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Lizzie Borden & The Disappearance of Andre Daigle
40 Plays1 year ago
This week, it’s sharp axes and even sharper psychics!
First up, Felicia explores the infamous, notorious Lizzie Borden - the axe murderer of Fall River, Massachusetts. While Borden may have been acquitted for the axe murders of her father and stepmother in 1892 when she was only 32, she forever remains linked to that horrific case. Her story has been immortalized, told time and time again in movies, television series, plays, books…and now this Sinister Sisters episode!
Next, Lauren covers the case of the 1987 disappearance of 27-year-old Andre Daigle in New Orleans, Louisiana. When Daigle didn't show up to work after a night out with a friend, desperate his sister Elise contacted psychic Rosemarie Kerr, who she had received a psychic reading from only 2 days prior. Kerr used her clairvoyant abilities to help Elise find her brother and his kidnappers/killers - her visions so accurate that she was the first psychic to be placed on the witness stand for a murder trial and a case they helped solve. But you won’t believe the scary details of this sad case and just how accurate and detailed Kerr was…
PS: If you have requests for future episodes or just want to hang out, follow us on Instagram @sinistersisterspodcast
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Transcript
Introduction to the Sinister Sisters Podcast
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to the Sinister Sisters podcast. I'm Felicia. I'm Lauren. We're best friends. And we like spooky stuff.
Farewell to October and Upcoming Plans
00:00:21
Speaker
Yep. And we're out of October now. Goodbye, October. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. What's that in Hocus Pocus? Goodbye.
00:00:34
Speaker
But yeah, now we're November and back to normal episodes.
Felicia Reviews: Cobweb and Bug
00:00:39
Speaker
So Felicia's birthday month. Oh, that's true. That's true. I'm going to be 31, which feels kind of boring and sort of like impossible where I'm just like me. Like it feels fake. Like it feels like not a number that is assigned to me, but strange.
00:01:01
Speaker
Watch anything good lately? I was going to say I watched Cobweb. Did I already text you about it? Yes, you did. I really liked it. It gave me malignant vibes, I think. I don't know. There's some good twists and turns. I love Lizzie Kaplan. Me too.
00:01:29
Speaker
And yeah, I don't want to spoil anything for you, so I won't say the thing that was kind of disappointing to me. It's like, you know, right at the end, you're like, oh, I wish like this was slightly different, but you'll see. But very interesting. And one of those movies where you don't quite know what's going on until, you know, the big reveal, which is always exciting.
00:01:54
Speaker
And then I also wanted to recommend, have you ever seen Bug? Did I text you about this one too? Like the play? That's what I was going to say. It's a play that they turned into a movie with Michael Shannon. Yes. Yeah. Oh, I remember. Yeah. Yeah. You've seen it. No, no, I haven't seen it, but I feel like people do it and somebody did a scene from Bug and that's how I knew it. Yeah.
00:02:18
Speaker
It's honestly like you have to watch the movie because it is so insane. There are a couple of really gross parts, but it's like a fascinating movie. And a movie that like, yeah, I watched it, James programmed it for his like Halloween screening. And I did not have any idea like what it was about. And so midway through, I was like, James, why did you pick this? It was like a happy movie. Like this is like. And then I was like, just wait. Yeah.
00:02:47
Speaker
Oh, I see now. But it was really incredible performances, really dark, really interesting. And then I also really liked Pulse that he screened too. It's like a, like a very 80s feeling movie about sort of like, you know, the dangers of technology, but it's pretty, it's pretty good too. It's like a, it's one of the, do you remember the Lawrence brothers? Oh yeah, of course.
00:03:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of them and it's really cute. Or he's really cute. The movie's not right. But it's a fun movie too.
Lauren Reviews: Boogie Man and Priscilla
00:03:24
Speaker
So those are my recommendations. Nice. Exactly.
00:03:29
Speaker
For me, I watched Boogie Man, which is the Rob Savage, like, I guess like first more traditional horror film that he's made. He did host and dash cam, but this is the Boogie Man. I didn't realize it was based on a short story.
00:03:46
Speaker
by Stephen King, but that's what it says on the Wikipedia. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I didn't realize. But I thought it was good. It had Chris Messina, who I immediately had to Google because I was like, what is that guy from? What is that guy from? And I think I figured out that I knew him best from being the boyfriend and Julia and Julia. If you remember that movie with Meryl Streep. Yeah, not not The Mindy Project. Yeah. Well, I never watched The Mindy Project. Oh, I did now.
00:04:15
Speaker
Sorry, that was a recent... Did I finish it? That's so crazy. That was one of my pandemic binges, I think, where it's all kind of... Yeah. Yeah, I think I did watch it. I watched it. I just didn't like... Did I finish it? I think after the office, right? You were like, I need to watch more. Oh no, it was after Jane the Virgin.
00:04:34
Speaker
But anyways, um, yeah, it was, it was good. Yeah. It was honestly, it was a solid, I mean, predictable in a way, but pretty solid horror film. Good cast. I really like the, that Sophie Thatcher girl is really great. And I know I like her a lot. Yeah. And it's just kind of a spooky, like what's in the closet film. Also about like grief, that kind of stuff.
00:05:00
Speaker
And then I just saw yesterday I went to the movies by myself because I was like, I just told Lauren I'm having all this life drama right now. But I was like, you know what I need to do is I need to go like escape in a movie for a couple of hours and not think about anything. And so I went, I literally did like an everything shower, which if you're a girl, you understand what that means.
00:05:24
Speaker
I put on like a full face of makeup. I did my hair. Wow. And I went to the movies by myself to see Priscilla, got a large popcorn, candy, and a beer, and just was living my life in there and had an amazing experience. And I enjoyed it. That sounds so beautiful.
00:05:45
Speaker
Thank you. I was like asking myself because I had had a couple of days of like depression hole and I was like, okay, what would a not depressed person do? And I was like, oh, I would take myself to a movie and get really hot to go do it and be this alluring, sexy woman that's randomly at the movies by herself to be serious. And still be a couple of films. What does she have going on?
00:06:10
Speaker
But it was great and it's interesting because you haven't seen it yet. Not yet. No, I saw Elvis obviously, but have not seen the other side. I don't want to say too much, but I guess I'll say it was a very eye-opening look at grooming because Elvis met Priscilla when she was 14 years old.
00:06:39
Speaker
And she was 24. And just an interesting story about her life. And it was also interesting because I felt like the girl who played Priscilla had like so few lines in the movie. It was very interesting. Like when you see it, tell me if you notice as well, but she like barely speaks in this movie, I swear. But there's something about it like. Yeah. Is that like who Priscilla was? Like, is that, you know, maybe very quiet.
00:07:07
Speaker
maybe but they but the Sofia couple also does these things where they'll like film they'll like have a long shot of her like at a party or something and it was such this like I saw myself in it where you're just like kind of watching everyone
00:07:25
Speaker
Interact and you're just kind of I don't know like not sure how you fit into the room in a way I don't know there was a lot of things in there that I thought were really Fascinating and just made me want to go watch all Sofia Coppola's movies because I've never really done that before So I have you know really So that's what I'm that that's those are the things I watched and that I was interested in I love that I'll add it to my list I have been wanting to watch it and obviously you know I
00:07:52
Speaker
Yeah. Incredible female director, too. Yeah. And A24, all good stuff. Cool. Amazing. All right.
The Lizzie Borden Case
00:08:01
Speaker
So I'm going to go into my topic for the day. And I am talking about Lizzie Borden. So the saying goes, Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother 40 wax. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.
00:08:23
Speaker
And the Lizzie Borden, it's like, I knew that it was a girl that had been accused of murdering her family. I knew there was a movie. I knew there was a TV show. I knew there was a musical. Did you? I was just going to say, I think I've seen both Christina Ricci and where's that? Isn't there a Chloe Sauvignier one?
00:08:49
Speaker
I don't know how you say her last name. I think me and Emma watched it because, oh yeah, it's just called Lizzie and it has Kristen Stewart.
00:09:00
Speaker
Oh, nice, nice, nice. Lovers. Ah, yes, yes, yes. So I'm just, so once again, like, I don't know, I didn't know a lot about this going in. So I just watched the most reputable documentary I could find and then did some websites. But this is what I found. OK.
00:09:23
Speaker
And also not what I thought at all. There's so much of it that I thought I knew that I didn't know. I felt that way when I watched the stuff too.
00:09:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's a big, it was a huge American pop culture moment in history of press and sensational headlines and all this stuff around a woman accused of murder. And this happened in 1892. So at this time, women were not typically thought to be able to commit
00:10:00
Speaker
such vicious crimes, especially something that was so violent. So we have talked about like old murder stories of women poisoning people and stuff like that. The idea of a young woman in 1892 being able to hack her parents to bits at such close range seemed impossible. And so the murders and the trial was just like, you know, crack candy for all of America at the time.
00:10:31
Speaker
So I don't know what crack candy came from. That's just what I thought to say. I'm sorry. They couldn't believe it. They just couldn't believe it. Yeah.
00:10:41
Speaker
So Lizzie, Andrew Borden. She was born July 19, 1860 in Fall River, Massachusetts. She was born to a mother, Sarah, and her dad, Andrew Borden. Her mom died when she was two, and she was the younger sister. She had a sister named Emma. So when her mom died, Emma kind of became more of a mother figure to her.
00:11:06
Speaker
And then her dad remarried when she was five to a woman that was basically at that time known as a spinster. So she was like in her thirties and didn't really have any prospects, I guess. And to think about her family that I have to mention because it's going to make what happens after the trial make sense is that
00:11:30
Speaker
Her dad made good money, but they lived well below their means. This is a time in which people had running water and electricity in their homes, and the Borden family had neither. They had a pump well outside. They used those gas lamps. So they were truly living well, well below their means.
00:11:53
Speaker
And when Lizzie Borden was young, she started to get a reputation in town as a shoplifter. So she would go to places, steal stuff, and it became such a regular occurrence that the stores would just have a list and bill her father for it and he would just cover it, basically. So yeah, so there's this like starting initial connection of like,
00:12:19
Speaker
Her family living below their means, her kind of knowing her family has money but isn't willing to spend it and her stealing things. Like there's something there that I feel like makes the end of the story make sense. So in 1892, when the murders take place,
00:12:41
Speaker
A couple of days before the murders, there was a robbery at the Borden house. So Andrew Borden called the police saying that somebody had broken in and stolen $50 in some of his wife's jewelry. So they started this investigation and after two weeks, Andrew called off the investigation.
00:13:06
Speaker
And people assumed it was because he found out Lizzie had taken the stuff, and so he called it off. So... Seems logical. Yeah, yeah. So that's sort of what's happening right before. And then, a couple of days before the murder, something else happened that everybody in the Borden house got really, really sick.
00:13:32
Speaker
And the stepmom thought that it was the baker's bread and it was like poisoned. Somebody else thought the milk had gotten poisoned. And Alice Russell, who knew Lizzie Borden,
00:13:48
Speaker
said that Lizzie has said that she was afraid that her father had some sort of enemy and that he was in trouble with his men that come to see him. And basically she was like sleeping with one eye open. So she had told her friend that like she thought somebody was like out to get her dad and her family in general.
00:14:10
Speaker
She also said that they broke into the house in broad daylight with Emma and her there at the house. And she said her dad like forbid them from talking about it. And so there was just, she was like putting to her friends that there was some suspicious things going on with her dad. Yeah. Okay.
00:14:35
Speaker
So on August 4th, 1892, this is the day the murders happened. So at some point, they think between 9 and 9 30 a.m. And at this time, Andrew Borden was out of the house and the people that were home were the stepmother, the maid and Lizzie.
00:15:02
Speaker
And sometime between 9 and 9.30, the stepmother was murdered in a bedroom upstairs that she was cleaning. So yeah, it says that after cleaning the guest room, Abby went upstairs sometime between 9 and 9.30 to make the bed.
00:15:23
Speaker
According to forensic investigation, Abby was facing her killer at the time of the attack. She was first struck on the side of the head with a hatchet, which cut her just above the ear, causing her to turn and fall face down on the floor. And these pictures of the crime scene do exist, so you can see these, creating contusions on her nose and her forehead.
00:15:46
Speaker
So the picture of her, she's face down to the ground. Her killer then struck her multiple times, delivering 17 more hits to the back of her head, killing her. So it wasn't actually 40 whacks, it was about 17-ish. Oh no, 18, excuse me. And then Andrew comes home, the dad.
00:16:09
Speaker
So he comes home and he notices that the house was bolted shut, which was not normal. He knocked and the maid came downstairs and answered. And the maid has also gone on record saying that when she answered the door for Mr. Borden, she heard Lizzie laughing from the stairs. Weird.
00:16:31
Speaker
Creepy. Creepy. And she testified that she was in her third floor room and at some point I can maybe talk you through the layout of the house because that's kind of a big part of the case. She was cleaning windows and just about 11, 10 a.m. she heard Lizzie call from downstairs. Maggie, she's the maid's name, come quick, father's dead, somebody came in and killed him.
00:17:01
Speaker
And so, by the way, at the time of her father's death, nobody had discovered Abby, the stepmom's body yet. So now there are two dead bodies in the house. What do you mean? Say again? Like the maid didn't hear the stepmom be like, ow. No, apparently not. Apparently not. So police were called at 11 15.
00:17:28
Speaker
Andrew Borden was on the living room sofa. He had been hit 11 times with a hatchet. His nose was severed. One of his eyeballs was cut in half. Sorry, this is very graphic. My bad. And aside from the board is made Bridget. Wait, Bridget, I thought her name was Maggie.
00:17:51
Speaker
I don't know. I'm unclear about that. Her names? I just looked it up. Her name, I think it's Bridget in the Lizzie Borden movie with Chloe and Kristen Stewart. Why did they say Maggie come quick? Bridget Sullivan, the maid whom they called Maggie. Got it. Okay. So it's the same person. Great. Thank you, Wikipedia. What a weird nickname for Bridget. What a weird nickname. Just to confuse podcasters like us.
00:18:18
Speaker
Yeah, so other than Bridget slash Maggie, Lizzie was the only one home when her parents were found dead. So yeah, the police came. They saw Mr. Borden's body. And when they searched the house, they found Mrs. Borden upstairs. Dun, dun, dun. So it came to light. So at first they didn't suspect Lizzie.
00:18:45
Speaker
And they did treat the house like a crime scene, but they didn't treat it as a crime scene with Lizzie as a suspect. So for example, Lizzie, while the place were there, like had changed outfits, but they didn't really think anything of that because they weren't considering her a suspect.
00:19:11
Speaker
Then following Sunday, and I have more information there, but just to add on, the following Sunday, Lizzie had been found burning a dress that she and her sister Emma said had paint on it, and so they were just trying to get rid of it, but might have been covered in blood if she had done it.
00:19:38
Speaker
They weren't thinking of looking through Lizzie's clothing or anything like that when they were searching the house. They weren't looking for a bloody dress. They were looking for clues that would probably have a male killer or somebody else.
00:19:57
Speaker
So they pretty quickly decided that it had to be someone Mr. Borden knew because there was nothing stolen from the house. They thought it was some sort of personal crime, and eventually they closed in on Lizzie for a couple of reasons. One, because she was the only one in the house besides the maid, and then also because when they were questioning her,
00:20:25
Speaker
They didn't like how she was acting. They said they disliked her attitude and some of the police officers said that she was too calm and poised and they just thought she was acting kind of strange.
00:20:38
Speaker
And then it came out that the day before the murders happened, Lizzie had been in town trying to buy poison. And they didn't sell it to her, I don't know why, but it was like this type of poison that she said was to kill like moths or something.
00:20:56
Speaker
Even though it's not the way she killed her parents, and they actually weren't able to use this in court, by the way. They weren't able to say, okay, the day before the murder, she was trying to buy poison, and then her parents got murdered. They weren't able to use that because the judge said that the parents weren't poisoned, so her trying to buy poison wasn't important, which is ridiculous, but fine.
00:21:24
Speaker
They also said she had motive because they said that she wanted her father's money that he would never spend. And she also was said to have hated her stepmother and had the opportunity to do the crime.
00:21:42
Speaker
They arrested her and they actually had to take her out of town to a different prison because there wasn't a place for female prisoners in this area. So they had to take her somewhere else to await trial. And then as soon as she was arrested, it was just bananas in the media.
00:22:05
Speaker
So they did. They also like the trial was also like insane. Like one of the insane things they did in the trial was the police exhumed the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Borden. Oh, my God. They took the heads off the bodies and brought them into the courtroom with with the hatchet that they found in the basement of the house to rep to show the court
00:22:34
Speaker
that the hatchet fit in the head places where the skull was cracked.
00:22:39
Speaker
Like, have you ever heard of anything like that? And when they did that, Lizzie Borden fainted in the courtroom, which of course also made more headlines. And people were like, oh, she fake fainted, blah, blah, blah. Like there was lots of people started to think she was she was guilty. And yeah, and they didn't have any actual physical evidence. Everything they had was circumstantial. They there was no blood found on or seen on Lizzie when the police came to the house.
00:23:09
Speaker
They of course didn't actually search for a dress. They did say that Lizzie was burning a dress, but there was this whole question of like, okay, if somebody murdered someone like this, they should be covered in blood. So then this rumor started that maybe she committed the murders in the nude, which was also like a sensational thing that people couldn't get enough of. And they went through this whole trial.
00:23:32
Speaker
And when the judge, like the last thing the judge said before the jury went to, you know, deliberate, he restated the law itself.
00:23:48
Speaker
And people said that he really leaned in like they he made it sound like they should acquit her. I don't know if that's exactly true, but that's just in the documentary I saw. And the jury apparently made their decision in 10 minutes. They waited an hour to come back in. But they said that their decision was in 10 minutes. And she was found not guilty.
00:24:13
Speaker
It's just so crazy, right? I mean, it's crazy. There was no evidence. No evidence. There's no evidence. And also her sister till the day she died said that Lizzie didn't do it.
00:24:25
Speaker
Wow. I didn't know that part. Yeah, yeah. And so then it gets a little... Her life gets a little more interesting. More interesting, I don't know how. But what the community of this town seemed to want is Lizzie, you know, she was acquitted for murder and they kind of wanted her to kind of disappear.
00:24:47
Speaker
because this was such an insane thing for this town. Some people still thought she had done it. And they kind of wanted her to just kind of fade into the background and let everybody move on from this. And she was not interested in that. So instead of moving away,
00:25:08
Speaker
She basically her and Emma got this huge inheritance after she was acquitted and Six months after the murder or six months after the the acquittal She sold the house that is now like the Lizzie Borden house where the murders took place and she bought a really big nice fancy house on the hill which was this area in this town that all the rich people lived and
00:25:36
Speaker
She called it Maple Croft, and she changed her name to Lizbeth Andrew Borden instead of Lizzie Andrew Borden, which doesn't feel that different to me. So she clearly wasn't trying to hide who she was. No. And she basically started going to the theater a lot and spending lots of money and kind of living the life that she had wanted to live her whole life and now had the means to do so.
00:26:03
Speaker
So she started going to theater a lot and hanging out with actors. And at this time, actors were basically seen as the same level of society as sex workers. So she would host these big parties for actors at her house and different theater people. And people saw this as totally, what's the word? Scandalists, I guess. Scandalists, yeah. Yeah.
00:26:32
Speaker
So okay, so then Borden got really close with this one actor named Nance O'Neill. They had a very close relationship and she would throw these big parties just for Nance at her house. And they were rumored to be dating. And there was also a rumor that Lizzie Borden had actually been having some sort of affair with her maid as well back in the day.
00:26:58
Speaker
But these things aren't necessarily proven, but that was kind of like the gossip mill at the time. And, and yeah, and so she was just kind of living
00:27:10
Speaker
her best life in this place. And she ended up living her days out in that house. She died when she was 66 in 1927. She died of pneumonia after having some sort of gallbladder surgery situation. And what's interesting also is that she left
00:27:39
Speaker
So in her will, she left Emma, who by the way, at a certain point after all these parties moved to a different state because she was like done with Lizzie and done with her lifestyle. And she was done, you know, having this murder hang over their house. And she was like, I'm out of here. So she left, moved somewhere completely different. Fair.
00:27:58
Speaker
And when Lizzie died, she left nothing to her sister, Emma, who by the way, died nine days after her death, even though she lived in Hampshire. So that's just kind of strange. And when she died, she was worth about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, which in today's money is five point six million dollars. Wow.
00:28:23
Speaker
So yeah, so at the time of her death, she had the house. She had owned several office buildings. She had two cars, a lot of jewelry, and she left $500 to the city basically to care for her father's grave. And she left $30,000.
00:28:45
Speaker
to the Fall River Animal Rescue League. And apparently this is because she had a huge love of animals. And so she left most of her money to them. And then she had a friend and a cousin that she had left some money to and a bunch of friends and family members that she like divvied all the rest of it up to.
00:29:13
Speaker
wow yeah she honestly did like kind of live her best life at the end yeah she did and like plenty of people were very unhappy about it and like the press never stopped reporting on lizzie borden her whole life so every year of the anniversary of the murders something was going to be in the paper every single year every time lizzie did something like one time
00:29:39
Speaker
She had this vase in her house that she gifted to somebody and it broke. And so the friend took it to the place where it was many to the shop, it was made in to get it fixed. And they were like, Oh, this was actually stolen because remember, Lizzie was a shoplifter. And yeah.
00:29:55
Speaker
So then they tried to arrest her for that and she just went and paid the debt or whatever. So that was in the paper. I mean, she was in the paper for all kinds of stuff throughout her life. And when she died, same thing. It was just huge, huge news. And I think there's a couple of reasons. One, did she kill her parents
00:30:17
Speaker
hard to say. I think maybe. There's never really been another suspect that people were interested in. But it's also, I think, first of all, a woman being able to commit these murders is one thing and then also a woman
00:30:36
Speaker
getting millions of dollars after the fact and then living this kind of full yet scandalous of society at that time of society's life and doing whatever she wanted and not really caring what anyone thought about her, I think just makes her
00:30:58
Speaker
I don't want to say cool, but memorable. And the fact that she was probably having affairs with women, she was just going all out and everyone was just like,
00:31:12
Speaker
Oh, my God. And unapologetically, just like. Yeah, absolutely. So so, yeah, that's that's what I've learned about Lizzie Borden. I want to like check out the TV show and the movie now, because this is just stuff I got off a documentary and I'm kind of like now I want to see like the storytelling version of all these things. That's what I like. Yeah, the Chloe movie makes like the case that she and the maid were like,
00:31:41
Speaker
having a relationship and that the dad was pretty abusive and sexually assaults the maid at some point, and then that's why she does it. Interesting. Yeah, an interesting idea. It does say the maid did eventually marry a man and move somewhere else with him. But that's, I mean, anything's possible.
00:32:04
Speaker
anything's possible. But yeah, that's basically- I love it. Oh, and the thing I was gonna say about the layout of the house, it's really hard to explain just talking about it, but basically where they lived were two apartments that had kind of been joined together. And so part of the house you could only get to from one staircase and part of the house you can only get to from another, which sort of explained why like the maid didn't hear anything and
00:32:31
Speaker
just made the house a little confusing in terms of how the murder happens and the possibilities. It wasn't such a straight, easy thing because the house was laid out very weird. And that a random person could have gotten in and killed both of them. Yes, totally. While two people were home and not noticed. That is so interesting. But yeah, that's it.
00:32:57
Speaker
It really and I hadn't thought about it as like such a compelling like, you know, female murderer at that time. Like, I don't know. I hadn't really thought about it that way. It's interesting. Yeah.
The Disappearance of Andre Daigle
00:33:21
Speaker
All right, so I am talking about the disappearance of Andre Daigle and really like this was the first time that a psychic was used in a murder trial. So I've always been super interested in that, right? Like anytime that we're like,
00:33:41
Speaker
combining the law with, you know, just as we talked about this with like that possession case, I think that you did at some point, like the conjuring one. Like, I just always think it's so interesting when the court has to like confront supernatural things. So basically in 1987, Andre Dagle went missing. He met a friend whose name is Nick Shelley at Chi-Chi's Mexican restaurant.
00:34:11
Speaker
They had some drinks, they had some dinner, and then they went over to a bar that was Mitchell's Lounge. And at the bar, they played pool, they drank, they flirted with women.
00:34:21
Speaker
And one of the women in particular took special interest in Andre. Her name was Thelma. So, you know, then him and his friends kind of went or him and his friend went separate ways and he kind of went missing from there. So, Andre's sister was Elise Daigle McKinley and she pretty much immediately knew something was up with her brother. He had missed work.
00:34:46
Speaker
I guess she found out that he had misworked and hadn't called in and so she was just immediately like something is up He would have contacted someone to let them know, you know, nothing was wrong So she decided to call the police but they weren't really interested in investigating that early That's always like my number one fear when you know something's wrong, but like the police is like that's probably fine. I
00:35:08
Speaker
It's like, what if it's not? Yeah. Yeah. So days before he had disappeared, Elise had actually gone to a psychic with some of her friends, just kind of for fun and didn't really like even believe in it. Like she wasn't somebody that was like.
00:35:23
Speaker
into it all, but once her brother disappeared, she kind of desperately remembered that this medium had said she was a psychic investigator, and so she decided to call this woman. This woman's name is Rosemarie Kerr, and she was the psychic investigator, and she agreed to help Elise and the Dackel family.
00:35:45
Speaker
So she asked her to bring over a picture of the brother of Andre and a map of Louisiana. So when Elise arrived, she placed them on the table with the picture facing down and not looking at it.
00:35:59
Speaker
So after some small talk, Rosemary closed her eyes and began rubbing the picture of Andre. And after a few moments, she started to complain that she had paint like a headache or pain in her head. She told Elise that it was like starting to feel like she was being hit repeatedly with a blunt object.
00:36:21
Speaker
Yes, so Elise was obviously upset or nervous about that pretty immediately, and then Rosemary described Andre's truck that had this very distinctive scratch along the side, and that's when Elise was like, okay, she started to believe her.
00:36:40
Speaker
And so Rosemary kept saying she was seeing someone with long blonde hair and that this person had a lot of power over Andre. And Elise was like, I have no idea who that would be. He doesn't have a girlfriend or a partner or anything like that. And so then Rosemary moved to the map. And so she started rubbing it and once again had a powerful headache come over her.
00:37:04
Speaker
And then she had a vision where she saw a swamp, a long low bridge over water, a sandy beach, and the number seven. Pretty like, I don't know. I'm like, these are like very specific things to me.
00:37:18
Speaker
So she continued rubbing her hand over the map until she stopped on a small town that was called Sladell, I guess. But it's about 30 miles from New Orleans. So she told Elise, like, you have to go there if you want to find Andre. And so she was pretty much so like, Elise was pretty all aboard this immediately. So she got her family on board. Some of them were more skeptical than her, obviously, but they started driving there.
00:37:47
Speaker
And so about five miles from Slidell, they saw Andre's truck. And they saw it with like, which I'm also just like, how crazy that they pretty immediately saw it. They saw the distinctive scratch. They knew it was his. But it was going the opposite direction. So they turned the car around. They started to follow the car. And they saw two men in the vehicle. But neither of them was Andre. So the Deagles called their mom.
00:38:14
Speaker
told her to call the police, and they said they were on I-10, the highway. At that point, they were all just kind of thinking it was like a stolen car chase. And the men in the car, in the truck, pretty immediately realized that they were being followed. And so they tried to lose the day goals before, or like they tried to get rid of them, basically.
00:38:37
Speaker
So they headed off onto Highway 11, and this was a much more deserted highway. It made the day goals immediately nervous to be going down this highway. There were trees lining the road, and they were coming up on this dead end. So they stopped the car at a bar because they didn't want to go further down this deserted highway.
00:38:57
Speaker
and the car stopped too, but then basically blasted beyond them. So they didn't want to lose the car, so they started following it again. And at this point, thankfully, the cops had come and told them they saw a cop car. They pulled over. They said to the cop, this is the situation. Our brother's missing. There's his truck.
00:39:19
Speaker
And then basically the cops and them started this car chase. So eventually they got the truck to stop and the cops booked Michael Phillips and Charles Gervais with a stolen car charge. But unfortunately there was more, this wasn't just a stolen car.
00:39:39
Speaker
situation. So they took the guys in when they were questioned by the police. This is also just wild to me. They pretty much immediately confessed to killing Andre. Super sad. So they didn't know him. They just said they wanted to see if they could murder someone.
00:39:58
Speaker
And so, I know, like truly just very dark and kind of random, but they basically sent Michael's girlfriend whose name was Thelma Horn, she would volunteer, to lure someone back to their place that they would then murder. So they wanted to, this is again, super dark, everybody, but they wanted to take turns hitting the man over the head with a hammer.
00:40:24
Speaker
And then they used coat hangers and the cord of a vacuum. So very dark. They killed Andre and his body was recovered from a strip of Sandy Beach off of Manchak Swamp. So exactly what Rosemary had said, the police noted that it was off of the highway exit seven, which was number seven that Rosemary saw. I know.
00:40:52
Speaker
insane. So because of her accuracy, Rosemary became the first psychic ever to be asked to testify in a murder trial. So she, she stood up on the stand and shared all the information that she had seen and then, you know, that had been accurate. And then she like kind of used this to, you know, help her psychic investigator business. And she did assist the police in several other cases, which I just think is so cool and
00:41:22
Speaker
I haven't really heard too many stories like that. So I'm like, it's so cool that she is able to use that ability or was able to use that ability.
00:41:33
Speaker
And so Michael and Charles pled guilty to the murder. They both received a life sentence without the possibility of parole. And the only kind of like weird part of the story is after a few years in jail, Charles actually changed his story. He said that it wasn't about them trying, you know, wanting to just randomly kill someone. Instead, he claimed it was part of a satanic ritual.
00:41:57
Speaker
I'm not really sure if this is part of it, but it was followed by a complaint that he was denied the right to practice his religion in jail. He said he was needed to practice his satanic faith, but they didn't do anything in jail. They didn't let him practice anything in jail.
00:42:17
Speaker
But despite Andre dying, Rosemary does say or said that she continued to speak to him over the years and that she would always like relay those messages back to Elise and the rest of the Daigle family. So, I mean, obviously a really sad story. But I will say too that this incident is on an episode of Psychic Investigators, the TV show. It has like interviews and what is that called? Dramatizations, is that right?
00:42:47
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And then Rosemary is also on the TLC show called Psychic Witness. So she is like a little bit of a, you know, personality, I'll say. And definitely like I just feel like it's such a something that I kind of want to look into more for the podcast is like all these psychics being involved and actually, you know, putting people in jail and finding people who have disappeared.
00:43:15
Speaker
But there's a whole string of episodes you can watch about different psychics that have helped in different trials. Yeah, and it's wild that.
00:43:25
Speaker
You know, something that many people perceive to be fake, that they are still utilized in our, you know, police and court system to some extent. Yes. It's pretty wild.
00:43:45
Speaker
It is wild and just like, yeah, as I said, like kind of that intersection of law and spirituality. It's supernatural. Yeah. It's wild. Yeah. It's very wild. But it's so cool that I mean, honestly, and she was just like kind of a random woman that Elise had, you know, happened upon a few days before her brother went missing, it all just feels like kind of serendipitous.
00:44:10
Speaker
Wow, that's wild. Very sad for him. The murder itself is horrifying and just so like the dark parts of our world that just make no sense to me, but then the psychic part is fascinating and very cool.
00:44:29
Speaker
Totally. Well, that's it this week. Thank you guys for listening. We hope you enjoyed our Halloween episodes too. And now we're moving on. Maybe we'll have to do some, I was thinking about, I was like, should we have like a Thanksgiving theme? Ooh, maybe. That could be fun. But yeah, thank you all so much for listening. And we hope you have some sweet, sweet nightmares. Bye.