Legends 74: Snake in the Grass

To be fair to him, he was quite literally the leader of the original Nazi party.

Those fellows were really known for their good judgment. And so, not many people say that they had a close-personal friendship with Adolf Hitler. And when I see that these men were close, I mean it. In fact, Hitler was one of the few people who knew that his friend was, in fact, same-sex oriented.

“Ernst Rom kept that particular secret under wraps until his political enemies released his”

private letters to the public in 1932. Although most historians agree that the evidence points to Hitler already being aware. Although that wouldn't be enough to save Rom, from what was coming next. In June of 1934, Hitler launched what has become known as the "Night of the Long Nives."

It was a total purge of his political enemies, along with any of his allies who put

his own reputation at risk, and that included Ernst Rom. On the night of June 30, Hitler himself arrested him, alongside hundreds of other politicians. He had forged documents to make it look like his friend had accepted a bribe from France to overthrow Hitler. When he addressed his subjects, he called Rom's alleged double-crossing "the worst

treachery in world history." In the end, Ernst Rom was given the option of taking his own life, but he declined. "If I am to be killed," he said, "let Adolf do it himself.

“He was executed just ten minutes later, by a stranger, not his friend."”

In between two of the most terrible people in world history, trust can be a special thing. And when someone takes a hammer to the trust you have for them, it can feel like the world has turned upside down. "I'm Aaron Manky, and this is Laura Legends." As a kid, did you ever think the people on the other side of the globe had to be walking

upside down? Considering typical kid logic, this made a lot of sense. Most of us probably live in the northern hemisphere, so our tiny child brains told us that we were walking right side up, while everyone on the bottom half of the globe must be doing the opposite.

If you are still operating under this misconception, though, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Presidents of Australia and New Zealand stand completely upright just like us, but that doesn't

“mean that their lives can't go topsy-turvy.”

In the earliest parts of European settlement, those two islands must have felt like a death trap.

Intense heat, venomous animals, difficult terrain, there were a million things that could

go wrong just based off the environment alone. But sometimes, the most dangerous part of living there was the people. The white settlers of Australia and New Zealand relied heavily on their small communities, both for socialization and for survival. They had to be able to trust each other to watch one another's backs.

Without mutual support, they wouldn't have made it for very long. Occasionally, though, there would be a snake in the grass, and I don't mean the venomous kind. The only time anyone in Oceana has ever actually felt like they've been turned upside down was when they were betrayed by the people they trusted the most.

16-year-old Phyllis Avis Simmons had been fortunate enough to go her whole life without getting that sinking gut feeling of betrayal. So far, life had been good for her. She had five other brothers and sisters, she was close to her parents, she was relatively popular at school.

Though it may not have been her favorite place in the world, seeing as her mother once described her as, "rather backward in learning." Unlike a lot of teenagers in the 1930s, Phyllis had led such a comfortable life that she had been allowed to keep as her father put it, her childish ways. When construction began on the nearby Mount Victoria Tunnel in Wellington, New Zealand,

Phyllis's mother started serving tea for the construction workers at their family home. After all, people were calling it the project of the century, so Mrs. Simmons felt that it was only right to support all the workers with free beverages whenever she could. And that is how Phyllis met George. George Arrow Coats was 29 years old, two Phyllis's 16.

He was also a widower with six children to feed, but Phyllis didn't care about any of that, and neither did George. The two hit it off when he came to her house for tea in 1930, and from that point on, they were seen together all the time. Then, once Sunday in March of 1931, Phyllis suddenly ran away from home.

A few days later, she sent her parents a letter claiming that she was staying with a

And she didn't mention was that her friend was George, and that the two were now living together.

“For the next several weeks, Phyllis and George hopped between boarding houses, and then”

in May, Phyllis discovered something else. She was pregnant. Unfortunately, it would not be an easy pregnancy. It's not clear whether she was suffering from severe morning sickness or something more serious.

All she knew was that she was miserable. Despite that, though, the couple planned to move house once again. The night before that, one of George's friends hung out with them, and then went home around 11pm, and that was the last time anyone saw Phyllis alive. George immediately fell under police suspicion, and not just because of the bad relationship

optics. According to relief workers from the Mount Victoria tunnel site, George had acted odd during his shifts at the dump. He was frequently seen digging much higher up in the dump than anyone else, creating a deeper hole than they needed.

And that was roughly five feet by three feet. And when his coworkers asked, he said that he was going to bury a dog. That was all the authorities needed to hear before they started searching the Mount Victoria tunnel dump. Over 100 relief workers assisted them and digging up over 2,000 tons of soil.

After six days of hard labor under the July sun, they found her. During George's trial, a pathologist testified that she had been knocked out with a blow to the temple, and that her head had been wrapped in a scarf afterwards, but the head wound hadn't been the thing that killed her. Now, her cause of death was asphyxiation.

Phyllis, you see, had been buried alive. After the trial, a remarkable tradition took shape. As motorists drove through the Mount Victoria tunnel, they let out a cheerful hunk of their horns. It started as a sign of respect for the girl who lost her life there.

And as of today, it's second nature for almost everyone.

At one point the government even tried to crack down on the unnecessary hunking, but nobody listened.

“Because for those who remember Phyllis's story, there is hope that the constant greetings”

will keep her spirit company. Wherever, she may be. Fred Fisher was a criminal. Mind you, he wasn't a particularly dangerous one. He'd simply been convicted of possessing forged banknotes.

He hadn't even forged them himself. He just owned a few. So in the grand scheme of things, he was relatively harmless. But back in the day, the British government's often punished petty crime nearly as forcefully as major ones.

Fraud might not have gotten you hanged per se, but it would certainly get you shipped off the prison. For worse, shipped out of the country entirely. So instead of a slap on the wrist, Fred was given a 14-year sentence in Australia. And it has to be said, this was a penal system that targeted the most disadvantaged members

of society.

“So when Fred joined the colony in 1816, he stood out for one very important reason.”

He had not grown up poor and uneducated like so many others there, which meant that he was literate. This was such a rare skill set that almost immediately after he landed in Australia, the colonial administrator hired Fred as a clerk. Within two years, he had become head of the Waterloo Flower Company.

As far as jail sentences go, I'd say that he managed to find a fairly lucrative one. Halfway through his 14-year sentence, Fred had actually saved enough money to purchase a farm in Campbelltown. And over the next three years, he brought that number to four. And his good luck couldn't last forever.

And an ended as soon as George Warl walked into his life. George was Fred's neighbor, and at first they seemed to get on swimmingly. In fact, Fred actually lived in George's house.

Oddly enough, Fred had never actually built a home on his new farmstead.

And so, at the end of the day, he would just go sleep at his neighbors. It was an unusual arrangement, but they seemed to get along just fine. By 1825 Fred had started a brand new company, dipping his toes into the construction industry. Like most of his financial ventures, Fred's new business seemed to do well, making him even more wealthy.

Unfortunately, Fred's old fraudster habit chose this moment to return. One of his clients accused Fred of deliberately withholding money. Fred denied the accusation by the two ended up in a physical altercation and Fred ended up arrested for assault. The certain that he would end up in an actual jailhouse this time, he signed over his power

of attorney to the man he trusted most in the world. His neighbor and landlord, George. And with the stroke of a pen, George was now allowed to act on Fred's behalf in regards to his property. Now, thankfully, Fred was only given a six month sentence, but the entire time he was

Fred returned, George was visibly upset to give his temporary stewardship back, but despite

“his reluctance, the two men picked right back up where they left off, living together”

under the same roof. That is, until June of 1826, when Fred went missing. In the days that followed, when he was asked where his roommate had gone, George told everyone that Fred had moved back to England and had left his property in George's care. Of course, people found this odd, but they quickly shrugged it off.

No, what made folks suspicious was when, three weeks later, George started selling all of Fred's belongings. To the people of town, it seemed that if anyone was going to sell Fred's things, it probably should've been Fred himself, it seemed odd that George would get to cash it all in. Plus, why was George wearing Fred's clothing?

It was all weird enough that a few nosy neighbors felt compelled to do some digging.

“They looked into the ship that George claimed Fred had taken back to England, called”

the Lord St Vincent, but it did it take long to learn that no boat by that name had ever docked in Sydney. At this point, authorities had enough probable cause to arrest George, but since there was still no smoking gun and no dead body, they couldn't technically convict him of anything. That is until the following month.

The night in October of 1826, a local farmer by the name of John Farley was on his way home when he saw something strange, sitting on the fence that enclosed Fred's farm was the missing man himself, Fred Fisher. Only, he wasn't alive. Head bleeding and skin glowing eerily, Fred's corpse apparently moaned at John, pointed

a finger toward the creek on George's property and then faded into thin air.

“Verified, John ran straight to town to tell the authorities what he had seen.”

Of course, nobody believed him, that is until a few days later when some kids found traces of blood and hair along the fence between George and Fred's properties. Unlike the tip from beyond the grave, this one actually launched an investigation and just up the creek bed, right where the ghost head pointed, they found him, Fred Fisher's murdered body.

George, you'll be glad to hear, was arrested, tried and courts and declared guilty. He was sentenced to death by hanging after just 15 minutes of deliberation. To the very end, George professed his innocence, that Fred's death had been an accident, but the evidence and the ghost quite literally pointed to the truth. Fred Fisher had placed his trust in a neighbor who promptly broke it for personal gain.

A mistake, the George, ultimately paid for.

When many emigrated from Scotland to New Zealand, she arrived without a past. Within a decade though, she had found a husband, Charles Dean, who worked as an in-keeper in a booming old mining town. While when that boom ended in the 1870s, it crushed their business, and so in 1878, they packed up and left for greener pastures in the town of Winton.

Once settled, Charles took a job as a laborer, while many became a teacher, but even on two incomes, it was tough to get by. Which is why, on May 13th of 1879, many published her first ad in the paper and hopes of bringing in some extra money. The ad read, wanted a baby to nurse, or one or two young children to bring up, or a baby to adopt, thoroughly comfortable home in the country,

terms very moderate, and thus, in 1880, many Dean had become a baby farmer. Now for clarification, baby farming was a grotesque term for what should have been an honorable profession. Is he back in the Victorian era, women who became pregnant out of wedlock, didn't have many options, and sometimes they were even disowned by their families, and kicked out into the streets. The solution was brilliant in its simplicity.

Baby farmers, respectable women who lived out in the countryside, could raise these babies themselves for a fee, and in theory it worked, children found a home, and their mothers got a chance to rebuild their lives. Many began by taking in a five-year-old girl named Margaret. Before long, though, there were nine or ten children under her roof at any given time.

And for the first few years, she managed to stay under the radar. Yes, she occasionally

got some side eyes from her neighbors, and the local police, when they realized how many kids she had living with her, but she wasn't technically doing anything wrong. The first red flag came when many tried to take out life insurance policies on a few of the babies under her care. In the end, she was denied, but just asking, had raised a few

and then died three days later from convulsions. Two years after that, another of the newborns in her care died of congestion and inflammation to the heart, and local residents

“began to suspect foul play. The police were suspicious as well, but the only thing they”

were able to charge her with was never officially registering her house. She quickly paid

the four-pence penalty, and then kept operating as if nothing had happened. Neighbors continued to report that Minnie was severely neglecting her underage tenants. The children looked unkempt, underfed, and unhappy, and although no one could prove anything nefarious was going on, they whispered that her turnover rate was unusually high, and that children vanished regularly. In 1893, the authorities finally stepped in when the owner

of a local boarding house called the police. Minnie had been staying there with an infant, and the land lady noticed that the baby had been drinking spoiled milk. The authorities forced Minnie to give the baby back to its mother. She had only had custody for three days,

“and yet the mother could already see how much her baby had wasted away. Nobody was able”

to pin down Minnie's misdeeds until May 2nd of 1895, when she boarded a train with a half-box and a baby boy, and then returned without him. For some reason, an observant railway attendant took notes of Minnie's Cummings and Goans, when she returned without the baby carrying what he identified as a suspiciously heavy half-box, he got the police involved. They launched an investigation, which included searching the garden at Minnie's cottage.

In the end, three bodies were discovered, a toddler and two infants, one of whom was the boy from the train. An inquest proved that none had died from natural causes, and as a result on June 21st of 1895, Minnie was charged with murder, quickly convicted, and sentenced to hang. While she awaited her fate in jail, she wrote her own account of what had happened.

“She admitted to giving one of them too much law to them, and accidentally dropping another,”

but she maintained that none of the deaths that had happened under her watch had been intentional. Each and every one was an accident. On August 12th of 1895, Minnie Dean was escorted to the gallows. Once there she announced to the crowd, "I have nothing to say except that I am innocent." As the executioner placed his hand on the lever, she cried out, "Oh God, let me not suffer." And then, she dropped.

Trust is a delicate thing. We build our lives around our relationships with others. Parents, grandparents, siblings, spouses, and friends. They all work together to create the social tapestry upon which we weave our lives. And weaving is all about tension, two forces holding each other and check and keeping the patterns straight. That tension is trust, and without it, we lose everything. Now in theory, we should be able to trust the mother figures in our

lives more than anyone else, but obviously life doesn't always work out that way. It certainly

didn't for the children under Minnie's care. Somehow, she seemed to be missing that vital internal voice that normally would have told her to care for the children under her roof. And for her betrayal, she has earned herself a permanent spot in New Zealand's folklore. Even today, she still remembered as one of the most evil women to have ever lived there. Of course, sensationalism has twisted the truth of her story just a little bit since the 1890s,

and now she's described as a monster who murdered children by the scores, only with a happen. Because of that, she's frequently invoked as a sort of buggy man. Miss behaving children are often told that if they don't straighten up, they'll be sent to Minnie's farm,

where they'll never be heard from again. And apparently, even the natural world wants to avoid her,

according to locals, nothing dare grows a top her grave. No grass, no ivy, and no wildflowers adorn the ground beneath her tombstone. She was such a terrible mother, the legends seemed to whisper, that not even heard decaying body, can nurture the soil. Some legends give us monsters of massive stature and deadly shape, the vampire, the when to go, or maybe the chupacabra come to mind. But I hope today's tour of a monster of a different kind,

still gave you an interesting glance at the legends of our world.

ones betrayed. But if you're able to handle one last example, there's one little girl who's story deserves to be heard, stick around through the spree sponsor break to hear all about it. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. March includes International Women's Day, a moment to celebrate women's strength and progress while also recognizing how much they carry every day. Between caring for others and managing unseen responsibilities, their emotional well-being

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One of the first safety lessons any of us heard in life could be summed up with two words,

Stranger Danger. When we were kids, it wasn't safe for us to trust anyone off the street. Small, weak, and naive, we were particularly vulnerable to the more unsavory members of society. Granted, I grew up in the 1980s in that Stranger Things era of writing my bike from miles without supervision, but the risks were no less real. All that said, we don't know if anyone ever taught this particular rule of life to Isabella. In fact, we actually know very little about

her or how she was raised. All we know is that she was born in 1863, lived in Little Ten New Zealand, was just shy of 12 years old, and her father was a shipwreight. On January 9th of 1875, her father sent her out on an air in debt for $45pm. The school was selling tickets for a picnic, so her father had given her some money, told her to buy the family a few, and sent her on her way. An hour and a half later, though, two boys found Isabella's bloody corpse on ripen street. The scene

was a gruesome one. Her throat had been slits before her body was dumped under a dense row of sharp thickets, which scratched and punctured her all over. The only clues nearby were a bloody handkerchief, her misplaced hat, and two picnic tickets. Once her body was taken by the authorities, her father had to come in and identify her. I can't even fathom what was going through his mind, as he stared down at her. With a voice choked with grief, though, he eventually confirmed that,

yes, this was the lifeless body of Isabella. Police began their investigation by questioning recently released convicts, but when they provided solid alibis, they were cleared of all involvement.

“So at first, the only thing they had to go off of was a tip that Isabella had been seen leaving”

the school building in the company of a man dressed in gray. But as word of her killing spread, they were soon able to gather more helpful information. At 5-10 pm, a shipmate named James Allen saw Isabella with a man that he identified as John Mercer. Another witness saw the same man just a few minutes later, although by then, he was alone and looking disheveled. But the tip that really sealed the deal came from a sailor identified as Captain Russell. He reported to the police

that the day Isabella had been killed, his vessels cook had some kind of mental breakdown, throwing out food and breaking the kitchen cabinets. That cook's name it turns out was John Mercer.

When the police finally arrested him, there was still blood and thorns on his clothing.

The initial inquest was quick and efficient. There was no doubt in anyone's mind who had killed Little Isabella. Multiple witnesses took the stand to testify that they had seen Mercer that evening covered in blood. One of his fellow sailors even testified that the morning of the murder he had run into Mercer who told him "I want to get a girl and if I don't get her here, I will in Christchurch and if I don't get what I want, I will cut her throat."

It was so obvious that Mercer was guilty that on the second day of his inquest, his legal counsel didn't even bother showing up in court. A short while later on February 2, 1875, he was found guilty for the murder of Isabella Thompson. His sentence was death. Local legend claims that Isabella still hasn't found peace in the afterlife. Her body might have been buried in an unmarked grave in the local cemetery, but her spirit is believed to still

haunt the place where she died. Over the years many people have reported seen a young girl lingering, rights in the area where the murder took place. And sometimes they've even heard her

she simply disappears. Only to repeat it all in the exact same way, the following night.

“This episode of "Lore Legends" was produced by me, Aaron Manky, with writing by Alex Robinson”

and myself and research by Jamie Vargas. Today's episode topics were actually submitted by our

listeners. If you have a local legend that you love and you want us to possibly mention on a future

“episode of "Lore Legends", email us here at [email protected]. My team and I can't wait to see what”

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