Alex Hortis
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Alex Hortis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
In the early morning hours, she's seen taking the Staten Island ferry, the Staten Islander, over to Manhattan.
And then she walks all the way up to Harlem, which at the time were country estates. So she, over the course of two days, she essentially walks a marathon in the cold and rain as she's eight months pregnant.
And he talks her into giving herself up. She hasn't been charged yet, but they treat her like a fugitive.
He went into George Waite's apothecary, and he detailed evidence that Polly had essentially been sleeping with George Waite.
George Wade is an apothecary, of course, off of Broadway, so he sold abortifacients at the time, these herbal remedies, which are very dangerous and noxious. So he is rumored to have procured, you know, maybe half a dozen abortions. There's really no proof of that. There's no way that the press could have proved that, but they ran with the story anyway.
At this point, he's a newsman, so he's writing essays for the Columbia Spy. But he was also very interested in crime, and he becomes fascinated with the idea of being essentially an amateur detective, and becomes fascinated in this idea that I can solve crimes using logic reported in the newspapers, and I can use deductive logic to solve crimes.
So he's already writing detective stories. He writes the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, in which this Detective Dupin, who becomes his alter ego and becomes the first sort of Sherlock Holmes character, solves an unsolvable crime. And then he comes across the Pauly Boudin case. He's following it very carefully. And then he goes on and he criticizes the police.
And he decides that Pauly Boudin is clearly guilty, but he believes that the authorities will undoubtedly mess it up.
As soon as the Herald and the Sun started reporting on the trial, it caused a huge furor. So people from Manhattan, people from Long Island, people from New Jersey, they all flocked to Little Staten Island and its courthouse. The case against Polly Bodine at that trial is largely circumstantial, but it's fairly extensive.
One of the key pieces of evidence that had come out was some pawnbrokers had answered a reward in the newspapers and had said that somebody had come on Christmas Day, this is several hours before the murders were discovered, and had pawned Emmeline's valuables. So it raises the obvious question, How in the world were those goods pawned half a day before the bodies were discovered?
How to have somebody who had access to the house?
But what they did was they had her dress up in her outfit that they had caught her with. And they brought the pawnbrokers to this lone cell. She was the only person there. There was no lineup. Like you'd have today, you'd have to have a lineup. Otherwise, it'd be considered unduly suggestive. And he said, you know, basically said, this is who we think it is. Is that her?
And they all said it was her.
And her family, Pauly Benign's family, the housemen, say George Waite's the killer, Pauly's innocent. George Waite essentially killed her for money.
was the defense's strongest point in many ways. She had actually delivered Annalisa, the young girl, an 18-month-old girl. Why in the world would Polly Bodine murder her 18-month-old niece over Christmas? Why would she murder her sister-in-law? The prosecution suggested that Polly was, in fact, in financial distress. The problem with this is that Polly came from a wealthy family.
There was an eccentric juror who actually was a fairly prosperous farmer on Staten Island. And he holds out and he says, I'm not going to convict her under any circumstances. There were some reports that he had been opposed to the death penalty. And so they have an all-night deliberation. And remember, these jurors, you know, these are not comfortable beds here. They're in a very small jury room.
They don't have much to eat. They have bread and water. They used to actually withhold bread and water from jurors until they reached a decision. But he's the lone holdout. Everyone else votes to convict. He literally jumps out the window and runs away.
And it becomes this enormous social event. It far attracted women spectators far more than men. They'd be dressed up in the latest stylish outfits. They'd be eating lunches. They'd bring their children. They'd treat it like a show, essentially. On the first day of trial, there was a near riot, and the police had to beat down spectators because it had caused such strong feelings about it.
It's really the first case... in which the entire country is following details of the case. And you have very able reporters that are transcribing it and doing very detailed day-to-day trial testimony.
So he creates this disgusting wax figure of Polly essentially as this old witch, killing Emmeline. And Annalisa. In the American Museum, he advertises during her trials, there are undoubtedly were many, many thousands of people who saw both this horrible wax figure and then went over and sat in the trial, which was only about two blocks away.
Showing 21–40 of 52 · page 2 of 3
← Previous
Next →