Episode Transcript
[00:01:39] Greetings, Radio Fremont. Claire, darlings, it's time for Jack of All Graves Radio.
[00:01:46] I'm your host, Corrigan Vaughn, here to take you on a cozy little journey through some very dark things.
[00:01:53] So grab yourself a beverage and gathering close as I tell you true tales of the horrors of being human.
[00:02:05] A few months ago, we had a home inspection as part of the buying process, and our house was found to have higher than normal amounts of radon, which is, according to the cdc, an odorless, invisible, radioactive gas naturally released from rocks, soil and water.
[00:02:26] To oversimplify, radon is what's released by the decay of the element radium.
[00:02:34] So we had that in our house. Not a ton, but enough that it's technically in the danger zone. And I thought, well, why on earth would my house be radioactive?
[00:02:44] To which the inspector responded, well, there used to be a watch factory nearby in Orange, where they painted the watch faces with radium as a result of, I don't know, runoff, I guess. A lot of houses in Montclair and Glen Ridge have high amounts of radon.
[00:03:03] Somewhat disconcerting, right?
[00:03:06] But my grandma moved into this house when she was around 28 and died in it when she was 92, so it feels like we're probably okay.
[00:03:16] The girls who worked in that factory, however, are an entirely different story.
[00:03:21] It was 1917 when the US Radium Corporation opened an orange manufacturing, among other things, the aforementioned watch faces.
[00:03:30] Radium was at the time seen as a bit of a miracle element.
[00:03:35] It had been discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898 and isolated by Marie in 1910.
[00:03:43] While it was clearly a little bit hazardous, giving Marie Curie various burns and causing Pierre to fear too much exposure to it would blind him.
[00:03:51] Generally, it was believed that in smallish quantities, it was actually good for us.
[00:03:57] It was used in health tonics, toothpastes, and even cosmetics, because, as you can imagine, if you put it on your skin, it gave you a cute little glow, the glow of radioactivity.
[00:04:10] But one of its most useful applications was for watches and clocks. And you can imagine why, right?
[00:04:17] Watches are great during the day, but what are you supposed to do when it gets dark out and you can't read the time anymore?
[00:04:24] This was a particularly big problem in the theater of war, where you obviously didn't want to be shining a light on your wrist every time you wanted to check what time it was.
[00:04:34] Radium was kind of like all that glow in the dark stuff we used to play with as kids.
[00:04:40] You expose it to the light and it absorbs the energy. And then when you take it into the dark, bam. It glows.
[00:04:47] Super useful. And as long as you don't try to eat your watch, not harmful at all.
[00:04:52] After all, the thing about radium is that as long as you don't ingest it, it's pretty much harmless.
[00:04:58] But if you get it all up in you, it is absolutely devastating. All that's interesting puts it this way.
[00:05:05] When radium is placed next to human cells or in the bloodstream, like when it crosses a mucous membrane such as the gums, it turns into a microscopic machine gun that gets lodged in the body's tissues.
[00:05:18] The radium then fires off particle after particle at very close range, eventually mutating and killing the cells around it.
[00:05:27] And we know mutating and killing cells is not great because. Because that's what stuff like, you know, cancer does.
[00:05:34] So US Radium Corp. Here in Orange, New Jersey starts employing young women to paint the numbers on their watch faces using radium. These girls were employed for their small, delicate hands that allowed for precision in painting the watches.
[00:05:49] An extremely skilled woman could paint up to 250 wristwatches in an hour, although it was far more common for them to average around 6.
[00:05:58] But that's incredibly fast, any way you slice it.
[00:06:02] One of the tricks these girls were taught in their work was to use the corners of their mouths to make a fine point on their paintbrushes, making it easier to be more precise.
[00:06:13] This would prove a fatal mistake for almost every single one of them, save for a few, including May Keane, who was lucky enough to get fired after a week on the job and only lose all her teeth and get four different kinds of cancer.
[00:06:28] She lived to be 107.
[00:06:31] None of her co workers at the Waterbury Clock Company in Connecticut were so lucky. It all seemed like good fun at first. While the men in the factory wore lead aprons because they were working with large quantities of raw material, it was thought that the small amount of radium the girls were working with wasn't harmful and they weren't given any protections at all.
[00:06:51] Like I said, they were trained to literally put radium doused paintbrushes into their mouths while working.
[00:06:59] They'd get radium all over themselves and many would wear their best dresses to work so that when they went out dancing, their attire would have a beautiful glow, as did their skin.
[00:07:09] People started calling them ghost girls because of the way they glowed in the dark. They painted their nails with it, put, put it in their hair and applied it to their teeth like beauty queens do with vaseline, after all. USRC assured them that it was 100% safe to do so. The first indication that something was very wrong came in 1922, when a worker named Molly Maggia had to get a tooth extracted due to a bad toothache. And then, a few weeks later, she had to get yet another extraction.
[00:07:40] In either case, the extraction sites never healed, instead becoming pus filled abscesses.
[00:07:48] Still more teeth had to be removed. And eventually, when her dentist opened up her jaw to remove an abscess, the whole bone literally crumbled at his touch.
[00:07:58] Just dust where her jaw should be.
[00:08:01] Which led him to simply pulling her left jaw out with his bare hands.
[00:08:07] The radium had stripped the bone cells of calcium and left, as ATI described it, little more than a pile of splinters.
[00:08:16] She developed extreme pains in her limbs that eventually left her unable to walk.
[00:08:20] Soon after, her whole jaw was removed, then parts of her inner ear, until just eight months after her initial toothache complaint, the tumors cut into her jugular and flooded her throat with blood, choking her to death in her bed.
[00:08:35] An absolutely brutal way to die. But compared to some of her colleagues, a quick death.
[00:08:41] Other girls who worked in the factory started developing similar ailments, as well as various others. Collapse of the vertebra, various cancers, cataracts, hair loss, tooth loss. And perhaps one of the most famous effects was a thing called radium jaw, which, along with causing your jaw to become abscessed and fall off like it had in Molly's case, could also cause a massive sarcoma that created something that looked a bit like elephantitis of the chin.
[00:09:10] But the company insisted it had nothing to do with them. In fact, Molly's death was attributed to syphilis.
[00:09:16] The absolute audacity is striking.
[00:09:20] Independent studies, and even one the USRC commissioned themselves, showed that radium was categorically unsafe if ingested.
[00:09:28] But they refused to accept those studies. And naturally, they paid for a study that found that, in fact, ingesting radiation, radioactive paint was good. Actually, it was not good, as Dr. Harrison Martland concluded when he examined Molly's corpse and found there was absolutely no evidence of syphilis, but a ton of evidence of radiation.
[00:09:49] The company hit back, of course, claiming that these women were simply looking for a payout to deal with totally unrelated medical issues.
[00:09:57] But they persevered in holding the company accountable.
[00:10:01] And they did this knowing they were the walking dead.
[00:10:05] They knew that nothing could be done for them and they'd suffer and die painfully, like their colleagues had begun doing.
[00:10:12] But it was important to them that the company take responsibility because this wasn't the only factory of its kind in the US and they wanted to protect other girls from the same fate.
[00:10:23] It was an uphill battle. Attorneys didn't want to take their case either because they they didn't believe them or because they thought the radium companies were too formidable a foe.
[00:10:34] There was also a statute of limitations of two years on cases of occupational poisoning. And radium's effects tended not to manifest till about 5 years after exposure.
[00:10:45] A lawyer named Raymond Barry finally took their case in 1927. But by that time, the girls who had brought it to court were just months from the grave and they had to settle out of court.
[00:10:57] Those that didn't die within a few years spent the rest of their lives dealing with debilitating medical issues.
[00:11:03] One even having been bedridden for 40 years, her bones so brittle that she'd broken several of them simply trying to turn over her mattress.
[00:11:14] Still, what happened to these young women dubbed the Radium Girls had profound impacts on how the US would handle radioactive hazards in the future.
[00:11:24] The Manhattan Project used research on the radium girls to develop protocols for handling such materials.
[00:11:30] Dr. Martland became a renowned expert on the effects of radiation who helped various organizations develop health and safety protocols for the handling of things like uranium and plutonium.
[00:11:41] The outcome of the lawsuits in which the company was held liable for the health and safety of their workers paved the way for many regulations and the creation of the U.S. occupational Safety and Health Administration, the or OSHA.
[00:11:55] But as author Deborah Bloom put it, we really don't want our factory workers to be the guinea pigs for discovery. Oops. Is never good occupational health policy.
[00:12:08] We'll be right back.
[00:12:25] Satan. O warning sign.
[00:12:56] Watch the thunder. Satisfied in the past it will not lie.
[00:13:03] The future. You and I get blown.
[00:14:33] Sam.
[00:15:23] Welcome back to Jack of All Graves radio on Radio Free Moncler.
[00:15:28] Once again, I'm your host, Corrigan Vaughn, here to tell you true stories from our very dark timeline.
[00:15:35] Our next story has brief mentions of sexual assault, so please take care of yourself and others in choosing to listen.
[00:15:42] Now, back to the void.
[00:15:47] Have you ever heard the phrase the bystander effect?
[00:15:51] I'd be willing to bet you have.
[00:15:54] The main idea of the bystander effect according to the American Psychological association, is that groups are less likely to help someone in trouble than a lone individual.
[00:16:06] And when we learn about this bystander effect, it is without fail connected to one tragic story.
[00:16:13] The 1964 murder of 28 year old Kitty Genovese, which was allegedly comprised of three separate attacks before she was finally killed and witnessed by 38 people, none of whom called the police.
[00:16:28] Here's how the New York Times wrote about the event about two weeks after it happened.
[00:16:34] For more than half an hour, 38 respectable law abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.
[00:16:44] Twice the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off.
[00:16:51] Each time he returned, sought her out and stabbed her again.
[00:16:54] Not one person telephoned the police during the assault. One witness called after the woman was dead.
[00:17:01] That was two weeks ago today. But Assistant Chief Inspector Frederick M. Lusson, in charge of the borough's detectives and a veteran of 25 years of homicide investigations, is still shocked.
[00:17:13] He can give a matter of fact recitation of many murders, but the Kew Garden's slaying baffles him. Not because it is a murder, but because the good people failed to call the police.
[00:17:26] As we have reconstructed the crime, he said the assailant had three chances to kill this woman during a 35 minute period. He returned twice to complete the job. If we had been called when he first attacked, the woman might not be dead now.
[00:17:41] The article goes on to describe how she screamed for help, shouting I'm dying repeatedly and how lights came on all over the building from people hearing her. But still no one called.
[00:17:54] One resident is quoted as saying that eventually he did call much later, but that he didn't want to get involved.
[00:18:02] The police again and again in the article chastised the public, saying repeatedly that they could have stopped this crime had someone just called them.
[00:18:11] But to put it bluntly, the police lied.
[00:18:15] And the official narrative far exaggerates the number of witnesses and downplays the fact that the police were in fact called but simply failed to act.
[00:18:26] So let's go backwards a little bit for context. Kitty Genovese was born and raised in an Irish and Italian American neighborhood of Brooklyn called Park Slope.
[00:18:36] She was a popular student at Prospect Heights High School, where she excelled in English and music and won class cut up in her senior year superlatives.
[00:18:45] In 1954, when Kitty was 19, her mother witnessed a murder in the city which freaked her out enough that the family, which included four siblings besides Kitty, decided to move to New Canaan, Connecticut.
[00:18:59] Kitty didn't go, though. She was about to get married to a military man that October, which didn't end up lasting very long. They annulled it soon after and were officially divorced two years later.
[00:19:12] And There's a pretty good reason that marriage didn't work out. Kitty Genovese was gay.
[00:19:20] She got her own apartment in Brooklyn and got a job as a bartender while also doing some bookmaking on the side, a thing that got her briefly arrested in 1961 and cost her her job since she was, you know, taking bets from the patrons at the bar on company time.
[00:19:39] Funny enough, while most of the time when you see mugshots used in true crime stuff, it's to make someone look like a villain.
[00:19:46] Kitty's mugshot from her arrest is actually the most famous picture of her because she looks like an absolute delight being the charming, funny and reliable person she was. She bounced back quick with another job at EVs 11th Hour Bar in Queens and eventually became the manager. And she was making great money there, about $750 a month, which is equal to about $6,800 a month now.
[00:20:14] She was saving to open up an Italian restaurant.
[00:20:19] In the meantime, she was a comfortable fixture on the NYC folk music scene and the lesbian scene. And it was an underground lesbian bar in Greenwich Village called Swing Rendezvous that she met Marianne Zelenko.
[00:20:32] The two began a relationship and ended up moving in together into a second floor apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. But exactly one year after meeting her partner, Kitty was killed outside that very apartment.
[00:20:46] She would become the second murder victim of 29 year old Winston Moseley, a married father of two, who on the night of March 13, 1964, was driving around with a hunting knife in his pocket, looking for the perfect victim. It was just as he was about to call it a night, around 3am that he spotted Genovese in her car at a traffic light.
[00:21:07] She parked her car in the Kew Gardens LIRR parking lot.
[00:21:12] The lot was mere feet from her apartment building, but in the time it took her to get from the car to the door, Mosley came at her with the knife and stabbed her in the back twice as she attempted to run.
[00:21:23] Obviously being 3am, the neighborhood was quiet.
[00:21:27] There were no businesses open and nearly everyone was asleep.
[00:21:31] But when Kitty screamed, oh my God, he stabbed me. Help me. A few residents awoke and one Robert Moser called down, leave that girl alone. This spooked Mosley enough to flee the scene and Kitty was able to get up inside her apartment building, where she collapsed in the vestibule.
[00:21:50] Now, friends, let's think on this for a minute. In comparison to the official narrative here, Kitty is attacked and a few people heard some sort of commotion.
[00:22:00] Someone called out and the attacker fled.
[00:22:03] Kitty got up on her own and went inside. As far as any bystanders could tell, crisis was averted. In that first attack, everything seemed to be fine.
[00:22:13] It's not really an indictment of the neighbors that no one called the cops, but also a study released in 2007 found that someone actually did call the cops when they witnessed this part of the attack.
[00:22:25] They simply didn't follow up after, when it seemed the attack had stopped.
[00:22:29] What none of the neighbors could have known was that Kitty had collapsed, barely conscious, in a hallway at the back of the building, completely out of sight of the street, where she had been able to attract some attention before.
[00:22:42] She had managed to make it inside. But there was a second locked door that she couldn't get through.
[00:22:47] And Mosley came back, a thing I imagine no one would have predicted.
[00:22:53] Being completely shielded from prying eyes. This time, Mosley stabbed her repeatedly, raped her, and stole her money. During the attack, Kitty cried out for help. And despite what the police had reported to the Times, several neighbors heard her and called it in again. They simply did not come. It wasn't until Kitty's neighbor, Sophia Farrar, came downstairs to help whoever was in distress to that any real aid came.
[00:23:17] And Sophia is a downright hero, by the way.
[00:23:21] She just raced right on down there, not knowing what she was about to face, but just knowing someone was being attacked and she needed to help.
[00:23:30] She found Kitty barely clinging to life and called out for someone to call an ambulance before holding her in her arms until she died.
[00:23:38] There was one neighbor who really did shirk his responsibilities abilities here, and one whose role is not great, but not villainous. The first, Joseph Fink, no relation to the welcome to Night Vale guy, saw the whole first attack happen and did nothing.
[00:23:55] After Mosley fled, rather than helping Kitty, he took a nap. The other bystander was an actual friend of Kitty's, a gay man named Carl Ross.
[00:24:05] Ross was intoxicated and heard the struggle outside and after some deliberation, decided to crack open his door to look there. He saw Genovese being stabbed by Mosley.
[00:24:18] In a panic, he went back inside and called a friend who told him he shouldn't get involved. I think we'd be being very naive to think this wasn't, at least in part because he was gay.
[00:24:28] Knowing Kitty was gay, he had every reason to believe in 1960s New York that this attack might be motivated by her sexuality and that he'd be in danger too. And on top of that, police at the time were not great about gay people, and he couldn't be sure they wouldn't arrest or otherwise harm him either.
[00:24:48] Carl climbed out his window, went to a neighbor's apartment, and it was there that he finally called the police. After hearing Sophie screaming for someone to do so, he told the police, I didn't want to get involved, a quote endlessly repeated and supposedly typifying the bystander effectively.
[00:25:05] They first interviewed Kitty's girlfriend about the murder, finding her drinking and being consoled by Carl Ross. The next morning, by the way, the cops did in fact arrest Ross for disorderly conduct because they felt he was being intrusive to questioning, so his fears there were pretty well justified.
[00:25:24] The cops then spent six hours asking Zalanco in face of questions about their relationship and sex life.
[00:25:31] Ultimately, they were able to dismiss her as a suspect, but they continued questioning neighbors and fixating on the gay lifestyle.
[00:25:39] Had Mosley not been arrested for robbery a few weeks later and confessed to his many murders and rapes, the cops might have just chalked the whole attack up to some gay debauchery and let it go.
[00:25:51] We don't really talk enough about the fact that this is largely a case of police not only failing to respond to numerous comments calls, but then inventing a story that shifted the blame onto the neighbors, a thing they really didn't need to do because the story barely was a blip on the news radar until their excoriation of the bystanders turned it into a scandal. That said, in this case, some good did come from it.
[00:26:14] Kitty's murder actually helped to spur the creation of 911 as a nationwide number for emergency calls, rather than having to call your local precinct directly.
[00:26:24] Further, there is some truth to the bystander effect, and experts have come up with some hot tips on how to avoid it.
[00:26:31] In fact, there are five steps that social psychologists John Darley and Bib Latane came up with to aid in the decision making process. When it comes to intervening in an emergency, they say, 1. You should notice something is wrong.
[00:26:45] 2. Define the situation as an emergency.
[00:26:48] 3.
[00:26:49] Decide whether you're personally responsible to act.
[00:26:52] 4. Choose how to help.
[00:26:54] 5. Implement the chosen behavior.
[00:26:58] But as I said, the bystander effect refers to the phenomenon that groups of people are less likely to come to someone's aid than an individual.
[00:27:07] And that said, the APA points out that research shows this tendency pretty much disappears in situations where there's a clear emergency or when someone is required to physically intervene in order to help.
[00:27:19] Studies by Latane himself and by other social scientists found that people tend to be pretty helpful if they think something is an emergency. For example, in one study, students asked people if they could spare a dime and only 34% did so.
[00:27:35] But then they asked folks if they could spare a dime because their wallet had been stolen, in which case 72% ponied up.
[00:27:44] In another study using EMS data, it was found that the response of the bystanders directly correlated to the health severity of the situation.
[00:27:54] So there are a lot of things to be gained from knowing the truth behind the Kitty Genovese story. It caused a lot of change in the way America responds to emergencies and how we view our social responsibility around them.
[00:28:06] And it is up until her murder. An actually pretty great story of how gay people in New York managed to survive and thrive and make meaningful, happy lives for themselves in spite of major oppression.
[00:28:22] Thanks for listening to Jack Palgraves Radio on Radio Free Montclair. For more content like this, check out the Jack Palgraves podcasts everywhere. Podcasts can be found or hit us up on our website jackofallgraves.com the intro music was Imperium by Ghost. The music break was In a Lifetime by Clannad featuring Bono. My name is Corrigan Vaughn and you should stay spooky, my friends.
