Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they earn the label crime of the century.

But the stories that made headlines in decades past are necessarily remembered today.

I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author.

In each episode of this show, I'll examine a case that's maybe less known today, but

was huge when it happened.

This is crimes of the centuries.

Carrie Buck hadn't meant to get pregnant.

In fact, she hadn't meant to have sex.

It was forced on her at age 17 by a nephew of her foster parents.

Foster parents, who, when they learned of her, quote unquote, condition, quickly moved

to boot her from the house.

Carrie's birth father had ditched the family when she was young, and Carrie's birth mother,

Emma, had been arrested for vagrancy and sex work, which led to mom being committed

to an institution for supposedly feeble-minded people, which led to Carrie being given

to foster parents because mom was supposedly to dumb in a moral to raise her.

See, the state of Virginia had tried to protect Carrie by putting her in a foster home where

she ultimately was raped and impregnated.

Carrie was shuttle to the same institution as her mother, where she gave birth to a healthy

baby girl named Vivian.

A judge decided that Carrie wasn't just too dumb to raise her kid, but she was too dumb

to procreate at all.

And so the judge ordered that Carrie be sterilized under Virginia's brand new eugenics law, leading

...