Karen Kilgariff
speaker
3,962 appearances
39 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 8 Jun
Karen Kilgariff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And what's really weird that sometimes this happens on the show, and it's kind of what I'm in it for, if I'm going to be honest. Yeah. is when I was there for a cultural moment. I was 14 years old. The reason I know this case is because of a made for TV movie that came out when I was 14. So like a handful of years after it happened. No way. And you remember it? Oh, like it was yesterday.
And I remember not only watching it
and experiencing it but then what happened after it wow and it was one of those things that i think these days a lot of it had it had the natural almost viral effect but it was 1984 right which so that never happened yeah and it was that kind of thing where suddenly people were seeing and talking about this issue in a completely different way because i feel like like with so many of these things
It starred Farrah Fawcett. Okay. Now, this was Farrah Fawcett when I was a young girl. She was one of the stars of Charlie's Angels. Legendary. And she herself legendary. But for like a Charlie's Angels, I was on the love boat. She was basically the most beautiful woman in America. She did movies and stuff, but she wasn't known for acting first. She was known for beauty first. Right.
This changed that. Wow. She stars in it and does such an unbelievably amazing job. It was like no one could believe it. It was truly incredible. I just I remember not being able to believe what I was looking at. Wow. The other part of it was this thing was, you know, I don't know if you had a lot of experience with made for TV movies or that like CBS Friday Night at the Movies or whatever. Yeah.
but it was usually kind of family oriented, you know, kind of like this is a true story of a horse or whatever.
Someone, everyone could watch it. It would be like either inspirational or yeah, romantic or whatever. This was like a true crime documentary. It was so upsetting. It was so harsh. It was so realistic. And the abuse scenes were unlike anything anyone had done before.
No, quite the opposite. And for the time, it was totally revolutionary. Okay. I would say, although this is my opinion, it shocked the nation. You could use that phrase. The day after it was what everyone was talking about.
It essentially ripped off the mask of wife beater jokes because it exposed the true horrifying nightmare of living life with a violent abuser and what years of life with a violent abuser can actually lead to. The toll it takes. It's so...
So this is the story of Francine Hughes and the Burning Bed murder, a case that forced the issue of domestic violence out of the shadows and into popular culture.
The main sources used today are the book The Burning Bed by Faith McNulty, a 2020 mini documentary from the Retro Report and The New Yorker entitled The Domestic Violence Case That Turned Outrage Into Action, a 1984 People magazine article by Gioia Diliberto, entitled A Violent Death, A Haunted Life, and the rest of the sources are in our show notes.
So our story begins in Michigan in August of 1947, and that's when Frances Hughes is born. Her dad, Walter, is a blue collar laborer who works on farms and in factories. Her mom, Hazel, is a waitress. They have six children, including Francine. They live in poverty, which, of course, is made worse because Walter squanders everything they have on alcohol and gambling.
And he's also physically abusive towards Hazel. Francine leaves her parents' house as soon as she can when she's 16 years old. She drops out of high school and marries a man named Mickey Hughes, who's three years older than her. So a 16-year-old and a 19-year-old.
Yeah. Right.
women were so at this time which would have been like what late 50s early 60s women's independence like was almost impossible it was so restricted right yeah you couldn't get a bank account under your own name couldn't get it with not without your dad or your husband and then you have a dad like, let's go ahead and name him, Walter.
So Walter's the guy that if you don't have somebody better than Walter in your life, then you're just screwed. Totally. So Francine says, quote, I thought he was so sophisticated. He had his own car and most people I knew didn't. So within weeks of their wedding, Mickey's behavior toward Francine changes. She will later remember, quote, I bought some new clothes. He ripped them off me.
I don't know whether I look too pretty or what, but he didn't want me to look that way. I was shocked because I'd never been treated like that before. What do you do when you're 16 years old and you had to beg your parents to let you get married? Of course, he said, I'm sorry. Forgive me. It'll never happen again. And I believed him. But it did happen again.
And by that time, I was pregnant and felt like I had to make the best of it. Baby angel. Tough. So by the time Francine's 22, she has four children with Mickey. Wow. Two daughters and two sons. But Mickey can't hold down a job. The money he does earn goes to his growing drinking habit, not his family's. So now Francine is stuck in the same cycle her own mother was stuck in.
Her full-time job is caring for her children, but Mickey's drinking and gambling make it nearly impossible for her to buy groceries or pay rent. And at one point, she's left to feed her kids popcorn that she mixes with jelly and water just for the calories. Aww. So meanwhile, Francine lives with a looming threat of violence at the hands of her husband.
Not constantly, because sometimes Mickey can be loving when he wants to be. But Francine learns to walk on eggshells around him. Her son James later reflects on the tense atmosphere in their home by saying, quote, So when Mickey's mad, he usually takes it out on Francine. Sometimes this happens in front of the children, and sometimes it's so bad the cops are called.
Showing 821–840 of 3,962 · page 42 of 199
← Previous
Next →