Skinned

Hey True Weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. People accumulate a lot of stuff over a lifetime. An attic or basement full of boxes, lots of junk really, but some treasures, antique Christmas ornaments, a box of old army uniforms, a giant plastic bag full of other plastic bags, some old pots and pans, a carton of Kodak color slides, a ceramic Easter Bunny, one ear long broken off.

But, wait, wait, what's that? It looks like an old leather wallet, but it's shriveled and brittle and a weird color. Keep it or toss it. I guess that depends on your taste, after all, a wallet made from the skin of a notorious executed killer isn't for everyone. Today, Morristown, New Jersey is one swanky expensive place to call home, which makes sense.

It's only about 30 miles outside of Manhattan location, location, location, which means your bank account better be massive, massive, massive. The median home price in Morristown is about double the national average. The downtown has epic charm and the restaurants are fantastic. The place is loaded with history. They call it the capital of the American Revolution.

It was the site of General George Washington's winter headquarters. Now, don't go getting any fancy ideas about that. Washington's Continental Army all but starved and nearly froze their musket balls off during those brutal New Jersey winters. Kids, we don't even know a winter like the ones those 10,000 troops shivered through in their meager bedrolls on that frozen ground.

Couple of fun facts about Morristown's revolutionary war history before we move on. Benedict Arnold, that legendary trader, was court-martialed at the Dickerson Tavern in Morristown in 1779, and the town is home to a military installation with a name straight out of a cartoon, Fort Nonsense, built on a hill overlooking the town.

It was meant to serve as an observation post and a place for soldiers to retreat. As fate would have it, the British never once attacked Morristown, so the hilltop fort was never used as intended. Legend has it that the place earned the name Fort Nonsense because George Washington had his men continually working to fortify the earth and structure as a way of keeping them busy.

How do we know this? Because long after the war was won, when surviving troops submitted their claims to receive their hard-earned military pensions, those who'd served under Washington at Morristown listed their work there as Fort Nonsense. From the 1790s on, the name stuck. Today it's a national park, and the view alone is worth making the short hike to the very top.

Okay, wait, sorry, I have one more fun fact that I have to share with all of my fellow Hamilton fans. You know the Marquis de Lafayette, as in, I go to France for more funds, I come back with more guns and ships, and so the balance shifts? That Lafayette. Well, in 1825, when the Marquis de Lafayette returned to America for a little 15-month visit, the people of Morristown threw a glorious ball in his honor.

The home where the ball was held is still standing today, and at one time was the home of the great-grandson of another Revolutionary War icon, Paul Revere. Very cool, right? Anyway, after George Washington made the place famous, and just as the robber barons of the Gilded Age were feverishly erecting these utterly magnificent mansions in Morristown, you know, in which to store their silver teapots and squadrons of servants, another Frenchman set sail across the Atlantic.

Not a war hero this time, or a diplomat, or an aristocrat. Just a nobody hoping that America, that land of dreams, could make him a somebody. His name was Antoine LeBlanc. Like countless others before him and after, LeBlanc came to America seeking his fortune and a better life. He was a motivated man, and probably more than a little bit angry and humiliated, too.

You see, back in France, his homeland, Antoine was a disappointment to his family. He hated school and was frequently truant. He was said to be sarcastic and cruel, quick to dish out an insult, but unable to take one without violence. His own father declared that Antoine's life was sure to come to misery. Frustrated and angry, Antoine left home for Germany, where he found work at the house of a widow.

And surprisingly, he did well in that job, or well enough, at least, to remain employed there for nearly five years. The widow had three daughters, Christine, Mariette, and Marie. Over the course of time, Antoine's attentions toward Marie were rewarded. He fell in love, and wonder of wonders, Marie loved Antoine back.

Her mother, not so much. She forbade the marriage on the grounds that Antoine was both poor and of poor breeding, completely unfit for her daughter. It stung, and Antoine refused to accept it. Yet nothing he did persuaded the widow Smicht to change her mind. Antoine realized that there was only one thing to be done, head for America to make his fortune.

He and Marie pledged their devotion to each other, each swearing to never marry anyone else as long as they both lived. Antoine promised to return from America a wealthy man and a more than suitable bridegroom. You might be tempted right now to judge Marie's mother harshly, but hold on. Sometimes parents are right. Sometimes they really can see things you can't, infuriating as that is.

And this is one of those times. Antoine LeBlanc set foot on American soil on April 26, 1833. He was 33 years old, strong, healthy, and blessed with a bit of good luck because he found work almost immediately. No small feat given that LeBlanc barely spoke one word of English and had arrived in the new world with little more than the shirt on his back.

It was only his third day in a crowded boarding house on Fulton Street when a genteel farmer from New Jersey paid a visit in search of a man interested in working as a hired hand. This was work Antoine knew well, and finding this position so quickly was a good omen. He'd be returning to his sweet Marie in no time. Antoine's new employers were Samuel and Sarah Sayre, a wealthy and prominent couple in Morristown, New Jersey.

Samuel had been a merchant and a justice of the peace. Sarah was his second wife. His first wife, Charlotte, passed away in 1819. The Sayres were in their early 60s. That's prime pickleball age today. But this is 1833, when life expectancy for an American male was about 43 years. It's easy to understand why the Sayres needed help on their farm.

It was just the two of them and a servant girl named Phoebe. Their previous worker, a young boy, had run away. It's thought that both the boy and Phoebe were slaves, and I think that's accurate. We'll come back to why, but I'll warn you now that it's appalling and terrible and outrageous. So the Sayres needed a farmhand and Antoine LeBlanc needed a job.

It's possible, given the language barrier, that he didn't fully understand the gig. He'd expected to be working as a gardener, but instead he found himself toiling in the fields, long, exhausting days of endless physical labor. The lodgings he'd been promised as part of the deal turned out to be a dark, windowless room in the Sayres' dank earthen cellar.

And worst of all, LeBlanc did not comprehend that his compensation for all this labor was to be room and board only. That realization hit hard. Life in the new world was not at all how LeBlanc had imagined. He dreamed of his hands grasping easy wealth, not farm tools. And it didn't take long, less than a month of this, before LeBlanc's gratitude at finding work curdled into a resentful rage.

And as he later confessed, his thoughts very quickly turned violent. Antoine may have only been on the Sayre farm for a few weeks, but he'd been paying close attention to the Sayres. He saw the casual ease with which Samuel Sayre handled his money. Payments went out, payments came in, and none of it, not a single dollar, made its way to Antoine. He prayed to God to be prevented from committing the sin of murder, but that felt hollow and empty.

He decided God had abandoned him. And why not? It had been 10 years since Antoine had last made confession. Why should God hear his pleas now? The decision was made. He would kill the Sayres, steal their valuables, then make his way back to New York and board the first ship bound for Germany. Now, there were two more members of the Sayre family living on the farm, grown daughters.

Both were away and had delayed their return home, a move that ended up saving their lives. LeBlanc had been keeping a close eye on one of the daughters, Mary. He was very taken with a gold watch that the young woman always wore, a watch he was determined to have. Day after day, he waited for Mary to return. And then, growing impatient, he decided to go forward with his plan to slaughter the Sayres and just give up on the watch.

Poor Mary, who with her sister would return home to a ghastly tragedy, having no idea how close they'd come to joining their parents and their servant girl in the grave. On the afternoon of May 11th, 1833, a Saturday, LeBlanc approached his employer and asked for five dollars. Samuel Sayre instead gave the man a coin, something Antoine took as a grave insult.

Heading into Morristown, he purchased some cigars and hard cider, then went to a tavern to drink brandy and pass the time. LeBlanc knew that the Sayres other hired hand, a worker they paid to do a fraction of the labor required of him, would leave the farm late that afternoon as he sat alone in that tavern. Antoine brooded over his circumstances, to have journeyed so far, to have sacrificed so much only to find himself working like a mule and living like one, too.

The more LeBlanc drank, the more it rankled him. Should a man be worked to the bone, housed in the dirt and denied any wages for his labors? LeBlanc thought not. He pulled himself up and made for the door and the Sayre farm. LeBlanc idled in the Sayres barn until about 10 p.m. when he approached the farmhouse. Samuel was alone in the kitchen shaving.

Through gestures and pantomime, LeBlanc persuaded the older man to accompany him to the barn to tend to a horse in distress. Lifting a lantern from the table, Samuel Sayre followed Antoine LeBlanc into the night. As he stepped through the stable doors, LeBlanc swung and struck him with the business end of a shovel, killing the man instantly.

Now it was Sarah Sayre's turn. Back to the farmhouse, LeBlanc went. Now he laid a slightly different trap in rapid French and with frantic gestures, he conveyed to Sarah that her husband had collapsed in the barn and something was terribly wrong. The poor woman was dressed for bed, a kerchief wound around her hair, a bonnet hastily tied on before she could make it to the stable door.

Antoine swung the shovel again, but it was dark, pitch dark, and he managed only a glancing blow. Again and again, he battered Sarah with the shovel until finally her body was still. He dragged her corpse into the stable. He'd already buried her husband deep in a pile of manure. He threw Sarah's body onto the heap, making only a half-hearted attempt to cover her remains. There was still so much yet to be done this night.

Antoine headed back to the farmhouse again, this time to the bedroom where Phoebe, the servant girl, was asleep, oblivious to the horrors unfolding just outside. The authorities conjectured that Antoine killed Phoebe with a pitchfork. There were neat holes in her ear and temple, and it was clear that her death had been swift. She was found lying on her side, her hands folded across her breasts.

It was believed that she didn't even awaken to see her killer, the smallest of mercies, but the only one granted to her. Antoine left the dead girl lying in her bed, her blood soaking the mattress. Then he got busy plundering the Sayre home. The paper currency? Antoine LeBlanc had no idea what any of it was worth, so he left it all behind.

Instead, he stuffed a pillowcase with jewelry, envisioning how beautiful those gems would be on his sweet Marie. He filled another case with all the sterling silver he could lay his hands on. He stole clothing and spoons and even thimbles. In his greed and fury, Antoine opened every drawer and cupboard, picked every lock and ransacked every room in the house.

What he didn't take, he tossed aside. Then he dressed himself in Samuel Sayre's trousers and coat and headed back to the barn to fetch a horse. But the usually docile gray mare that he chose to make his escape was having none of it. LeBlanc later described how she balked and kept turning back toward the farm. My God, what a magnificent and loyal horse she was in the struggle to keep the mare moving forward. LeBlanc couldn't keep hold of his bundles.

Things were spilling out onto the ground all around him. By sunrise, he gave up and dismounted. He had decided to cut the mare's throat and leave her where she lay. But that sweet old girl knew what was up. And with one swift turn, yanked herself free of LeBlanc and disappeared at a gallop. It was a setback for the killer, but one that didn't worry him all that much.

He believed that it now being Sunday, a day of rest. No one would think it strange for the Sayre farmhouse to be quiet, convincing himself that he had until Monday at least before the bodies were discovered. Antoine turned his face to the rising sun and set out on foot. When it comes to murder, even the best laid plans are no guarantee of success, and these were hardly the best laid plans.

As the murderer LeBlanc was hauling his stolen loot east, other men were out and about that early, early Sunday morning. Neighbors of the Sayres, one a farmer driving his cows out to pasture. The men, Colin Robertson and Lewis Halsey, were stopped in their tracks by a most unusual sight, a bundle on the ground, its contents strewn across the dew-soaked grass.

Women's clothing. Bending for a closer look, one saw the monogram embroidered on the fabric. He realized at once that the garments belonged to one of the Sayre daughters. He plucked the items off the ground, and once the cows were happily grazing, the pair made their way to the Sayre farm. There was no answer to the repeated knocking, and with a bad feeling creeping over them, the men forced the door.

Seeing the house had been ransacked, they moved from room to room, calling out and getting no response until at last they came to the attic bedroom of the serving girl. You already know what they found there. Phoebe slain, her blood now pooling on the floor. The men raced for help. The group that assembled in the Sayre home eventually made their way to the barn.

They saw blood spattered shovel lying on the ground. They saw blood smeared on the barn's floor, a trail they followed to the dung heap. That's when one of the men stumbled on Samuel Sayre's boot, sticking out from the pile of manure. Frantic digging revealed the rest of the body, along with that of his wife, Sarah. It was immediately assumed that the newly hired laborer, Antoine LeBlanc, must be the one responsible for this foul, unspeakable deed.

He was nowhere to be seen. And the gray mare, known to be a favorite of Samuel Sayre, vanished as well. Sheriff Ludlow, along with U.S. Marshal Zephaniah Drake, correctly guessed that LeBlanc would be headed for New York. Law enforcement fanned out across the countryside. It didn't take long for Antoine LeBlanc to be apprehended.

It was two o'clock that same afternoon that LeBlanc was found in the Mosquito Tavern on the Newark Causeway, enjoying a cigar. When arrested, he was wearing his victim's pants and hat. His pockets were stuffed with $20 worth of silver, two of Samuel's razors and Sarah's gold watch. Beside him were a pair of bundles, clothing stolen from his victims.

Something he'd lost on the road when the mare balked and bucked was a bag of gold worth $200. That's about $7,500 in today's money. Talk about leaving evidence everywhere. Justice came swiftly for Antoine LeBlanc. The savage nature of the killings, the bodies desecrated by livestock dung, the literal trail of loot that led from the scene to that tavern in Newark where LeBlanc was found serenely puffing away on a stogie.

LeBlanc had virtually no chance of walking away a free man. His attempts at an alibi failed miserably. His insistence that there had been five other men on the farm that night was a story lacking even a shred of confirmation. He had committed brutal, bloody murder and had been more than a little sloppy as he went about it. He'd not even gone 20 miles from the crime scene before getting caught.

The police chained him in irons and hauled him back to Morristown. Today, a crime like LeBlanc's could take years to prosecute and then any conviction might be followed by years of appeals. That's now. Morristown, New Jersey, then they weren't playing. The trial of Antoine LeBlanc began on August 13th, 1833. It took a jury only nine days to hear the evidence and find LeBlanc guilty of murder.

He was sentenced to hang for the killing of six men. Samuel and Sarah Sayre. Wait, what's that? Hadn't there been three victims that awful night? Samuel and Sarah Sayre? Yes. And Phoebe, the serving girl? Well, here's where it gets appalling and outrageous, as promised. Despite the fact that New Jersey was very much north of the Mason-Dixon line and the most simplistic history of this country would have you believe that slavery didn't exist in the The Sayres were apparently slave owners.

The young farmhand who ran away, creating the opening for Antoine LeBlanc to come to work on the Sayre farm? A slave. Phoebe, a slave. And in those shameful days, a slave simply didn't have the same legal standing as a free person. A slave wasn't considered a full human being. So while it was unfortunate and tragic and all that for Phoebe to be slaughtered where she slept and a pitchfork to the head is no way for any human to die.

She was a slave. She was property. Her death simply didn't count. Not the way Samuel and Sarah's did. It's sickening. That's how it was. And remember, Phoebe's murder took place 28 years before the Civil War began. It's probably safe to say that few people gave her humanity much thought one way or another. There was a big to do made about how she was spared the suffering her mistress endured out there in the barn.

But justice, justice back then was strictly for white people, not slaves, not property like Phoebe. On September 6th, 1833, Antoine LeBlanc was removed from his jail cell, taken to the Morristown Green and hanged. His execution was a riotous spectacle, with more than 12,000 people gathered to witness his death. To give you some perspective on just how huge that crowd was, the population of Morristown at the time was just 2,500 people.

Spectators climbed trees and gathered on rooftops to get a better view. The gallows themselves were specially constructed with a pulley system capable of hoisting LeBlanc eight feet above the ground so that all might see him perish. It was reported in the Jerseyman newspaper. No such crowd of witnesses. It was probably ever in the town before or since people came by the thousands, not only from within the bounds of Morris, but from Essex, Union, Somerset, Warren, Sussex and all other contiguous territory.

Horses and wagons at times blocked the roads and were tied from the park on the roads leading from it for a mile or more out in every direction. Many people brought their lunches, but all supplies gave out early and scores went hungry. But all my weirdos, now we've come to it. The moment where the people of New Jersey planted the seed of what would ultimately become their birthright and their legend.

Call it the Garden State all you want, but New Jersey is where they invent it, f*** around and find out. No sooner had LeBlanc's body stop twitching than it was cut down from the gallows and the real party began, because in addition to hanging, Judge Gabriel Ford had also sentenced Antoine LeBlanc to an additional post-execution punishment.

From the diary of a witness, Judge Stephen Vail, who, as it happened, had arranged for the construction of the special gallows used in the execution. The sheriff cut the rope and the weight dropped and he went up eight feet and struggled two minutes. By my stopwatch, he hung 35 minutes and was let down into his coffin and taken to the courthouse for the surgeons to try out the galvanized battery and then dissect him. That post-execution punishment was a medical dissection led by a Princeton University professor named Dr. Joseph Henry, along with a colleague, one Dr. Canfield. They kicked off the merriment by first making a death mask.

And you can see Antoine's now on our website, TrueWeirdStuff.com, and death masks, which originated with the ancient Egyptians, because of course they did, were enjoying a real revival in popularity at the time of LeBlanc's execution. Yeah, it's pretty creepy to behold. With the death mask completed, the doctors made small incisions in the dead man's arms and legs, exposing the nerves.

They then hit the flesh with a jolt of electricity from that galvanized battery to see if the muscles might contract, giving very much Dr. Frankenstein vibes, is it not? Then they briskly proceeded to dissect the body. Once that chore was completed, the corpse was bundled off to the ethno-tannery in Morristown for the flesh to be tanned.

Wait, what? Flesh to be tanned? Why? Why do such a thing? Well, how else were they to turn the skin of executor murderer Antoine LeBlanc into delightful little keepsakes and souvenirs? That's how furious and disgusted and out for vengeance the people of Morristown were. Death wasn't close to sufficient punishment for Antoine LeBlanc.

He'd heaped manure upon the bodies of his victims. Now his body would be desecrated as well, turned into wallets and book covers and trinkets, trinkets that were both highly prized and highly collectible. The Jerseyman gleefully reported, Honorable A.W. Cutler of Morristown was said to have a piece of the skin and Honorable Thomas Carter of Newton has a pocketbook made from it bearing the endorsement by Sheriff Ludlow that it is the pure goods.

Well, that's good to know. One would hate to be tricked into buying a counterfeit murder skin wallet. Please never talk to me again about the good old days because the people of the past were freaking ruthless and saw any gruesome event as just an opportunity to pack a picnic and bring the kids, you know, make a day of it.

And here's a nickel to go fetch Papa a piece of that their murderers can hide. LeBlanc's death mask, along with one of the wallets, remained in the possession of a private owner until sometime around 2010 when both were donated to the North Jersey History and Genealogy Center. It's unknown how many relics remain tucked away in attics and basements waiting to be discovered at garage sales or chucked in the trash bags and long moldering in landfills. And if your ancestors missed their chance to snatch up a piece of the notorious killer's flesh, that's too bad.

It was their only chance. Antoine LeBlanc's hanging was the last ever public execution in Morristown and the one and only where the deceased was turned into leather and sold as souvenirs. This isn't quite where the story ends, though, believe it or not. The Sarah Farmhouse remained standing. It changed hands numerous times and underwent many renovations.

Its last incarnation was as a restaurant called Jimmy's Haunt. By the time it was torn down in 2007, all that was left of the original structure was its gambrel roof, which had been constructed all the way back in the 1780s. Wow. Now that's a quality roof. Buildings or something unspeakable has occurred, some unthinkable act of violence, of cruelty. Those buildings can carry an echo of those events.

When that happens, we call it haunted. Was the Sayre Farmhouse haunted? Even after so much time and so many reinventions? Because long before it was called Jimmy's Haunt, it was the Wedgwood Inn. It was Society Hill. It was Argyles. It was many things, places filled with life and warmth and the sounds of music and laughter. But was it haunted?

They say that it was Phoebe, the servant girl murdered in her sleep, the one victim denied true justice, whose restless spirit could not depart from the scene of her death. Even after the Sayre home was converted to a restaurant, the room that had once been Phoebe's simply couldn't maintain its heat. No amount of effort or repair could take the chill off the space.

Waitresses at the Wedgwood Inn, the first of many dining establishments to set up shop in the old Sayre Farmhouse, reported seeing Phoebe's reflection in the room's mirror and not their own. A woman named Laura Muller, whose mother worked as a bookkeeper at the Wedgwood Inn, wrote once that the cost of replacing dishware and glasses was high since the waitresses spying Phoebe would drop their trays in sheer terror.

This was happening in the 1970s. There were other odd occurrences, too. Staff reported feeling cold hands on their shoulders, only to turn and find no one behind them. At night, after closing and locking up, staff would sometimes glance back and see the flicker of candlelight through a window. Candles that had been carefully extinguished hours earlier.

Disembodied voices, swaying chandeliers, doors opening on their own, that sort of thing. The classic mischief a ghost gets up to. Psychics came and went over the years and reported that there were indeed restless spirits trapped in the old place and not just Phoebe or the Sayres. They said that the ghost of Antoine LeBlanc was there, too, condemned by his own dark choices to remain forever in the place where he traded three human lives for a pillowcase stuffed with jewels and silver.

And now, with the Sayre farmhouse completely demolished and a bank erected where the place once stood, perhaps those spirits have finally been released or maybe not. Maybe Samuel and Sarah and Phoebe and Antoine are tethered to that unhallowed ground for all time. And if that's true, then the murderer Antoine LeBlanc isn't in hell.

His victims are trapped forever, unable to escape him, even in death. Next time on True Weird Stuff, how do you feel about puppets, love them or hate them? We've got the tale of a Christian puppeteer who fantasized about killing and eating the children he entertained. Just some good old fashioned family fun headed your way on the next True Weird Stuff.

So, Shari, what light reading left you to the story of a man who was executed and his skin turned into wallets? Oh, my gosh. Well, you know, we had been we'd had kind of a hectic couple of weeks, a lot going on. And and I thought, I want to I want to write an episode that will cheer Max up. I need to write one about a really twisted dude.

So how like how did I stumble across Antoine LeBlanc? A couple of years ago, I took my youngest to visit a college in New Jersey, Seton Hall, which is up near Newark. And she was pretty, pretty convinced that she wanted to go to Seton Hall until we got to Seton Hall on a cold, dreary, sleety, rainy day when my daughter immediately realized that she didn't have what it took to live in Newark, New Jersey for any amount of time that she was way too soft for that.

And so after we did our Seton Hall tour and had a look around, we decided that we would do some exploring in North Jersey. And I said, let's go to Morristown. It's this famous town for Revolutionary War history. And it's super duper cool. And Morristown is one of it's like it's like one of those towns in a pharmaceutical TV commercial. Like it's flawless, right?

It's perfect. You can't even afford to park your car and walk in and get a cheeseburger. Like it's ridiculously expensive, but it's loaded with Civil War history or Revolutionary War history. And I said to my daughter as we were driving out of Morristown, I'm like, you know what else this place is famous for? They they hanged a murderer and they turned his skin into wallets.

And as I said it, I thought to myself, you're making that up. You're misremembering that. So I did it. I came home and did a dive and I was like, no, I didn't make that up. I did not misremember that. That is what happened. And I know how much you enjoy a good plot twist in a murder story. That's a twist, Sherry. You have to understand, Sherry was so excited to go.

I know who will enjoy this. Oh, I like my fellow weirdo, Max. He'll really love this. Oh, you guys, thank you for listening to this podcast. You don't even know how like I'll be. I keep like piles of Post-it notes and I've notebooks with all kinds of like barely legible scribbling in them. And I've got episodes that are in progress at all different ways.

But every once in a while I'll be like, you know what? This one's for Max. Next week's the the Cannibal Christian Puppet Ministry, I also thought you would enjoy and we've got one coming up after that. That's going to be a real ball and a half. So, yeah, the thing about so here's the thing that I often think about when we're producing these episodes.

There are two there are two American histories, the one we were taught in school, which is more of a marketing campaign. About the idea of America and then the actual history, which is this stuff that nobody knows, like nobody knew it was illegal to celebrate Christmas. Nobody knew that in 1833, which is not all that long ago, we were we were canning a human being's flesh and those artifacts still exist and quietly are quietly traded among collectors because it would be considered really, really macabre and inappropriate to have a human skin book cover.

I think it was interesting that his hanging was such a major event. And then I think you said that was the last time that it happened. Is that correct? And I'm just so what had happened? Somebody step up and go, you know, this is a little weird in the wallet thing. This is a little weird. Maybe this shouldn't be such a public thing.

I got to tell you, I could not find one instance of somebody going jeepers. We may have gone too far here, but not one. You would think somebody would at some point along the line, because we sort of straightened up a little bit and became a little bit more civilized when it came to how we executed people, you know, I mean.

Just the littlest bit, though, I mean, just the littlest bit, we have an episode coming up in a few weeks that is even more recent than what happened in Morristown that shows you that, let's see, a hundred years after Antoine LeBlanc's execution, we still hadn't quite gotten our heads right about what was and was not decent and humane behavior.

So that Morristown, New Jersey and the players in this story are super significant in American history. You just don't know their names necessarily. But like Judge Stephen Vail, who built the gallows. So Judge Stephen Vail had an ironworks in Morristown. His ironworks built the very first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

Wow. Samuel Morse came to Morristown and worked there researching and creating the telegraph, Morse code. Right. So this is a very important little patch of ground for American history and human history. And Judge Stephen Vail was a very powerful and connected and important man who gleefully took on the task of building a gallows that would allow them to kind of spring load the murderer's body into the air.

So even the most distant spectator could get a good view. That's pretty like no one would admit to that today. Right. And I want to thank that's my brother, my big brother, Mark Lynch, who voiced Judge Stephen Vail for us. He's a big listener to true weird stuff. And he was like, I'll do some of that if you want me to.

I was like, well, I've got a bloodthirsty New Jersey judge with your name on it. Judge Gabriel Ford, who pronounced sentence on Antoine LeBlanc, death by hanging and then dissection. When have you ever heard that? I've never. And they hooked him up to a battery and were trying to make his limbs jump. Like what the hell?

That's really bizarre. I've never heard of that before where they did something. I mean, that sounds like something that happened in medieval times or something back in, you know, ancient Rome or something like that. It doesn't sound like something that would have happened, you know, not really all that long ago. You don't mess with New Jersey.

People think that's a recent development. You know, oh, Jimmy Hoffa. Oh, you know, the mafia. Oh, the Sopranos. You don't mess with New Jersey. You didn't mess with New Jersey before it was a state. You certainly don't mess with New Jersey now. Those people have zero tolerance for it. And you see that in the case of Antoine LeBlanc.

But let me say this about LeBlanc. Sometimes, whether it's today or 300 years ago, right, sometimes a person through a series of poor choices, bad decisions and happenstance finds themselves committing a terrible, terrible crime. Right. They're no less guilty. But but you can see it's like a like dominoes falling. Wrong place, wrong time.

Too much to drink. Access to a weapon, hair trigger, temper. Someone's dead. I think that Antoine LeBlanc fits the textbook clinical definition of a psychopath because you go back into his early life in France before he left to find work in Germany. Just this lack of empathy, this remorselessness, this sort of indifference to human suffering, this inability to comprehend that other people were people in the same way that he himself was textbook psychopathy.

And you might want to argue that and go, yeah, but he fell in love with Marie. OK, yeah, OK, whatever. But that that's not that's not redemption because his love for Marie in some ways wasn't a fully developed, mature relationship. It was an idea and an ideal as much as it was anything else. The two, you know, they were like, I love you.

I love you. I'll go to America and make my fortune and come back for you. What we have no idea what life might have looked like had they actually lived together under the same roof as man and wife. And just because they're calling it love doesn't necessarily mean that it's love. Do you know what I mean? I mean, it's yeah, I think Marie dodged a bullet.

You think so? So, yeah. And keep in mind. So he comes Antoine LeBlanc comes through the harbor and steps foot on American soil in April, April 26. He committed these murders on May 11th. That's 15 days. It took 15 days for this man to come to America, get a job and work up the kind of fury and and vengeance that led him to brutally slaughter three human beings.

Fifteen days. You can't make you can't make a case here for anything other than savage, brute psychopathy. Or can you? No, no, no, no. Especially in that short period of time. No, this is he's a psychopath. I mean, there's no other way. I mean, think about your own life. It can take you 15 days to decide whether or not you have the energy to go to the dry cleaner. Right.

Fifteen days. You step off the ship. You here you are in America, the land of dreams. And 15 days later, you're putting a pitchfork into a sleeping servant's head. Well, he didn't have. I mean, OK, he didn't like the people that owned the place. He didn't have to kill her, too. You know, again, psychopathy. Yeah, because she she could have he could have left her alone.

Of course, he wanted to ransack the house. And and what if she had waken up? But at that point, you could say, all right, if she wakes up and comes down, then you kill her. But he slaughtered her in her bed and then went to town. He trashed that farmhouse. It was shocking when they when those two neighbors went through the front door, they had no way to comprehend what had happened.

It looked like an earthquake. He savaged the place. And now back to Marie and what I think of as this sort of like very juvenile, hyper idealized love story that he had in his head for Marie. He filled those pillowcases with things he thought she would like. The dresses that belonged to the daughters, thimbles, thimbles had no value to Antoine LeBlanc, but his Marie would like them.

So put yourself in his shoes that night, frantically assessing, you know, take this, not that. Take this, not that. Oh, Marie would love this. Oh, Marie would love that. And the fact that he didn't even he's holding sheet like handfuls of paper money and can't comprehend what the value of any of it is. So he tosses it all aside.

Max, you know, I feel about this. And yeah, that was the one thing that I thought, because Sherry Sherry gets less upset about the crime sometimes that she does, somebody being really sloppy about the horse. You know, he just think if that horse would have cooperated with him, he probably would have gotten away with this.

Right. Because he might have. He might have. Yeah. Because he would have had a much quicker escape and probably would have stayed ahead of anybody looking for him. So if if the horse had been cooperative, he wouldn't have lost so much of the loot on the ground. And there wouldn't have been the evidence that would have triggered the alarm for the neighbors. If the horse had been cooperative, he would have made it to New York that late that day.

Now, whether or not there was a ship getting ready to depart, who can say. But without that trail of evidence. You know, there's there's less there's more time to make your escape before the alarm gets raised. That horse deserves as much credit for Antoine LeBlanc being brought to justice as I think anybody. And it killed me.

I was so thankful that the horse that he didn't kill the horse, too. It killed me that he was he was just so cold, Max. He was like, all right, this horse ain't going to play bomb. It cuts throat and walk. What? Just the casual. Attitude toward the most extreme violence. Again, I think he's like clinically a psychopath.

You know, there's something else that in the killing of people, I love that TV show Mind Hunter, which I think they say is going to come back. But the one Ed name who's who's the great big six foot nine serial killer Kemper. OK, so Edwin Kemper says something in there that apparently Edwin Kemper really did say. It's hard to kill a person.

It's hard to kill somebody. So you have to figure, all right, he killed the servant girl with a pitchfork. That was quick. These other people, he beat them with a shovel. How many whacks do you think it's going to take for him to kill somebody in that situation? I mean, that is that's a level of rage that, you know, was more than just, hey, they're keeping me in a dark basement and I'm having to work for free.

Which I think we can all agree, like, what the hell with that? Of course, you know, we weren't in that boarding house that afternoon when the between the two men was struck and Samuel did not speak French and Antoine did not speak English. It's hard for me to believe that, you know, so the guy's just going to work all the time and live in your basement and not get a nickel.

Like, what the hell? Yeah. But as we pointed out, the Sayres were used to not really paying for their labor on the farm, were they? And the fact that there was still some question, some historical question about the status of Phoebe and the slave boy, I think that question gets answered by the fact that Phoebe's death was not considered a murder.

It was like it sucked, but he wasn't. Antoine wasn't prosecuted for her murder. Did that not make you sick? It's like he just he destroyed their property like a human vandalism. Right. Yeah, it was vandalism. So there's so there's so much in this story. Like you feel, of course, you always the victims. No one deserves this.

But a lot. No, very few people had clean hands in this story. Like it's I can't really comprehend the part where he lives in the windowless basement without so much as a nickel for his trouble. But apparently he agreed to that, not realizing what he was sharing. I remind you that I have work in a windowless room for hours on end every day.

And no one's coming at you with a pitchfork, mister. So let's be counting those blessings now. Better for you. I'm not coming for anybody with a pitchfork. So for real. So this is again, you know, this is one of those stories where it's like, oh, that was so shocking and terrible. And why did you tell me that story? And oh, it's going to give me nightmares.

Here's why I told you that story, because you think those things only happened in other places. You think only the Nazis were turning people into lampshades and wallets. We like we're kind of savage when it comes to justice. It's only fairly recently that we've been a little bit less savage. When it comes to justice and if you don't know, you know what they say, if you don't know your history, what happens?

You repeat it. But I guess the rationalization was, well, this isn't cruel and unusual punishment if if we're doing this after the fact. Well, and you know what's super interesting about that? When I say to you, Princeton University. I know that was that jumped out at me. It really did. You're thinking Ivy League, prestigious halls of learning, center of so much research and scholarship and knowledge.

You wouldn't have guessed that Princeton University would have had a part to play in this. Would you? No, no, not at all. And so the other thing that I learned from Antoine LeBlanc story is that human leather. Is not the most attractive or durable leather, or maybe that's because the at note tannery in Morristown didn't do a great job with it.

Like it's just appalling. And the simple truth is bits and pieces of Antoine LeBlanc are still out there. They're still out there. So I guess you can go to this genealogy museum that's up in North Jersey that they gave the the death mask and the wallet. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think I don't know that it's open like, you know, on a regular basis.

I think maybe you can visit, you know, if you arrange it ahead of time. And we do need to know like we need to know these things about our own history. We do. There's no I don't understand people that think historical amnesia is somehow a good thing. Can you walk me through that? No, you should be horrified by it. And if you see any anything, even approaching that that's happening today, stand up to it, because, you know, human beings seem to have a real capacity for cruelty and meeting out kind of bizarre justice.

And I get oh, I get that the people of Morristown were there. There was no. There was no way to satisfy the demands for vengeance that the people of Morristown were making, because the nature of the crime, it it wasn't just that he savagely and brutally took the lives of these three human beings, two of them very elderly, one of them completely innocent.

Look what he did with the bodies. Human beings going back to I mean, we have archaeological evidence that dates back millennia that shows you that even early primitive hominids often had rituals and burial practices around their dead. Yeah, it is part of our species that we care for the dead. And we show reverence to the dead.

And we are careful about how we handle the bodies of our dead and how we venerate our ancestors. And so with Antoine LeBlanc, killing these people and then cramming their body into a stinking pile of animal manure was a violation of the deepest, deepest held values that human beings as a species have. And that is the way we care for and venerate the dead.

So you can see how the people of Morristown, New Jersey were like, Oh, no, you didn't and need it more than a public execution to feel properly satisfied, which is not me defending, hooking the man up to a battery and then turning him into a good lord. But you can take yourself back there and and you can see there's something we see this today in modern criminal cases, you see this in the true crime world all the time when a terrible story breaks and you find out what happened to the bodies of those victims.

Look at the John. I'm going I'm just going through this podcast with John Wayne Gacy and it is it's so stomach turning. I was listening to it and I just said, you know, we need to take a break from this because it was so depressing and it was so descriptive. And of course, this guy goes into a huge description of this because he believes that John Wayne Gacy did not work alone and he makes a very compelling case for that, by the way.

But he goes through specifically what was going on with each of these bodies, how they were killed and the condition in which those bodies were found in order to make his point. And it is stomach turning. And even though I'm a little bit of a weirdo, I can't even deal with it. I take a break from it sometimes because it's so horrifying.

It's so much. It's so much. And it's it compounds the the act of violence when the bodies are so desecrated. And 1833 was a different time than today. And so that desecration, I think, was felt even more acutely in a town. I mean, Morristown at the time these crimes went down was a village. It wasn't what it is today.

You know, fewer than 3000 people live there. And yes, it was, you know, it was an important place in the region and it had important history for America's revolution. But it was just a village. It was very rural, very agrarian. Like a lot of people don't realize how much of New Jersey is very rural. And how and how is it that a roof only lasts for about 20 years now if you have if you buy a new home?

But back then, that roof lasted from the 1700s up until the 2000s. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? I don't know what they built that thing out of. It's just just an incredible piece of construction. And of course, if you're thinking, well, how did the farmhouse become a restaurant? Well, I mean, the march of time, the tiny village of Morristown grew.

And as it grew, it expanded out and out and out until bits and pieces that have been considered, you know, the boonies were now part of the bustling town. That's how it happened. Morristown just grew over the years and decades. And now, of course, the building is gone after all that time and all those many incarnations of restaurants and taverns.

Now a bank, every brick, every piece of wood, everything is gone. And a bank stands on that site. But it is said to be haunted, which I thought was an interesting sort of postscript to the whole LeBlanc story. And I find it unbearable if it's true. Let's put on our tinfoil hats and say, OK, it's all true. Every word of it's true, true, true, true, true about the haunting.

What kind of hell. Is it to have your spirit trapped for all eternity? With the relentless psychopath that took your life. How kind of bad deal is that? What kind of purgatory is that and why Phoebe, although, you know, the psychics say it's because she never had justice, but why can't why can't Phoebe's spirit go into the light at least, right?

Isn't it interesting that that love of money is what drove him to that? And then there's a bank there today. I oh, what a good point. What a good observation, because that's what it all that's what it all came down to was money. And that brings us to the patron saint of True Weird Stuff, Marge Gunderson from the movie Fargo.

You did all that for a little bit of money. Don't you know there's more to life than money? Don't you know that? Apparently, Antoine didn't. A lot of people don't. And let's just be glad we live in a time when a couple of judges aren't putting their heads together and deciding how to make your execution an even bigger public spectacle.

And be real careful if you have like, let's say, an aunt, maybe your grandmother's sister, and she lives in New Jersey. You've only seen her a handful of times since you were a kid. But she dies and the house needs to be emptied out. And she left you a little something in the will, you know, an antique table, $5,000. And you go, you go to your Aunt Barbara's house or Mary or whatever her name is.

And you're sorting through those boxes, because she never threw a damn thing away. You're sorting through those boxes in the attic and the basement and the closets. And you come upon it. And it's brittle. It's a weird color. And you're not sure what it is. Set it aside. Because it might be Antoine LeBlanc. We'll see you next time on True Weird Stuff.

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