
[01:13:29]  I don't like what you're saying.
[01:13:31]  And I don't like and I don't trust the reasons why you're saying it.
[01:13:35]  I don't like some fucking psychedelic clown.
[01:13:37]  So don't tell me what to do.
[01:13:39]  Well, I don't know.
[01:13:39]  Isn't that his whole thing?
[01:13:40]  I'm not telling you what to do.
[01:13:41]  But he is.
[01:13:42]  He is.
[01:13:42]  Drop in.
[01:13:43]  Yeah, I don't want to.
[01:13:44]  Drop out.
[01:13:45]  I'm not doing it.
[01:13:45]  I'm trying to drop in.
[01:13:46]  Yeah.
[01:13:47]  I'm trying to skate.
[01:13:49]  So she meets him in 62, right?
[01:13:53]  Yeah, at the Harvard Psilocybin Project.
[01:13:57]  And Leary says, also, just like Janny, just like Brace, just like myself, falls in love with Mary upon first seeing her.
[01:14:06]  And apparently they go right back to Leary's house to drop mushrooms together.
[01:14:12]  And she says during this mid-trip, a guy that she just met, Mary says, the guys who run things, I mean, the guys who really run things in Washington are very interested in psychology and drugs in particular.
[01:14:26]  And they want to use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing, for control.
[01:14:32]  True.
[01:14:33]  So true.
[01:14:34]  This is Leary saying this, though, years later.
[01:14:37]  Yes.
[01:14:38]  Okay.
[01:14:39]  This is a reported incident from Leary.
[01:14:42]  All of the stuff really about LSD is just Leary saying there's zero evidence elsewhere.
[01:14:50]  But she becomes part of this, like you're little, you're saying like a little clique of Georgetown trippers, basically.
[01:14:58]  Yeah.
[01:14:59]  And Leary reports that she asked him to teach her how to become an LSD guru and like wanted to, she said she wanted to turn on one of her very powerful friends, her boyfriend.
[01:15:14]  And then Leary, in a traditional liar guy way, remembers like two decades later, like, oh, maybe she was talking about JFK.
[01:15:26]  Yeah, because that wouldn't be the first thing on his mind at the time.
[01:15:30]  Yeah, Well, we got to get to the, we got to get to the famous incident here of her bringing some weed to the White House.
[01:15:53]  Yeah, JFK smoked on that loud in the White House with Mary.
[01:15:59]  This is like confirmed.
[01:16:01]  The JFK White House is very strange because a bunch of those little dorks who worked for him would spend the rest of their lives saying he was a perfect saint.
[01:16:10]  I don't know what you're talking about.
[01:16:11]  He never slept with anyone.
[01:16:13]  But like JFK said in passing at one point, like, you know, I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass every day.
[01:16:24]  Strange.
[01:16:25]  The White House was like.
[01:16:26]  Fucking Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:16:27]  I'd say I would say most of my migraines have been because of strange pieces of ass.
[01:16:35]  Liz shook her head, but it's true.
[01:16:38]  Yeah, I mean, so she, she, I mean, JFK, listen, everybody knows he and his brother, which I think is weird, almost certainly had sex with Marilyn Monroe.
[01:16:53]  More than once.
[01:16:53]  More than once.
[01:16:54]  He loved blondes.
[01:16:55]  He loved blondes.
[01:16:56]  And brunettes.
[01:16:56]  And Brunette, me too.
[01:16:57]  And redheads.
[01:16:58]  Love them.
[01:16:59]  And what's the other one with black hair?
[01:17:02]  Yes.
[01:17:03]  Ravenhead.
[01:17:04]  Yeah.
[01:17:05]  Does.
[01:17:05]  And I'm sure like a strawberry he would be into.
[01:17:08]  Maybe some women with shaved heads if he lived to the 90s.
[01:17:12]  You know?
[01:17:12]  I'm sure he's like an ombre, which is really, you know, you can have lots of colors in that.
[01:17:17]  Ombre is crazy.
[01:17:18]  I still don't know what's going on with those.
[01:17:20]  That blew my mind when I was 18 when I had a girlfriend that was an ombre.
[01:17:23]  What are you doing?
[01:17:25]  What are you?
[01:17:26]  But he was getting it all over the place, which we should maybe do an episode sometime.
[01:17:31]  A lot of JFK stuff.
[01:17:32]  But he had a lot of, there was a lot of these women in his life.
[01:17:35]  Next year, maybe.
[01:17:36]  There's a, there's always, yeah, next year if we should just do our episode of JFK's women, because sick of the guy himself.
[01:17:42]  But he, he, he, the Marilyn Monroe thing is there's an interesting little Peter Lovenda.
[01:17:50]  I think it's in, I can't remember, something grimoire or whatever, about the circumstances around, surrounding her death.
[01:17:57]  Well, Marilyn Monroe guys are like, I mean, that's a whole other kind of guy.
[01:18:03]  Well, it's just like, that's a whole other rabbit hole going into the mysteries and this, you know, the kind of chaos of Marilyn Monroe.
[01:18:12]  But Mary brings in a little bit of that sticky, icky, good shit to the White House and is like, I bet it was bad.
[01:18:20]  I bet it was so bad.
[01:18:24]  Just like, there's no way.
[01:18:26]  It was like, Jack, try this.
[01:18:30]  And he, he apparently burns it down with her.
[01:18:34]  And she's like trying to get him as they fucking do.
[01:18:37]  Everyone's always smoke a little more, smoke a little more.
[01:18:39]  But I lose the smoke contest.
[01:18:41]  And she's like, smoke this.
[01:18:42]  And he smokes it.
[01:18:43]  And then she's trying to get him to smoke more.
[01:18:44]  He's like, but what if the Russians attack?
[01:18:47]  Yeah, I love that.
[01:18:49]  What if the Russians attack?
[01:18:52]  You have to do it in the accent, too.
[01:18:53]  I can't do it in the Boston accent.
[01:18:55]  Can you do it, Devin?
[01:18:57]  No, I've been thinking about it all week, and I just can't.
[01:19:03]  But what if the fuck, I can't do it.
[01:19:06]  Boston accent or whatever.
[01:19:08]  Not even Boston.
[01:19:10]  Yeah.
[01:19:10]  Yeah.
[01:19:11]  What if the Russians attack?

=== Cocaine And Conspiracy (07:13) ===

[01:19:13]  That's pretty good.
[01:19:16]  I can't, I can't, why?
[01:19:18]  I get a migraine if I don't get a strange piece of ass every day.
[01:19:21]  After the fact, it's like, well, if they attack, like, you're high as shit.
[01:19:24]  You're high as shit.
[01:19:25]  Just delegate, bro.
[01:19:26]  Yeah.
[01:19:26]  That's what being a leader is.
[01:19:27]  Pass that football.
[01:19:29]  And she's also like, well, if you don't, I think, is it she that offers him cocaine or does he offer her cocaine?
[01:19:34]  I've read that he offers her cocaine.
[01:19:37]  Like, I will get you some Coke in exchange for these drugs.
[01:19:42]  Yeah.
[01:19:43]  I will say this.
[01:19:44]  Weed probably sucked back then, but Coke likely ruled back then.
[01:19:48]  It was probably so good.
[01:19:51]  My God.
[01:19:52]  Especially the presidents.
[01:19:54]  Because that's before they even had Laxis.
[01:19:56]  Who knows where he's even getting it?
[01:19:57]  President's weed?
[01:19:58]  Excuse me.
[01:19:59]  Cocaine?
[01:19:59]  Yeah.
[01:20:00]  Dentist, probably.
[01:20:01]  He's getting it fresh from the source.
[01:20:03]  But they, so they, they're also, weed also is kind of back then, I feel like known as an aphrodisiac.
[01:20:09]  Like there's an air of like sexuality around weed.
[01:20:11]  Like you smoke a little tea and then have your like bohemian love making session.
[01:20:16]  And I feel like that's kind of the air that it's like presented in.
[01:20:22]  And it's, I, I don't, when did their affair actually start, Devin?
[01:20:27]  Uh, let's see.
[01:20:28]  I do know 58 is when they get divorced.
[01:20:33]  And I think they start the affair in 1961.
[01:20:37]  But you're right.
[01:20:38]  I remember Norman Mailer also having a deranged quote about like, have you ever had sex on weed?
[01:20:44]  It's amazing.
[01:20:46]  It's crazy that all these people are so like bohemian and central, but it's like your ass is in like a woolly turtleneck and tweed all day.
[01:20:52]  Like that's crazy.
[01:20:54]  That was both.
[01:20:55]  That's like, you think you'd like loosen up a little bit that you're quite restricted in those thick fabrics.
[01:21:00]  So imagine smoking weed, wearing like an eight-pound turtleneck like sweater like those guys, how itchy you would feel.
[01:21:06]  No problem.
[01:21:07]  It's no, you'd feel in swampy DC.
[01:21:10]  It's like July.
[01:21:12]  You just, you're wearing the thickest sweater and sweater vest underneath that.
[01:21:15]  Yeah.
[01:21:16]  So itchy.
[01:21:18]  I guess they're all chasing it with like terrible whiskey.
[01:21:21]  But she is so there's like a bunch of basically like they've been able to figure out that they were having this affair A, because people talked about it, but B, because she's on like White House logs.
[01:21:30]  And she's not on like, I mean, she was often also a guest of people.
[01:21:33]  So like they don't even know how many times she was there, but she was there.
[01:21:37]  She was like always around, like so much so that people would comment like she's a fixture.
[01:21:41]  Yeah.
[01:21:41]  Like she was just always there.
[01:21:43]  Which is kind of, you don't, that's another thing you really don't hear much about these days.
[01:21:47]  People, just like random people being around the White House.
[01:21:50]  They don't really like that.
[01:21:51]  Trump had some of those.
[01:21:53]  That's true.
[01:21:53]  But they weren't girls.
[01:21:55]  No.
[01:21:56]  They were just like old men.
[01:21:58]  Yeah.
[01:21:59]  Just like weird, drunk, old, it's like Rudy Giuliani.
[01:22:02]  And the pillowman.
[01:22:03]  The pillow guy and Rudy.
[01:22:05]  It's like we've come a lot.
[01:22:07]  Talk about like pockmarked, sweaty, bloated alcoholics.
[01:22:10]  Someone left Blow there last year.
[01:22:11]  That's this year.
[01:22:12]  This year.
[01:22:13]  And they were like, we don't know how that got in.
[01:22:15]  Have you seen it from like a tourist group?
[01:22:17]  They said, I think.
[01:22:18]  Have you seen how little Coke it is, too?
[01:22:19]  It's like $20.
[01:22:21]  No.
[01:22:23]  But yeah, I mean, she's definitely Hunter.
[01:22:26]  She's there when Marilyn Monroe dies.
[01:22:28]  Like, she's at the White House.
[01:22:30]  Yeah.
[01:22:31]  Consoling him, I think.
[01:22:33]  Yeah, that's the story is that she's also there during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
[01:22:38]  And the counterculture will pick that up and sort of run with it and say, Mary Meyer is like this LSD guru for Kennedy.
[01:22:47]  She's bringing him back from the brink of like this Cold War death drive.
[01:22:55]  She really does become like the anima and like the Jungian sense.
[01:23:00]  I love that.
[01:23:00]  It's an obnoxious thing to say, but it's true.
[01:23:03]  I don't know if that's true, but I love that for her.
[01:23:06]  And I think that we should believe that for fun sometimes.
[01:23:09]  think it's a fun thing to believe so again allegedly after the affair ends with uh philip graham uh out in arizona with his girlfriend hammered drunk in a bunch of in front of a bunch of journalists you
[01:23:38]  and he just starts running his mouth about Mary Meyer and JFK.
[01:23:43]  And allegedly, that's when they decide to dial it down.
[01:23:47]  But as you're saying, Mary Meyer is still like a fixture in the White House all the way up until the assassination.
[01:23:55]  Is there anything we know about what Mary thought of the assassination?
[01:23:59]  The only thing is, of course, from Timothy Leary, who is alleged to have called, I can't remember if he called her or she called him, but she allegedly said he was getting too far out of their control.
[01:24:15]  Right.
[01:24:17]  We do know, though, that like she was definitely passing information about Cord Meyer to Kennedy.
[01:24:24]  And Cord and Kennedy hated each other.
[01:24:27]  And like Cord went on a big long screed in his diary that he knew his wife read about like this guy is never going to put me in the White House and like he's never going to give me a job and I'm going to have to wait until the next administration.
[01:24:40]  That makes me so mad.
[01:24:42]  So mad.
[01:24:43]  I might kill her.
[01:24:44]  I might murder.
[01:24:47]  Well, we do know, we do know that she had purchased a copy of the Warren Commission report shortly after it came out, very shortly after, because she was killed pretty soon after that, too.
[01:25:02]  And that she read it with great interest.
[01:25:04]  And the Warren Commission report is very fucking long.
[01:25:08]  Yes, big boy.
[01:25:09]  You know, and I, you know, on one hand, like, you know, for taking the very non-conspiratorial view, you know, if somebody that I dated was assassinated and then they wrote like congressional report, like thousands of words about it, I'm like, I'd probably pick that up.
[01:25:23]  Sure.
[01:25:23]  I don't know if I'd read it, but I'd pick it up.
[01:25:26]  But she apparently read it with great, great interest.
[01:25:30]  And this is notable because so many people that she knew very well, including the man who recruited her ex-husband to the CIA, were involved in the whitewash that this report contained.
[01:25:46]  Yeah, you guys were talking about last in the JFK series, just about how the Warren Commission report needed to toe a very specific line about, you know, avoiding nuclear war and that Engleton is one of the main tamperers with that document.
[01:26:06]  And so later the lore goes that Mary Meyer, who has lots of connections to journalists and big platforms, was threatening to go public with both her affair and her objecting to the Warren Commission.
[01:26:23]  And that's why she had to get got.

=== Mary's Dilemma (06:50) ===

[01:26:26]  So yes, that's something that needs to be kind of nailed down here is that like the affair, which we've been talking about a bunch here, is not publicly known at this point, like at all.
[01:26:36]  Like people don't know that like this is not common knowledge.
[01:26:39]  People don't know this.
[01:26:40]  It's not been publicized at all.
[01:26:41]  Yeah.
[01:26:42]  And people don't even know the extent of what the CIA is doing until Watergate, basically.
[01:26:49]  And also sort of coincides mid-70s with the first reports about the affair.
[01:26:56]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:26:57]  So, yeah, there is a lot of there's a lot of different opinions about what could possibly happen, what could have happened on the towpath.
[01:27:10]  I'm not, I don't really know, just as a maybe closing set of questions, like, I don't really know what happened.
[01:27:20]  I think Ray Crump easily could have done it.
[01:27:22]  Peter Janney's version of what he says happens is like that it involves like a team of 10 people.
[01:27:31]  Basically every character on the towpath has to be involved in like the hit squad for this, for his sort of idea to come up.
[01:27:41]  Yeah, it's a little hard to wrap your head around.
[01:27:46]  And then Jani also gets really fixated on William Mitchell, who is like the jogger on the towpath.
[01:27:52]  Yeah, yeah, there's like a jogger that passes by at one point who I believe says he works for the Department of Defense.
[01:27:59]  And Jani is convinced that he actually, because his, I mean, I guess fair enough, like his, his, his records don't match up.
[01:28:07]  And like, you know, basically he's pointing like, oh, this means he works for the CIA as possibly like an operational agent rather than like, you know, a bureaucrat or whatever.
[01:28:18]  But he basically points to that as like, this guy must have been the one who actually shot her because he was part of this like hit team who did this professional hit on Mary.
[01:28:28]  Yeah.
[01:28:29]  You know, it's funny, you're bringing up the wilderness of mirrors earlier.
[01:28:33]  And you said, Devin, you said at the beginning of this that if this whole incident and story feels like it was designed to like kind of make you go insane because every point you turn, there's like another character with another connection that maybe could be, but maybe couldn't be, but is also somehow kind of collaged together in this weird mosaic that if you kind of like squint and you like draw some,
[01:29:01]  you know, strings together, could make out one story or it could make out another story.
[01:29:06]  And at the same time, all of these people are kind of in a milieu that is like incredibly important and influential and also very, I don't know, a little like raucous.
[01:29:19]  And so it's all this stuff that feels, it's all very slippery.
[01:29:23]  And then you got fucking Timothy Leary in there.
[01:29:25]  Like, I'm curious, like, before we wrap up, I'm curious, like, what even brought you into this story?
[01:29:31]  Like, what's your, what's the story of you getting into it?
[01:29:34]  Oh, yeah.
[01:29:36]  It is, I, like I mentioned, I'm not a huge JFK head, but I was looking into the this era of the CIA because I'm working on like a nonfiction book about the Veiled Prophet and I need to know a little bit more about like early to middle CIA history.
[01:29:59]  And this one comes up also with one of my favorite St. Louis paranoids, Ken Thomas, who ran the steam shovel press for a long time.
[01:30:09]  And Ken was another guy who was like very interested in Mary as like this goddess and that the secrets of the aliens are in the diary, that kind of stuff, which I love those stories.
[01:30:23]  I even love a story like this that is like a little too hard to figure out.
[01:30:28]  But as I tried to do in the essay, like I'm not necessarily trying to convince anybody of any one narrative, but that you can still learn things about history and politics through Ray Crump's story, even if he is the murderer in the end that just gets implicated in this gigantic web.
[01:30:49]  Like, it's still, it's an interesting little paranoid map to make.
[01:30:56]  I think that there's something that's very like attractive about this story, too, in that like That I think attracts a lot of people to it is the love affair and the sort of doomed lovers aspect of her and JFK, right?
[01:31:09]  Like both dying within a year of each other and both getting shot.
[01:31:13]  And, you know, one getting shot as president.
[01:31:16]  Well, JFK wasn't the first president to get shot, certainly, but like, you know, it's a little more in that line of work than it is like in her line of work, which is beautiful painter.
[01:31:26]  And, you know, there's this sort of like, you know, I know there was a letter that JFK purportedly wrote to her, but never sent like a sort of steamy love letter, which is, I, you know, implore you to look up if you're into, it's not steamy.
[01:31:45]  It's not like I missed your mucus or something.
[01:31:48]  No, you got to do it in the accent.
[01:31:50]  I can, do you want me to read the letter?
[01:31:51]  I have the letter.
[01:31:54]  But it is, it's, you know, it's just this sort of like romantic thing.
[01:32:00]  And there's, there is a great deal of like, I guess, mystery to all this because like even if Crump shot her, why?
[01:32:08]  You know, like it's, it's, it's, obviously, like he, there was, he, he was violent towards women, uh, mostly after this.
[01:32:15]  Like, you know, he spent a year in jail and mostly after that year in jail, he was, he's definitely capable of violence towards women.
[01:32:21]  But like, that isn't a, a, there's a lot of wife beaters in this world and not all of them just shoot a lady randomly on a telepath.
[01:32:29]  Who didn't have a purse on her?
[01:32:30]  No, exactly.
[01:32:31]  Yeah.
[01:32:33]  And it's, it's just like, you know, there's no gun.
[01:32:37]  It's just, it's so strange because there isn't really a pat explanation.
[01:32:40]  There's an explanation you can come up with, you know, with a lot of, it's almost similar to the, to the Crump case.
[01:32:45]  Like there's a lot of circumstantial evidence, but like what is it?
[01:32:50]  And there's just that MacGuffin of the diary.
[01:32:52]  We don't know what's in that fucking diary.
[01:32:54]  And we never know.
[01:32:55]  We shouldn't either because I think it should be illegal to read people's diaries.
[01:32:58]  I like that.
[01:32:59]  That's nice.
[01:33:00]  Absolutely.
[01:33:12]  Well, Devin, the pieces, you know, I said it at the beginning, but I'll say it at the end too.

=== Why A Big Suit Jacket? (04:41) ===

[01:33:16]  The piece is fantastic.
[01:33:17]  We're going to link to it.
[01:33:18]  I implore all of our listeners, like, go read it and get into it and get kind of freaky with it because it's a fun read.
[01:33:28]  Yeah, I, as always, love having you on, Devin.
[01:33:32]  And frankly, I always like it when you write a little thing because I like to read them and then sometimes you come on afterwards.
[01:33:39]  Yeah, it's always great.
[01:33:42]  But you can't see him, but Devin is very clearly in a coat closet right now.
[01:33:49]  And I appreciate you taking this time to sit in a small, confined room and speak to us about this.
[01:33:57]  I'm always in the closet thinking about lots of paranoid stuff.
[01:34:02]  There you go.
[01:34:03]  There you go.
[01:34:04]  All right.
[01:34:04]  Au revoir.
[01:34:05]  Au revoir.
[01:34:20]  Did I tell you I bought a clown collar?
[01:34:23]  No.
[01:34:24]  But tell me.
[01:34:25]  Do you want to see it?
[01:34:26]  Yeah.
[01:34:27]  This is, we're using this Riatro.
[01:34:28]  It's Spanish.
[01:34:29]  It's a Spanish clown.
[01:34:30]  What are you doing?
[01:34:31]  What is in your life demands this?
[01:34:34]  This is for around the home.
[01:34:35]  You should see the size of the turtleneck Liz has on right now.
[01:34:38]  Yeah.
[01:34:38]  Don't make fun.
[01:34:39]  I'm not making fun.
[01:34:40]  It's very warm.
[01:34:41]  It's huge.
[01:34:43]  Does it look too big?
[01:34:44]  No.
[01:34:45]  It's skinny.
[01:34:46]  I feel like it's fashionable to wear clothes that are too old.
[01:34:48]  It won't let me.
[01:34:49]  Women always do this.
[01:34:50]  They'll wear a giant suit jacket.
[01:34:52]  You notice that?
[01:34:53]  Yeah.
[01:34:54]  What?
[01:34:54]  I wear that all the time.
[01:34:56]  I know, but I said, but I've been wearing that for a while.
[01:34:58]  I know, but I'm saying like a thing that seems to be like an eternal fashion woman thing is just to wear a big suit jacket.
[01:35:04]  Yeah.
[01:35:05]  Big old suit jacket.
[01:35:06]  But that's because I've always like, my style's always been sort of like.
[01:35:10]  Big suit jacket.
[01:35:13]  I don't know.
[01:35:14]  What is that?
[01:35:16]  What's the big suit jacket?
[01:35:18]  What's the style name?
[01:35:19]  I don't know what you would call it.
[01:35:20]  I guess it's sort of a little 80s coated, but it's kind of like a classic silhouette.
[01:35:26]  Gotcha.
[01:35:27]  It does lean a little.
[01:35:29]  Look, this is my clown collar.
[01:35:30]  Oh, this is different than I thought.
[01:35:32]  Yeah, of course.
[01:35:33]  Oh, okay.
[01:35:34]  All right.
[01:35:35]  And I was definitely expecting something else.
[01:35:39]  This is cute.
[01:35:40]  It's nice, right?
[01:35:40]  But you could see me wearing it.
[01:35:42]  I could see you wearing that.
[01:35:42]  Yeah, but that's all right.
[01:35:44]  I do love a like elegant clown.
[01:35:46]  I pictured something in white with red polka dots on it.
[01:35:50]  They might make, no, they don't make that version.
[01:35:52]  Do you think I should get ruffles?
[01:35:54]  I don't, you know, I do think, and I have thought this for a while, and I'm going to say it, especially because you have a bit of a rumpledness to you right now.
[01:36:03]  Oh, because of that.
[01:36:04]  Yeah.
[01:36:04]  My hair.
[01:36:04]  Say that I wash my hair.
[01:36:06]  It makes me always look fucked up.
[01:36:08]  Which is that I do think that you could pull off a silk ruffled shirt.
[01:36:12]  What's it?
[01:36:13]  What?
[01:36:13]  Dude, no.
[01:36:14]  Anytime a woman's ever told me I could pull off something and then I've gotten that.
[01:36:18]  Okay, it's been the thing I've least been able to pull off in history.
[01:36:21]  You have no idea.
[01:36:22]  But I've seen clothes throughout my life that I have some female has commanded that I purchase because this is actually good on you.
[01:36:33]  I would never actually let you go out in the world with that, but I just would like to see you wear it for me.
[01:36:38]  Okay.
[01:36:38]  I'll wear it for you.
[01:36:39]  I'll wear it for you.
[01:36:40]  If you buy it, $2,000 on Socents or whatever.
[01:36:44]  Fucking some Celine's fucking best pirate shirt.
[01:36:48]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:36:49]  What's that?
[01:36:50]  Essence sale right now.
[01:36:52]  Essence is always having a sale.
[01:36:53]  That's the only thing they do is put everything on sale.
[01:36:55]  Essence?
[01:36:55]  Yeah.
[01:36:56]  That's what that's supposed to be?
[01:36:58]  Yeah.
[01:36:59]  Yeah, it's essence.
[01:37:00]  Like the essence.
[01:37:02]  I know.
[01:37:03]  I'm going to tell you right now.
[01:37:04]  I don't remember when Essence came out, maybe like 10 years ago.
[01:37:08]  It took me a while and I worked in fashion to get that one.
[01:37:12]  I got to tell you, as always, head-to-toe, normal clothes.
[01:37:17]  And no endies.
[01:37:19]  Let's wrap this up.
[01:37:20]  Yeah, I got to go get my clone caller.
[01:37:22]  I meant Mike Roch.
[01:37:23]  But the episode as well.
[01:37:26]  That was fun.
[01:37:27]  My name is Liz.
[01:37:28]  My name is Brace.
[01:37:29]  We are, of course, as always, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:37:33]  And the podcast is called True Anon.
[01:37:35]  We'll see you next time.
[01:37:36]  Bye.
[01:37:56]  Come out.
[01:37:57]  Come out.