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.
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Appearances
Curiously, P.T. Barnum was not, you know, probably trying to endanger. He wasn't a bloodthirsty person. He opposed the death penalty. But he also knew he believed in selling tickets. That was his modus operandi. And so he really becomes one of the first people to make true crime entertainment.
The trial goes on extremely long, about five weeks. And the defense pulls out all the stops in this case. The defense floats the idea for the first time that it was a gang in New York. The Bowery Boys, the Dead Rabbits, the Roach Guard. These were menacing street thugs.
This is a big problem for the prosecution. It disrupts their timeline.
These two witnesses are an enormous problem for the prosecution, and Pauly then starts to have less opportunity, less of a window to occur the murders.
He said that Pauly was going to a place to deal with her pregnancy, where there's euphemisms for an abortion, Or, alternatively, there were these houses where women gave up their children. He calls no witnesses to substantiate this. But it's a brilliant way because he knew how to play to the press. He knew that people cared about abortion. He knew people would pay attention to this.
It was plausible, you know, on his face at least, for why then she would have lied to her son. It gives her, quote, an alibi. But, of course, there actually is no alibi witness. But he knows he has to play to the press. He's very good at manipulating the press.
There are some jurors that want a manslaughter conviction because the cause of death, the prosecution never could really prove the exact cause of death. They might have been bludgeoned. It might have been something else, poisoning.
He had long opposed the death penalty and was radically opposed to the death penalty. And in part is because he had sort of a radical Christian sympathy.
He went on to write, So he projects his own kind of ideological views onto the case, just as Edgar Allan Poe projected his views about how the police should conduct investigations onto the case, and just as how many people on the abortion issue project their views onto the case, what this all had to do with her guilt or innocence, you know, very tenuous.
In the last trial, the prosecution suffers from a number of problems. First of all, it's the third trial, and these witnesses are tired of being abused. Their names are run in the newspapers. They're, you know, savaged on their cross-examination.
What also happened was Newberg got turned off by all this vitriol towards Polly. There was this scandalous pamphlet that had made up, you know, these stories about her being a harlot, basically. And the people of Newberg were just so turned off by the red meat press at the time that they start swinging sympathetically towards Polly as if she were a victim. And so they acquit.
And so Polly is let go eventually the following year, but in a sense she's not free because the people on Staten Island all believe that she's guilty. She lives in this small cottage. She never leaves Staten Island, and she's sort of this recluse. There are rumors about her, and she lives out her very long life as a recluse on Staten Island, still shunned.
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