#41 Barbara Wilson

This episode is the second in a two-part series.

If you haven't heard Barbara Part 1, please go back and listen.

Thanks, and on with the show.

You know, I have a passion for dance.

No, I did not know that.

And I was wondering if I could, because I'm going to be giving break dancing lessons online, and I was wondering if you could put up a flyer about it at the hospital.

Do you guys have like

a little staff room or something?

Not a lover of dance, I guess.

From Gimlet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight.

Today's episode, Barbara Part 2, Barbara Wilson.

Right after the break.

This is an iHeart podcast.

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Barbara's online obituary obituary contradicted everything my mother-in-law Becky thought she knew about her old friend.

So Becky tasked me with finding out the truth.

In the process, I uncovered the murder Barbara committed in 1968.

But reading through the trial transcripts, the prosecution's argument didn't make sense to Becky, or to me.

Why would being asked to leave the nest provoke Barbara to murder?

To understand the why, I need to better understand the who.

Who was Barbara before Becky met her in Copenhagen?

So, I'm heading back to the beginning when Barbara Shutt was Barbara Wilson.

I start where I always start when I'm trying to get to the bottom of anything in my life.

YouTube.

Me and my buddy Brian are down here off a Whipper Wheel.

This is Douglas and his buddy Brian.

On their YouTube channel, they post videos of cemeteries and other creepy locales that have fallen into ruin.

And we have located the remnants to an old house down here.

What's this place called?

Galilean Children's Home.

Galilean Children's Home.

You can Google it yourself.

If you were to Google it, you'd see that the Galilean Children's Home was an orphanage outside Corbin, Kentucky that shut down in the 1950s.

The orphanage is where Barbara was raised, back before she was adopted by the Shutts, back when she was Barbara Wilson.

Dad gum.

Here's an old boot.

There's a kid-sized boot right there.

Founded in 1939 by a self-ordained mountain preacher named John Vogel, the orphanage was home to over 80 kids who considered themselves brothers and sisters and called John Vogel daddy.

When he was a boy, a house fire killed Vogel's five step-siblings, but spared him.

He took it as a sign that he'd been chosen by God for a higher purpose.

Vogel bragged that the Galilean children's home wasn't supported by any church, state, or public endowment.

He raised money through donations and by touring the kids around the country in a yellow school bus as a children's choir.

Much of what I learned about Vogel and the home comes from his autobiography, which, as my nephew Theo learned during his lessons with Becky, is a book written by the person that it's about.

Right, Otto means self.

Vogel's autobiography, This Happened in the Hills of Kentucky, is filled with folksy anecdotes about precocious kids getting up to naughty shenanigans.

I search the book for a mention of Barbara, but only find one anecdote.

It's about a little Barbara who tries to convince Vogel to let her chew gum.

Barbara is a quote champion chatterbox who argues that if her mouth is busy chewing gum, she won't be able to talk as much.

Little Barbara is given no last name, but she reminds me of adult Barbara, who knew how to get what she wanted.

One of the comments on Barbara's online obituary is from a fellow Galilean children's home resident, a man named Larry Brewster, whom I decide to phone.

Mr.

Brewster speaking.

Oh, hello, Mr.

Brewster.

Yes,

how did I get so lucky to get the call from you?

Oh, I don't know

how lucky it makes you, but I appreciate you saying that.

Once I've hand-fanned the blush from my cheeks, I explained to Larry that I'm calling about Barbara Wilson and what life was like at the Galilean children's home.

We had

as many as

20, 21, 24 of us in one room.

We had bunk beds, three bunks high.

I was taken there at the age of two years old.

I stayed there until 1955.

I broke them 13 years, one longest of any of the kids.

I thought that was why everybody lived at a children's home.

My housekeeper wants me to tell you that we had Christmas dinner with Colonel Sanders five years in a row.

Does Larry mean that, Colonel Sanders?

I wonder.

But then I take stock of my Yankee bias.

Can one not earn the rank of colonel in the great state of Kentucky without being mistaken for a white Van Dyke, chicken-frying, string-tie-tying, fast-food mascot?

But Larry assures me that indeed he is talking about that Colonel.

It seems Colonel Harlan David Sanders was a patron of the Galilean Children's Home, and according to his memoir, Life as I Have Known It Has Been Finger Lickin' Good, the Colonel had many failed careers.

Insurance salesman, army mule tender, ferryboat entrepreneur, and perhaps most alarming of all, amateur obstetrician.

But then, at the age of 65, the Colonel opened his first KFC.

And where he'd failed at birthing children, the Colonel excelled at birthing chickens.

His very first restaurant was located in Corbin, near the orphanage.

So you guys had fried chicken for Christmas dinner?

Fried chicken, everything.

Apple pie and ice cream, one on the cob, biscuits and gravy.

We had it all.

He spoiled, he said he wanted to be our grandpa.

He said, you know, it won't be illegal, but I'll be your grandpa.

Larry speaks warmly of his time at the home.

He says he attended class in a little schoolhouse, sang in the choir, and performed farm chores like milking goats and cows.

When I ask him about Barbara, though, he doesn't remember much.

The boys and girls were kept pretty separate.

The only time we saw the girls were in school because the miss halls were separated.

Girls had their own miss hall, and the boys had their own miss hall.

John Vogel was pretty strict about segregating the boys and girls, especially as they entered puberty.

Was John Vogel like a like a father to you?

Oh, he was most definitely.

In his mind, he wasn't for ours he was was uh we call him dad vogue i i have no nothing but but uh the best of memories i try to forget the bad ones sorry i try to forget the bad ones

and there were bad ones well

larry hesitates as though what he's thinking of saying next might stir up the bad ones They did have me come back once after I had left to go to court for Dad Vogel.

I had to go to court for some reason.

And I went to court.

I gave him a testimony.

I don't know if it helped the director, if it hurt him.

He didn't ask me to come back anymore.

Huh.

What do you remember about the court case?

No, I really don't know much about it.

What court case is Larry talking about?

When I get off the phone, I look into it, and the records I discover reveal a much darker portrait of the place Barbara was raised than that of Larry's memory.

And just a quick warning, the details I'm about to share deal with child sexual abuse and other sensitive subject matter.

In 1955, 16 years after opening the home, John Vogel was indicted for rape.

A headline from the Lexington Herald reads, Daddy John Vogel was a serpent in a hilly garden of Eden.

Two sisters who had grown up at the home accused Vogel of raping them.

The abuse began in their early teens and lasted years.

Vogel threatened to send them to jail if they ever told anyone.

Juanita was 20 when she finally came forward, Ruby 19.

Ruby's case went to court first, and parenthetically, it was Colonel Sanders who posted Vogel's bail.

A hung jury led to a mistrial, and at the retrial, Vogel was found innocent.

As for Juanita, Fearing a trial would cause her public embarrassment, she eventually withdrew the charges.

But she always maintained that her accusations against Vogel were true.

John Vogel wasn't the only person to publish a memoir about life at the Galilean home.

Memoir comes from a French word meaning memory.

Yeah, it sort of sounds like memory.

Yes.

Now, a memoir is...

The Self-Anointed, Love and Terror in My Father's House, is written by John Vogel's only biological child, Lenore Dupree.

Lenore is now 87 years old and lives in a senior residence hotel in Michigan, where she talks to me over the phone about her father.

He could charm the pants off of people, you know, and everybody thought he was a real wonderful person, but behind the scenes, he was pretty much of a dirty dealer.

How do you mean?

Well, he got all involved with these girls because he didn't want them ever to go away, so he started messing around with them so they would feel obligated to him.

Oh, you know, then

everything just kind of got in the wrong pocket.

You know,

people can try to make you do things for God, and it's not really for God, it's for them, and they hold the power over you that way.

In her book, Lenore describes her father calling her into his study after a fight they'd had.

All the other girls seem so committed to me, Fogel says.

Why are you so slow to commit yourself to God?

He reached up and put his hand on my breast, then pulled me down and kissed me on the mouth.

I shuddered.

Later, Lenore writes that she told one of the other girls about what had happened.

The girl just shrugged.

He does things like that all the time, the girl told Lenore.

I explained to Lenore the reason for my call, about my mother-in-law, Becky, about Copenhagen.

About a girl who grew up at the home named Barbara Wilson.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I do remember Barbara.

Yeah, she uh she was a real cute little kid.

She was sort of dark-haired and quite pretty and uh

she got along real well with the other kids.

She actually was adopted by somebody after she left there and she got in a lot of trouble or something.

I explained to Lenore that in fact it's that trouble that I'm phoning about.

Is there anything from Barbara's past that might help explain why she later did the thing she did?

Lenore volunteers the details she remembers, including how Barbara came to live at the home.

Their background was kind of poor.

I think that the mother was slightly feeble-minded and had a terrible palsy.

A palsy.

A nervous disorder, yeah.

And she was shaking so hard all the time she couldn't take care of her children.

Barbara wasn't the only Wilson left at the orphanage.

An older brother, Earl, had been brought there, too.

Growing up, though, Barbara and Earl barely knew each other since Vogel kept the boys and girls segregated.

When I asked Lenore if she thinks John Vogel might have preyed on Barbara, she says she doesn't think so, that it wouldn't have fit his M.O.

Vogel was mostly focused on the older girls.

Barbara was only a couple of months old when she arrived at the orphanage.

She was taken special care of by one of our teachers.

This Miriam Jones just almost adopted her as her private child.

Was it typical?

Like, were there other teachers who kind of adopted, informally adopted adopted students there?

No.

Miriam Jones fell in love with Barbara, and she raised her in her, you know, the workers had these separate rooms, and she kept Barbara in there with her and took care of her, and really it was wonderful to her.

Lenore depicts the Galilean children's home as a dog-eat-dog world.

There were the favorites and there were the semi-favorites, Lenore tells me.

And then there were the lost and forgotten.

You needed someone looking out for you to survive.

Listening to Lenore, a pattern emerges.

Miss Jones at the Galilean children's home, the warden, Miss Wheeler, at the Marysville Prison.

Throughout her life, Barbara procured benefactors.

One of the first things Becky told me about Barbara was that she knew how to get what she wanted.

But what Becky thought was a function of growing up rich and spoiled was actually just the opposite.

Barbara learned to manipulate in order to survive.

And it might have all begun at the Galilean children's home.

But when the home all broke open, she kind of, like everybody else, got scattered to the winds.

Though John Vogel was acquitted of the rape charges, he lost his license to operate the orphanage.

So he went to Florida, where he tried reopening with the remaining children from the Galilean home.

Among them, Barbara.

She was one of the kids that was left.

So many people came and took their children and welfare came and took some of them.

But if she went to Florida, this means she was one of the core group left that nobody claimed.

And so, unclaimed, at the age of nine, Barbara moved three states away with an accused rapist.

With his reputation in ruins, Vogel wasn't able to get the orphanage in Florida off the ground.

And when it finally fell apart completely, that was when Barbara's life became even less stable.

She bounced around in the Florida foster care system and at the age of 13 was brought back to Kentucky, where she moved every few months between distant relatives, some so poor, their homes were without running water.

In her junior year of high school, at the suggestion of her benefactor from the children's home, Miriam Jones, Barbara enrolled in a high school run by a nearby college called Berea.

And it was at Berea that she met the family that would finally adopt her, the Shutts.

In a long interview Barbara gave to the papers after her arrest, she recounts the day she originally met Jane Shutt.

Jane was a doctor at the Berea Infirmary, but Barbara says she didn't meet her as a patient.

Instead, she went to the infirmary that day to see the doctor that everyone said was Barbara's doppelganger.

All the kids on campus told me that she and I looked so much alike, it was uncanny, Barbara is quoted as saying.

And sure enough, we did.

And it's true.

In a photograph taken around the time, Barbara and Jane stand side by side.

They're both petite with small noses and tight-lipped smiles.

They both have dark hair, the same short, boyish cuts.

Barbara got close with Jane and her husband Charles, a dean at Berea.

Charles tutored Barbara in math, and Barbara babysat their two younger biological children.

When the family moved from Kentucky to Ohio before Barbara's senior year, they adopted her and took her with them.

Something still doesn't make sense to me though.

It's one thing to befriend a young high school student, but another to adopt her, especially at 17, one year away from legal adulthood.

He had a wife that was much younger than he was.

Other than that, I don't remember a single thing.

Charles was a beloved figure at Berea College.

The class of 1959 even dedicated their yearbook to him.

But when I reach out to alumni who might have insight into the adoption, I don't find much.

I don't really think that I have anything to contribute.

He was a kind man.

I have absolutely no memories, no contact.

I make a request to Berea for Charles's papers, his personal notes and correspondence, which they keep in their collection.

Anything that might offer information about the family.

And I find something.

Among the documents is the transcript of a tribute Charles was honored with after his death.

In it, there's a section dedicated to honoring Charles Schudd, the family man.

But as I read further, I slowly realize that the family under discussion is not the family he had with Jane.

It turns out, before Charles was married to Jane, he was married to a woman named Elva Weidler.

with whom he had two children.

In the tribute, neither Jane nor Barbara are so much as mentioned.

They're missing from the story of Charles's life.

Just like in Barbara's obituary, anything in anyone remotely related to the tragedy has been completely erased.

Yeah, you really picked a story.

This is Charles' granddaughter from that first family.

She has something new to tell me about Barbara after the break.

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Yeah, you really picked a story.

Charles's granddaughter asked me not to use her real name, so we decide to call her Nancy.

It seems I phoned her in the middle of her daily exercise.

I've been walking because I can't get my steps counted while I talk.

Okay.

How many steps do you average a day?

5,000 is sedentary, so you have to have over 5,000 a day.

Hmm.

Yeah.

How many do you get?

Oh, these days, uh,

nah.

After a few of my patented hems and trademarked haws, I reluctantly check my iPhone.

Way below sedentary.

It seems I haven't left my desk in days.

Barbara's case has become all-consuming.

Nancy is Charles's granddaughter from his first marriage, but she grew up knowing Jane and Charles and their kids.

Which is to say, Nancy grew up knowing Charles' adopted daughter, Barbara.

She was Aunt Barbara.

She was part of the family.

It is kind of a surprise, obviously, when someone is adopted when they're an adult.

But we didn't really think about that.

According to Nancy, Barbara was distraught when she learned of the move Charles and Jane were planning from Berea to Cincinnati, which is why they adopted her.

She was just begging them to take her with them.

Don't leave her behind.

Don't abandon her.

And that if they left, she'd have no one.

She had no family.

She had no one.

Barbara was communicating to them that if they didn't adopt her, they were hurting her.

They were harming her.

Once the adoption was official, Nancy says Charles and Jane were very attentive to Barbara, sometimes at the expense of their other kids.

She remembers family gatherings where all the energy was focused onto Barbara, what she was up to, how she was doing.

Nancy remembers an extended family conversation about Barbara's trip to Copenhagen, a graduation gift from Jane.

And Charles, Nancy says, was especially devoted to Barbara.

He'd buy her anything she wanted and take her on expensive vacations.

In fact, the summer after Jane's murder, while Barbara was out on bail, Charles and she went to Florida together.

Throughout his life, Charles remained convinced that Barbara was innocent.

He continued to visit her in prison, driving the two hours each way and always bringing little gifts.

He had an emotional attachment to Barbara.

Yeah.

I mean,

wouldn't that have been why he,

I mean, did he think of her as a daughter?

Nancy hesitates, choosing her words carefully.

They were,

according to one of my cousins, they were closer than you would expect a father-daughter pair to be in our culture.

How do you think they meant that?

Well, I know what he meant.

He meant that he went to a drive-in movie with them, and he was in the front seat, and they were in the back seat.

He described them as hugging and kissing.

Like

romantically, like...

Yes, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Yes.

That was one of the discoveries that they had some kind of romantic relationship.

Yeah.

For my mother-in-law, Becky, and I, the discovery fills a gap in our understanding of Barbara's motive to commit murder.

Was it to get rid of a rival?

I mean, if she was in love in that way with her father,

how did she feel about her mother?

Did she hate her mother?

Her mother was in the way?

Did Barbara murder Jane not just because jane was kicking her out of the house as the prosecution argued but because she saw her mother as a romantic competitor someone who was trying to break up her and charles

in some ways it kind of makes this story it makes it makes

it

makes more sense i mean if you're in love with somebody

And you feel like that's going to be taken away from you.

That's a pretty strong motivation.

You know, you can fall pretty hard when you're a 23-year-old girl.

You can also be taken advantage of.

I think back on the letters from Charles that Becky so envied in Copenhagen and what they might have actually contained.

Charles had been 51 years old when he married Jane, who was just 20 at the time, around the same age Barbara was when they adopted her.

Was Charles using Barbara to replace Jane?

Did Jane want Barbara out of the house because Jane was threatened by her?

I put the theory to Charles' granddaughter, Nancy.

I could only speculate that Jane would be more concerned about

the boundary violate about this as a boundary violation than as a threat to herself.

She would not see it as healthy.

Not healthy for Barbara.

Correct.

That is, Jane wasn't threatened by Barbara.

She was worried for her.

She might have been more concerned with Barbara's well-being.

Yeah.

And Barbara's mental health.

There's another version of how Barbara first met Jane that day on the Berea campus, one that has nothing to do with them looking alike.

According to the court transcript, Barbara was brought to the campus infirmary because she'd attempted suicide by drinking ammonia.

And Jane was the attending physician who received her.

Jane would have known just how fragile Barbara was.

Nancy believes that Jane was kicking Barbara out of the house not because she was jealous, but to protect her from Charles.

All Barbara's life, she sought benefactors, protectors, mothers.

It's ironic that the mother who was arguably trying to protect her from the greatest harm, the one really looking out for her well-being, is the one Barbara killed.

I would like to know what else your mother-in-law knew about Barbara.

Did Barbara ever mention her by a lot of her family of origin?

No.

Because she never mentioned them to us either.

The story we got was that she had no family.

And it wasn't even true.

Her obituary?

It describes a family.

The shots aren't mentioned in Barbara's obituary, but the Wilsons are.

Besides Barbara's deceased brother Earl, the obituary names a few surviving relatives, including a niece, Patty.

I reach out to her, and though she doesn't want to be recorded, she agrees to talk.

Patty tells me that in the last few years of Barbara's life, her extended biological family reconnected with her.

As it turns out, the Wilsons knew of their distant aunt Barbara, who had been abandoned as a baby, and finally tracked her down.

For the first time in Barbara's life, she wasn't the one seeking family.

Family was seeking her.

Patty tells me that in her later years, long after prison, Barbara moved into a retirement home.

The other residents were from wealthier backgrounds, and Patty says Barbara, try as she might, never really passed for the fancy type, like she had in Copenhagen.

in Becky's eyes.

Patty thinks Barbara was shunned by the other residents, and that drove her to her death.

It was a suicide, Patty tells me.

Barbara committed suicide in 2012.

In the end, there were no benefactors in the home to turn to.

No one to offer sanctuary.

In trying to understand who Barbara was, I spoke to many people who knew her from many different points in her life, her school days, her working life, her retirement.

But when I talked to the kids she lived with at the Galilean children's home, there was a recurring refrain.

No one wanted to believe that Barbara had done it.

Perhaps because Barbara was the one who got out, the one who graduated college, who found a nice family, and made something of herself.

I'm 84 years old, said one woman from the home who didn't want me to use her name.

But what happens to you as a child, you will never get over it.

Never, ever, ever.

I often wonder how many of these kids made it okay.

how many of these kids didn't go to jail or something like that.

A baby was born at the county jail and we were asked to take him.

His name was Jackie.

This is Lenore again, John Vogel's daughter, reading from her memoir.

In it, she never mentions Barbara, but she does include a passage about a little boy named Jackie.

Jackie is the pseudonym Lenore used for Earl Wilson.

Barbara's older brother.

His name was Jackie.

The mother was a rape victim and the baby was tiny and sickly.

It was a risk.

If he had died we would have been in for some kind of investigation.

But the baby lived and no one ever inquired about him.

I watched him grow and become a beautiful child.

Sometimes I stare at him wondering how such an exquisite thing could come into the world under such horrible conditions.

Was it possible that each life was a fresh start, a gift channeled straight from the beyond, without regard to its surroundings.

Did Jackie have a chance to grow up normal?

Sometimes I get a bit choked up and I can't do it.

Did Jackie have a chance to grow up normal?

Did any of us?

Thank you, Lenore.

When my mother-in-law Becky first told me Barbara's story, Copenhagen was just one more interlude in Barbara's life of privilege and good fortune.

But Copenhagen might have been as special for Barbara as it was for Becky.

The trip is mentioned in the court transcript.

It comes up when Barbara's lawyer asked Barbara to give an account of her life.

She lists a series of milestones, getting into Berea, finally being adopted.

and the summer she spent working at the laundromat in Denmark.

The first time I saw it, it surprised me.

But now, knowing what Barbara's life was like before the trip and after it, I think I understand.

I believe that she was totally happy when she was in Denmark.

And I just wonder if maybe that wasn't one of the happiest times, or certainly her last happy time.

Yeah, it might have been.

Yeah.

Our friendship was

almost had a purity to it, like we didn't bring our baggage to to it.

We enjoyed the moment with each other,

and that was all.

It had no past, and it had no future.

No matter what she did afterwards, we had what we had.

And that won't change for me.

While at my in-laws for dinner recently, I saw pinned to the kitchen corkboard beside the emergency phone numbers and coupons, a photograph of Becky and Barbara.

In the photo, they're in City Hall Square in Copenhagen.

Becky is in jeans and a striped t-shirt, carrying a tote bag.

Barbara has an expensive-looking leather purse and is wearing a skirt and trench coat.

She looks as glamorous as she does in all the newspapers and courtroom photos.

Except in this photo, she's smiling.

Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home

Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damaged deposit

Take this moment to decide

if we meant it, if we tried

but felt around for far too much

This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Stevie Lane, along with me, Jonathan Goldstein, and Mohini McGauker.

Our senior producer is Kalila Holt.

Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg, Fia Bennon, Justin McGoldrick, J.T.

Townsend, and Jackie Cohen.

Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K.

Sampson, Sean Jacobi, Michael Hearst, and Bobby Lord.

Additional music credits can be found on our website, gimletmedia.com/slash heavyweight.

Our theme song is by the weaker thans, courtesy of Epitaph Records.

Follow us on Twitter at heavyweight or email us at heavyweight at gimletmedia.com.

We'll be back with new episodes after Thanksgiving, exclusively on Spotify.

Ah, smart water alkaline with antioxidant.

Pure, crisp taste, perfectly refreshing.

Whoa, that is refreshing.

And a 9.5 plus pH.

For those who move, those who push further, those with a taste for taste.

Exactly.

I did take a spin class today after work.

Look at you.

Restoring like a pro.

I mean, I also sat down halfway through.

Eh, close enough.

Smartwater alkaline with antioxidant.

For those with a taste for taste, grab yours today.

You've probably heard me say this.

Connection is one of the biggest keys to happiness.

And one of my favorite ways to build that?

Scruffy hospitality.

Inviting people over even when things aren't perfect.

Because just being together, laughing, chatting, cooking, makes you feel good.

That's why I love Bosch.

Bosch fridges with VitaFresh technology keep ingredients fresher longer, so you're always ready to whip up a meal and share a special moment.

Fresh foods show you care, and it shows the people you love that they matter.

Learn more, visit BoschHomeUS.com.

When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing.

ODU solves this.

It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales.

Odo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way.

You can save money without missing out on the features you need.

Check out Odoo at odoo.com.

That's odoo.com.

This is an iHeart podcast.