MYSTICAL: The Silent Twins

We've all heard about the twin bond, right?

This idea that twins are somehow physically connected.

They know what the other is thinking and feeling.

Some twins even say that they can feel when the other one is hurt or in danger.

But the twins we're talking about today have a connection that goes far deeper than that-a connection that no one else in the world could understand.

Because for most of their life, they refuse to talk to anybody but each other.

That's how June and Jennifer Gibbons became better known as the Silent Twins.

And they wouldn't truly break their silence until one of them was dead.

This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This week, I'm looking at June and Jennifer Gibbons, better known as the Silent Twins because of their muteness.

And on the rare occasion when the girls did speak, it was often in a language no one else could understand.

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One of the most intriguing things about June and Jennifer Gibbons' silence is that it was pretty much ignored for years.

They didn't just fall mute one day.

It went back to the time when they were toddlers.

The girls just didn't talk.

They'd say one or two words here and there, but that was it.

You'd think for most parents, this would be really concerning.

They'd be worried that there was something wrong with their girls, maybe that they were falling behind.

But Gloria Gibbons, their mother, felt reassured that the twinnies, as she called them, were just going through a phase.

They just seemed shy.

And their pediatrician told Gloria that sometimes twins learn to talk later than other children.

It's actually pretty common.

Now, the Gibbonses were immigrants from Barbados, so they didn't have any immediate family where they lived in England.

In the absence of any outside advice, Gloria takes the doctor at his word.

She lets it go.

She's got three other kids to raise after all.

But even by the time June and Jennifer start going to school, they still aren't really speaking.

Sometimes they'll say one and two word sentences to their classmates like, give me or no, but they won't say anything to their teacher.

The school doesn't make much of a fuss about it.

They just send the girls to weekly speech therapy sessions.

But even after two years, nothing changes.

At the end of the second grade, their school reported, Jennifer has no oral response but writes diligently.

June is still silent and won't converse.

Both of them are very shy.

But the next year, when the girls are eight, they're transferred to a new school.

The Gibbonses are a military family, so they actually moved around pretty frequently.

Neighbors never really lasted long, the children had to make new friends every few years, and they attended a half dozen schools between them.

June and Jennifer's newest school isn't as understanding of their strange silence as the last one was.

They're basically seen as freaks by the other students and even by some of the teachers.

They're bullied on the playground, they're laughed at in class, I mean, it's horrible.

And it doesn't make the girls start talking.

Instead, June and Jennifer get even quieter.

They wouldn't even talk to their own family.

June and Jennifer only spoke to their youngest sister, Rosie, and they gave one-word answers to their mother when she asked them direct questions.

But they said nothing to their father and two older siblings.

Their father, Aubrey Gibbons, couldn't figure out what was happening, but he knew that something was wrong.

I mean, his twin daughters had never said a single word to him, ever.

But when the twins were alone in their bedroom, Aubrey and Gloria could hear muffled chatter as the girls spoke to each other and to their dolls.

The girls clearly could talk, they just didn't want to.

But again, their parents just kind of shrugged and said they must be shy.

But that excuse didn't explain everything.

Because sometimes when Aubrey eavesdropped on his daughters, he couldn't understand the words that they were saying.

He'd catch snippets of things here and there, but it sounded like June and Jennifer were speaking a foreign language, and he had no explanation for that.

As the girls get older, their behavior just gets weirder.

They will only walk in a line, one in front of the other.

They take each step at the same time, their arms swinging in time, almost almost like a goose step, which is that military marching that I'm sure you've seen in movies or in real life if you've had any experience.

The twins walk like this everywhere.

A teacher once followed them in his car all the way home from school, and he said that they never deviated from this.

They also started doing everything in unison.

standing up and sitting down, crossing and recrossing their legs, sipping their tea.

All of it was done in sync.

To achieve such perfect mirror movements, any motion was slow and deliberate, which only added to the weirdness.

They dressed in matching outfits and braided their hair the same way.

They never left each other's side, literally not even to use the bathroom.

And of course, they did all of this in complete silence.

The staff at school were generally at a loss about what to do with the silent twins.

The headmaster agreed that the Gibbons twins were strange, but I mean, what could you do about it?

They were otherwise well-behaved and they never broke any rules.

So the school lets them be.

They move the girls into a special education class and sort of just wash their hands of it until an actual doctor finally gets involved.

In the fall of 1976, Dr.

John Reese visited the school one afternoon to administer routine TB shots.

He saw nearly 1,500 students that day, but 13-year-old June and Jennifer Gibbons stood out from the rest.

When he injected them, neither of them gave any reaction.

Not a yelp, not a wince.

It was like they were in a trance.

He described them as zombies, and he said the only other time he'd ever experienced anything like it was when he worked with severely traumatized war veterans.

The experience was so unnerving, Dr.

Reese was still thinking about it days later.

Eventually, he went back to the school to speak with the school's headmaster about the Gibbons twins.

Something was wrong with them.

And Rhys needed to know exactly what was going on.

At Rhys's insistence, the school finally did something.

June and Jennifer were referred to a series of specialists.

But because the girls still refused to talk to any of them, no one could really offer a diagnosis.

They still weren't entirely convinced that their muteness was selective.

Maybe the twins really didn't know how to talk.

And if they did know how to talk and were simply refusing to, that had some pretty disturbing implications on its own.

Because if this was all an act, it was the most committed performance any of these doctors had ever seen.

Some of the teachers felt like something very dark was happening with the girls.

It felt supernatural.

It was almost like June was being mind-controlled by her twin.

One speech therapist said, I could see June dying to tell me things.

Then something would happen.

Jennifer was stopping June.

She sat there with an expressionless gaze, but I felt her power.

She made all the decisions.

June was possessed by her twin.

After a few months of seeing doctors but not getting any answers, the school decided that 14-year-old June and Jennifer needed more help than they could provide.

They transferred the girls to a special education school called Eastgate, where they could work one-on-one with a dedicated teacher.

For a year, their teacher tried dozens of techniques to get the girls talking, but none of it worked.

Every therapy session was dominated by the screaming silence.

June and Jennifer wouldn't talk, refused eye contact, and continued their habit of slow, synchronized movements.

The only progress they made was that the girls would now communicate through handwritten letters.

The Eastgate staff felt beaten by the twins, completely at their mercy.

At a loss, the school eventually decided that the only hope for the Gibbons twins was to separate them.

One teacher reasoned, they are dying in each other's arms and we must save one of them, even if it's at the price of the other.

Though some of the staff at the school found it cruel to separate the twins, they truly believed it was their only hope for normalcy.

At first, June and Jennifer were receptive to the idea of separating.

In a letter to their teacher, they agreed that they were holding each other back because neither one of them wanted to be the first one to change.

But if they were apart, they wouldn't know what the other one was doing.

It would be easier for them to get better, to break the vow of silence.

But then, June and Jennifer changed their minds, and for the first time in years,

they spoke.

Coming up, the twins break their silence.

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Now let's get back to the story.

By 1978, pretty much everyone in June and Jennifer Gibbons' lives knew something really weird was going on with them.

The now 15-year-olds were effectively mute outside of the privacy of their bedroom, and they wouldn't even make eye contact when someone tried talking to them.

They'd seen doctors, specialists, speech therapists, but no one knew how to cure the silent twins.

So, eventually, a decision was made.

They had to separate the girls.

But the girls hated this idea, so they took drastic action.

One night, the girls' therapist at Eastgate, a man named Tim Thomas, received a call from a payphone.

After a few moments of silence, he heard a voice that he didn't recognize.

And the voice was speaking so rapidly, he could hardly understand it.

It said, Good evening, Mr.

Thomas.

This is the twins.

We're really sorry about what happened today.

We'd like you to know that if you don't separate us, we'll start talking next week.

Thomas was floored by the call.

I mean, had he really just heard one of the Gibbons twins speak?

He wouldn't have believed it, but they'd also called another teacher at the school and begged her to let them stay together.

They could talk, undoubtedly.

He approached the school on Monday morning with the first piece of hope since the twins arrived at Eastgate, but it was short-lived.

They immediately broke their promise to speak.

They pretended like the phone call never happened.

And so the staff made good on their threat.

One of the silent twins would be sent away.

When the staff told the girls, it provoked an unprecedented reaction.

As Marjorie Wallace described in her book, The Silent Twins, Jennifer gave June a menacing glower.

There was a scream, then a series of unintelligible shouts as Jennifer lunged forward and dug her long nails into June's cheek, just below the eye, drawing blood.

The girls chased after each other, screaming and ripping out chunks of each other's hair.

It was so vicious, the staff was too shocked at first to even do anything.

The silent, lifeless twins were suddenly female gladiators.

When the staff did finally manage to tear the girls apart, they instantly went limp, defeated.

At the end of March 1978, 14-year-old June was sent to St.

David's adolescent unit, which was a boarding school, and Jennifer stayed at Eastgate.

Away from her sister, June was basically catatonic.

Not only did she refuse to talk, she refused to even move.

Staff had to literally pick her up out of her bed and carry her from place to place, then prop her stiff body up against the wall like a plank.

The only sign that she was even alive and not some kind of incredibly realistic statue was her tears.

June silently cried for hours on end.

She didn't weep or wail, didn't show any kind of hysterics.

She just let the tears flow freely down her cheeks, not even bothering to wipe them away.

The only time she stopped crying was when she was able to talk to Jennifer on the phone.

Needless to say, this was really upsetting to the other students.

Even though Jennifer wasn't there, everyone at St.

David could feel how much power she had over June.

One staff member said, it seemed she was on a leash to Jennifer.

There was something almost mystic about their relationship, like black magic.

I felt June could have been a normal, popular young girl if she had been released from her sister.

But June couldn't allow for such a release.

After two months of separation, she went on a hunger strike.

The staff at St.

David wasn't prepared to force feed her, so they eventually relented.

The girls were reunited at Eastgate, and June was back under Jennifer's thrall.

Any hope of breaking their silence was lost at this point.

With that, the Gibbons twins' formal education ended.

The staff at Eastgate had tried everything that they could think of to help June and Jennifer, and frankly, they were out of ideas at this point.

So, like many other teachers and headmasters and doctors before, they washed their hands of the 16-year-old Gibbons twins.

In 1979, the girls were registered with the Unemployment and Benefit Office and set loose to figure out the rest of their lives for themselves.

At first, they enjoyed the freedom.

It It was exactly what they wanted, just to be left alone with each other.

The two 16-year-olds spent their days in their bedroom with their dolls and imaginations, living a very rich, though entirely fiction-based life.

Their dolls were their closest companions, their surrogate families, and each player had a rich and detailed backstory.

June and Jennifer were essentially immersed in a soap opera in their bedroom, with the dolls marrying, divorcing, even dying.

The dolls went to school and to church and to parties.

The twins spent hours sewing costumes and constructing props for their vignettes.

This fantasy life was also a way for the girls to communicate with each other.

The dramas and emotion that the dolls acted out served as a surrogate for June and Jennifer.

It was an extension of the pact of silence.

They still weren't speaking, they were play acting.

And it was also an extension of their synchrony.

They had to agree to all of the actions of the players.

Just like in the real world, nothing happened in the doll world unless they both agreed to it.

But the terms of the deal started to shift in the winter and spring of 1980.

The first development was the diaries.

June and Jennifer each received a five-year diary from their mother for Christmas.

They immediately started documenting the details of their housebound lives with dutiful accuracy.

But it was this very act of recording their own thoughts that threw the power dynamics of their relationship into question.

The girls had always referred to themselves and each other interchangeably as just J.

They saw each other as equals, the same person.

But now with the diaries, the girls were expressing themselves on an individual level, possibly for the first time in their lives.

As each sister contemplated the other in the pages of their diaries, they found the other wanting.

They realized they were not equal and they started to resent each other for being locked into this game of sameness.

Yet they had no idea how to escape it.

After so many years, neither had the strength to break the pact.

Like a married couple in desperate need of a divorce, June and Jennifer started to despise one another.

Jennifer wrote in her diary, Jay can't be my real twin.

My real twin was born the exact time as me, has my rising sign, my looks, my waves, my dreams, my ambitions.

He or she will have my weaknesses, failures, opinions.

All this makes a twin, no differences.

I can't stand differences.

The other factor in all this is that the girls were 17 years old now.

They'd gone through puberty, which is all about self-discovery.

But the twins felt chained to each other, locked in their childhood bedroom, unable to connect with anyone else.

They wanted what their dolls had, friends, lovers, lives.

So they decided that it was time to venture into the world and see if if they could really be two different people.

The twins decided that what they really needed was boyfriends.

After all, they were teenage girls who wanted to take their first steps into womanhood.

But they could never muster up the courage to actually talk to the boys in their neighborhood, as much as they practiced in their bedrooms.

Instead, all they could offer were fits of giggles.

Every interaction was ruined by their awkward silence.

And eventually, they'd alienated all the boys in town.

So they decided to change tactics.

June and Jennifer started to fixate on a boy they knew from Eastgate.

From all my research, this boy goes by the pseudonym Patrick Armstrong.

Now, he didn't seem to mind the girls' silence.

In fact, he once defended them from a bully at Eastgate.

So they felt that he was practically already in love with them.

They tracked down Patrick's address 10 miles away in Welsh Hook.

They got all done up in makeup and wigs and paid for a taxi to drive them over.

Now it turned out Patrick had moved back to America, but he had three other brothers and June and Jennifer decided that pretty much any Armstrong would do and they shifted their obsession.

At first, their time with the Armstrong boys was exciting.

They introduced the twins to an entirely new world.

They started drinking heavily, smoking pot, and sniffing glue.

Not only did it fulfill their distorted fantasies of life as a hedonistic teenager, but the substance abuse also made it easier for them to speak somewhat normally.

A few swallows of brandy or huffs of glue was enough to loosen the twins up.

But their summer with the Armstrongs also brought darkness and confusion.

They floated through their days in a haze, and the Armstrong brothers didn't necessarily like the twins.

It was more like they tolerated them.

The destruction came to a head when Jennifer did something that made her decidedly different than her twin sister, shaking their dynamic to the core.

She lost her virginity to one of the Armstrong boys.

After years of demanding that the two remain entirely equal in every way, terrified that her sister would outshine her, it was Jennifer who took this monumental step first, differentiating herself as the more attractive sister, the more lovable sister, the more desired sister.

She was now a woman, and June was still a girl.

The illusion of equality was shattered.

And this filled both the twins with a burning burning existential rage.

What had they been doing all this time trying to be one?

Two nights after losing her virginity, Jennifer attacked June in their bedroom.

A squabble over the radio's volume suddenly turned violent.

Jennifer wrapped the radio's electric cord around her sister's neck and tightly squeezed until June begged for her life.

Shaken by this, the girls snuck out of the house and went for a walk to get some air.

But they clashed again, and this time, June was the aggressor.

She pushed Jennifer off a bridge and into a rain-swollen river.

Then she jumped in after her, not to save her, but to finish the job.

June grabbed Jennifer by the hair and shoved her head underwater, using all of her strength.

When a car drove over the bridge, the headlights exposed the brawling sisters.

Only then did June release her twin.

As Jennifer gasped and gagged and spit up water, June silently dragged them both back to shore.

And she just shouted, I love you.

Jennifer choked back, still coughing up water, I love you too.

Then they sat on the bank, wet and shivering, holding each other and crying.

Things would never be the same.

After that point, June and Jennifer basically spiraled out of control.

The balance in their relationship upended.

They started roaming the neighborhood and breaking into abandoned places, stealing things, even writing graffiti on walls.

Weirdly, the twins frequently reported these break-ins to the police.

They called the station from a payphone and tried to disguise their voices by putting on an American accent.

The police likely knew they were talking to the Gibbons twins since their giggling could always be heard in the background.

But they weren't really doing enough damage to press charges or warrant a police investigation, so they basically just got ignored.

But the girls, feeling like they were regular Bonnie and Clydes, Clydes, escalated their crimes.

They broke into the local tennis courts by smashing a window.

They climbed inside and cased the place.

Once they realized there was nothing really worth taking from the tennis club, they sprayed ethanol all over the place, lit a match, and set the courts ablaze.

The next night, they did it again, only this time they burned down a private establishment, a tractor store.

Unlike their other crimes, arson wasn't something the police could simply ignore.

They'd done serious damage now, close to 100,000 pounds worth.

A few weeks after the tractor store fire, police caught the girls red-handed during another break-in.

The constable had placed a few plainclothes officers in the area on a hunch.

They heard a window shatter and followed the noise.

When they arrived, they saw June and Jennifer each holding a lit match in one hand, a bottle of ethanol in the other.

Even worse, when they searched the girls' bedroom, they found all the things they'd stolen during their B ⁇ Es.

Police read their most recent diary entries that described the beautiful flames that they saw at the tractor shop.

Suddenly, the silent twins looked like dangerous delinquents.

They were remanded to Pucklechurch prison without the possibility of bail.

The judge was convinced that if the twins were released, they'd go right back to their life of crime.

June and Jennifer Gibbons were labeled as felons, and unless they could finally speak up for themselves, they'd remain in a cell for the rest of their lives.

Up next, June and Jennifer fight for their freedom.

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Now back to the story.

If their time in school had shown anything, it was that public institutions just didn't understand June and Jennifer Gibbons.

And Pucklechurch Women's Prison was no different.

For all the progress they'd made during their summer of hedonism, the twins reverted right back to complete silence for the first few weeks there.

When they were taken to their shared cell, they stood for hours, frozen in one spot, clutching the sheets of their beds.

Eventually, two guards came in and made the beds, then forced each immobilized twin into a cot, posing them like dolls.

They even had to push their heads back onto the pillow and close the girls' eyelids.

Life at Pucklechurch was chaotic and exhausting for June and Jennifer.

The girls completely regressed.

Unflinching silence, no eye contact, and slow, synchronized movements.

They also entered into a new pact with much higher stakes, a starvation pact.

They would alternate every day which one of them could eat and which one would fast.

Soon, they were both so thin they were sent to the hospital ward.

When the staff realized that their starvation was linked, they decided to separate the girls.

They thought that if June and Jennifer were apart, they would be able to break their destructive cycle.

But this only made things worse.

Without knowing which one of them was eating and which one was starving, they both refused to eat.

staff also remarked that even when on opposite sides of Pucklechurch, the girls would be in sync.

If one of them was reading a book, so was the other.

If June was sleeping, so was Jennifer.

They even appeared to mirror each other's posture.

I mean, that's how deeply they were connected to each other.

And that's how much they practiced being the same.

When they were together, they fought viciously.

In their 8x10 cell, June and Jennifer clawed and screamed at each other.

In their diaries, each blamed the other for their present situation.

The dangerous tightrope of their pact had finally caught up to them, and once again, they longed to be rid of the other.

June wrote, A deadly day is getting closer each minute, coming to a point of imminent death like hands creeping out against the night sky.

I say to myself, how can I get rid of my own shadow?

Without my shadow, would I die?

Without my shadow, would I gain life?

Perhaps the only thing that saved their lives was the bleak reality of their dire situation.

After seven months, June and Jennifer finally stood trial for their arson.

It didn't go well for them.

They'd been arrested holding matches and Accelerant.

There was really no doubt of their guilt.

In May of 1982, they were convicted of 16 joint counts of burglary, theft, and arson.

19-year-old June and Jennifer were evaluated by a state psychologist in the lead up to the trial.

Per the usual, they refused to speak to him.

He diagnosed them with psychopathic personality disorder.

Because of this, he recommended that they be detained in Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.

And he recommended they be sent there indefinitely.

For their entire lives, no one had known what to do with June and Jennifer Gibbons.

The twins hadn't really even known how to help themselves.

But now that they were convicted criminals, the state had to produce an answer.

And it was to lock the girls up and just throw away the key.

Within a few weeks at Broadmoor, June attempted suicide.

Jennifer attacked a nurse.

They were both administered heavy amounts of antipsychotics.

The starvation pact returned.

They both basically just shut down, retreating into themselves.

No speaking, no eye contact, no movements.

Journalist Hilton Owles wrote, when they were together, they wanted to kill each other.

When they were apart, they were so lonely they wanted to die.

Then when they were reunited, they were disappointed and imagined that they felt stronger alone.

And this whole time, no one came any closer to figuring out what had made them silent in the first place.

But then, Marjorie Wallace got involved.

Wallace was a journalist for the London Sunday Times.

She was a friend of a friend of one of the teachers from Eastgate, that guy Tim Thomas.

Having worked with the girls for years, Thomas knew that they weren't insane and that they didn't belong in a place like Broadmoor.

So he tried to generate interest in their story.

Wallace visited Aubrey and Gloria Gibbons and they gave her access to the twins' diaries.

She wasn't sure what to expect at first.

I mean, a lot of other people that she talked to had given her plenty of low expectations about the twins' intellect.

But in those pages, she found poetry reflecting deep, intricate lives that June and Jennifer led from the safety of their small bedroom.

The imagery was so potent, the language so powerful.

After reading those pages, she was just as convinced as Thomas.

June and Jennifer didn't belong in Broadmoor.

But in order for Wallace to convince the hospital and the courts to release the twins, she had to attempt to explain their silence.

If there wasn't anything wrong with them, why did they act like this?

Why did they commit crimes?

Wallace proposed that the twins' criminal behavior was a misunderstood cry for help.

They knew that something was wrong with them, with their silent pact, with their lives as a whole, but they had no idea how to escape it.

To the twins, they saw the police and the justice system as a force for good, people who could help them.

Wallace thinks that subconsciously, they started their crime spree with the express intention of being arrested because they were that desperate for an intervention.

Remember, they called the police to report their own crimes more than once.

As for their silence itself, Wallace thinks that it was one symptom of a much larger issue.

The twins suffered from an extreme case of identity blending.

And to understand that, you have to understand a little bit of some twin psychology.

It's really important for parents to encourage individualization in twin sets.

In fact, it's something that parents need to actively work at because it's so easy to treat twins as one person instead of two.

I mean, just think about the way we refer to them, the Olson twins, the Bush twins.

Many twins have names that even rhyme or are similar.

They're dressed in matching matching clothes.

People constantly tell them that they have trouble telling them apart.

And this leads to blended identities.

We know that Gloria pretty much exclusively called the girls the twinnies.

She dressed them alike, braided their hair the same way, and commented that the girls did everything together since birth.

She even breastfed them simultaneously.

And I mean, she was running a household with five kids.

If she could handle two at once, that was just knocking out one chore with two stones.

She didn't see any harm in it.

But it seems like at some point, June and Jennifer started to merge into one person who they called Jay.

It probably started as a game at first, maybe a challenge to one another.

Let's see how long we can go before no one can tell us apart, before we can't even tell ourselves apart.

But it evolved into a warped battle of wills.

Like holding their hands over a candle flame and seeing who would flinch first.

Neither June nor Jennifer wanted to be the one to break first.

Neither one wanted to lose the game.

And eventually, the game dictated every moment of their life.

Wallace also felt that Jennifer was the enforcer of the silent pact.

Remember, those same adults who sensed Jennifer's dark power also sensed a brightness in June.

They felt that June was the good twin.

the one who could have been popular and successful without the overbearing nature of Jennifer.

So Jennifer needed June to stay the same as she was because because she was terrified of what would happen if her sister eclipsed her.

She was terrified of being alone.

Journalist Hilton Als proposed that this fear was exacerbated by the fact that the Gibbons were often the only black family in their many neighborhoods over the years.

They constantly moved and they were constantly outcasts.

If Jennifer lost her sister, who would she have?

But neither of the girls expected that as they got older, they'd actually want to be two different people.

And by that point, the silent pact had taken over everything.

They didn't know how to go back to being two people.

And when they did do small things to differentiate themselves, they found the change so threatening, they attacked each other for it.

And so, trapped in this vicious cycle, June and Jennifer spiraled out of control.

They weren't crazy.

They weren't possessed.

They just had never really been seen or understood their entire lives.

With this explanation, Wallace was able to help June and Jennifer.

She advocated for their case to be re-evaluated.

She also worked with the girls to start talking.

Having read their diaries, she was able to connect with them in a way that no one else had.

She saw them and she broke their silence.

But Wallace's explanation of the twins' psychology doesn't totally explain everything.

After 12 years in Broadmoor, the twins were finally able to appeal for their release.

Wallace visited them nearly every day, readying them for life back on the outside.

But she said that a few weeks before they were supposed to get out, the twins' attitude turned dark.

They'd made a new pact.

They told Wallace that once they were released, one of them was going to die.

She had no idea what to make of this, and she tried just to reassure the girls that everything's gonna be fine, that they were both going to get their lives back.

And she didn't want to hear anything else about this death pact.

29-year-old June and Jennifer were released from Broadmoor on March 9th, 1993.

The night before, Jennifer had been sick.

She'd vomited twice after eating, but by the morning, she was feeling better.

She had her usual breakfast, which was just a cup of tea and a cigarette, and the twins packed their meager belongings, said goodbye to the friends they'd made on the ward over the last decade, and then boarded a van to take them away from Broadmoor.

A few minutes into the journey, Jennifer laid her head on June's shoulder, exhausted, and she drifted off to sleep.

But when the van stopped and it was time to get off, Jennifer wouldn't wake up.

An ambulance arrived and took her to a hospital around 1 p.m.

By 6.15 p.m., she was gone and the pact was fulfilled.

Some accounts of the given story insist that June murdered her sister, but there's no evidence to support that.

In fact, Jennifer's cause of death is unknown even to this day.

Her heart simply stopped beating.

It could have been due to the medication that she was given at Broadmoor.

It could have been from the starvation pact.

Or it could have been that deep down, Jennifer knew that it was time to let her sister go.

It was time to let her live on her own.

And that the only way June could really do that was if Jennifer was gone.

June was initially destroyed by the grief of losing her twin, but eventually she was able to acclimate to society.

She started talking.

She now goes by her middle name, Allison, because she felt that June came with too much bad luck.

In an interview seven years after her release, she said that she visits her sister's grave every Tuesday.

One of June's poems is inscribed on the headstone: We once were two, we two made one.

We no more two,

though life be one.

Thanks for listening.

To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.

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