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Season Five: Home for the Holidays 24
126 Plays2 days ago
In Today’s Episode, we put together our Home for the Holiday cases.
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Sources:
Various News Sources Mentioned by Name
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Transcript
Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
Christmas Eve True Crime Introduction
00:00:22
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
00:00:28
Speaker
So if I've timed all this correctly, then what we have going tonight isn't, it's an older case and it's Christmas Eve.
Who is Joel Emmanuel Hagelin?
00:00:36
Speaker
I picked a weird one from this because of...
00:00:42
Speaker
I don't know, wanting to tell kind of a special story. This is one of those that like, there are a couple of sources out there. They're kind of strange. There are, the villager had an article on him that I pulled. There's this episode, Billy Bragg talking about, thanks for giving a damn with Otis Gibbs. I pulled it a couple of New York Times articles. When I read about this, I wasn't a hundred percent sure I would be able to find enough sources that were like kind of accurate about what had happened with them. But I will say that like a lot of material in modern music today is kind of attributed here. Some of what I'm telling you is not going to be facts. Some of this is like a collection of sort of statements that have been made in the media over time.
00:01:28
Speaker
and This is about just this one guy. I just thought his case was interesting. And I thought, you know, the questions at the end are really interesting, particularly with with how it it shook out. So the story that we're telling you today is about a guy that was born October 7th of 1879.
00:01:47
Speaker
His name was Joel Emmanuel Hagelin. He was also known for a period of time as Joseph Hillstrom. He was a labor activist. but He was a songwriter. He was a member of the Wobblies, which is the industrial workers of the world. and We'll talk a little bit about them here in a minute. When he was born, he was born in Gastrochlin, Sweden. He was one of nine children. The family had lost a couple of kids who who died very young. his His father was a man named Olaf.
00:02:14
Speaker
who worked as a conductor on a railway in Sweden. His dad died young. He died when he was 41 years old. His dad dying basically doomed their family. Now, his mom, Margaretta, she kept everything together as much as she could, but she wasn't able to succeed necessarily financially. Their home, their family home, it still stands at the same address that it's always been there. I think that it still has a museum in it. I don't know that for sure. I do know that there's a garden and like a little event space
Joe Hill's Activism and Songwriting
00:02:48
Speaker
there. Joe, he ended up falling pretty seriously ill when he was young.
00:02:55
Speaker
He went underwent extensive treatments and in October of 1902, he was around 23 years old when he and his brother Paul left Sweden and they came to the United States. He moved around doing different types of day labor work. at First, he was in New York City, then he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and he would make his way to San Francisco because we know he was there at the time of the 1906 earthquake in san San Francisco. He began to use the name Joe Hill when he joined the Wobblies around 1910 or so. He was working on the docks and in the loading areas in San Pedro, California. In late 1910, he wrote a letter to the industrial worker, which was the IWW's newspaper. He identified himself as a member of the local chapter out of Portland, Oregon. He moved up in the ranks of the Wobblies. He traveled pretty widely.
00:03:50
Speaker
And he would organize workers under the IWW banner. He would write satirical poems. He was making speeches. He was very much an orator. This was a time when a lot of people in power, for good or bad, they could use their ability to speak in public and to put together good words to rise to interesting positions. We've seen it in World War I, World War II. He would write political songs. So he and Harry McClintock were spellbinders.
00:04:17
Speaker
for the
1913 Tucker Utah Strike and Influence
00:04:18
Speaker
ww www people may know harry mcmick clintock uh for the big rock candy mountain song they showed up in june of 1913 for the tucker utah strike and that is one of the more interesting things that we're going to talk about today the tucker utah strike was a 1913 strike action against the utah construction company's railroad track lane operation he's mentioned in in multiple books that talk about the union movements in Utah. At this time, he had fully shortened his name to Joe Hill and was only going by Joe Hill. This is how he wrote his songs. He would draw cartoons related to the work that he was doing. And this is all his other writings from this time would appear under the name.
00:05:03
Speaker
Joe Hill. He is credited with having coined the phrase pie in the sky, which I don't know if a lot of people use that phrase anymore, but pie in the sky ah is from his song, the preacher in the sleigh. The lines that he used said you'll get pie in the sky when you die.
00:05:22
Speaker
And the idea was a
Accusation of Murder and Trial
00:05:25
Speaker
fanciful notion or this like ludicrous concept where you're promised something that is probably not going to happen. He has a list of other songs that you can find online as he's moving around and. going job to job, he is bouncing on and off of freight trains. And by the end of 1913, he was working as a day laborer at the Silver King Mine in Park City, Utah, which is not all that far from a Salt Lake City. And on January 10th of 1914, John Morrison and his son Arling
00:05:56
Speaker
They were killed in the Salt Lake City grocery store that they owned by two armed intruders who were masked with red bandanas. They were using them like balaclavas. Kind of an Old West image, like I think of um the bad guys in cowboy movies dressing like that. The police first thought that this was some act of revenge. Nothing was stolen.
00:06:18
Speaker
and John Morrison, who was the dad, he had been a police officer and they believed it was possible he had created quite a few enemies in this time as a police officer. The same evening that that they're shot in their grocery store, Joe Hill shows up on the doorstep of a local doctor and he has a bullet wound that's pretty serious. It's through his chest and it's gone through his left lung. According to Joe Hill, he said that he had been shot in an argument over a woman. He didn't name the woman, he didn't name who shot him at the time. The doctor reported that Joe Hill was armed. He had a pistol on him. So 12 people are arrested in this case, not Joe Hill, to start. This was men that were rounded up when they went and basically rounded up the usual suspects. ah This was related to John Morrison's past as a police officer. These were people he would have run into. Ultimately, the 13th person to be arrested in this case is Joe Hill. He's arrested and he's charged with their murder. They find a red bandana in Joe Hill's rented room.
00:07:16
Speaker
and the pistol that the doctor said he had seen Joe Hill carrying is not found. Joe Hill says that he was not involved in the robbery and killing of John and Arlie Morrison. He said that he was shot, his hands were over his head, and the bullet hole in his coat, which was four inches below the exit wound in his back, seemed to support this claim. So the trial comes up. Joe does not testify at his trial. His lawyers point out that four other people were treated that very same night for bullet wounds around Salt Lake City. They also point out that the lack of robbery and Hill being completely unknown to Morrison pretty much left him with no motive. So the prosecution brings in quite a few witnesses, including about 12 people who said that the person that went in and out of the grocery
00:08:07
Speaker
resembled Joe Hill. They have a 13 year old named Merlin Morrison, who he is John's son and he is Arling's brother. According to what had been said was when the police first asked him about Joe Hill, he said, that's not him at all. But later on when it gets the trial, he does identify Joe Hill as being the person who had killed his father and his brother.
00:08:36
Speaker
Had you ever heard of this case before? It's a weird one that I picked here. Yeah, no, I've never heard of it. The jury takes about four hours to deliberate and find Joe Hill guilty of these murder. He appeals. There's a man named Oren Hilton. He represents Joe Hill in one round of his appeals. And he declares the main thing that the state had on Joe Hill was that he was a member of the IWW. And as far as anyone would ever be concerned about Joe Hill, he was going to be guilty.
00:09:04
Speaker
Now, Hill had tried to keep his membership with the Wobblies out of the trial, but ultimately the media at the time didn't have much else to do in this area, yeah so they kept mentioning that he was a member of the IWW. He gets all the way to the Utah Supreme Court and his Appeal is unsuccessful. In a letter to the court, Hill continued to deny that the state had a right to inquire into the origins of his wound just because it's a bullet wound. So different judges looking at that at the appellate level and then all the way up to the Supreme Court, they took that to basically mean he was probably guilty of
Joe Hill's Legal Battle and International Attention
00:09:45
Speaker
something. In fact, Chief Justice Daniel Stroup, he wrote up that this unexplained wound was a distinguishing mark and that the defendant may not avoid
00:09:55
Speaker
natural and reasonable inferences of remaining silent, which is kind of a big deal as the defendant's right to not incriminate themselves or to remain silent have been well established after this. Right, but it's not necessarily saying, well, it's kind of hard to say because I feel like the justice was saying like, yes, the I don't know if the presumption of innocent was there.
00:10:21
Speaker
innocence was there, but he's saying that there are going to be reasonable inferences, right, which actually flies directly in the face of how we perceive a defendant remaining silent today, in my opinion. We're protected by Miranda today, and we are also protected by the Fifth Amendment, but neither of those would really work in Joe Hill's favor for post-conviction relief. His argument was that the state didn't have the right to inquire into the origins of his bullet wound, right? Yeah. But even today, if you get shot and go to a hospital, you it will be reported. It will. It will. And so do you know why that is, by the way?
00:11:08
Speaker
Well, just to have a record of it. And so it falls under mandatory reporting. Have you ever have you ever delved into this part? I doubt it. Okay. We're going a little off topic for a minute, but I think this is an interesting way to go. You go hunting to figure out why this requirement exists. It's a statute that most states have. 48 states have mandatory reporting statutes. So that's going to be all but two. The statute lays out a mandate that health care providers have to report knowledge and or treatment of bullet wounds.
00:11:40
Speaker
And that's regardless of the timeline or age of the injury. Violations of this mean that depending on the state, the person who doesn't report can get a fine or go to jail. And also the timeline for when they have to report it varies and the subsequent legal actions can vary. This is something that has come about because in the United States we have a lot of Bullet wounds. And I looked for a deeper origin for this, if that makes sense, like where did this come from? I feel like it's ah but it's partially to maintain the ah seriousness of bullet wounds, of gunshot wounds. So, Joe Hill, while he's incarcerated, he writes an article for a socialist newspaper that was known at the time as appeal to reason.
00:12:33
Speaker
Socialism is an interesting conra ah construct into itself, but the appeal to reason kind of interested me and I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole. It was a weekly left-wing political newspaper from 1895 until 1922. The whole concept of appeal to reason was to have an outlet for the Socialist Party of America to Lynn's support to different minor parties to like in history, the farmer's alliances in there, the People's Party in there. It's largely looked at as like a communist movement today. And the publication dies out in 1922.
00:13:11
Speaker
It ends up being terminated and replaced by a different weekly paper that sort of gets away from the whole idea of socialism because the United States was not treating socialism, communism, general equality very well in the 1920s and the 1930s. So when he writes for this paper,
00:13:31
Speaker
Joe Hill says, owing to the prominence of this former police officer and grocer, Mr. Morrison, there had to be a goat, and the undersigned being, as they thought, a friendless tramp, a Swede, and worst of all, a wobbly.
00:13:46
Speaker
had no right to live anyway, was duly selected to be the GOAT. This case turns into a media debacle. You got the president chiming in, Swedish ambassadors chiming in, the Swedish public are chiming in. Helen Keller gets involved in this. Helen Keller is always an interesting figure to me. She's an author. She is an IWW member. She was blind and deaf. Because of the Swedish connection and because of the IWW connection, it is ultimately an international incident.
00:14:16
Speaker
Now, critics of this incident, they argue that this trial and Joe Hill's conviction are unfair. There are various petitions to the governor at the time, a guy named William Spry, but despite all of this, his guilt is maintained. His conviction is affirmed. Now, in a biography published in 2011,
00:14:39
Speaker
William Adler ends up talking about Joe Hill. He suggests that Joe Hill looked at himself as worth more to the labor movement as a martyr than he was alive, and that this understanding may have it influenced his decisions, one, not to testify at the trial, and two, according to Adler, Joe Hill doesn't really participate in his chance at clemency or a pardon. There was an early suspect in this named Frank Wilson. So Frank Wilson is a pseudonym for a career criminal named Magnus Olson. Have you ever heard of this guy before? No. Okay. So if you go find if you go find a rabbit hole for Magnus Olson, he was born in Norway.
00:15:29
Speaker
He was the youngest of five kids. He was the suspect that like was number 12. He had been arrested for these murders, but at the end of the day, they couldn't like pin him down.
00:15:43
Speaker
So they let him go. Now, what's interesting about him is in the 1920s, Magnus Olson or Frank Wilson, depending on what you want to call him, he also went by James Morton, FZ Wheeler, James Farmer. He would go on to be a collector for Al Capone and his bodyguard. When the St. Valentine's Day Massacre occurs in Chicago in 1929, seven people are killed. Guess who the car At the scene is registered to when the killers leave Magnus Olson, but I think so there's a story There's multiple stories in here. If you want to go down the rabbit hole for Joe Hill the story that you want to read is Joe Hill the man who never died the life and times and legacy
00:16:24
Speaker
of an American labor icon by William Adler. That's a good book. I think you can find it free online. there's also ah The New York Times article I mentioned at the beginning of all of this is called Examining a Labor Hero's Death. so Joe Hill has a different ending than most of the people that we've been talking about throughout this series. and Because of that, his episode is a little shorter. On November 19th, 1915, so keep in mind, this murder took place January 1914, all these appeals have gone on.
00:16:54
Speaker
Joe Hill is at Utah's Sugarhouse prison. He is executed by a firing squad.
Legacy and Folk Hero Status
00:17:00
Speaker
According to reports, Deputy Shetler, who was the leader of the firing squad, he called out a sequence of commands preparatory to firing, ready, aim, and Joe Hill apparently shouted, fire, go on and fire. That same day,
00:17:19
Speaker
At the Tarrytown estate of a man named John D. Archbold, who's a president of what's known as Standard Oil Company at the time, a dynamite bomb is discovered in his house. Police had a theory that Wobblies were going to blow up John Archbold's house as a protest against ah Joe Hill's execution. But the bomb ends up being found by a gardener. It's four big sticks of dynamite.
00:17:48
Speaker
They're about a pound each, and they're hidden in a rut in the driveway, right outside the front entrance of the residence. They had been bound together by a length of wire. They were fitted with percussion caps, and they were wrapped with a piece of paper that would make them blend into the driveway. It's the same color. So this was the path that if Archibald's coming and going from his home, or if his car is sitting there or driving right by the front entrance,
00:18:15
Speaker
It's going to blow up. There's also an account that Joe Hill had written to one of the leaders of the Wobblies saying, goodbye, Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize. And could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don't want to be found in Utah. um Hunter S. Thompson has a different take on his last words. I'm not going to get into that whole deal. Hunter S. Thompson is his own creature.
00:18:45
Speaker
So Joe Hill's body is sent up to Chicago and he's cremated in accordance with his wishes. His ashes are placed into 600 small envelopes and they're sent around the world to be released to the winds of different cities. In 1916, delegates attend the 10th convention of the Wobblies in Chicago. ah They all get envelopes. It's one year to the day of Joe Hill's execution.
00:19:11
Speaker
The rest of the 600 envelopes are sent to locals, sympathizers, and union members, and they get theirs on January 3rd, 1917. Here's a weird thing that happened. In 1988, an envelope had been seized by the United States Post Office in 1917 because it had subversive potential. The envelope,
00:19:37
Speaker
It's got a photo affixed to it. It's captioned, Joe Hill murdered by the Capitol class November 19th, 1915. And its contents, they were deposited into the National Archives. A story appears later on in the United Auto Workers Magazine solidarity.
00:19:57
Speaker
And then the New Yorker picks it up and they do a little article on it. So members of the Wobblies, the IWW in Chicago, they laid claim to the contents of the envelope. After some negotiations, the National Archive refuses to turn over the envelope, but when they realize it's Hill's ashes in 1988, they turn it over.
00:20:20
Speaker
There was an article in in these times, they ran a notice of the ashes and they actually had kind of a poll or like a write-in comment box to suggest like what should be done with them. ah Various things came about where Abby Hoffman suggested that they be eaten by today's Joe Hills and he named a list of people.
00:20:40
Speaker
allegedly, that kind of happened. And when they started to track down what had happened, the majority of the ashes had been cast to the wind in US, Canada, Sweden, Australia, and Nicaragua.
Was Joe Hill Guilty?
00:20:51
Speaker
Yeah, the ashes were weird. Don't eat people's ashes. Have you read Adler's book? No. It's been a long time. According to what I read there, like they found the people. They found that a guy named Otto Apokos had shot him and that they were fighting over Yeah, that's what I was. They came forward and he was having a disagreement with his friend over the girl that was like the daughter of the house they were boarding at. Yeah, they're in a boarding house or renting a room and there's a girl there named Hilda Erickson. And so she's younger than Joe Hill, by the way. she's I think she's 19 or 20.
00:21:29
Speaker
He has a friend that's staying with him named Otto Applequist, and the two of them had like a rivalry going on. and Hilda wrote a letter that talked about choosing between the two men, and it was discovered in sometime in the 2000s that this letter indicates that she had found out that Joe Hill had been shot and that he had sent her a letter explaining to her that he and Otto had gotten into an argument and Otto had shot him because Otto believed that Joe Hill was going to win Hilda's affections. I thought it was interesting that this guy dies by firing squad. He's 36 years old when he dies over a teenage girl. Right, and I feel like this is a case where he should have testified. Yeah, he should have testified.
00:22:13
Speaker
I feel like that was a completely plausible scenario, but because especially since, you know, I don't know if you caught it or not, but they said the bullet hole in his jacket was four inches higher than the wound, which means his hands were up in the air, right? Yeah.
00:22:30
Speaker
because when you raise your hands up, like fitted jackets go up, they don't stay where they're at, right? Yeah. And so when you put your hands back down, the hole is going to be higher. I don't believe in any of the conspiracy type stuff. I think they wanted to solve this crime, this double murder, and this was convenient. The fact that there were four other people or four other gunshot wounds in the area treated. I mean, it's possible that one of them was the perpetrator. It's also possible that they didn't get medical treatment that I was going to say, how did they know the perpetrator had been shot? My guess was that
00:23:12
Speaker
Okay. And I don't know this, for ah like I haven't read this story in so long. I think it's because Morrison's gun had been destroyed in the robbery. Okay. And so there was a huge presumption made there. Now the other thing is that there were two armed intruders, right? Correct. Who's the other guy?
00:23:31
Speaker
Exactly. And so to me, this was a rush to judgment. This was a situation where he should have been on he should have testified. And they drew conclusions that were too broad, in my opinion. But I can see where presented with this information and lacking a um adequate defense, like,
00:23:58
Speaker
you know, what actually happened. I would say that any time somebody, the story has been said like, oh, the perpetrator was shot and the defendant presented himself shortly after the crime for medical treatment for a gunshot wound. Right.
00:24:18
Speaker
that is automatically going to draw the attention and and a the presumption of innocence is going to be lost, right? And I think that's what happened here. Now, so he died by ah death by firing squad, which is horrifying. Do you know why they do an an entire squad? So nobody knows who did it? right yeah so then nobody knows who did it nobody knows which person's bullet kills the person and i saw where the sheriff of salt lake city on november 22nd 1915 he sends to the Honorable Board of County Commissioners of Salt Lake City County, to Utah, gentlemen, I beg leave to advise your honorable body that the accrued expenses in the case of the state of Utah versus Joseph Hillstrom amount to the sum of $317.80. These costs are in connection with the execution of the said Joseph Hillstrom.
00:25:20
Speaker
will your honorable body please authorize the payment of this sum in accordance with the voucher which I will after authorization send to the county auditor the said voucher to be drawn in favor of John S Corliss trusting your immediate attention I remain yours respectfully John. What? S Corliss. The sheriff sent a request for payment of the sum of $317.80 on November 22nd, 1915. For the execution? Yeah. Oh my God. I want to see what that converts to. Okay, so it's 3.21% or something like that. How much was it? 317 what?
00:26:11
Speaker
317.80. So that conversion would be $9,921.06. I guess. thererebels So that's what they share. That's what it costs to kill him. That's what they that's what he says it costs and he requests it be paid to him. cool Well,
00:26:34
Speaker
It's actually a really um sad case. i have a fear I don't think that he was responsible for it. We don't see any sort of indication that they tried to find who accompanied him. I really don't like it when evidence is sort of cherry-picked in testimony, because you know the testimony was there were two, right? Yeah. Where's the other guy? I wonder if it's Otto. Well, I mean, it seems like under the circumstances, he could have very easily given Otto up.
00:27:05
Speaker
But I don't know. like i I don't think it was him. Do you think he did it? No, I don't think it was him. I don't i i don't even understand why he didn't testify. or like If they hadn't found the letter, Adler's book would be kind of difficult to swallow. This is a weird case. Not a lot of documents. But ultimately,
00:27:27
Speaker
Well, he did tell the doctor that he was shot during a ah a disagreement over a girl. And that was before he would have known. that that this was all gonna happen. yeah And so to me, it lines up, especially since the girl who said it is the girl that was at ah that, what was her role? For some reason, I can't find this again. she was in the she was um She was the daughter of the the lodging house.
00:27:59
Speaker
She was a daughter of the people who owned the lodging house. So she was a member of the family with whom the two men were lodging. um And so it she this girl had been playing. She was 20 years old. wow She had been playing both of these men. And ah I shouldn't say it that way. She had been seeing both of them. And so he was shot because his friend was jealous. That actually makes so much more sense. Yeah, that makes more sense than if him him having been a robber.
00:28:29
Speaker
I mean, well, no, that it wasn't even a robbery. That was the thing that was so weird. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. That makes more sense than him having been the shooter. Like they were on the right direction when they were getting, they had 12 people and they look at him as number 13 and decide he's the one. Like i I often wonder, these cases make me wonder, what did that guy do that? Like they went, he's the guy.
00:28:57
Speaker
I feel like it was the fact that he had been shot at the hospital. Do you think that's the thing that puts them over the top and they just decide it's him? And like his, he didn't elaborate further with regard to his injuries because like his friend shot him over a girl and he didn't want his friend to get in trouble. And he had no idea it was going to escalate like this.
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah. Because I feel like if he had if it was legitimately a cover story, he would have given more information. I think you're probably right. um It's actually really sad that it played out the way it did. He was trying to be a stand-up guy, I think. it It seems like it was just a like a series of unfortunate events, the fact that he was the 13th suspect arrested. I mean, can you imagine being murdered and having the police very easily arrest 12 people under suspicion of your murder? I mean, most of the time they can't get one person arrested, right? yeah
00:30:10
Speaker
Having 12 people considered suspects, it seemed like, and it was Morrison who was the victim, being a police officer, there's no information that there was any sort of run-in.
00:30:24
Speaker
And it was established, it seems like, at least biographically, if not during the trial, that there was no connection between Hill and ah the victims, right? Right. Now, I do think that Hill took it to an extreme that was a little bit unbelievable by saying that, like, he was deeply oppressed and discriminated against just because he was a
Joe Hill: Martyr or Controversial Figure?
00:30:47
Speaker
wobbly. He's a... Okay, he's the dead guy here, but...
00:30:51
Speaker
He's a little bit of a drama queen in his writing. Well, yeah, and I'm saying I don't think that he he absolutely was able to be that way. I just don't think it that was the reality. No, he just chose this hill to die on.
00:31:06
Speaker
Right, and and you know it did give him some, like you were saying, he was more of a like he's more famous in death than in life, but I don't see him as any sort of martyr or anything. He did protect his friend, I guess.
00:31:22
Speaker
How? And protect his food from what, though? From getting charged with shooting him? but Yeah, I guess. And I don't know, like, how relevant that was, and I feel like he did not have adequate representation here. I also think that sometimes, not just in, like, death penalty cases, but in any type of situation, you know, sometimes people don't want to be saved, right? Yeah.
00:31:49
Speaker
and It's not like, I mean, he had his share of hardships and he may have just, you know. He had just come to the conclusion this was his life. He accepted his fate and to me that's why he like made all these like crazy statements like that because he was part of the IWW he had no right to live anyway because I mean that wouldn't be the case. There was nothing about being a member of the IWW that made him less than anybody else.
00:32:19
Speaker
But it did bring a little bit of attention, right? And I think that that was his sort of point in it all. It's a very sad story. And I do feel like that we have this very strong like, you know, right to remain silent and like, defendants don't testify on their own behalf. I do realize that I understand the strategy behind that, but at the same time, I feel like he could have handled the the prosecutors cross-examination here, you know because he was if he didn't do it, like he would actually be able to answer the questions without fear of implicating himself. yeah
00:32:58
Speaker
and And I feel like it could have been a very bright line and very clear to a jury if he had explained the situation. Not to mention, if they had, you know, they found the information that there were four other gunshot wounds treated, you know, did they look into those people? I mean,
00:33:17
Speaker
I'm saying like creating reasonable doubt as opposed to like trying to establish factual innocence. They could have at least created some reasonable doubt and I'm still not entirely... To me the biggest thing was that it's not even like completely established that the perpetrator was shot. Isn't that crazy?
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah, it is weird. There is further reading on this. ah The William Adler book, The Man Who Never Died, that one is available. There's also a book by Philip Forner, who's a little bit better known author. He wrote a book called The Case of Joe Hill. He wrote a lot about the American labor movements. You can definitely go down a couple of rabbit holes on those. I think both of those books would be free at some of the local libraries. One of the things I was going to do with this episode, I ended up not doing it because I like sometimes I genuinely get a hold of something that I don't quite understand. There is this story about joe Joe Hill becomes a folk hero, basically, and the places that his ashes end up are are interesting. one of them One of the envelopes of his ashes, allegedly, was part of a monument in the Columbine Massacre, which not the Columbine Massacre that people know, but the Columbine Mine Massacre of 1927.
00:34:34
Speaker
That's another rabbit hole you can go down if you just want to have some more historical stuff to read. That's a 1927 massacre in Lafayette in ah lafayette co and Columbine, Colorado, I believe. it's A lot was going on there between the state police and local militias and essentially coal miners. So there's those three rabbit holes that go down from this case. It is a little bit shorter an episode, but I thought he was an interesting folk hero. The way that his story gets told, nobody really addresses this anymore, whether he did
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00:35:05
Speaker
it or not. And I think you and I have, like, I think my conclusion is, I don't think he did. I don't think he i had anything to do with this. He was just wrong place, wrong time, wrong situation.
00:35:16
Speaker
I don't think he had anything to do with it either, and I have to say that Death by Firing Squad, I feel like, is one of the worst execution methods. Yeah, I think I have to agree with you on that.
00:35:33
Speaker
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00:39:13
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