Hey, true weirdos. We just wanted to take a minute and thank you so much for your support.

True Weird Stuff has won the best history podcast in the Women in Podcasting Awards,

and we've also won a Signal Award in the paranormal category.

And that's only happened because of you, our fellow strange people.

Thanks.

Stick around if you want after the episode for a little bonus content and conversation.

The courtroom was packed that December morning in Mountain View, Arkansas.

Murder trials always attract big crowds of the curious and the morbid,

and this trial had the kind of melodrama going for it that would have been right at home in a copy

of True Detective magazine. Five assailants were charged with the crime, an act of fiendish violence.

The details of the crime were lurid. The star witnesses

were a teenage girl and a man who could neither hear or speak. And in an extra unexpected twist,

the prosecutor and the attorney for the defense were brothers. It was just one week before Christmas in 1929 when that defense attorney, Ben Williamson,

found himself questioning the last person anyone expects to take the stand in a murder trial,

the victim.

You weren't beaten to death and burned last March, were you?

Well, I don't look like it, and I don't feel like it.

And they got a small beam of light against the mirror.

I'm going to go.

Real, real, real, wow. In fire! When it's weird. Weird. Weird. Stuff.

When it was founded in 1873, it was called the Arkansas State Lunatic Asylum. Today it's called the Arkansas State Hospital. There was a brief period in between when it was known as the State Hospital for

nervous diseases.

...