Lovesick

Our quests for love can be disappointing. Maddening, even. When the love story that plays out is different than the one imagined – or the one you had wished for – the results can be devastating... or even deadly. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to American Shadows, a production of iHeartRadio and
Grimm and Mild from Air and Manky.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
The letters continued to show up, just as they always had.
They arrived in all sizes and colors, perfumed and sealed
with kisses. The male had always managed to follow Ted
from place to place. The envelopes were a welcome window
into another world, a vehicle for escapism for the amount
of time it took his eyes to scan the pages.

(00:41):
They were made up of gentle missives and sweet nothings,
words of adoration and declarations of love, marriage proposals. They
were one of the most meaningful parts of his long days.
He felt good reading them powerful. Even those who saw
him every day shook their head at this guy, they

(01:01):
thought were they envious? Perhaps to them all of his adoration.
This reverence was a horrifying idea, indeed, but Ted loved
the attention. He had always been good at getting it.
People were drawn to him by all accounts. He was
a catch, a charismatic law school graduate, and a family

(01:24):
man to boot. And Ted's face greased the paper's front
pages and just about every magazine cover at the checkout line,
even from the page, His eyes were arresting, his face handsome,
But it was this same veneer of normalcy that chilled
the American public. He inspired obsession, yes, but also fear

(01:47):
he was a killer. Two hundred and fifty reporters showed
out to broadcast the first televised American murder trial, his
murder trial. But alongside these reporters were thrown of women
clamoring for his attention. And after Ted Bundy was sentenced
to die, his jailhouse confessions only made him more popular.

(02:09):
The stream of letters turned into a cascade. The terror
that Ted wrought across the nineteen seventies had been replaced
with a different emotion, desire. He was inarguably one of
the most popular inmates bound for the electric chair, but
he wasn't alone in stirring passions. This wasn't a new phenomenon,

(02:32):
but it was certainly noteworthy. For as long as people
have been incarcerated, they've had fans on the outside. But why.
Psychologists have long been fascinated by this question, and what
is it about these prisoners, men and women alike that
turned them from nightmare into fantasy? There are few hypotheses.

(02:55):
They have to do with brain chemistry and the stories
that we tell ourselves about love. Romantic love is made
up of chemicals. It's a potent cocktail of oxytocin and
dopamine that hijacks our nervous system and throws our reality
into tumil effectively, when we fall in love, we're under
the influence of drugs. Scientists have watched it light up

(03:17):
brain scans of the newly in love and broken hearted alike.
Some have even gone so far as to categorize love
as a kind of mental illness. Plato famously called out
all those years ago that love is madness. When we're
falling in love, we're overcome with potential, with the idea

(03:38):
of who someone is, or who we think they are,
and who we might be with them. In the case
of jail house romances, especially one that will end in
the electric chair, there's little opportunity to move the relationship
beyond the courtship phase. It can be drawn out, installed
in this space for a very long time, longer than

(03:59):
a general would be on the outside. The senses are heightened,
Every exchange is loaded with meaning. Because this connection isn't
rooted in a collection of shared experiences. The participants engage
in elaborate world building. The relationship, then, is really a
fiction of the participant's design. It's a complicated approach to

(04:22):
finding love, but there are countless people every year who
choose this avenue through any number of dating services catering
to exactly this. And as history tells us, pining for
forbidden love is the raw material from which some of
history's greatest works have been born. But romantic love is

(04:43):
fleeting in any lasting relationship. It's the shortest lived phase.
The heat eventually cools as the mechanics of life set in.
The shine tarnishes, the sparkle dulls. The prolonged exposure between
people breeds famili filiarity. This familiarity breeds comfort, but it
can also breed something else, contempt. There's a lot of

(05:09):
disappointment in our quests for love. When the story that
lays out in front of you is different than the
one you had imagined, the one you had wished for,
the results can be devastating or even deadly. I'm Lauren Vogelbaum.
Welcome to American Shadows. Nanny was nursing another headache. She

(05:41):
stood at her kitchen counter, rubbed her temples and folded
her cake batter together. They had come to her ever
since her childhood accident. They had been with her for
decades now, plaguing her during her days and well into
her nights. She didn't sleep well. Even still, she really
tried hard to be a good mother, a good wife.

(06:03):
But sometimes and it still perplexed her as to why
it just wasn't enough. Maybe she thought she wasn't enough.
Her ideas about romance had been engineered early on her blueprint.
The way she had come to understand what real love
was was through romance. Literature, novels, and magazine columns were

(06:26):
her drugs of choice. For years, she had been studying
these stories, searching for some real proximity to the love
she dreamed of, the love that she hoped would someday
be hers. It certainly wasn't modeled well by her parents,
and Nanny's father was a fearsome man, quick to anger
and didn't hesitate to show it. He was cruel to

(06:48):
his wife and children and kept the reins on his
family tight. It was surprising then that he allowed Nanny
to marry Charlie Bragg's, a local Alabama boy, when she
was fifteen. Her romance novels had set her expectations high
for what this love would be, what shape it would take,
what it would feel like, and who she would become,

(07:10):
But the practicalities of loving someone weren't something Nanny had
ever considered. The teenage couple started off happy, as most do,
and in time started a family, But as the sparks
began to fizzle out and the mundanities of everyday life
began to set in, Nanny became agitated. Charlie's wandering eye

(07:32):
had started to get the best of him, but Nanny
was certainly no angel herself. Even with four children. She
began to wander off for periods of time. She was
searching for that state of limerence, that new relationship electricity
that would make her feel special. The love that she
had always yearned for never seemed to be an impossibility,

(07:55):
if only she continued to make her own opportunities. Charley's mother,
Peggy Jane, who lived with them for some time, loathed
her daughter in law. Nanny had never met her high
standards of care for her son, and less so when
she began seeing other men. Peggy Jane saw how Nanny
and Charley fought, but was still reluctant to admit her

(08:18):
son's complicity in his wife's unhappiness. Things only got worse
when two of their children died. Charlie would later say
that they were sleeping only to suddenly be dead. No
one could wake them. He claimed that their little bodies
had both turned black by the time the undertaker came

(08:39):
to get them. This horrified the household and shocked the community.
What could have happened to two perfectly healthy children. Their
health insurance policies covered some, but not much, of the
expenses for the funerals and the upkeep of the rest
of the young family. Charley didn't believe in such policies himself,

(09:00):
but it seemed that Nanny did. At the funerals, Nanny
cut a stunning figure in her mourning attire, a vision
in black. She had always been beautiful, but in this
moment of grief, standing calm surrounded by family, she was
almost admirable. But Peggy Jane, who had long been privy

(09:20):
to Nanny in her moods, wasn't buying any of it.
She warned Charlie that something was amiss. This woman, who
had played an iron fisted role in Nanny and Charlie's
marriage began to shrink. Peggy Jane began to fear her
own daughter in law and warned her son to be careful.
Though Nanny was an excellent cook, maybe he should be

(09:43):
careful about eating what she fed him. Charlie wouldn't have
to be careful for long, though, as they soon divorced.
Nanny had started going off further and for longer, and
after eight years, they decided to permanently part ways. This
was a choice Charlie later said that probably saved his life.

(10:05):
Nanny reached for a baking dish and dusted it with
flour into it, she poured the batter for one of
her signature cakes, slices of which won her many hearts.
In recent times, she had gotten into the habit of
romancing with sweets. A way to a man's heart is
through his stomach, they say, and she liked to include

(10:26):
pretty paper wrapped baked goods in her correspondence. The mailman
had recently begun delivering fat stacks of letters again now
that she was back on the market. The Lonely Heart's
personal ads and the men who she found there were
never in short supply, and Nanny figured all she needed
to do was keep looking for her soulmate. He was

(10:48):
out there, and she would find him, no matter the cost.
In nineteen twenty nine, Nanny received a letter signed by
a man named Frank Harrelson. It said that he sent

(11:09):
her a poem and a photo of himself, and she
sent a photo back in kind. He replied by showing
up at her doorstep. And what he found, it's believed,
was better than he could have imagined. There was beautiful Nanny,
a cherubic face with dimples on her cheeks, and she
was sweet and gentle, a young, responsible mother looking for

(11:32):
her match. He began sending chocolate and flowers, sweet notes,
and big promises. Within two months, she and her girls
had moved with him to a plot of land in Alabama,
where Nanny intended to begin anew Nanny was utterly besotted.
Here was the gentleman, a real prince charming. It seemed

(11:52):
that she had always deserved. She had finally found him.
If Charlie was a trial run, he had indeed prepared
her for Frank. Frank's old habits didn't take long to
catch up to him. It had had a lifelong affinity
for the bottle a habit that came back full force
after the two had become legally bound. His heavy drinking

(12:16):
soon began to tarnish the luster of Nanny's perfect vision
for herself. For her entire life, she had felt like
an afterthought, prone to the company of neglectful and often
abusive men. He would arrive home breath hot with whiskey
and make slurring demands of her. He was hansy. He
would prowl at all hours and not come home for days.

(12:39):
She was living with a jekyline hide right in her
own bed. So Nannie did what she knew. She threw
herself into parenting her remaining children under her in Frank's roof.
She was especially close to her daughter, Melvina, who was
her first born. Nanny had big dreams for the girl,

(12:59):
a life better than the one she had had, far
beyond the limits of their small Alabama town, But it
soon became clear that the apple didn't fall far from
the tree, and Melvina began repeating her own mother's same mistakes.
Melvina would eventually grow up to welcome not one, but
two children. Her marriage didn't work out, so they came

(13:20):
back to live with her mother. Nanny felt that she
was flighty and disobedient, and careless with her life, and
flagrantly dismissive of the love Nanny gave her. Nanny felt
once again powerless. It's here that Nanny could have been
the savior in her own story, had both of the

(13:41):
children not died. The baby girl was the first to go,
passing in the hospital shortly after her birth. The older child, Robert,
died some months later. In her post birth haze, Melvina
would later remember something so shocking she wouldn't dare say
it out loud. It had all felt like one strange,

(14:04):
bad dream, But in the fog of her memory, she
recalled seeing her mother take a hat pin and push
it through her newborn baby's skull. And after two year
old Robert died suddenly some months later, Melvina's father, Frank,
and his brother Ernest went to visit the child's grave.

(14:25):
Ernest would recall that Frank pointed to the grave and said,
I'll be next. He wasn't wrong. Two months later, Frank
was dead, his body cold and contorted in his backyard.
The police who came to investigate the scene quickly decided
that his demise was attributed to some bad moonshine, which

(14:47):
they could still smell on his body. At the funeral,
Nanny's children stood far away from her what they suspected
cast an even darker pall over the day, as Frank
was lowered into the dirt, their mother, their sweet mother,
was beginning to look less like a cherub and more
like an angel of death. They decided that they would

(15:10):
never again speak to her, out of sheer horror and
fear that she would have no reason to spare their lives. Nanny,
for her part, set about recovering from her grief rather quickly,
a thanks to Frank's smart thinking early in their marriage.
She now had a sizeable life insurance payout but allowed
her to move and buy a new little cottage. It

(15:33):
would be all her own, and for the first time
in her life, she would be indentured to no one.
But still something in her recoiled. She so desperately craved
enmeshment with another person, even when her own history told
her this was a very dangerous thing. So Nanny took
to the rails, traveling all over to visit suitors who

(15:55):
she met in the Lonely Heart's ads, but in all
of this, Nanny couldn't escape her own darkness. She married
for a third time in nineteen forty seven to a
man named Arley, but failed to stay sated for long.
During their marriage, her sister ended up dying after a
short visit, as did Nannie's new mother in law. Then

(16:19):
Arley died in nineteen fifty two. His passing was attributed
to a coronary condition, but it looked suspiciously like the
other deaths that Nanny had seen across the decades of
her life. Not to be deterred, Nanny bought more stamps,
signed more letters, licked more envelopes, and got back out

(16:39):
on the road. When Richard Elmorton wrote to the Diamond
Circle to remove his name from their list, he told
them that thanks to them, he had met a sweet
and wonderful woman. It was an exclusive club for romans seekers,

(17:01):
one which could be opted into by paying top dollar,
and Nanny thought that maybe this would result in her
finding a top caliber mate, a high value man who
would finally appreciate her. He was a tall, tan and
handsome fellow with enough swagger and reputation around Emporia, Kansas
to make tongues waggle, but when he found Nanny she

(17:23):
would be the only one for him, at least for
a little while. She moved there to be with him,
reveling in his adoration and avalanche of gifts. But when
Nanny discovered that she wasn't the only one receiving his
gifts and his affections, the scales fell from her eyes
once again. He became sick while working at a billiard's parlor,

(17:46):
was sent home and died the following day, and their
family dog got sick and their home burned. Morton's son
became suspicious of all of this, but police investigations slim
as they were turned up no evidence. Off to North Carolina,
Nanny went to care for her mother. During her stay,

(18:06):
she would correspond with Samuel L. Dass, who became her
fifth and final husband, and joined him in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
in the wake of her mother's death. He was a
widower and a preacher, Having lost his entire family to
a tornado, He now ministered to his Baptist flock and
lived out similar principles in his home. He came to

(18:29):
loathe Nanny's love of romance novels and considered them wicked things.
Samuel proved himself to be a godly and domineering man.
Her father simply cut from a different set of genetics.
It seems that the blueprint of Nanny's childhood was inescapable.
For across her years, she continued to inadvertently fall into

(18:50):
the old cycles of her childhood. Trauma. History continued to
repeat itself, and her home would prove to be unsafe
for everyone involved. So Nanny would do what she had
always done, dispose of this next person who stood in
her way of finding what she was owed. She knew

(19:11):
the recipe well at this point. A little rat poison
went a long way, especially when administered over a long
period of time. It had worked for all of her
other husbands and tangential people in her orbit. So into
the pot of stewed prunes she stirred the chemical, knowing
full well that the sticky, earthy fruits would cover any

(19:32):
traces of bitterness. It was one of his favorite foods
and he ate them often. In time, Samuel began to
suffer from nausea. He lost sixteen pounds and was sent
to the hospital. It took him weeks to recover, but
he was finally released and allowed to go home. Nanny
had misjudged her dosage, but she wouldn't this time, and

(19:56):
when Samuel arrived back home, she made a big show
of cooking his favorite dinner. She finished the meal with
strong cups of black coffee, another one of his favorites,
and smiled. He was dead in two days. She already
had another plan lined up. She had been corresponding with
a dairy farmer in North Carolina and had even sent

(20:18):
him one of her famous cakes. But Nanny Doss's time
was running out. She had gotten away with literal murder
for so long and across so many states that a
cloud of suspicion was coalescing around her. Her big misstep,
the fatal move if you will, happened when she was

(20:39):
cornered at Samuel's funeral by his attending doctor. There was
no way Samuel would have so suddenly died after leaving
the hospital in such good shape. In this very public setting,
with crying eyes all around, the good doctor pressured Nanny
to allow him to perform an autopsy. Whatever it was

(20:59):
he in sinnea, it might be deadly to the larger community.
Nanny was trapped. She shifted her weight uncomfortably and looked
at the faces around her. I want to find out
what killed my husband, she said, because it might kill
someone else. It didn't take long for Samuel's body to

(21:31):
incriminate Nanny. Upon inspection, he had enough arsenic in his
Organs quote to kill a horse. She was put under surveillance,
in which time she began working as a living housekeeper
with a family. In a strange twist, they knew of
her alleged crimes and kept police abreast of her movements
each day. The mother assured the papers that even though

(21:54):
she knew what Nanny was accused of, and that yes,
they were a bit nervous about eating her cooking, she
didn't think the grandmotherly woman would harm any of her
three children. She told the papers. All I can say
about Nanny was that she was a good woman. In
that time, more bodies were exhumed, and Nanny was finally

(22:15):
brought in for questioning. After countless cigarettes, she calmly confessed
to killing four husbands, but claimed no responsibility for any
of the other deaths around her. According to one paper quote,
she actually seemed to be enjoying her interrogation by police.
Her eyes sparkled merrily. She blamed the impulse on a

(22:37):
head injury she had received in childhood, and also blamed
her victims. For Frank husband number two, she claimed to
have poured rat poison into his whisky. He drank all
the time and wasn't much of a loss, she said.
As for Arlie, husband number three, she claimed she was

(22:57):
jealous of how popular he was with other women and
angry that he threw a wild party at their home
while she was away. She was a bit remorseful that
she had poisoned him because, according to her, he otherwise
was quote a pretty good husband. When she was accused
of killing Richard, husband number four, she initially denied having

(23:19):
even known him, but when police showed her evidence of
the small life insurance policies she had collected after his death,
she came clean. I didn't want any one to know
I had been married to a man that old, she explained,
And Nanny told police that she hadn't liked him running
around with other women and that he had even purchased

(23:39):
an engagement ring for some one else. As for Samuel,
she said, he was just mean to me. He denied
her the simplest pleasures of life, and for this he
had had to go Nanny denied killing any of her
blood kin. She said, I dealt strictly with men, and
when the time comes, I can justify every act. But

(24:03):
this wasn't the case. When the bodies of her mother, sister,
and grandson were exhumed, they were also found to be
pumped full of arsenic. Nanny was spared the electric chair
because the judge deemed her a quote mental defective. Her
eyes sparkled, but looking closely enough, they seemed hollow. Her

(24:24):
spontaneous giggling would ring a trifle too long, as she
explained that she wished everyone could be nice and happy
and kind. She told the newspapers that all of her
husbands had failed her in some way, and that those
failings were often denied by her family and her husband's families.

(24:44):
In her search for connection, Nanny never felt anything but alone.
In nineteen fifty four, she was interviewed on television. The
newscasters suggested she'd take off her glasses and smile. He
told her teasingly that you might get another husband if
you look nice. Nanny giggled and replied, ain't that the

(25:06):
dying truth? There's more to the story. Stick around After
this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. By

(25:33):
the light of the moon, Carl and Elena danced. A
breeze came through the window and carried their two entwined
bodies across the floor. Together they stepped and spun, with
Carl leading. Of course, he was a gentleman, and he
loved a good waltz. It was a peaceful night, a
carefree one, even with the Florida heat hanging heavy and right.

(25:59):
So Kata saying, and thunder rumbled across the coastline. The
beads of sweat appeared on Carl's brow. He felt alive.
He was in a good mood, as he almost always
was when he was near his beloved. He adored Elena
more than anyone he had ever met. After all of
these years, the singsong cadence of her full name, Maria

(26:21):
Elena Malagro the Oios still made his stomach flip. He
had been married once before, but this was different. This
was a love far bigger than him. He almost couldn't
stand the magnitude of it, and it was all theirs.
Carl Panzer had loved Elena for years, so many years.

(26:44):
She was young when they first met in nineteen thirty,
much younger than him, but he felt the electricity in
the space between them. She reanimated his world, infusing it
with technicolor and a verve in his spirit that had
long been dormant. And she was beautiful. But she had
gotten sick. It was tuberculosis, a bad case of it too.

(27:08):
She tried everything. He tried everything, a blood testing, radiation,
electroshock therapy. It all took a toll on her. Carl
remembered those hard days and held her tighter. He could
barely bring himself to think of them. Those times were
so dark, so hopeless, so filled with fear. But life

(27:31):
was different now, and he was grateful for that, and
there was a levity in the air, and their home
felt brighter. He kissed the top of her head and
ran his fingers down her neck. It was rough and cold.
You see. Elena's skin had started decomposing and falling off
years ago, so Karl had replaced it with plaster. He

(27:54):
had also harnessed her joints with piano wires and replaced
her eyes with glass after her had rotted in their sockets.
He made her a wig and stuffed her disemboweled body
with rags Elena was dead and had been for years,
but Carl had found a way for them to be together.

(28:15):
Elena and her mother had first met him at a
Key West hospital where she had gone to seek treatment.
He wasn't a doctor, just a radiologist, but he insisted
that he could help cure her. All the same, Elena
and her family were struck by an overwhelming sense of unease.
The sky was weird, but they were desperate, and Elena

(28:35):
didn't want to die. The other thing Elena didn't want
were Carl's romantic advances. She didn't want to date him,
let alone marry him. She wanted nothing to do with
him socially. At twenty years old, she was young enough
to be his granddaughter, but he kept showering her with
gifts and proposals, none of which Elena accepted. But when

(28:57):
she grew weak, Carl saw an opportunity. He was adamant
about being allowed to move into Elena's home to care
for her. She resisted, but her family put their foot down.
It was all just too much, and she was tired.
Her body couldn't take it any more. After she died,
Karl was pitched into mourning. He paid for her burial plot,

(29:20):
and her headstone, he conveniently left off her last name,
her husband's name, and put his own. Karl made sure
to visit her grave each night, and it was there
he'd say that he heard her singing to him and
begging him to take her home. So two years after
she was buried, on a night just like that, warm

(29:43):
and bright one, he disintered her body, put her in
a little wagon, and wheeled her away. And then he
lived with her body for seven years, and turning her
into a taxidermid doll, keeping her fresh with disinfectants and deodorizers.
He brought her to the breakfast table, and he brought
her to bed with him. But seven years after her death,

(30:07):
Elena's sister Florinda, just couldn't take the rumors any longer.
There were whispers around town about Karl, dreadful, ghoulish whispers,
and about her sister. People insinuated things that chilled even
in the light of the tropical sun. When Florinda confronted
Karl at his home, she discovered that these tales weren't fiction,

(30:30):
they were facts. And there she found her sister costumed
in a wedding dress. She had been made to play
the part of a bride, though she had been veheminently
non consenting to this wall alive, but in her silence
Karl had stopped taking no for an answer. He was

(30:51):
promptly arrested. His denial of her death and Frankensteinian methods
of trying to work around it, and all soon became clear.
He told a newspaper, life is dormant in a person
who has died. The ears can hear, but the eyes
cannot see because they are in darkness. He tried to

(31:11):
engineer a homespun resurrection, bathing Elena's body in tubs of
chemical solutions in the hope that her cells would saturate
and awaken from their suspended animation. But Karl was lucky.
By the time his case went to court, the statue
of limitations for his charges of desecrating a grave was up.

(31:33):
Elena was given a second funeral. She would finally be
allowed to rest. Karl lived out the rest of his
days with an effigy of Elena, a doll with her
death mask glued to its face. His obituary reported that
he died alone, with some rumors saying that he died
in the arms of his fake Elena. It was reported

(31:55):
that he collapsed near the organ that he loved to
play for her. He had once told a newspaper that
he knew she was there with her latent spirit lying dormant,
and hoped that she could hear him at a faint distance.
He believed this act of tenderness of his love would
be beneficial to her in the hopes that it would

(32:17):
keep her mind and spirit at peace.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
American Shadows as hosted by Lauren Vogelbaum. This episode was
written by Robin Minatter, researched by Robin Minitter and Cassandra
di Alba, and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Trevor Young,
with executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
To learn more about the show, visit Grimminmile dot com.

(32:49):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Six