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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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In 1972, glamorous American socialite Barbara Daly Bakeland was stabbed to death in her chic London penthouse. The culprit? He was her very own son, Tony, wayward heir to the Bakelite plastic dynasty. He was locked up in Broadmoor Hospital for almost a decade until a posse of devoted friends with connections in high places campaigned to get him out.
Only for him to then attack his elderly grandmother with a knife just six days after touching down in New York City. The crimes were a shocking glimpse into a filthy rich family hiding toxic secrets beneath its dazzling veneer. So how did a clan that had made its fortune in plastic from a Belgian scientist with a simple American dream turn into a twisted nightmare?
Featuring madness, obsession and mother-son incest, be warned. I'm Saruti. I'm Hannah. And this is a case that makes Mummy Dearest sound like a bedtime story.
I think this is another one that we tried to pitch to documentary makers because they would always be American and they'd be like, go and find some British stories. And it would be this one, Gail. This is one of the ones. I see.
Well, it never made it to that. No, it did not. So we've got it here for you today. And it is a very perfectly transatlantic story and perfectly fucked up.
Mm-hmm. To start this bloody saga, we need to begin almost at the end. On the 17th of November 1972, Barbara Daly-Bakeland was living in a posh townhouse flat in West London. Despite being estranged from her husband, Brooks Bakeland, for over four years, Barbara was still very much reaping the rewards of marrying into the Bakelite plastic fortune back in the 1940s.
And it cannot be stressed how revolutionary Bakelite was when it was created. The reason this family has so much money is they invented plastic in the modern sense that we think about it. They were the first people to... Well, not they. The person who invented it in their family that started this dynasty... was the first one to create heat-resistant plastic.
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Chapter 2: What led to Barbara Daly Baekeland's murder in 1972?
So a precursor to what we now have, but absolutely the beginning of all those dead turtles. For sure. And if you think West London flat sounds small, no, no. Barbara's swanky Chelsea apartment was also home to her 25-year-old son, Anthony, known to his friends as Tony. And Barbara's spoilt Siamese cat, Mr Wuss. It's a great name, to be fair.
Barbara lived a life of leisure, lunching with wealthy pals and attending caviar-laden cocktail parties across Europe and the States.
And that particular Friday afternoon in November, Barbara had visited her friend, Missy Harnden, an exiled Russian princess who ranked highly in her stuffed rolodex of aristocratic intimates. And Barbara and Missy had met up for a spot of lunch and a good old gossip. Over filet mignon, Barbara had mostly gushed about her favourite topic, her son, Tony.
She referred vaguely to the problems that Tony had been having lately, but insisted that he was mad about London, and she was certain that sunnier times were coming soon. In fact, she beamed as she told Missy that Tony planned to cook her dinner that evening.
Leaving Missy and sashaying across the immaculately kept Cadogan Square around 3.30, Barbara most likely turned a few heads, because she was once dubbed one of the ten most beautiful girls in New York. And at 51, Barbara still had it. Have you seen a picture of her? Not in recent memory. Let me show you.
I think people always talk about people from the past as being, like, beautiful, and then you see them and you're like, meh, okay. But she is, like, yeah, she's certified 50. Oh, yeah, wow. Like, yeah, for sure. So I'm sure she was turning a lot of heads even at 51. With her fiery red hair, high cheekbones and dazzling smile, Barbara was the sort of person who you couldn't help but notice.
But Barbara had no idea that the most attention she would ever get would be in just a few hours, when she'd be dead.
At around 7pm that evening, police responded to a terrified call from a maid that there had been some kind of altercation between her employer and her son. Officers reported to the penthouse flat at 83 Cadogan Square to find Barbara Bakeland lying motionless on the floor of her kitchen. There was a tiny hole in the bodice of her dress and only a small trickle of blood.
A bloodied kitchen knife lay on the worktop nearby. They quickly ascertained that the knife had plunged neatly, just once, directly into Barbara's heart, severing her arterial chamber and killing her almost instantly. Elsewhere in the flat, investigators found Barbara's son, Tony. He was on the phone to a Chinese restaurant ordering a takeaway. Yeah.
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Chapter 3: Who was Tony Baekeland and what was his relationship with his mother?
I think it's the kind of thing that at first Brooke's probably like, oh, this is cute. This is fun. And then you're like, oh, my God, you're mental. All that mischief is mischiefing up our lives.
Friends described Barbara as a violent person who threw herself full tilt into everything she did, using her willful personality to get her own way, no matter what the risk. And in classic old-timey stereotypes, Barbara's hot-blooded ways were easily blamed on one thing being a ginger. I wish it was that simple. I think she has a personality disorder. Things can be two things.
Family friend Ethel Woodward de Crocier described Barbara as having a violent Irish streak and being a red-headed domineering person. Maybe we wouldn't be so violent if you weren't oppressing us all the time.
So genetics aside, one thing was clear. The next generation of the Bakeland dynasty would be built on very shaky ground with a dash of mischief in the blood. Upon hearing of Brooks and Barbara's nuptials, psychologists, the one we met earlier, Foster Kennedy, who had met both of them actually as troubled teens, allegedly cried, God forfend they have a child. LAUGHTER
Maybe it will cancel all itself out. Maybe. It's like that Mr. Burns bit in The Simpsons when all of the diseases mean that he doesn't actually get sick. So who knows? Who knows? But well, no, I do know. And that's not what happens. It's really bad. What better time on that note to introduce you all to little Tony. Anthony Tony Bakeland was born in August 1946.
Inheriting Barbara's red hair and dark eyes, he was described as a beautiful little boy with cherubic good looks and a sensitive, intelligent soul. Throughout Tony's youth, his father was distant in an emotional and physical sense. I doubt that was particularly unusual for the time. And Brooks is around. He's just like, OK, little boy, I see you.
Brooks was often more engrossed in his own projects, like the novel he kept claiming he was writing but never actually made much progress on, or the summer he spent in Peru, searching for a lost Incan city with fellow adventurer Peter Gibble.
That's like good rich man stuff. You go and have an adventure in the Amazon, you know, that's cool.
He's not like murdering prostitutes. He's just like, I'm going to go to Peru. See you later, kid. Good luck. Like, yeah, it's just classic rich old and timey stuff. And in his absence, Tony became the quintessential mummy's boy. Wherever Barbara went, Tony went too, clinging to his mother's skirts while she held court with princes or drank cocktails with the stars.
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Chapter 4: What were the signs of dysfunction in the Bakeland family?
What all of those people are doing are talking about the pushing of sexual boundaries. Aha. And they're all talking about taboos. And what does it even mean? Like, are we more shocked because she's a woman? Absolutely. That's because men do this a lot more than women do. Also a fact.
But like, it's so interesting that she's all for the pushing of boundary until we're talking about legacy and we're talking about dynasty and we're talking about where your inheritance is going.
And I think it's very interesting because when I was looking into Barbara Bakeland, I think one of the things that is very clear about her being a social climber, all the ways in which she gets to the position she's in, she's very, very concerned with how people perceive her. She's very concerned with how people perceive her son because then that reflects poorly on her or well on her.
And then I was like, so why is she then running around telling people what she's doing? Because she like says this to her own sister-in-law that this is what she should do. It starts off as a joke, but then quickly she is making very like salacious comments about having sex with her own son. And I was like, how does that make sense with the idea of how she perceives herself?
But I think you're right. It's this idea of she wants to also be perceived as this kind of out-of-the-box thinker, this avant-garde sexual being who is like, we let our son read Marquis de Sade, ha ha ha, those are his favourites.
But she can't quite cross into the gay side of things because you're right, I think it comes back to legacy, it comes back to, well, you know, who's going to carry on the line that I worked so hard to fucking secure?
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Chapter 5: How did Barbara's upbringing influence her relationship with Tony?
But it's like to her, her fucking her own son is less of a problem than him just being gay. Which I can say what you want at the time and the place about how homosexuality was perceived. Is there ever a time and a place where mother-son incest was approved?
Maybe within the social circles that she's running in, if she's running with people like Salvador Dali, Manet, because you're right, when we listen to Root of Evil, this is what these people were doing. And it's this time period. And maybe it's her perception is warped because she already has a very distorted sense of reality because I don't think she is very mentally A-OK.
That she is able to absorb that and then live in that space and not be able to separate that the rest of the world would be like, sorry, what? And I think she's confronted with people who are like, what the fuck is she talking about? And she doesn't get it. She doesn't get it.
No, or they don't challenge her.
because she's terrifying yeah and there's also like one of the like questions people ask is like do you think you have a drinking problem and they're like do you hide your drinking do you lie about how much you drink so then I think that sort of spills into people telling other people about how much they're drinking and it being too much and everyone being a bit like but no one's saying anything oh well it's not a secret so it's fine do you know what I mean I think it could be like an element of that of like well I'm talking about it I'm not hiding it I've got nothing to hide there's nothing wrong with it I'm not hiding anything yeah maybe
Over dinner with friends, Barbara herself would make all sorts of crude comments about sleeping with her own son, like it was gossip rather than a shocking crime.
And look, I know we should be saying raping her son, but like, this is how she is presenting it. She's presenting it like it's a consenting relationship or a consenting thing, insofar as she is like admitting that he is gay, but she's like, oh, but you know, this is what we're doing.
She didn't show any guilt. and really did seem to think it was a perfectly legitimate response to addressing Tony's troublesome sexuality. And the extent to which this would have served to distort Tony's reality can't be overstated.
It's one thing when sexual abuse happens behind closed doors, but imagine the damage it would have done to Tony psychologically to have his mother running around town telling everyone what she was doing. That she was helping him.
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