The Poet | 6. Buried
episode
The Binge Crimes: What Happened to the Harrisons?
39 min
8 speakers
5 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, it's Elizabeth Day from How To Fail here. My next guest is the actual Prime Minister, Andy Burnham.
I have to be careful here, this does make me quite emotional. Of course it does. She said, we all knew kind of what time you might be coming up Downing Street. So we got Roy and we got the telly right in front of him and six of us stood around him and all said, look, Roy, look, look. Momentarily, they said, we thought he knew.
Listen to How To Fail wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to all episodes of The Poet ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge. Feed your true crime obsession. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know this episode deals with mentions of self-harm and suicide and crimes involving children.
Good evening. There appears to be a major break in the Poet case.
Wichita police at this hour are interrogating a suspect in the case, and TV10 News has learned that that suspect is Ruth Finley herself.
Ruth's story had gone public, covered here on local news station Cake TV by reporter Larry Hatteberg.
Finley told Hill that she wrote the 230 crude letters sent to herself, police, and the media.
The case had become one of the most expensive in Wichita history, totaling more than $370,000, the equivalent of more than a million dollars today. Police Chief Richard LaMunyon thinks Ruth should be held to account in a court of law. He wants to charge her with perjury and filing a false police report. Ruth is in the psychiatric ward in the hospital on an involuntary hold. She's been put on suicide watch. The prospect of going to trial is almost too much for her to bear. She's never even had a traffic ticket before. She's disoriented and terrified, too scared to even go to the bathroom. And it's in this state that she meets psychologist Dr. Andrew Pickens.
She was anxious. I mean, not out of control, but she was nervous, tense, soft-spoken, wasn't talkative, but, you know, she appeared like a normal person in an abnormal situation.
Dr. Pickens doesn't know much about the case. He didn't read the coverage in the papers. What he does know is this middle-aged woman in front of him has perpetrated a four-year-long campaign terrorizing herself.
It was a big surprise to her. She had no knowledge of it.
Ruth can't quite wrap her mind around the idea that she was the poet. She tells Dr. Pickens that she doesn't remember much about the poet's actions. Here's Jean Stone.
She's saying that, yes, I must have. They have proof of me doing it. They've shown me pictures of it. So I did it.
she can only recall short glimpses, like sitting by her washing machine and writing letters. Clearly, something was going on under the surface here, and it was up to Dr. Pickens to uncover it. But this wasn't going to be like any regular case. Dr. Pickens was working against a ticking clock. He has 90 days to make a psychiatric evaluation. The court is counting on him to answer two big questions. Did Ruth know what she was doing? And should she be brought to trial? From Sony Music Entertainment and New Metric Media, I'm Rachel Brown, and this is The Poet. Episode 6, Buried.
Andrew Pickens was destined to be a shrink. When he was 12 years old, he saw the movie that inspired his life's purpose. That movie was the 1948 psychological thriller, The Snake Pit.
The Snake Pit referenced a large psychiatric hospital where many of the patients were psychotic. My head hurts. There's something the matter with my head.
Come on, darling, let me help you.
Who are you? The patient featured in the movie, she was initially thought to be psychotic by the people who were treating her, and she wasn't. And the therapist who treated her, I realized retrospectively, was a psychoanalytic kind of therapy. And it made sense to me that I thought that that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be like that psychiatrist in the movie.
The caption beneath his photo in his high school yearbook reads, little man, big brain, future psychiatrist.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:08
2
How did Ruth Finley’s false confession become a major break in the Poet case?
6:08–11:04
3
What were the immediate legal and psychiatric responses after Ruth’s confession?
11:04–20:37
4
Why did Dr. Pickens diagnose Ruth with a dissociative disorder within 90 days?
20:37–23:29
5
Who is Dr. Andrew Pickens and how did his background shape his approach to Ruth’s evaluation?
23:29–39:54