016: True Crime

Pleasing Terrors

Mike Brown

Arts, Performing Arts, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.9 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2017

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fairy tales often teach an important moral lesson, hidden within the entertaining twists and turns of the story. The tale of Bluebeard, the rich man who keeps the bodies of his murdered wives locked behind the forbidden doors of the dungeon in his castle, doomed to have his wrongdoing exposed by his newest wife, serves as a reminder to young women that curiosity can sometimes be your downfall -- or your savior. In real life there are rarely happy endings to tragedies and moral lessons must be learned the hard way.

For Zona Shue, choked to death in her own home, life was certainly no fairytale. Yet the strange events that led to a murder conviction were as fantastical as any tale written up in a storybook. The moral lesson in her twisted fairy tale?

Mothers are always right.

Episode Highlights:

The horrifying fairy tale of Bluebeard and his wives
The trial of the Greenbrier Ghost
Zona and Trout: A love story gone sour
A grisly discovery
Witnesses on the stand
Mary Jane Hester's otherworldly visitor
Confessions from beyond the grave
Broken vertebrae and bruised skin: Autopsy discoveries
Trout Shue's troubled life
A mother's vengeance -- fact or fairytale?

Resources:

The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives by Katie Letcher Lyle, Quarrier Press 1999

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Over the past seven months, it has been my great pleasure to correspond with a particular group of women who are among the brightest lights in the true crime genre.
0:11.0	Whether their focus is forensic psychology, investigating those who have gone
0:16.4	missing or a certain twisted city of brotherly love, I am humbled by their
0:22.4	exhaustive research, their amazing storytelling, and the
0:26.8	compassion they show for those affected by the horrific events chronicled in
0:31.8	their podcast.
0:34.0	You ladies are an inspiration.
0:36.9	This episode of the Pleasing Terrorist Podcast is dedicated to you.
0:54.0	Some stories were never supposed to be told. Stories that exist in the twilight,
0:57.0	between science and the supernatural,
1:00.0	between history and the horror,
1:03.0	stories that speak of terrifying things,
1:07.0	stories that you want to hear,
1:10.0	stories that you need to hear, stories that will sink their teeth in, and never let you go.
1:19.0	My name is Mike Brown, and this is pleasing terrors. is Episode 16 True Crime I'm going to be. In 1697, Charles Perot published his fairy tales from past times with morals,
2:02.3	or the tales of Mother Goose.
2:04.8	His book popularized a number of French folks stories that would be the basis for some of our
2:10.2	most famous fairy tales, not the least of which was the story of Little Red Riding Hood.
2:17.6	One of the stories included in that volume was that of Bluebeard. Bluebeard was an incredibly wealthy nobleman who was physically very ugly.
2:27.5	He used his money and influence to marry a beautiful woman.
2:31.5	However, his wife soon disappeared.
2:35.0	And though there were rumors about what had happened to her,
	...

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