The Puppeteer

ticket for the always true crime live show?

“Stue it from British murders, Mike from Murder Mile, and Paul, the true crime enthusiast,”

are teaming up for the ultimate true crime takeover at Crossed Wires Festival. They'll be diving into the details of some gripping cases in a live show that you won't want to miss. Search Crossed Wires Festival now and see all three shows with just one ticket. Dr. Swartz was based down in a pool of blood.

A renowned scientist killed in a murderous frenzy. A very gruesome and disturbing scene. Persons of interest, obsessed with role-playing and the occult. We're here now, I can smell blood. From Sony Music Entertainment and Em William Phelps LLC, Fatal Fantasy, available now on the

range, search for fatal fantasy wherever you get your podcasts. Warning, this series includes discussion of inhumane medical experimentation, including on children, violence, sexual assault, abuse of children, and cultural genocide. I shouldn't have been putting the Allen. I was a runaway kid. I did not commit a crime. All I did was run away from home.

In 1958, Lana Ponting found herself at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal. Under the care of psychiatrist, Dr. Donald U. and Cameron. He was preoccupied with a theory that sounds like science fiction. That he could erase a person's mind. I don't even remember how we age.

“I don't remember that at all, and that bothers me a lot.”

Then I can't remember that. And rebuild it from scratch. What we're going to be like, we're going to be his puppets and do exactly what he says. I'm Dr. Julia Shaw, and this is Project Mind Control. Lana's memories of her time at the Allen Institute have gaps.

But there are some memories that still trouble her. It was a rule I was put in where the light was consistently on and off. It made me sick. Maybe very sick. I was scared. I remember treatments, and I remember the pain I felt.

And I remember all the drugs that gave me. I think a lot of it was LSD. There was so being amateur, all there were so many drugs. And then I remembered lying on a lying on a stretcher. And I was bleeding from the vaginal area.

Lana's memory of what it was like inside the Allen is poor, which is in line with what Dr. Cameron said about his own deep patterning procedures. Dr. Cameron is voiced by an actor.

In the first stage of the stubbornness of the space-time image, there are marked memory deficits.

“I don't even remember how we age. I don't remember that at all.”

And in the second stage, after more treatment, like electro-shock therapy, drugs, or induced comas, Dr. Cameron explained that... The patient has lost his space-time image, but clearly feels that there should be one. I must have plucked in and out of each play I did, but the rooms I can't remember. Imagine the fear of realizing that you should know where you are, but you don't.

That you should know the time and date, but you just can't quite grasp it. He feels anxious and concerned, because he cannot tell where he is and how he got there.

Then there was a third stage.

During this stage, the patient made sure of a variety of other phenomena, such as the loss of a second language, or all knowledge of his marital status. In more advanced forms, he may be unable to walk without support, to feed himself and make sure double in continents. She was sitting on the floor, she couldn't walk. They forgot whole languages, forgot that they were married.

Rendering people unable to be independent in the most basic ways is a symptom of brain damage. It is a severity of the effects of the deep patterning procedure that earned at the nickname "electrical lobotomy."

Most people will know it as the procedure which involved hammering an ice pick through the ice socket into the front of the brain behind the forehead,

“in order to treat various forms of mental illness, but it turns out there were multiple versions.”

The bottomary originally was not that. Sociological historian Andrew Skull. It was so-called precision lobotomy which is an ironic tone of phrase given what they were doing, drilling holes in the top of the head and inserting something that looked like a bottom knife and severing bits of the brain.

lobotomies whether using ice picks or electricity basically turned people into zombies and would often have long-term effects on their memory.

This was a time in history when psychiatry was doing many weird and terrible things. Here's Andrew Skull. Mental patients were shut up in a double sense. They were locked away, but their voices were also silence because whatever they articulated was seen as a product of their madness, and therefore easily dismissed, and families were usually desperate.

And so on the flimsy as possible basis, psychiatrists in the 20th century indulged in an orgy of therapeutic experimentation,

that I described in my book Dispert Remedies, they really were allowed to do things that when we look back now, we tend to see as quite horrific.

“Would they at the time have said that they are experimenting for the benefit of their patients and that they're ethically doing something good?”

Absolutely, sincerity is no guarantee of doing the right thing. Indeed, when you become a true believer in what you're doing, it blinds you very often to the consequences that are happening all around you. There were some truly wild medical ideas that were still actively being studied when Dr. Cameron joined the Allen Institute. The enthusiasm for focal sepsis as a cause of mental illness, the idea that low-grade infections in your body were poisoning your brain, which led to surgical excision of teeth, tonsils, stomachs, colons, splines.

So they were removing these bacteria? We were removing those because there were no antibiotics, so you engaged in what was called surgical bacteriology for the ones that got the abdominal surgery in America. You were killing 45% of them and nobody scored. Nobody said, "Oh my God, what are you doing here?"

“So how does a teenage girl end up in a place like the Allen, just for running away?”

Judge Nicholson was the one that put me into the Allen, and I found out he was a friend of Dr. Cameron's. He was soliciting people to be brainwashed.

That's basically what he was doing.

We found the judge that Lana is talking about. In the 1950s, he was heavily involved with sending children between the ages of 16 and 21 to reform schools. An alternative to adult prisons. At the time, Canadian children could be institutionalized for so-called status offenses, things like incordability, sexual promiscuity, and running away. This means that Lana's teenage rebellion was enough.

So what happened to her at the Allen? Young girl admitted accompanied by father. She complains of sharp pains in her head and abdominal pain, which she states, "Everyone says I imagine it, but I don't." Seems to be adjusting well. Lana was able to get access to some of her medical records, which she shared with us, about 60 pages, half of which are from the Allen. Most of them are bedside notes, records written down by nurses, and kept as the name suggests by a patient's bed.

They track things like the patient's treatments, progress, and medications, and they were recorded three times a day. My producer Simonorata went through them. April 28, 1958, 3 p.m. Attractively groomed, playing rock and roll records most of the day, childish attention-seeking manner. What stood out to us was the tone in which many of these notes are written.

Lana is called "childish" and "attention-seeking," repeatedly.

Silly, girl-ish manner, childish behavior, and conversation. April 11, 1958, usual childish flippant manner.

“Her appearance is mentioned more than once by the staff of the Allen.”

Attractively groomed has been crimping and complaining about her appearance. Appearance is sometimes clinically relevant, not showering or feeling to look put together. Consignal things like depression or dementia. Too much attention can hint at anxiety, manic episodes, or obsessive compulsive thoughts. But it's one thing to note that someone hasn't showered in weeks, and another, to note that they have been crimping, or are attractively groomed.

In the notes, there's also a significant amount of attention paid to Lana's relationship with boys.

April 5, 1958, dressed up, talks freely of her several boyfriends. Several boyfriends.

“In talking about only therapies, almost all of them were disproportionately visited on women.”

The notes remind me of something I spoke about with Professor Skull. It's true of ECT and remains true of ECT today. It was true of lobotomy. We don't have national statistics because nobody was keeping them on lobotomy. But several of us have gone into the hospital records. But every one of us who has seen those records sees that with lobotomy, the ratio is something like 70-30.

So 70% of the people who received lobotomies were women. This has been a pattern in psychiatry in general. Women have been treated more often, including with methods that are more invasive and brain damaging.

“I think in my view, it's impossible to escape the fact that gender bias was heavily at work here, even for Freeman.”

That's Walter Freeman. The man who popularized lobotomies. The fact women could, after all, he says, return to work as a housewife. That doesn't take much imagination. It didn't matter if they fried women's brains because these patients were in his view just housewives. And when it comes to Lana's notes, there's something else.

There is no mention of experiments anywhere. In fact, there is no mention of her having undergone any psychiatric treatment at all.

Instead, there are records of her body temperature, pulse, blood pressure and respiration for the first three days,

and only the first three days. Which looks to me like they were tracking her baseline vitals. It's the kind of thing you might do before administering treatment to make sure that the patient can tolerate it. But when Lana first saw these records, there was something in them that redefined her whole life. "I got pregnant when I was at the allen. Now, who buy I don't know?" Lana, now on her 80s, discovered from her records that she had carried and given birth to a healthy baby.

Not long after leaving the allen, at the Missouri Court Hospital in Montreal, she had no memory of this. No memory of being pregnant, no memory of delivering the baby, and no memory of what happened after to her or the child. She had spent the five decades after she left the allen Institute unaware that she had had a child. The records we were sent don't include a birth certificate, but they do note her child's date of birth as the 10th of March 1959 at 10-12pm.

Lana's age is recorded as 17. Seeing these records, specifically the dates, lead Lana to believe that it was during the one month she spent at the allen that she got pregnant. "When I went into the allen, I was the virgin, but who may be pregnant? I don't know." Dr. Swartz was based down in a pool of blood. A renowned scientist killed in a murderous frenzy.

"Person's of interest obsessed with role-playing and the occult."

"We're here now. I can smell blood." "From Sony Music Entertainment and Em William Phelps LLC, Fatal Fantasy, available now on the bench, search for Fatal Fantasy wherever you get your podcasts." "I remembered lying on a stretcher, and I was bleeding from the vaginal area." Lana believes she was sexually assaulted while she was at the allen. She's explained her salt to us and has recorded it in two separate affidavits, both from 2022.

Here are extracts from those affidavits voiced by an actor, note that this section contains graphic details.

“"I was also gang raped when I was there, and I think that's when Cameron and all of them decided to get rid of me."”

"I was starting to really question what they were doing, so they got rid of me. I was pregnant." "Dr. You and Cameron, the man in charge of Lana's care, and the care of hundreds of others." Lana's medical records are incomplete, and what is there doesn't match what she remembers. They say that Lana's pregnancy lasted 38 weeks, and again, that she gave birth on 10 March 1959. 38 weeks before that is the 17th of June 1958.

Lana was discharged from the allen on the first day of May 1958.

So while the dates are close, at least according to the records, Lana had been released from the allen for a month and a half before she became pregnant. She was recommended for follow-ups at the allen, even after she left. "Everything they said about me, they're not true, they're not true at all." The notes also repeatedly list dances, noting whether she was attending or was not attending them. Like this mention from the 28th of April,

"Attended dance," stated she had "lousy." Probably meaning she had a lousy time. Her bedside notes have Lana as physically leaving the allen and later coming back multiple times. But Lana remembers things differently.

“The allen kept dust like prisoners. That's why we were adoptive so much so we couldn't run away. We couldn't do anything. They had people to catch us.”

We wanted to run, but where would we run to? Would a psychiatric institution let 18-age run away leave? According to her notes, on many of these occasions, she was leaving to see her boyfriend. April 23rd, 1958, returned from outing with boyfriend, cheerful. When she wasn't seeing him, she was either writing to him.

April 13, 1958, occupied with "hit parade" on the radio and writing letters to boyfriend or waiting for him to call. April 28, 1958, annoyed because her boyfriend did not call. Despite the lack of detail relating to her treatment, there seems to be a surprising inclusion of an alleged engagement. I found two entries that hint at that possibility. So one is from April 29th, two days before she left the allen, and it reads, "returned at 930pm."

“They had a good time with her boyfriend, says she has, in quotes, a very special secret, which she cannot tell. And there's an earlier one from April 16th, and it reads, "returned from her afternoon.”

Apparently showed the attendant a diamond ring saying she was secretly engaged." What about Lana's parents? Did they know that she got engaged? Lana told us that they did visit her. "I didn't recognize them. I know I do. They were because I was so drugged. I didn't know anything."

Could this Lana, the Lana who didn't recognize her own parents, have accepted a marriage proposal?

I was sent the files late at night, and I'm scrolling quickly through everything curious.

And at one point I stopped and I zoom in, and I read Lana McKinnon. McKinnon? Lana's family name is Ponting. Why is her surname here, McKinnon? Ms. Bellden corrected a bunch of times throughout by the way, but every time it said McKinnon, there was no mention of Ponting anywhere. So either these are somebody else's files, or Lana got married at some point between her time at the island and giving birth.

“Is it possible that Lana not only does not remember giving birth in 59, but also that she does not remember getting married?”

The patient made sure of her idea of other phenomena, such as the loss of a second language, or all knowledge of its marital status.

I looked at the records, the Missouri Court file that I sent you, and they said the father's name was Alex McKinnon. I don't know anybody by that name at all. Lana does not believe the version of events supported by her records. They had the occupation as she kept it at the age of 21, and I thought either all lies or files for full life.

“There's another document in Lana's files, a letter from social services, informing the Ellen of Lana's pregnancy six months after her discharge.”

November 3rd, 1958. Patience pregnancy has been definitely established. She is presently staying at the Missouri Court children home for unmarried mothers, but far to deserve to remain there. They discussed the possibility of re-admitting Lana to the Ellen after she's given birth. But crucially, they referred to her in this letter as Lana Ponting. In fact, we've discovered that at the Missouri Court sheltering home, an institution run by Catholic nuns, all unmarried mothers assumed a different name for the duration of their stay.

The anonymity was to protect the reputation of their families. This was an era when names and records could be altered to suit the sensibilities of the time. Could this have happened, Lana? I thought I was going in there to get better, but that didn't happen. I didn't have an at all. At this stage, it's all but impossible to be sure of what happened to Lana. We know that during her time at the Ellen, or in the month immediately after leaving, she became pregnant. And we know that this life-changing and traumatic experience which ended with her separated from her baby has been wiped from her brain.

It caged no one to have a child. So where was I? Lana's memories of her assaults in the Ellen came back to her fairly recently. In an interview from 2021, she said,

“"I was asleep one night, and then all of a sudden I just woke right up. I don't know how long this happened for, but I started to remember things."”

While memories long forgotten and then recovered, can be accurate. They can also exist in between truth and fiction. You're brain using aspects of things that really happened, and weaving in elements that aren't quite right. I am a criminal psychologist, and in my academic work, and my work as an expert witness, I specialize in research on false memories. It is my role to examine the quality of memory evidence in criminal cases. In my own research, I have shown that we can create complex false memories of crime, from pieces of information that we are trying to make sense of.

While Lana will never know the paternity or circumstances surrounding the birth of her child, what we do know is something horrifying happened to her behind those walls that wiped those memories away.

Proof in itself that the procedures at the Allen had unimaginable consequences. It really bothers me that this happened because, you know, when you have a child, and you don't know who he is, it's very, very hard to live with that. The Lana we spoke to firmly believes her medical records are a work of fiction, and she has reason to believe this, because Lana told us something else.

Next time, on Project Mind Control.

“I saw her for a while and been all of a sudden she was gone.”

We search for an indigenous girl who disappeared from the institute.

When they found bones, they're like, oh, that's an animal. Oh, that's animal, and it's like when animals die, they don't get buried.

“Other animals eat them or the elements take them away, but these were deep in the ground.”

I'm Dr. Julia Shaw. Project Mind Control was presented by me and written by me and my producer Simone Arata. The executive producers are Elsa Rochester and Louisa Adams, sound designed by Craig Edminson. Lana's affidavits were read by Martin Richards. The words of Dr. Cameron were read by Paul Livingston.

Project Mind Control is an always true crime production.

“Do you know why you have to make a podcast in which you're a true crime and a crime?”

Or? It's really very complicated and with every main thing. The whole spectrum of the primifel is still being produced from all sides and how to modernize things. And then we'll be able to call Hollywood kids and give them a new call. That's fantastic. It's a great deal.

Heard my reign. Hollywood kids? You were I was podcast-skipped.