REMASTERED – Episode 49: Seeing Double

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Thomas Harvey wanted to give his mother's home a bit of a fresh cleaning.

She had lived in the house for 40 years, but little had changed in the decades leading up to 1960.

If you'd asked around in the neighborhood there in the Welsh town of Ryl, every single person would have said that Sarah Harvey deserved that gift.

She was kind and quiet, if not unremarkable, and she'd been living alone ever since her husband passed away in 1938.

Well, that's not entirely true.

For a handful of years, beginning in 1940, Sarah Harvey played host to a lodger.

Mrs.

Knight was an older woman who had recently separated from her husband.

She wasn't well, and so Sarah had looked after her while she stayed there.

But when World War II ended, Mrs.

Knight moved out of town.

Fifteen years is a long time for someone to live alone, which is why her son Thomas wanted to freshen up the house before she returned home from a stay in the hospital.

On May 5th, 1960, he was standing on the landing of his mother's stairs, looking at a large storage cupboard.

Maybe he thought it contained cleaning supplies or perhaps boxes of old decorations.

I have no clue, really.

Whatever the reason was, though, he reached up and opened it wide and found a body.

The petrified, mummified body of a woman.

Insects had eaten away most of the face and hair and there was a thick layer of dust on the skin.

But that didn't stop the police from identifying her.

It was Mrs.

Knight.

Harvey had apparently strangled the woman in 1940 and then continued to collect her pension illegally.

We think we know our neighbors.

But do we really?

No one would have suspected Mrs.

Harvey of murder, after all, if it wasn't for her curious son.

Whether they're a respected public figure or a quiet elderly widow, it's impossible to know the whole story.

It seems that some people, quite literally, have skeletons in their closet.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

I know we've talked a bit about Edinburgh before, but indulge me for a moment.

Today we know it as the beautiful ancient capital of Scotland, but that wasn't always the case.

People have lived in the area for over 10,000 years, but it wasn't until the end of the 7th century when they started to gather into anything resembling a community.

A Celtic fortress was built there in 638, and that's where the city as we know it today began.

Sure, it had the usual outlying outlying village, but it wasn't until Scottish King David I established an official royal settlement there in the 12th century that things really started to take off.

Within two centuries, writers across Europe began to refer to the city as the capital of Scotland, but that expansion came with some growing pains.

Up until the end of the 16th century, every bit of the city was still wrapped up in the tender embrace of the defensive walls that surrounded the community.

So rather than growing outward, buildings were starting to climb higher.

Some of them even reached a height of 11 stories.

Not too bad for the pre-skyscraper era.

But all those people living in such confined space was creating a problem.

For a long time, Edinburgh was known as one of the most filthy and overpopulated urban centers in all of Europe.

Those high-rise tenement buildings were packed with people, and beneath them were countless vaults, like an ancient hybrid between a dungeon and a basement.

And as the city attracted more and more newcomers, they tended to find themselves down there, in the shadows.

But thankfully, that was all about to change.

In the 1760s, the city reinvented itself.

It's a long story, involving a competition to find the best architect, so I won't dig into the finer points.

But the end result is going to be a brand new part of the city, referred to as Newtown, situated north of the older portion, logically known as Old Town.

The planning committee had a clean slate, so a grid of streets was laid out north of Norlock.

As construction went on over the coming years, the loch, which had originally just been a dumping site for sewage, was filled in with earth, and today it's known as the mound.

All of those gorgeous buildings, the National Gallery, the General Assembly Hall, the Museum, all of it, you see, was built on the human waste of Old Town.

And Newtown was gorgeous.

There's no doubt about it.

It was modern and beautiful and perfectly matched to the enlightened minds that were flocking to the city.

Before long, Edinburgh was known as the Athens of the North, and all of that knowledge and advancement, along with the available space for new construction, attracted a wave of elites and wealthy landowners.

This new setting created a demand for luxury products.

Those fancy Georgian townhouses practically begged for beautiful new custom furniture, right?

And those wide, clean streets, well, they were the perfect place to drive your brand new carriage on.

A whole new industry, from ironwork to cabinetry, began to blossom.

Newtown, whether it was intentional or not, quickly became Rich Town.

And because it was situated at a higher elevation than the rest of the city, a very real physical separation was formed between the wealthy and the poor.

If you lived on the southern side of Newtown, you could quite literally step outside and look down on the poor.

But no city can engineer away all of its social problems.

As the 18th century gave way to the 19th, Old Town continued to suffer in the shadow of Newtown.

Between 1750 and 1850, the population of the city tripled from 60,000 to nearly 180,000.

Most of those newcomers settled in the poor areas of the city, and with them came increasing waves of illnesses like cholera, rampant crime, and deep poverty.

In a very real sense, Edinburgh had become a city with a split personality.

To the south, there was darkness and danger and filth.

The north, in contrast, represented hope and a bright future.

But few people ever saw both sides of the city.

If you were born in the slums of Old Town, you were more than likely going to live there, work there, and die there.

The wealthy to the north put themselves into a similar situation.

They were isolated from the lower class.

They'd left their problems behind, in a way.

Newtown was a place of wealth and progress and knowledge.

The elite who lived there were, at least in their own eyes, better because of that.

But Edinburgh wasn't unique in its dual nature.

Sometimes Sometimes people are capable of double lives as well.

William's first real crime could be viewed as an act of mercy, if you squint really hard and ignore all the illegal bits, I suppose.

He had a friend, you see, and that friend had a problem that needed solved.

So the man asked William for help.

The friend, a Mr.

Hay who worked as a stabler in grass market down in Old Town, was mourning the loss of his son.

The boy was barely a teenager, but he had been charged with a crime, and it looked as if all the evidence pointed to his guilt.

As a result, the boy was being set to hang in just a few days.

So on the eve of the execution, both men approached the old toll booth building, sort of a mixture of a jail and a courthouse, and made their way to the jailkeeper.

They'd brought along a large quantity of alcohol, and while Mr.

Hay made sure that the jailer drank as much as he possibly could, as quickly as he could, William slipped over to the cell holding Hay's son and picked the lock.

Then he smuggled the boy out and into the darkness.

But he needed a hiding place where the boy could stay until he could be safely removed from the city, and that's where William proved how bright he was.

He took the boy to Greyfriars Cemetery and then made his way to the tomb of Sir George Mackenzie, known throughout town as Bloody Mackenzie.

William broke into the crypt and then hid the boy inside.

And the plan worked.

In August of 1786, William stepped up his life of crime.

He managed to use a counterfeit key to break into a locked desk drawer in the offices of Johnson and Smith, bankers in the Royal Exchange.

He stole a pile of sterling banknotes, valued at about $125,000 in modern U.S.

currency.

Business, it seems, was good for William.

But you need to spend money to make money, right?

So a short time later, he hired a handful of associates to become a sort of heist team.

He needed more hands, more faces, and more players if he was going to be able to take on bigger jobs with higher payoffs.

And that's how Andrew Ainslie, George Smith, and John Brown ended up working for William.

On Christmas Eve of that year, they assembled for their first job as a team, breaking into a jeweler shop called Bruce Brothers.

They walked away with about $50,000 worth of precious stones, watches, and rings.

Satisfied that the team had worked well together, William and his crew began a string of thefts that spanned nearly 10 months.

In late October of 1787, they somehow managed to gain access to the room at the University of Edinburgh College where the old ceremonial mace was kept.

This object was a symbol of the university's authority, as well as being a priceless antique, and the men made off with it as easily as if it had been left out on the back steps.

The rumors were rampant.

The city was plagued by a thief, or thieves, who could not be caught.

Shopkeepers were terrified of being the next victim, and some people even whispered about the supernatural nature of the thief.

Whoever it was, they said, he seemed to be able to walk through walls.

But of course, they weren't going to catch him because they were looking in the wrong place.

They assumed, as anyone would have in the middle of the 18th century in Edinburgh, that the thief was a poor, desperate tenant of the slums of Old Town.

But he wasn't.

Instead, he was a member of the town council, the same people who were charged with investigating the theft of the mace and finding a replacement.

William, you see, was the deacon of the Incorporation of Wrights and Masons, sort of the president of the organization, if you will, and also the head of the craft of cabinet making.

He was, in fact, one of the most prominent cabinet makers in the city, a trade and business that he had inherited from his father, Francis.

He had inherited a lot, actually.

Four houses, the cabinetry business, and a bank account worth about $1.6 million in today's American currency.

He fit right in up the hill in Newtown.

He was upstanding, respected, admired, and emulated.

William Brody was a rising star.

And it was all that prominence, as well as his position on the town council, that had actually aided his life of crime.

Whenever the council needed somebody to handle the city's carpentry jobs, they called on him.

Things like repairing security mechanisms and installing locks.

He frequently installed the front doors on local shops, and all of his work gave him access to their keys.

By night, though, he had this alter ego that felt ripped from the pages of modern comic books.

He would step into a hidden area of his home and literally suit up for criminal activity.

He had a disguise, a vast collection of tools, and even strapped on two pistols, you know, for those tricky situations, right?

But you can only keep a secret for so long.

At some point, the world was going to find out.

Brody hadn't always been criminally inclined.

Most historians actually think that the source of his shift was a bit of pop culture.

You see, as a teen, Brody was obsessed with a play called The Beggar's Opera, which was a huge hit at the time.

Written in 1728 by John Gay, the show set a record for the most consecutive performances of any play in Scotland or England up to that point.

Even after the streak ended, it was still performed consistently for decades.

The story centers around the world of thieves and the upper-class women who loved them.

One of the main characters is this dashing charismatic leader of an entire gang of criminals, and yet he somehow managed to find time to balance not one, but two mistresses.

The glamour of that lifestyle, according to many historians, must have appealed to young William, because as he grew into adulthood, he took on more and more of that persona.

William also loved to gamble.

He belonged to an exclusive men's club known as the Cape and spent a good part of his time at a tavern called the Dice Box.

But all of that gambling had also led to a good amount of debt.

And even with all of this on his plate, a full-time job, job, his city appointments, the gambling addiction, all of it, he still managed to father five children by two separate mistresses, and all without either of the women knowing that the other existed.

Sometimes it seems, life truly does imitate art.

As you might guess, paying for this lifestyle wasn't easy, and that's where the nighttime career as a thief came in.

But for as good of a thief as he was, Brody never seems to have stopped.

Maybe his gambling debt was just too large to ever go away, or perhaps he just fell in love with the thrill that came with each successful heist.

It's hard to say for sure, but what we do know is that even after a heist as high profile as the University Mace, he stayed active.

In early 1788, he began planning the biggest heist of his career.

It would be an armed burglary of His Majesty's Excise Office, the building where all of the tax revenue of Scotland was kept locked up.

So he assembled his team and they set their plan in motion.

This time though, they had no key and Brody insisted that the whole team be armed with pistols.

The events of that night are a bit fuzzy, but we do know that they managed to gain access to the building.

At some point though, it seems that Brody stayed outside the door to act as a lookout while the others made their way to the loot.

While he was there, an excise official randomly returned to the building and when Brody saw the man, he bolted into the night.

Abandoned and exposed, the rest of the gang did their best to escape.

The men walked away with about four pounds in their pockets, nothing like the fortune that Brody had promised them, and as a result, they were more than a bit disgruntled.

Later that same night, one of the men, John Brown, decided that it would be more profitable to turn Brody in.

There was a price on the man's head, and so he reported the whole crew to the authorities in exchange for £150 and a king's pardon.

Ainslie and Smith were arrested immediately, but William Brody was nowhere to be found.

And that's because he had fled the country, making his way to Amsterdam.

While he was away, the story broke and Brody's careful public image shattered instantly.

The city was shocked.

He had been one of the bright ones, the elite, the hero, but he had turned out to be nothing more than a fraud.

Brody was taken into custody and then brought back to Edinburgh, where a trial was set for August of that year.

It went on for over two days with very few breaks and in the end, Ainslie managed to escape charges.

Smith and Brody though were both found guilty of theft.

Their penalty?

Death by hanging.

A crowd of over 40,000 curious onlookers gathered to watch their execution on October 1st of 1788.

They'd come to see a hanging.

They'd come to see one of the new town elite get strung up like an old-town pickpocket.

They had come for justice.

Despite all of this, though, Brody was in good cheer that day.

He wore a splendid black suit and a a powdered wig as if he were dressing up for a celebration and climbed up the ladder with a spring in his step.

He requested that his hands be left untied and then helped the hangman adjust the noose to get it just right before pulling the hood over his own head.

His last act was to pull a handkerchief free from his pocket and drop it into the crowd.

There's a legend that as a carpenter for the city, Brody actually built the gallows, but there's little evidence that the rumor is true.

If anything, he helped draw up the plans for them, but that's about it.

Another legend claims that he somehow inserted a metal pipe into his throat to prevent his neck from breaking, and that afterward, a French doctor would revive him and spirit him away.

None of it, sadly, is true.

One thing that is true, though, is that Brody's execution took place at the tollbooth, the very building, if you remember, where he committed his first crime years earlier by freeing a prisoner who'd been sentenced to death.

Irony is a wonderful thing sometimes, isn't it?

The idea of double lives certainly has its appeal.

If historians are correct, that attraction is what got William Brody into trouble in the first place.

For him, it was a necessary evil that provided a solution to his personal problems.

For others, maybe it's the desire to live out secret fantasies or to express themselves in ways that their public life won't allow.

Most people have a secret.

Some people yell at their kids behind closed doors or drink a bit too much.

Some apparently live secret lives as criminal masterminds and take their final bow from atop the gallows.

The old cliché says that the real you is the person you are in private.

For Brody, that couldn't have been more true.

He was a womanizer, a cheat, and a criminal.

But you wouldn't have known it by looking at him.

It certainly begs the honest question, deep down, beneath all the polish and public make-believe, who are any of us, really?

It's a question that another Edinburgh native tried to answer nearly a century later.

He was a writer, and in his youth he had written a play about William Brody that he called The Double Life.

Sadly, it was a commercial flop.

And it was a failure that he took personally too, because he felt like he had a real connection to Brody.

Growing Growing up, his parents owned furniture handcrafted by the man, so as far as this writer was concerned, it was as if he had been raised in the same household as the legendary thief.

There was something about the tale that always stuck with him, even as he pushed further into his writing career.

In 1885, he was sick in bed, struggling to recover from a lung infection when his sleep became fevered and broken.

Then, one night, he awoke from a dream with the plot perfectly formed in his mind.

Surely, he told his wife, this would satisfy his publisher's demand for a cheap new thriller, what he liked to refer to as a shilling shocker.

Today, that novel is one of the finest psychological thrillers in all of British literature.

It's been adapted more times than Frankenstein or Dracula and has inspired countless storytellers over the years.

And if it wasn't for the influence and duplicity of William Brody, we wouldn't have the book at all.

So let's all be glad for what Robert Louis Stevenson ended up writing.

a little novel that he called, The Strange Case of Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde.

Folklore around the world is built on a small number of common ideas, all rooted in human nature.

And I hope today's exploration of the double lives that people can live has served as a guided tour of one of those big ideas.

We want to trust people, but sometimes they just aren't who they appear to be.

Which is why I've saved one more tale of duplicitous devils for you to enjoy.

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Double lives, ulterior motives, two-faced parents.

It seems that throughout history, some people have been too tricky to trust.

But every once in a while, someone comes along who goes against the grain.

In a world where it's hard to put your faith in most people, sometimes the only person you can trust is the one you probably shouldn't.

His name was John Revelstoke Ratham, an Australian-born journalist who was living in the US at the turn of the 20th century.

He'd built an impressive reputation for himself over the years, having studied at Harrow School in England before reporting for the Melbourne Argus on a British military campaign happening in the Sudan.

He was rarely away from the action.

After spending some time embedded with the Chinese military, John went to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War, where he was severely injured.

He then made his way to South Africa to report on the ongoing Boer War once he had healed.

He finally wound up in America, where he received his citizenship, as well as congratulatory letters from both President William McKinley and future President Teddy Roosevelt.

John had not only lived 10 lives in the span of a handful of years, but others had taken notice of his work as well, specifically the hiring committee at the Providence Journal newspaper in Rhode Island.

In 1912, they were looking for a new managing editor, and it seemed John was the perfect person for the job.

And yes, it's true that the Providence Journal was a small paper in a small state, but its quality was unparalleled, and many of the stories published within its pages were reprinted in every other paper in America.

John was soon promoted to head editor and in 1915 saw a way to not just report the news, but to influence it.

You see, at the time the United States had a long history of not getting involved in international conflicts unless absolutely necessary.

The country was not going to intervene in World War I unless it had to.

John, on the other hand, didn't agree with this neutral stance, so he took matters into his own hands.

With his team of journalist spies, the editor of the Providence Journal began uncovering evidence of German espionage.

They would sneak into offices, read confidential papers, go undercover with the enemy, and infiltrate the spaces where they weren't welcome in an effort to gather as much intel as possible.

However, none of this was done on behalf of the U.S.

government.

It was all done in service of journalistic transparency.

John published everything he and his team uncovered in the paper, including occurrences of German diplomats committing passport fraud, spreading propaganda, and stirring up labor unrest to sabotage the U.S.

weapons manufacturing industry.

He even accused one specific German diplomat, military attaché Franz von Papen, of masterminding the bombing of a railroad bridge between Maine and Canada.

John's work got von Papen and other diplomats deported out of the United States.

But that was only the beginning.

The journalist turned activist had earned himself a new nickname, Spy Hunter.

And thanks to the reporting done by him and his team, the American public started taking a side.

Gone were the days of a neutral America as people finally saw what the Germans were really up to.

The idea of going to war suddenly didn't seem like such a bad idea.

Meanwhile, those who had supported those German diplomats affected by John's work started doing their own digging.

Anything pertaining to his past became fair game.

Allies, addresses, family members, anything they could use as leverage against him.

They looked high and low, and what they finally came up with was...

nothing.

John Wraitham hadn't just covered his tracks.

He hadn't left anything behind.

John Wraitham didn't exist.

It was believed that the man known as John Wraitham was born as John Solomon in Melbourne, Australia in 1868.

He wasn't really a journalist, just a very talented grifter and con man, and a brilliant actor.

There was no evidence of a John ever having attended Harrow School, nor had anyone by that name written for the Melbourne Argus.

Those tales from the front lines of the Spanish-American War and the Boer War, it's probably safe to say that those were all fiction as well.

And those congratulatory letters from present or future presidents didn't exist either.

Heck, McKinley had already been dead for five years by the time John had earned his American citizenship.

He had built his entire career on a foundation of lies.

But what about all the hard work that he and his team had done to open the public's eyes to what the Germans were doing?

Well, the easy answer is all of that was nothing but propaganda.

Every story about international espionage and diplomatic skullduggery had been concocted by John to help push the United States into war.

But the truth didn't matter.

Despite the fiction that he peddled, John became quite influential in American politics, so much so that the U.S.

government blackmailed him into silence in 1918.

John, never afraid to push his luck, fought back and ruined his reputation in 1920.

He died shortly after, and his name was barely uttered again.

But his job was already done, because by that time the United States had fully entrenched itself in World War I, no doubt due in large part to the stories put out by the Providence Journal.

So, what business did an Australian conman have spreading Ally propaganda?

Many believe it's because he actually believed in the cause.

John allegedly wanted to combat the rampant German propaganda with a healthy dose of his own from the other side.

You know, fight fire with fire.

When you spend your life duping others for personal gain and look back on what you've accomplished, what do you have to show for it?

Some money?

A legacy of lies?

Perhaps John just wanted to become the hero that he had fooled everyone into believing he was.

But as the old saying goes, Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with additional writing help from Harry Marks and additional research help from Jenna Rose Nethercott, and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

You can find information about all of those things and more over at lorepodcast.com.

You can also follow this show on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.

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