463. Women and Poison in History with Mikki Kendall

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 463 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. Today we are going to talk about food safety law and the history of women who probably poisoned their husbands – allegedly. Mikki Kendall, who is on Twitter as @Karnythia and is the author of Hood Feminism, is also a very eager historian into the mysteries of what women get away with, and so we are going to talk about poison clusters, dying of fever, and the poisons that might be hanging out in your backyard. Now, this conversation was inspired by two Twitter threads, and I will link to both for your continued wide-eyed reading. They will be in the show notes.

As Mikki said in, in an email after we recorded, “We have evidence of poison clusters with inorganic poisons from autopsy reports, and you can look at death record indices when hunting for clusters of odd deaths.” So obviously I have a couple CONTENT TRIGGER WARNINGS here: we are going to talk about food safety, food horror stories, actual murder, questions about what is in vaguely labeled food, and we are going to discuss the signs of intimate partner and child abuse. If Earl Had to Die is an unofficial theme around here lately, this episode is another part of that series.

Thank you so much to Mikki Kendall for hanging out with me and talking about poison. I will have links to everywhere you can find Mikki Kendall’s work in the show notes and at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast, as I always do, ‘cause I would never let you down like that, not ever.

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I was so excited when Mikki Kendall agreed to do this episode. On with my conversation about women and poison in history with Mikki Kendall.

[music]

Mikki Kendall: Hi! My name is Mikki Kendall. I am a writer, and occasionally I pretend that I am a full-fledged feminist, not just a Hood Feminist, and I also love history and knowing things that women did.

Sarah: As I just said, I know that lots of people come to you to talk about Black feminism, Black Twitter, online activism. I want to talk to you about poison.

Mikki: I love talking about poison.

Sarah: I’m so excited to talk to you about poisoning! Okay, so first: you tweeted recently about food safety, including the Embalmed Beef Scandal, which were not three words I had ever seen together, and that you have a favorite piece of historic food legislation! I love this so much; this is fascinating. How did you come to have a favorite piece of historic food legislation about embalmed beef? I’ve never said those words together.

Mikki: Okay, so couple things –

Sarah: Yes, ma’am.

Mikki: – (a) I am from Chicago, where we had a poison cluster, but we also had a bunch of food scandals, especially around the time of the poison clusters. So a lot of early women who got away with murder got away with it because covering up that it was a, a bad bit of beef was super easy, right? His stomach bothered him; he dropped dead; I got sick. No one’s proving whether or not she got sick was the perfect alibi for a really long time. (a)

(b) When we had to read Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, (a) that book is disturbing. (b) Because I had a history teacher who was a cruel, cruel bastard, we also had to look up ways that meat production had been bad –

Sarah: Bleah!

Mikki: – because, yeah, Chicago.

Sarah: Ugh.

Mikki: Carrying some peak emotional trauma. There was a period where I tried to be a vegan.

Sarah: I was going to say, that, that probably sent you straight to veganism for a bit, right?

Mikki: Yes, it did. It did.

Sarah: Yep! Been there, been there, been there. Mm-hmm.

Mikki: But along the way, I found out that there was all of this legislation sort of stacked on top of each other that becomes, like, the FDA and USDA and all of these other jobs that we then forget about.

Sarah: Yep!

Mikki: Like, we just sort of lose those facts, right? So then, whenever I see people talking about how they’re getting water from their secret springs or that they have been curing their own meats or whatever, I think about these things.

Sarah: Do you want to have cholera?

Mikki: Yes!

Sarah: Is that what you want? Do you –

Mikki: Yes, they want cholera.

Sarah: No. No, nobody wants cholera. For God’s sake!

Mikki: Yes, yes, they do. They want cholera and dysentery and tapeworms. They –

Sarah: See, these are people who never played Oregon Trail, right?

Mikki: They, either they didn’t play Oregon Trail or they didn’t understand.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: Right? When you start getting into, like, the weird habits people have with food – and they will tell you on Twitter and TikTok and whatever all of the things that they do. I unfortunately know some sh-. So I know what’s in your groundwater.

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: I know how easy it is to kill people with stuff from your garden. I’m in the Midwest.

Sarah: Oh!

Mikki: There’s a lot of things you have to learn not to eat.

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: And then I see the news stories where women are still getting away with it. Can I tell you a story? Can I tell you a story?

Sarah: Oh, please tell me a story! I want to hear –

Mikki: Okay.

Sarah: – all the stories. Just –

Mikki: Okay. So this is a theory, but I think the police also agreed with my theory, though they couldn’t prove it. A woman on the West Coast took a bag of mushrooms from a stranger who had been foraging, and wouldn’t you know, her husband and several of his family members were poisoned. They died. Their baby did get sick, but the important part of this story is that when it’s over, the baby was better. She got a little sick too. She didn’t go to jail for it. It was very tragic! Can’t prove a thing, but the part of the story that never made sense was that supposedly someone she had never met gave her a bag of mushrooms, and she used all of them to cook for her family.

Sarah: Okay. Now, I realize that we live in an era when I was growing up where you didn’t –

Mikki: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – tell people online where you live and you didn’t give people your name, and now, you can tell people your name and ask them to come in their car to get you at your home and take you somewhere; like, it’s a whole other world of online interaction, but I still don’t know that I would take mushrooms from a total stranger and be like, let me just make some ragu real quick.

Mikki: That was the part of the story that never made any sense to me. And the police definitely investigated, but they never found the man, and they could never prove she did it to her family herself? Like, I don’t believe they ever figured it out. It goes back, there’ve been several of these stories where periodically, even the people who do forage mushrooms, like, as a hobby make a point of saying, if you do not know what you’re doing –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: – or don’t know the person –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: – who has given them to you –

Sarah: Do not.

Mikki: – and thus you don’t know if they know what they’re doing, you shouldn’t eat them.

Sarah: Right!

Mikki: And this was the thing, because there are a couple of these cases, there’s another case around the same time where a bunch of people were, in November of, I want to say in, in 2016?

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Mikki: People started eating these wild mushrooms, and several people got sick – Northern California is where it happened – and basically they were like, yeah, a meal of grilled mushrooms leads to liver transplants, or –

Sarah: Oh dear God! Do, do people not understand that there are functioning parts of government that operate behind the scenes to keep you from dying of stupid?

Mikki: I, I thought so, and I’ve seen a girl on TikTok talking about how she picks berries and things, but you know what’s different about her content? She always tells you what not to eat. She makes a point –

Sarah: Yes!

Mikki: – of saying, this looks like this. This is safe to eat. None of these things are.

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: Other people tend to make content about what they found –

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: – and how yummy it is.

Sarah: Yeah. Are they making content about them hunched over their toilet wishing for, for the sweet porcelain god of death to come and relieve them of this pain?

Mikki: They never mention that part!

Sarah: You don’t say! [Laughs]

Mikki: – mention it!

Sarah: Mmm!

Mikki: But the part that’s interesting is that that outbreak, several of the people involved there survived; they survived with liver transplants. However, around the same time as that story there was then the other story in the same area –

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: – and that woman’s husband, and I want to say two other people? Don’t believe they survived. But it was sort of buried in the story, because it was part of this big cluster of people who had done this very stupid thing.

Sarah: Right, and it’s being framed as, look at these people going out in the woods, eating stuff off the ground; maybe you shouldn’t do that.

Mikki: Right! And so I went looking back when that story came out in 2017 and then found out that there were others from the ‘90s. You know, when we think of poison now, we think of things they test for, and this is, like, my completely-irresponsible-but-I-have-to-say-it-out-loud and accurate statement: there are many very pretty things that grow in your community that are plants that are flowering that are fatal.

Sarah: Don’t eat random things off the ground seems like really good advice! [Laughs]

Mikki: I mean, it’s at the point where New Hampshire is now requiring, like, licenses for people who want to forage, and classes? Because again, they have realized, as did you, that some people will go out and pick things, and that sounds great, but just randomly eating things you don’t know anything about can kill you.

Sarah: Yeah. You’ve got to stop people from dying of stupid. It would be good.

Mikki: Well – it would be good; the only problem is that I’m not sure people are willing to stop dying from stupid?

Sarah: What is exactly your favorite piece of historical legislation? Can you please tell me about this?

Mikki: We have to keep in mind that many of the things that happened after Eleanor Roosevelt created the American Chamber of Horrors to illuminate deficiencies in older acts?

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: Right, so it’s not even like we get a single act; we get this stacking of acts, which is why I have to think about what the name of the original one was, because when I tell you the, the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act is not it, but it’s the one everybody thinks of, so I’m trying to find the name of the original, because –

Sarah: According to your tweet, it was the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Is that it?

Mikki: Yes! That’s the –

Sarah: Yes.

Mikki: – yes, that’s my favorite one about meat. There’s another one before that from 1848, and I’m trying to find the name of it. I found out about it after I wrote that thread, because the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Food and Drug Act, Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, all of that happens after one in 1848.

Sarah: That’s a bit of time between those two. Lot of –

Mikki: Yes!

Sarah: – lot of food can go wrong in that time.

Mikki: Yes. And I’m trying to remember the name of that one, and I am failing only because I’m one of those people who was fascinated by the fact that food inspection was largely thought to be the duty of the consumer prior to 1848.

Sarah: Yeah, that’s not going to work.

Mikki: So, like, there’s this whole list, right? Where even if 1820 is when we first start to standardize medicines –

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: – kind of, right, and then we get to these other acts, and then we start to say, wait, we need people to make sure that these acts are being obeyed. So then there’s like this hundred-year process where we start to, like, poke little Band-Aids on the holes, but prior to this, America’s a mess, and you know what you find? These big clusters, not just of typhoid and typhus and whatever, but cholera and dysentery that they just didn’t know where it came from. And so this was the thing, because I had that whole thread, right?

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Mikki: And so then this guy emails me a story in his name – I’m not sure he wants it public, and so I won’t say it –

Sarah: That’s fine.

Mikki: – just in case, anyhow – but he’s just talking to me about the Sherley Amendment and how that exists basically because Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for Teething and Colicky Babies –

Sarah: Oh God.

Mikki: – was never labeled, but it was full of morphine.

Sarah: [Gasps]

Mikki: That was the other one I was trying to find. I tell you that there were so many things that we were just sticking, like, little –

Sarah: Little Band-Aids. Like the –

Mikki: Little Band-Aid here.

Sarah: – like the tiny little square ones. Yeah, the little square ones that don’t stick very long: those Band-Aids.

Mikki: Yes! And we are poking those Band-Aids over literally big, gaping holes –

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: – abscesses running with us.

Sarah: Yeah. You said in your thread, you’re amazed we made it out of the 1900s alive.

Mikki: I – listen, I knew about the baby bottles that were breeding bacteria that killed babies? I didn’t know about the unlabeled teething syrups loaded with morphine.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: It was very effective. I went back; I could find some of the ads. It was considered very effective.

Sarah: Well, I mean –

Mikki: The ads are beautiful. The ads – it’s a mother reclining in bed with her babies. They’re all smiling.

Sarah: ‘Cause they’re getting an incredibly concentrated dose of morphine right next to their brains on open, teething gums. Yeah, that’s not good.

Mikki: Not, yeah, not just on teething, because in some cases, as you know, kids lose teeth, and that hurts too.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: So yeah.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. So you also mentioned in this thread, where you’re talking about the – ugh! – Embalmed Meat Scandal – ew. Ew!

Mikki: The Embalmed Beef is great; it’s great.

Sarah: They sent it to the army in cans, and it was like, this smells bad; eat it.

Mikki: Not only was it, it smells bad; eat it; it smelled of formaldehyde.

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: It stank of formaldehyde. An interesting thing is that in many cases it was basically mush, an unrecognizable mush coming out, right?

Sarah: Yeah!

Mikki: But also, we don’t really know where they were sourcing that beef.

Sarah: Oh, absolutely.

Mikki: And we hope it was beef.

Sarah: Yeah. Well, it’s like pet foods that are labeled animal byproduct. What animal and what byproduct? Could you be more specific, please? That’s important information here.

Mikki: I mean, listen, I come from a community where we eat chitlins, right, which is the intestines of pigs, cleaned, cooked down – there’s a whole thing –

Sarah: Yeah!

Mikki: – if you’re going to prepare chitlins.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: But you know it going in; you know what you’re eating, right –

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: – it’s not a secret, right? And Americans love a good, like, mountain oyster, right? That kind of thing.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: We love all of our little bits and pieces of animals.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: So when you tell me that it’s animal byproducts or specially potted, specially prepared meats or whatever it is, the term is –

Sarah: Potted –

Mikki: – I get very concerned.

Sarah: Yeah, potted meat food product –

Mikki: Yeah.

Sarah: – what does that mean?

Mikki: Right! Because I know that I’m eating intestines and, and testicles –

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: – but you’re not going to horrify me. We eat cow eyeballs and tongues and –

Sarah: Brain.

Mikki: What is this? What’s in here?

Sarah: Yeah, what’s a byproduct? What are you hiding? So you also mentioned in this thread something about poison clusters and that there have been many poison clusters through the years. What’s a poison cluster, and how many do you know about?

Mikki: So I know about several. I’m going to tell you a story that will explain why it is that we mostly don’t hear about them. So we have that musical Chicago, and it’s set in Chicago; women are killing all these men. Wait. We know about that, we know about some of the serial killers, but if you go back and you look, you start to realize that gastroenteritis in various places is a wonderful death certificate statement, right?

Sarah: Oooh!

Mikki: Well, some women – there’s one in particular who I found in Chicago history, who ended up in the newspaper, right. Her first fiancé, he fell backwards out of a window while he was cleaning at her parents’ house before the wedding. He died. You have to stitch the dots. I started wondering what happened to her, right? Well, if you stitch the dots, she jumps to marrying one of his friends later, who comes from a much wealthier family.

Sarah: Ohhh!

Mikki: Then there’s another article about his, her husband’s injury where she accidentally severed an artery in his arm while they were playfully knife fighting. I don’t know what that means either.

Sarah: That’s like the potted meat food product of alibis right there: we were just playfully knife fighting.

Mikki: Right! And so, the thing is, though, it’s reported in a casual, gossipy way, and at this point I’m like, wait a minute. How do you playfully knife fight with live edged blades? At dinner. At dinner, they’re playing –

Sarah: Oh, absolutely. We, we do that all the time in my house! You don’t just whip out the steak knives and start fencing across the table?

Mikki: No, right?

Sarah: No, no, we don’t either. [Laughs]

Mikki: Serrated metal and skin seem like a bad, a bad recipe.

[music]

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And now, back to my conversation with Mikki Kendall.

[music]

Mikki: But, you know, okay, so I’m reading that and I’m thinking, this is weird, and then she’s got another marriage announcement. There’s no, like, connecting of the dots at the time, right. This is me really specifically trying to find this one woman and what happens. And wouldn’t you know, she ends up married to his great uncle, because he died of typhus. Now, years have elapsed. No one has connected the dots, but around this point I’m like, wait a minute. I thought the last article was weird, but it wasn’t – this was the same girl whose boyfriend, well, fiancé, fell backwards out of a window and died. She marries his wealthier friend; now we’ve moved on. But she was a shopkeeper’s daughter at the beginning of this, and now she’s married to a major financial investor and Chicago elite. Then he dies too, and she’s briefly a suspect that time, but then his business partner is believed to be the one that did it. And she moves to Florida. She married a man who owned an orange plantation; wouldn’t you know, he collapsed of a stroke in the sun.

Sarah: The devil you say!

Mikki: And so she got all of that money too. All of this, all of the money from here, and all of the money from there. Then she sold everything off and left for Europe, and that was one of the things that I found while I was trying to figure out why so many poisonings, because American divorce law was this really weird thing where we didn’t have any laws that protected women and still don’t have great laws that protect women?

Sarah: True facts.

Mikki: But we had a handful of things. We have that running joke where we miss the days when men went off to war and died, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: But before that joke, men died of stomach problems very young, and for a very long time it was great to be a widow. It was not so great to be single or a wife, but in American law and British law, it was great to be a widow.

Sarah: Oh yes.

Mikki: And there are several times we find where, ‘cause women are caregivers, they didn’t suspect until much later, twenty, thirty bodies – sometimes we catch them; sometimes we figure it out, but I got interested in wealthier women. Didn’t have to be super wealthy, but in upper middle class, let’s say, who seemed to have gone through several husbands, because they tended to be rewarded financially, especially if those husbands died after a long period of illness, right?

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: It was never a short, abrupt, sudden death.

Sarah: No. He’s poorly for a while.

Mikki: Right, he’s poorly for a very long time, and then we start looking. And I’ve told this story on Twitter before, but a woman once told me about the time she murdered her husband and got away with it.

Sarah: I love this story so much. Thank you, first of all. Is this, it this your biggest Twitter thread?

Mikki: I’m not sure. Possibly one of my biggest?

Sarah: ‘Cause Twitter doesn’t let you sort by retweets. Like, you can’t see, like, easily –

Mikki: No.

Sarah: – which one it is, but – would you, would you, would you recap this story? Do you mind?

Mikki: Okay, so let me tell you – this is the longer version.

Sarah: ‘Cause you and I have that same thing where people just tell us their business right? My husband –

Mikki: Yes.

Sarah: – my husband calls it bartender pheromone? Like, people just tell me everything –

Mikki: Ohhh!

Sarah: – and I’m just like, why? Why, why do I know this now?

Mikki: I, so I was on a bus.

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: First of all, I have a face where it not only says, tell me all your business, but also, she’s the nice one. I don’t know what that is, but especially older people will come and sit next to me on public transit. Right?

Sarah: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Mikki: They will walk past other people to sit next to me, and then I get, like, the questions about who I am, what I’m doing. If they are lonely, they are talking to me –

Sarah: Yep!

Mikki: – ‘cause this – so we’re sitting there, and we got stuck in traffic on Michigan Avenue. If you’ve ever been in Chicago in the summer when the festivals and stuff start, you know that sometimes that 6 bus you caught further north moves really quickly, and sometimes you’re just going to be there; it’s going to be an hour.

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: Right. And the reason to take the bus and not the train is that the trains are going to be packed full and buses have windows that open. I know that doesn’t sound like it makes much of a difference, but trust me, it does in the summer. So we’re sitting on the bus, and I was already in the, in the throes of figuring I needed to leave my own marriage because I was married to somebody I needed to divorce.

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: That happened to me. I did divorce him; didn’t kill him. Just want to point that out. But we’re talking, and I must have looked sad, ‘cause she asked me what was wrong, and she looked kind of like Whistler’s grandmother, right? We are talking cute little twinset and pearls that, like, if you’ve ever seen, like, a Midwestern roller-set perm –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: – right? The very soft curl; like, there’s this, a look to these women. Wouldn’t –

Sarah: Just a little puff at the top and the sides, yep.

Mikki: Yes! And there’s no fear of whatever you’re saying, whatever’s going on; like, they just look like you could cuddle them.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: It’s a thing, right? So we’re sitting there, we’re talking, and she looks at me and she says, I was married to one like that. He was a liar! And, like, the shift, the flick, I was married to one like that; he was a liar! And I’m like, ahhh!

[Laughter]

Mikki: Like, I just –

Sarah: Okay!

Mikki: – ma’am! But also, now I’ll tell you the other thing: I’m nosy!

Sarah: Oh!

Mikki: I am emphatically, unbelievably, dyed-in-the-wool, it’s-genetic nosy.

Sarah: Yes, this is why I have a podcast.

Mikki: And so people will just tell me all of the things; I will listen. I am mostly not, frankly, judging you, because your story fascinates me. So then she starts talking about this man who was almost twenty years older than her, though she didn’t know that when she married him. He lied to her about his age; he lied to her about everything, okay? So she’s a teenage girl from a farm somewhere in Iowa when she meets this man who’d been working as a traveling salesman. He never bothers to tell her that he’s sick – he has some kind of heart condition – or that he is really looking for a nursemaid more than anything else, right? She has no idea.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mikki: So they get married. He makes all the appropriate promises, including the fact that he has a house and that he wants her to come to his home in Chicago. At the time, it sounds like he promised that when he’s taking trips to Iowa, which were pretty regular, he would take her too, so she would get to see her family all the time. Right? But she wouldn’t have to do all the other traveling around. So family agrees, get the impression there were a lot of kids – this is possibly also why this agreement kind of flows really smooth. Okay, great. She gets to Chicago; he does own a house; that’s the only thing that’s true. He’s actually about to stop being able to travel very much. He’s got some kind of pension. There’s no going to see her family, and then he proceeds to be abusive. Even when he’s not physically abusive to her, he’s verbally abusive to her, and everything is a reason for him to be mean to her. The kind of meat she brings home from the grocery store isn’t good enough? It’s a bad day. It’s too nice; he calls her all kind of names and asks what she did to get it. She spends too long outside talking to the neighbor – whatever, right?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mikki: She’s not, she’s not outside long enough, the neighbors will think she’s rude. She can literally do nothing right. She’s telling me this story, and I’m very sad for her. And then she starts talking about the garden around this house and how no one had taken care of it. Now, in what we now call Tri-Taylor – it used to be called Little Italy – there are these little houses; they’re almost like row houses, but there’s a little space between them; they all have these small yards. So I know exactly where she’s talking about, and she then goes on to explain that the yard was completely overgrown.

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: Fun, weird fact in the Midwest is that because all of this was either, you know, woods or farmland or whatever, all manner of stuff will grow in this soil unless it’s really toxic, right?

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: So when she starts cleaning out the yard, it’s full of mushrooms; it’s full of digitalis plants, foxglove; it’s a pretty – all of these things; and as she’s explaining this to me, I’m trying to figure out, because I know just enough with the poisoning at that point, I’ve read enough Agatha Christie mysteries and things like that to be like, this is an odd story turn from, he was a terrible man and I hated his guts.

Sarah: To I got a backyard full of poison.

Mikki: Right. And then she says, so I started giving those to him. I said, giving what to him? The mushrooms and the jimson as part of making stews and soups and things. But she didn’t know how much to give him, so he would just get sicker. Right? But he’s so much sicker, now he’s not so mean, because his guts are basically trying to turn themselves into knots, because even though she said she just started giving them to him, I wonder after the fact if she really didn’t know how much to put in there, ‘cause I think put one in and see how sick it makes him, might do the thing.

But meanwhile, let’s circle back to the butcher for a second. Every time she goes to pick up their cut of meat for dinner, the butcher’s boy is nice to her.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: He’s very polite; he’s very sweet. He always asks after her, and, you know, until she makes him too sick to do so, her husband has definitely been hitting her, right. People know. There’s nothing anyone’s going to do about it, but people know.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: And the butcher’s boy is nice to her; he doesn’t judge her. He figures out the precise range of meat cuts, right, that this man will not give her too hard of a time –

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: – so. And I think she made a decision. I have no proof, but, you know, the man who works at the butcher’s, even though his family owns the business, he’s not guaranteed to have a lot of money, and I don’t think this was a girl who wanted to be poor. And her husband had this house, and he had that money that he was going to live off of, and a wife inherits. An ex-wife is penniless and disgraced; we’ll put it that way. So when, you know, she made him soup, a big pot of stew, mushrooms, all manner of leaves from the yard, all of those things, and then she didn’t eat any of it. He ate the entire pot, because that was the other thing was, he was greedy. He was always complaining about how much she ate, and he ate every bit, and then he went to bed, and she stayed up and she cleaned and she, you know, had a little bread and butter, and the, the next day she went out there and, what do you know, she cleaned up the garden, and I wouldn’t be surprised if hear that she disposed of the pots that she used, and she left him in there resting for a day and some change. And then she called the doctor when she couldn’t wake him up. And the doctor, possibly looking at a split lip or a poorly covered black eye, the doctor said his heart gave out in his sleep. He wrote the death certificate and sent him on his way. And meanwhile, she just had cleaned the house and bought groceries and taken care of things, trying to make that mean man happy!

Sarah: Yep!

Mikki: So she had a funeral instead, and the butcher had a new wife!

Sarah: Oh no!

Mikki: Butcher boy got a wife! They had a home! I don’t think they lived in that house, but a nice rental income –

Sarah: That’ll go very far! That’ll go very far.

Mikki: Yeah. It’ll go very far. And the interesting thing – I recognized she was probably trying to give a girl a hint – the interesting thing was that except from when she looked mean and angry about this man, she mostly looked very sweet –

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: – right? But she had a daughter who was widowed, et cetera, and had questions that I couldn’t ask, right; she got off the bus. Tiny, tottering old lady.

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: But, you know, she didn’t believe in men who were liars, she didn’t believe in men who were mean, and she understood the value of a good garden, and I sort of got my interest spiked in looking into these things in part because of her, and realized along the way, when I was trying to find out more and trying to, like, connect these dots in Chicago, because I’ve heard other stories like this about older women in Chicago, that we don’t really know how many people are poisoned. We think of poison as a women’s weapon, and we think of it mainly when they get caught, but we also have a lot of stories about women who did get caught having multiple victims, but the women who did not get caught (a) could have multiple victims, but also (b) they were satisfied with killing the one they needed to kill.

Sarah: They just needed that one!

Mikki: They needed that one.

Sarah: Like you said in your thread about the embalmed beef – ugh! – you know, a lot of these men coming back from war already had bad stomachs. They’d eaten terrible things, they’d been sitting in trenches, they had probably worms and all kinds of things, and it didn’t take much to shove ‘em off, especially if they were miserable.

And the poison clusters, I mean, all of this originates in the idea that by limiting women to marriage, that was their only choice, and if they didn’t have a good one, they didn’t have a lot of options to get out of it, either.

Mikki: Right, and this was the thing: we didn’t, we made it impossible to get a divorce, and in many cases, depending on where you were, even if you could get a divorce, you had to leave your children behind.

Sarah: Yeah, mm-hmm. Yep.

Mikki: And there was no guarantee, even if you were able to take your children, he would have to support them –

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: – right? And so we create that box, then we add in one more box, because this is, you know, back when getting an abortion was not yet a Republican talking point, but also it wasn’t cheap –

Sarah: Nope.

Mikki: – wasn’t easy for poor women. A lot of women had to know how to handle contraception on their own.

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: Right? There were things you could use, but we have all of these folk songs about teas to drink and things like that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mikki: – because women were used to passing that knowledge down.

Sarah: Yep. Pennyroyal –

Mikki: So I wondered –

Sarah: – things like that, yeah.

Mikki: – I wondered when I started to look at how many men who had come home from wars or elsewise, who in some cases had definitely criminal arrests, they, their wives survived; they didn’t.

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: And then I started to kind of dig further into what happened to the women who said, I’m going to have one husband. Okay, maybe I have two.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: And sometimes the husband went away and it was fine, and she was just a bigamist, but sometimes the husband didn’t go away, and then you would find that they just had an attack.

Sarah: Oh.

Mikki: And they would have these weird phrasing on their death certificates, if you go and you look at, like, the record, death records and things. And so I was talking to another historian who said, essentially, many times, because they were being cleared by people who weren’t coroners, who weren’t even necessarily doctors – you know, they were coroners, they were elected coroners, not medical coroners.

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: So I think it was very easy to get away with organic poison. It’s inefficient, probably doesn’t work great the first two or twelve times, doesn’t appear to have been something women didn’t know was happening, something women just didn’t really talk about.

Sarah: And then if you did have that knowledge, all right, here’s exactly how much of this weed from the yard that you want to put in the food to send them on their way, the, you, you pass that knowledge on. Like, I remember hearing from, so my grandfather was a urologist. My grandmother once told me after he had died that one thing he always told people when he was giving them morphine, like, you give this much, it kills pain; if you give this much, it kills the person. And I was like, well, that’s really interesting information to just sort of hand out to someone? Like just, here you go, here’s the murder dose? Thank you? See you later? Have a good day?

Mikki: Oh yeah! And this is the same thing with the, the, the garden pharmacopeia, right? If you go back and you look at a lot of the books –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: – the housekeeping books, many of them specify, a drop will do this; more than three drops will – so yes, we tended to catch the women who used inorganic poisons: arsenic –

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: – strychnine, cyanide, but only if they did it in a single dose. Many of the poisoners who did it in smaller doses –

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: – it was victim seven –

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: – victim twelve that they figured it out with, but they didn’t notice the first five victims.

Sarah: And there’s a lot of women, older women who have, who have dispatched a, a marriage, often, and it’s fascinating, especially right now with this trend of books where – that I’m calling Earl Had to Die – of women who are getting away with murder and are very upfront about it, and, you know, in, in, in writing you talk so much about the sympathetic characters. You have sympathy for somebody who’s like, yeah, nope, the only choice was killing him, so that’s what I did.

Mikki: When you read their letters back and forth to each other, in many cases women speak casually of the multiple deaths of so-and-so’s husbands, and they don’t seem particularly concerned or shocked or whatever, right?

Sarah: No.

Mikki: They think it is completely normal, and when you talk to elders who, you know, lived through these various periods, and they often will say, well, you know, so-and-so always had gallstones; so-and-so always had stomach issues; he was always poorly; and you start to think, how long would you have to make someone sick before they became just someone who was poorly? And I don’t think it took very long. I think it was a matter of weeks or months.

Sarah: And we’ve already got this suspicious food everywhere that’s unregulated –

Mikki: Well –

Sarah: – and unprotected, so it’s real easy to hide that underneath, you know, bad beer!

Mikki: Right! You had bad beef, bad mushrooms, bad beer, because bad beer killed a bunch of people, and I’m sure a murder or two was hidden there in England, but also bad beer gave a lot of people stomach issues here.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mikki: You have bathtub gin; you have all of these things. I mean, we had rendered women legally essentially children in marriage, right? They didn’t own their property; they didn’t have control of themselves.

Sarah: Nope.

Mikki: You couldn’t, for instance, get credit in your name –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: – or in some cases even have a bank account –

Sarah: In your own name, yeah.

Mikki: – right, as a wife, but as a widow – !

Sarah: Oh, well, I mean, there’s a whole subgenre of historical romances with, with widows who were able to do whatever the heck they want! So much power. So much wealth! So, so much to do.

Mikki: Right? And so much – I mean, to be honest, where was the downside for them if they were married to a man they didn’t want to marry in the first place, right? Like, we always have, like, these fortune hunter romance novels where the fortune-hunting guy comes in, he marries the heiress, and then, like, he’s assumed to be taking everything over.

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: But if you go back and you look even in – and this is a weird sub-twist, I know – but even in terms of white women owning enslaved people, the reason they were able to own enslaved people was that that wealth that could not be taken from them by law and by marriage, right? But if you look at those things, then you look at how many of them were married to men who then went on to cheat, and then they survived their husbands.

Sarah: It is one way to change your story, isn’t it?

Mikki: I mean, can you think of a better way? You have no shame!

Sarah: Nope.

Mikki: If you have been married to a man who was not good in an era where you have no way to get a divorce –

Sarah: And you, like you said, people know when, people figure out when someone is in an abusive relationship, even if they can’t do any- – people kind of figure it out.

Mikki: Right, they know.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: So then you live up to the archetype of the caring wife, the long-suffering wife long enough, he passes, nobody thinks it’s you, because if it were you, you would have done it immediate. But as long as you didn’t do it immediate –

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: – you could, you know – true, you could have suffered all this time and Mother Nature did it, but if he had a long period of belly issues, I have questions.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mikki: I have a lot of questions, because it’s such a common thing. And granted, lots of cover because of bad food, right? Because in some cases they detail them raving pains in their back, sweats, their eyes yellowing, and sure, it could be sudden and severe onset of jaundice, jaundice and renal failure. It could also be some mushrooms and, and, and maybe a little jimsonweed, because Datura poisoning does give you the raving raves, and nobody’s necessarily testing for jimsonweed.

Sarah: No. That’s not a real common test. I can’t get that at CVS.

So if you notice something, like, you’re like, okay, that’s, you know, really interesting, that many guys in that town died of gastroenteritis, what do you start doing when you want to, like, pull that thread and see where it goes?

Mikki: I, I just started looking at their causes of death and what else was going on around them before death. Right, like, were they getting in trouble with the police? Were they someone that neighbors complained about?

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: Because literally enough municipal complaints, from the neighbors, I look at the municipal complaints like this, but you know if your neighbors call you all the, the authorities about, if you’re a bad guy, they want to kind of intervene, but don’t have a way to intervene if you’re being violent, they have complaints about your yard. They have complaints about your trash. They have all of these complaints, right? And you’re constantly having to deal with all of this stuff, right? It’s just never-ending. But that means that inspectors are going by your house.

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: That means that people are paying attention; people in government are coming over and over and over again to deal with you, the problem neighbor! Right?

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: And those records are kept!

Sarah: Ahhh!

Mikki: Cities tend to keep those complaint logs because if you are a problem neighbor, we’re going to cite you. We’re going to write you tickets –

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: – things like that. And, you know, full disclosure: I have no hundred percent proof, because no one did an autopsy on many of these men; they just had these assumed deaths. But then I started looking at their spouses, and in many cases the wives inherit, the problems stop.

Sarah: Shocking! So surprising!

Mikki: Right? The problems stopped when he died, and sometimes the wives move! Sometimes they get married again and they just stayed there very comfortably, and occasionally, sometimes women need to maybe address a problem neighbor a couple times, but it sure looks like, for many of them, all of the city’s complaints about everything from trash to yard length, you know, noise –

Sarah: Noise, yep.

Mikki: – like, people were calling. And there was one guy where either he was the worst neighbor in the history of man, right, like, the absolute worst, or the neighbors had decided to take it in turn to call every chance they got, either to drive him out of the neighborhood or to make sure that he didn’t do whatever it was he was doing.

Sarah: Very organized HOA right there.

Mikki: Right.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: The most organized HOA.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: But you find kind of this – because, you know, the wife is, they’ve had a couple babies, that kind of thing –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mikki: – but the wife is sort of buried in here in the mentions, in the notes when these various people come out, because the other thing that was interesting is that in many cases the officers or whoever show up, well, they write down tiny details of what they saw, right, and these records are now open to the public; you just have to dig through them because no one’s digging through them. They mention things like black eyes –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mikki: – busted lips as a casual sort of aside, right.

Sarah: Bruises on her wrists, that kind of thing.

Mikki: Right, bruises on the shoulder and that kind of thing –

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: – even though records were, when children’s services, such as it was, were being called, were not public, you start to ask, how many times were they also called, or were other things reported? Because the time we get to the ‘80s and, like, the weird Satanic Panic thing –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mikki: – those agencies, which, which previously didn’t have very much power, had been robustly beefed up across that time –

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: – too. Right? And I mean, if you think about it, if he’s hitting her and he’s hitting the kids or kids are getting older, and you are generally expected to garden in many of these communities until very recently, it’s not like it would be hard to solve your problem. You know, the citation you often got, if there was one, after the fact, it was about her burning yard waste.

Sarah: Ohhh, goodness!

Mikki: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: Can’t be having any of that yard waste sitting around.

Mikki: Don’t want that!

Sarah: No, no, no! No, no! So you dig through those records and you find this pattern, and it’s a pattern.

Mikki: Yeah. Here’s the thing: sometimes we’ll try in areas where it’d be like, these men came home from war, they worked at this factory, whatever, and you could spot the two or three, because nobody else is shuffling off this mortal coil, right?

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: But these guys get sick around kind of the same time.

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: These guys kind of – and then – and I’m not the only person who ends up looking at some of these records – then, later, the story ends. We’ll be like, all of the men from this particular unit or, you know, this small group of men, they all die around the same time! And they’re not looking for poison, necessarily; they’re looking to figure out what else happened here –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mikki: – right, and then you start to realize that, wait, we didn’t have a mental health anything. We know that a lot of people, the ‘50s were really rough and that, into the ‘60s, we have women sort of, you know, women’s lib and all this, because we have this long period when women had jobs –

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: – right –

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: – not just women of color, but all the women were working.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: The men came back from the war effort, and they were supposed to give up their jobs and go back home, and we tend to point at that as where, you know, this is where women’s lib really comes together, and it’s like, is that it? Or did we really have a moment where they came back with maybe PTSD, even though that’s not what we were calling it then, right? Battle fatigue, whatever. Maybe they weren’t that great beforehand –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mikki: – and she’s had time without him –

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: – and she’s had time to lose the idea that she couldn’t live without him.

Sarah: Yep. And she’s had time to develop self-sufficiency!

Mikki: Yes!

Sarah: And be like, wait, I can do this!

Mikki: And especially if he comes back and he’s mean –

Sarah: Uh-huh.

Mikki: – right.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mikki: He’s really mean, and she’s working this hard for no reward, but before when she worked this hard, not only did she have money, she got to control the money.

Sarah: Yep. Yep. It’s one thing if you, if you’re a widow; then it’s all yours! ‘Cause you’re still Mrs. Dude Name.

Mikki: Right! If you were, you know, going to go back to your father, and I’ve seen stories where women went home to dad, and in many cases they were Mrs. So-And-So –

Sarah: Yep.

Mikki: – and they were able to get credit as a widow, because who wants to punish a poor widow?

Sarah: No, not at all! Especially one who, who, who survived such a tragic death!

Mikki: And she’s got this, those kids or that house to take care of.

Sarah: Yep!

Mikki: But, you know, houses were often being paid off, and you know what was a great way to avoid the neighbors talking? You sell the house.

Sarah: Yep. Well, it’s a, it’s a, you know, it’s got so many bad memories. Who, who wouldn’t blame them for wanting to move on, right?

Mikki: Right!

Sarah: Yeah! Got to go!

Mikki: She sells the house and she moves on, and if she happens to move to a city or a different city –

Sarah: Where no one knows her?

Mikki: Right!

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: And starts all over? And so when I was looking at all the records of, like, how some, some, even small towns sometimes just kind of collapse, right; businesses go under, all of these things –

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: – but, you know what we do with those records? We don’t keep as careful of an eye on what happens to them. A lot of them end up online, or they’re just, you know, on searchable library databases, whatever. But when you’re looking through the records and you realize that the coroner is, like, the mayor’s nephew, right; the town has one doctor who’s a general practitioner; yeah, sure, you had to move on, they had to leave; they had to sell up or whatever; but also, a lot of these men didn’t leave; their wives did. What was happening here? Like, there’s no mill explosion; there’s no mine collapse.

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: Right. But they had a lot of, a lot of gastro issues. Fevers. That’s my other favorite thing? Right, fevers or presumed fevers, but it’s the sweats that tell them they have a fever.

Sarah: Ah, so they may not even have a fever; they may be having sweats from some, a garden –

Mikki: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – garden malfunction. That piece of the garden ended up in the house. Yeah.

Mikki: We also have recipes. If you ever go looking at, like, ‘60s recipes and things, you get a lot of recipes that warn us about, this is poisonous; this is delicious.

Sarah: Yeah. This is your party dose; this is your death dose.

Mikki: Yeah. Like, they put it in cookbooks! Here’s how you murder him, in a cutesy cookbook women’s magazine.

Sarah: Maybe all of these weird salads we see on the internet where it’s like Jell-O with ham in it and, you know, these absolutely absurd salads that you look back and you’re like, no, this can’t be real, maybe those were poison covers.

So what are you working on right now?

Mikki: I’m working on stuff for my next book, which is sort of an autopsy of the American dream across generations. Listen, I was really going to do the poison cluster things at some point as a side hobby, but also along the way I started to realize the reason I was seeing so many poison clusters in other generations seemed to be tied very directly to the marriage. First of all, there were a lot of secret first husbands, like I mentioned –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Mikki: – but if you were going for earlier, you didn’t have any money in your name for a lot of them. None in your name. And men would leave with their girlfriends or whatever and come back broke. That was a problem. But I also started to realize that we not, we’re not seeing so much of them after marriage entered in the scene and things like alimony entered the scene, right?

Sarah: Right.

Mikki: ‘Cause there was no value add in killing him anymore.

Sarah: No.

Mikki: He was literally worth more to you alive than dead. And it’s not just women do this; it’s just that women seem more likely to get away with doing it this way. We expect women to be caregivers, all of that, and so the American dream for white, older, boomer men of a certain income class is true. It’s not really true for anyone else, except the women who kill them. There’s that, but also talking about race, because, as we all know, I occasionally talk about race, and when we say things like, okay, boomer, which boomers are we talking about? Because Black boomers were dealing with Jim Crow. So that’s kind of where the book is going. I’m not going to talk as much about poison in that I’m still trying to figure out how to prove how much of this is poison versus bad food, which is really difficult, because, like, bad food was the perfect cover.

Sarah: Oh!

Mikki: Bad food was the perfect cover!

Sarah: Absolutely!

Mikki: And I want to do something with this; I’m just trying to figure out what, because I’m fascinated by the women and the poisons and marriage laws. I would love to do something with this, ‘cause I think women are getting away with murder.

Sarah: I would love to read more about poison clusters. I am always fascinated by people who very quietly take back control of something and hide in plain sight.

Mikki: And I think they have perfected, in some ways, because unless you have a giant insurance settlement, who’s going to investigate?

Sarah: Nope. Nobody.

Mikki: Right? Unless you have killed four husbands or something, who’s going to investigate?

Sarah: Thank you so much for doing this podcast!

Mikki: Thank you for having me on! I wish I could prove all of my working theories about poison clusters, the perfect way, but I think people got away with murder. I think they got away with a lot of murder. That makes it even better.

Sarah: Yep. Earl Had to Die.

Mikki: Earl Had to Die.

Sarah: Earl Had to Die.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this episode. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. If you are looking for more information, you can find everything you need to know about Mikki Kendall at her website, mikkikendall.com – M-I-K-K-I-K-E-N-D-A-L-L. I will also have links to the books that she mentioned, including Hood Feminism, and if you’re curious, of course I will link to the Twitter threads and many other historical records that we talk about.

And if you would like to email me, I would love to hear from you, especially if you have thoughts on this episode. You can email me at [email protected] or Sarah, S-A-R-A-H, at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books dot com [[email protected]], whichever is easier for you to remember.

I have a joke. I always have a joke, but this is my favorite part of ending each episode: I get to find a joke and then share it with you. All right, you ready? This one’s, this one’s pretty great.

What is the answer when someone says to you, “Bro, can you pass me that pamphlet?”

What’s the answer when someone says to you, “Bro, can you pass me that pamphlet?”

The answer: “Bro, sure!”

[Laughs] Brochure! It really helps if I just imagine Bill and Ted saying this to each other. Bro, sure! Ah, so great. If you have jokes that you want to share with me, you know that I want to hear them, right? You can email them to me at [email protected]

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very, very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you back here next week.

Smart Podcast, Trashy Books is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at frolic.media/podcasts.