In this minisode, Molly highlights a couple of listener answers to questions raised on the show. Most importantly, we finally find out what Dan Burros was watching on TV on November 10, 1962.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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| This is an iHeart podcast. | |
| Guaranteed human. | |
| A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium. | |
| Women began to go missing. | |
| It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them. | |
| The murders have never been solved. | |
| Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence. | |
| Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now. | |
| Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Hello, Molly here with a little mini-sode. | |
| It's the end of the year, and that's got me thinking about trying to wrap up loose ends. | |
| Earlier this month, I answered some of your questions, but I left out something important. | |
| Sometimes you guys answer my questions. | |
| I get so many fascinating little tidbits from you all, and I'm not lying when I say I really do read all of your emails. | |
| I read all of them. | |
| And I appreciate every person of Greek ancestry who wrote in with their own family stories about the nickname Miyanaki, which is just Greek for little Johnny. | |
| And I was very intrigued to find out that Ryan Serault, pronouncing his name Serault and not Sorot, may be more than just the American tradition of mispronouncing anything foreign, because there is a particular linguistic tendency to intentionally bastardize the pronunciation of anything French in certain parts of New England because of local animosity towards Quebec. | |
| And several of you wrote in to tell me that Frank Smith setting his lawn on fire is apparently not that weird. | |
| And burning dormant grass in the winter isn't uncommon in rural areas. | |
| I mean, forgetting there was dynamite hidden in the hay bales is definitely not standard procedure. | |
| But the fact that he intentionally set his yard on fire wouldn't have been confusing to the fire department. | |
| And I didn't know that. | |
| You guys all know so much, and I love learning new things from you too. | |
| So thank you to everyone who has written in to share their knowledge with me. | |
| I think I'll start keeping notes on the fun facts I get so I don't have to just rely on my memory and maybe I'll add in a recurring segment or a quarterly roundup of the loose ends you guys have tied up for me. | |
| Off the top of my head though, there are a couple I wanted to tell you about. | |
| I'll keep your names off the air because I forgot to ask you how you felt about that and I put this off too long to have time to write you and ask you. | |
| But I recently got an email from a court reporter who had some information for me about what happens in the transcript when someone misspeaks. | |
| In the October 28th mini soad about how often people accidentally mix up Norman Rockwell the artist and George Lincoln Rockwell the Nazi, I told you about the time I heard a lawyer make that mistake in court. | |
| It was a memorable moment. | |
| I mean, it wasn't consequential to the case, but I remember it so clearly because I burst out laughing and was briefly a little bit grateful for the global pandemic because that's why I was listening to the trial on my headphones at home and not in the courtroom where that kind of outburst would have gotten me in trouble. | |
| But when I went back to look at the transcript while I was writing about it, it wasn't there. | |
| I mean, I couldn't believe it. | |
| I thought transcripts were these infallible records of everything that was said in the courtroom. | |
| Now, this might earn me more emails from court reporters because I'm sure court rules and local best practices vary. | |
| But the court reporter who wrote in said that where they work, the rule is that you don't put into the transcript words that were spoken by mistake if they are immediately verbally corrected. | |
| So the transcript wouldn't say, George Norman Rockwell, I'm sorry, George Lincoln Rockwell. | |
| It would just omit the mistake entirely. | |
| And if you're just reading the transcript, all you would see are the words that they meant to say. | |
| That makes sense, but it has been a tremendously unsettling realization for me. | |
| And now I'm never going to stop wondering what tiny little pieces are missing from the transcripts I read. | |
| It sounds so minor, right? | |
| It sounds totally meaningless, but when a case is appealed, there's not usually an audio recording. | |
| The appellate case is just a transcript. | |
| So there's no true faithful record of what the jury heard in the courtroom. | |
| There is no objective truth or reality when you're looking at the past. | |
| I don't know. | |
| It really shook me. | |
| And now this is just a mini, so I'll just tell you one more. | |
| One of you emailed me to tell me what Dan Burroughs was watching on TV on Saturday, November 10th, 1962. | |
| This was from the first episode about John Patler, the death of a demagogue part one from September 18th of this year. | |
| And toward the end of that episode, I was talking about the few months John Patler spent in New York City in late 1962, early 1963, during one of his spats with George Lincoln Rockwell. | |
| Remember, before he ultimately murdered Rockwell in 67, Patler had a few rough spots in his friendship with Rockwell. | |
| And in 1962, he had packed up and moved to New York City with another member of the American Nazi Party who was so mad at Rockwell that he also quit. | |
| It was a guy named Dan Burroughs. | |
| And they set up their own rival Nazi group. | |
| It never really had very many members and it was struggling to really even be a group at all. | |
| And this failure was starting to put a strain on their friendship. | |
| And the real nail in the coffin came on November 10th, 1962. | |
| John Patler was arrested that day for putting on a one-man protest outside Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral. | |
| And Dan Burroughs had refused to go with him that day. | |
| In a biography of Burroughs, it just said he stayed home to watch sports on TV. | |
| I wanted to know what game it was. | |
| The book didn't even say which sport. | |
| I spent like an hour or two on this, which is kind of embarrassing because it doesn't matter. | |
| I don't know anything about sports today, let alone about sports in the 60s, so I gave up. | |
| The day the episode came out, I think honestly, in the middle of the night, within hours of it appearing on the podcast apps, I got a text from my dear friend Goad. | |
| Now, if you don't know Goad, you should check out his coverage of Virginia State politics on Twitter, Blue Sky, and TikTok at God Gatsby, in case you didn't know. | |
| Maybe it's tacky to plug my friend's stuff in the middle of a story, but he's the only person in the world who has both picked me up from jail and been picked up from jail by me. | |
| And that's a special kind of friend. | |
| But God texted me to answer my first question. | |
| No, there weren't reruns of sports games on TV in 1962 like there are today. | |
| So whatever Dan Burroughs was watching, it was a game that would have been played that day. | |
| And God told me that the only televised sport on a Saturday in November of 1962 would have been college football. | |
| So that definitely narrows it down. | |
| And I felt satisfied. | |
| But then recently, one of you took this over the finish line. | |
| There were several college football games on November 10th, 1962, but CBS aired the Purdue at Michigan State game, which Purdue won 17 to 9. | |
| Now, does that matter? | |
| No, not at all. | |
| But I feel so much better knowing it. | |
| And maybe it does kind of drive home the point that Dan Burroughs was completely checked out of whatever he and John Patler were doing. | |
| There's no way he cared about either of those teams. | |
| He didn't even go to college, and he was from the Bronx. | |
| He never spent any time in Indiana or Michigan. | |
| But that football game was still more interesting to him than getting arrested with John Patler at Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral. | |
| So now we know. | |
| And I realize now that I was going about it all wrong. | |
| I was trying to find old TV schedules and newspaper archives instead of seeking out the online archives of sports fanatics. | |
| Research is its own skill. | |
| Subject matter expertise can only take you so far. | |
| You have to know how to find what you don't know. | |
| So I am grateful to all of you who write in to help me fill in those gaps. | |
| Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. | |
| It's research, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger. | |
| Our executive producers are Sophie Licherman and Robert Evans. | |
| The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. | |
| The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard. | |
| You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com. | |
| I will definitely read it. | |
| I probably won't answer it, but I might talk about it on the show. | |
| You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. | |
| Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys. | |
| Women began to go missing. | |
| It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them. | |
| The murders have never been solved. | |
| Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence. | |
| Le Monstre season two is available now. | |
| Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. | |
| I felt it rip through me. | |
| In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why. | |
| They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods. | |
| She received death threats before the bombing. | |
| He received more threats after the bombing. | |
| I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement. | |
| Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. | |
| Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Malcolm Glaudwell here. | |
| This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. | |
| And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years. | |
| That's probably not long enough. | |
| I didn't kill him. | |
| From Revisionist History, this is the Alabama Murders. | |
| Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| What are the cycles fathers pass down that sons are left to heal? | |
| What if being a man wasn't about holding it all together, but learning how to let go? | |
| This is a space where men speak truth and find the power to heal and transform. | |
| I'm Mike Della Rocha. | |
| Welcome to Sacred Lessons. | |
| Listen to Sacred Lessons on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| This is an iHeart podcast. |