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Red Collar

Follow the Blood Money: Claus von Bulow

Red Collar

Catherine Townsend

History, Red Collar, Con Artist, Investigation, American Greed, Society & Culture, Blood Money, Love Detective, White Collar Crime, Catherine Townsend, Hell And Gone, True Crime, Fraud, Murder, Documentary, Red Collar Crime, White Collar, Red Collar Diaries

4.6604 Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2022

⏱️ 8 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

BONUS CONTENT: Catherine investigates: Is it easier to lie if you are speaking in a second language? How many con artists have the middle name "von"? Plus, how much money does it take to buy an acquittal?

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, blood money listeners. So this week, I want to talk to you about con artists and their voices

0:07.3

because this is a subject that I find really fascinating. And I was definitely thinking about it a lot

0:13.2

in this week's case. I was rewatching reversal of fortune. I reread the book by Alan Dershowitz,

0:18.9

which is excellent, by the way.

0:26.0

A lot of people commented on Klaus von Buello's kind of strange accent.

0:28.8

And as someone who has lived in a lot of different places,

0:31.9

I know that accents can shift over time,

0:35.4

especially if you're spending a lot of time around different people. But there's a very particular style of speaking that

0:39.2

seems to be kind of unique to con artists. If you look at a lot of these cases, these people

0:45.7

will take on an accent that I can only describe really as affected. So with Klaus von Buello, his

0:53.7

accent sounded like what a Danish person would assume that a high-class

0:58.9

English person sounds like. It's almost like someone who has watched a lot of TV or an actor who's

1:05.3

doing a character study. I remember reading about Hannibal Lecter, and when Anthony Hopkins was

1:10.5

adapting that character,

1:12.1

he lost his Welsh accent totally, and he mixed together an English accent with Truman Capote's voice at a lower pitch.

1:18.8

It's pretty fascinating.

1:20.7

And con men and con women are actors, so this does make sense.

1:24.4

It made me think of another case, too, the case of Clark Rockefeller.

1:29.5

Clark Rockefeller was born in Germany, and over the years he developed this name and fake persona.

1:36.0

I actually covered this case in my Red Collar podcast. He pretended to be a member of the Rockefeller

1:41.7

dynasty, and he faked basically his entire life.

1:46.1

But one of the interesting things about that case was that apparently he lost his German

...

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