Case file 150Asylums, Prisons & Human ExperimentsCold War (1945–79)

The Morlok 4

Four identical girls born in 1930 became Michigan's darlings. At home, a Nazi-admiring constable ruled them, and all four developed schizophrenia.

May 15, 20261h 19m
00:00 / 1:19:29
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In this episode

  • Why a ten-year-old's winning entry in the newspaper baby-naming contest deserves a second look
  • The sign Carl Morlok hung on his front porch, and what happened once the klieg lights showed up
  • Twenty house rules, including one about library books
  • Three years under observation in Bethesda, and who the researchers decided to blame
  • Sarah, Baby C: the only sister who ever walked out the door on her own

“We should be so careful of stories that begin like fairy tales, because those stories have a way of ending like fairy tales, too, with a dark lesson and a heavy price paid.”

The story

In May 1930, in the rain, Sadie Morlok gave birth to four identical baby girls at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Michigan. They arrived at 29 weeks, thirty years before the first neonatal intensive care unit existed, and every one of them lived. For the next quarter century the nation watched four blonde heads and four matching smiles grow up in the heartland. The portraits never showed what was going on inside the house.

Sadie, a trained nurse, had known something was off. She was getting too big, too fast, and she suspected twins. Her doctor, Howard B. Haynes, chuckled and told her she was just nervous about a first baby. Then Baby A arrived at 10:25 a.m., Baby B at 10:30, Baby C at 10:32, and three minutes later a startled Dr. Haynes yelped, "Oh, my goodness. There's one more." All four came from a single egg that split four times. The odds of that happening naturally run as high as 20 million to one. The nine-banded armadillo, a nocturnal little varmint from South America, pulls off identical quadruplets with every single pregnancy. Humans almost never do.

A town adopts four daughters

The timing was grim. Michigan's auto industry had collapsed, unemployment in the state ran near 34 percent, and the girls' father, Carl, had lost his factory job in the first wave of layoffs after the 1929 crash. So Lansing stepped in. A dairy promised milk for six months, a bakery sent a fresh loaf every day, and the city council handed the family a rent-free house for a year. The Lansing Capital News ran a contest to name the babies. The winner was ten-year-old Nancy Haynes, who happened to be the daughter of the doctor who'd delivered them. She picked Edna, Wilma, Sadie and Helen, which spelled E-W-S-H. Sadie turned down her own name, so it became Sarah, and each girl kept her birth-order letter as a middle initial: Edna A., Wilma B., Sarah C., Helen D.

Carl was appalled at first. He believed multiple births were a sign of low breeding and worried people would think his wife had whelped a litter. Then he spotted the money in it. He hung a sign on the porch charging 25 cents to see the babies, and he sold newsreel footage to Fox Movietone, whose crew moved out the dining room furniture and aimed banks of klieg lights at four howling infants. Fame worked out for Carl in other ways too. On little more than having fathered the quads, he got himself elected city constable, a local law officer, and voters sent him back to the job 16 times.

The man with the billy club

Carl had been born in Germany in 1888. Sadie had grown up with a father who resented her for not being a son and later came looking for her with a shotgun after she ran away at 14. She wasn't sure about marrying Carl, a grumpy patient she'd once giggled at on a hospital ward. His brother Bill talked her into it: "Carl loves you so much."

At home, the constable made the law. By the time they were seven, the quads were touring music halls and had worked as the opening act for minstrel shows, where white performers in blackface acted out racist caricatures of Black people. Offstage, Carl laid down twenty rules. No talking at meals, no friends, no vacations, no movies, no telephone, no dating, no marriage, no children. Libraries were off limits because the books, he said, "They have germs." He took the doors off the house so he could watch his daughters dress and use the bathroom. He carried a Colt .32, kept a Smith & Wesson and a foot-long billy club, and shot neighborhood dogs and cats with a BB gun. He kicked a mop pail into Helen's face and broke her front teeth. When two of the girls were caught masturbating, their parents had a doctor perform clitoridectomies, surgically cutting away part of their genitals. As the girls hit puberty, he groped them and claimed he was showing them what boys would do on dates. As Sarah later put it, "Our father made rules. He never explained anything."

Carl also rooted for Hitler, hoping the Third Reich would win and come to America to purge what he called the defective. Sadie, terrorized herself, mostly went along. "Hush! You're American now," she'd tell him when he ranted in public.

The weird part

The girls America followed as four matching miracles all developed schizophrenia and became the government's key case study of the illness. The researchers blamed their mother and left out the town constable who had taken the doors off the house to watch his daughters undress.

Four diagnoses, one study

In their early twenties, all four sisters developed delusions and long catatonic spells. Edna was diagnosed with schizophrenia first, then Wilma, Sarah and Helen. Three of them went through electroconvulsive therapy. The brand-new National Institute of Mental Health offered to study them and to cover the cost of treating Carl, who was sick himself. Carl jumped at it because it was free. Sarah sided with her mother: "Life with father was almost unbearable."

From 1955 to 1958 the sisters lived at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where more than 45 staff members recorded everything they did. They sat for Rorschach tests, doll play, handwriting analysis and brain-wave readings. Lead researcher David Rosenthal published the results in 1963, hiding the family's identity behind a Greek-derived name meaning dire birth. He described a thoroughly pathogenic home. But in keeping with the thinking of the day, the blame landed on the mothers, Sadie and Carl's mother, and Carl's Nazism never made it into the report. Carl died in August 1957, while his daughters were still in Bethesda.

One of one

Sarah thrived there. She put on a white lab coat, volunteered as a stenographer, passed the federal civil service exam and stayed in Maryland when her sisters went home. She joined a church choir and a folk dancing group, married an airman named George Edward Cotton Jr., and followed him to England, Japan and North Dakota. She divorced in 1988, and in 1994 lost her son William to AIDS. She kept going anyway.

The four sisters ended up back in Lansing in the same apartment complex. Wilma died in 2002, Helen in 2003, and Edna in 2015. Sarah, the only one who ever lived on her own, died on July 7, 2025, at 95. Her memoir was sunny. She saved the dark parts for the end of her life and told them to writer Audrey Clare Farley, whose book is Girls and Their Monsters. The quads' names were kept out of the research to protect their privacy, and that also kept their names off the discoveries. Much of what medicine knows about schizophrenia was learned from four girls who got out of their father's house by agreeing to be studied.

The transcript

Chapters & full transcript11,538 words
Chapters
  1. 01:05Four from one egg
  2. 07:16A city's miracle babies
  3. 13:35The nurse and the grouchy German
  4. 26:11Twenty rules and a billy club
  5. 32:51Four diagnoses in Bethesda
  6. 40:24Sarah, one of one

This transcript was generated automatically from the episode audio and may contain errors. Times are approximate, since ad breaks can shift them by a minute or two.

00:01

Hey, true weirdos. I hope you know how much all of us here appreciate you. You are the people we're making this show for and your feedback means the world to us. We were so blown away for this show to win as many awards as it has. I mean, at this point, we're working for hardware handouts, but at the end of the day, it's you.

00:21

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00:44

Also, just go on whatever platform you listen to it and please rate and review it. It really helps us in getting discovered. And if you have a suggestion for anything, just reach out to us at our website, True Weird Stuff dot com. And thank you so much for listening. May 1930, quadruplets were born Monday to Mrs. Sadie Moorlach, wife of Carl W. Moorlach, a factory worker, two of the babies weighed over four pounds.

01:19

The chances of conceiving quadruplets naturally is anywhere from one and seven hundred thousand to one in a million pregnancies. A successful quadruplet pregnancy in 1930, a phenomenal occurrence. That's what made Sadie and Carl Moorlach's four baby girls such big national news. They were tiny and born at just 29 weeks, 30 years before the first NICU was launched.

01:46

Only sheer luck and the relatively robust size for preemies kept them alive. Back when Sadie Moorlach discovered she was pregnant, there was no ultrasound, no technology existed that could reliably identify twins or triplets or quadruplets. Doctors basically guessed they might be able to detect multiple heartbeats. A skilled manual exam might identify two or more heads or other distinguishable body parts. But it was far more common for multiples to be a great big delivery room surprise. Twins, that was one thing.

02:24

But quads for babies, the Moorlach infants made hospital history in Lansing, Michigan. The quads were miracles, born celebrities, every milestone followed, every birthday trumpeted with headlines, four gleaming blonde heads, four identical wide smiles, four special little girls growing up in the heartland under the benevolent gaze of the whole nation. Yet the carefully posed portraits released to the public concealed the truth of what was really happening in the Moorlach home to the Moorlach quads.

03:04

We should be so careful of stories that begin like fairy tales, because those stories have a way of ending like fairy tales, too, with a dark lesson and a heavy price paid. Because monsters are real and happily ever afters are rare, are rare. And they got a small beam of light. Here we go. Oh, four identical children born from a single egg.

03:59

The medical term is monozygotic multiples, same DNA, same gender. The odds of naturally conceiving identical quadruplets is as high as 20 million to one, although it's time for a random fun fact. The nine bandit armadillo, an armored, nocturnal, solitary little varmint native to South America, has one very remarkable characteristic.

04:29

No, not the fact that it can jump three to four feet straight into the air. Imagine your headlights picking up that site on a dark country road. The nine bandit armadillo has something in common with humans. Poly embryonic, the capacity to develop more than one embryo from a single fertilized egg. But wait, there's more.

04:49

The nine bandit armadillo has something called obligate poly embryonic. And that means that every single pregnancy she has will result in one egg being fertilized and then splitting, in her case, splitting four times identical armadillo quadruplets every time. The only species of vertebrate known to have this trait. How fun.

05:11

It's crazy that we're just out here living our whole lives in complete ignorance of the magic of the nine bandit armadillo. But anyway, the birth of identical quadruplets, armadillo or human is always an attention getter. And especially back in May 1930, when the Moorlach babies arrived. Readers of the Lansing Capital News will name the quadruplets born Monday to Mr. and Mrs. Carl Moorlach with the consent of the parents.

05:40

The newspaper today opens a contest. Mrs. Moorlach will select the winning combination of four names for her infant daughters. The babies were extra welcome, good news for the people of Lansing. Even before the stock market crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression, Michigan was already struggling. The state took a far more severe beating than the rest of the country.

06:14

The unemployment rate for the nation hovered at 26 percent, except in Michigan, where, thanks to the steep decline in the auto industry, the unemployment rate was more like 34 percent. Local governments couldn't meet the needs of the destitute or private charities. It was estimated in 1933 that local and private groups in Michigan were able to meet only 15 percent or less of the total needs of a strained and desperate population.

06:44

Not the most optimal time to be growing a family, but the Morloks could never have known that they were expecting four babies instead of one. And besides, the birth of a child, even in the hardest times, has always been something humans revere as a hopeful sign. Proof that life finds a way no matter what. And for little matching miracles, a fine distraction from the bad news that was grinding the good folks of Michigan right into the dirt.

07:16

Quadruplets excite Lansing city pride. The city of Lansing is showing a kind of fatherly interest in its collective attitude towards its first set of quadruplets. A public campaign has been started and a number of individual sources have responded. A dairy company has offered to furnish milk for six months. Mr. Moorlach is an employee of a local factory who's been out of work a great deal recently because of illness and unemployment conditions.

07:52

Donations poured in. The proprietor of the Miller Home Bakery promised the family a loaf of fresh bread a day for the first six months of the baby's lives. Mrs. Chester C. Twitchell stitched up four handmade baby gowns. Cash arrived to $25 from a Mrs. Ellen Wentworth, $5 from Martin DeGlapper, an engineer with the Michigan State Highway Department, and a very special $10 from 10-year-old Nancy Haynes.

08:21

She was the winner of the newspaper baby naming contest, and that $10 was every penny of her prize money. The fact that Nancy's daddy was Dr. Howard B. Haynes, the same doctor who delivered the quads, was probably a giant coincidence and had nothing whatsoever to do with her win. The names Nancy picked for the quads were Edna, Wilma, Sadie and Helen, E-W-S-H.

08:49

At the time, this was lauded as being insanely clever. I mean, OK, but also why am I so weirdly suspicious of this now long deceased child and her little moment of glory? What is wrong with me? The only hiccup in the whole name game came when Mrs. Sadie Moorlach modestly refused the name Sadie, saying she didn't want any confusion for the child.

09:14

She suggested the name Sarah instead. And that was accepted. In lieu of middle names, the girls each kept the single letter they'd been assigned at birth. Edna A., four pounds, eight ounces. Wilma B., three pounds, five ounces. Sarah C., four pounds, four ounces. And Helen D., last but not least, weighing in at three pounds exactly.

09:37

Mr. and Mrs. Carl Moorlach, parents of quadruplets born here May 19th, will not have to worry about rent for the rest of the year. City Council voted Monday night to allow them the use of a house owned by the city rent free for a year. It was called the Pung House, square framed and painted yellow. It was one of four houses purchased by the city for a street widening project.

10:04

The home was moved and placed on a new foundation. Repairs to the property were still underway when Lansing's mayor, after loud suggestions from the press, that the city do something for the Moorlach family, requested the city council take action. Ask any parent of multiples, especially when the children are identical, what it's like being out in public with their babies.

10:28

People can't seem to help but react with awe and wonder and curiosity. And that was especially true for the Moorlach babies in Lansing. Their pram alone was a showstopper. The Bishop Furniture Company in Lansing collaborated with the F.A. Whitney Carriage Company of Lemonster, Massachusetts, to create a custom stroller for the quads.

10:50

It was big, it was wide. And when the four tiny girls peeked their heads out, bonnets tied firmly beneath their chins. Well, who could resist pausing for a peek? Carl Moorlach was initially appalled by his own quadruplets on the grounds that multiples were a sign of low breeding. People, he said, would think his wife was a bitch whelping a litter.

11:17

But Carl very quickly caught on to just how lucrative these babies might turn out to be. Since the public had what seemed to be an insatiable curiosity about the quads, Carl thought, why not capitalize on that? He hung a sign on the front porch announcing that the babies could be viewed for 25 cents per person, which were gangbusters for a little while.

11:39

And then Hollywood came calling. Sound pictures were taken of Lansing's quadruplets by the Foxhurst Corporation, which makes new real sound pictures for Fox Movietone and for Hurst Metrotone. The film will be sent to New York by airmail and will probably be shown in the local theaters soon. The filmmakers transformed the Moorlach's borrowed home, moving the dining room furniture out of the way to make for the four compartment steeled bed shared by the infants.

12:11

Two banks of Klieg lights were trained on the babies who obligingly howled on command. A sign on the front porch inviting the public to view the quadruplets has apparently ceased to attract patronage. As the parents indicated, there has been a market falling off of the audiences. Papa Moorlach smiled a bit warily, indicating that the arrangements made with the moving picture people certainly met with his approval.

12:41

Local press did their part documenting every milestone in the quad's lives. Their first birthday, the Winsome Quartet, will be one year old on May 19th. They are involved in plans for the appropriate observance of that important event. Even the visit to the hometown of a nurse who cared for the babies made the news. The town of Perry was honored by having as their distinguished guest Edna A., Wilma B., Sarah C. and Helen D. Grandma Moorlach accompanied them and did her bit in presenting these young ladies to guests who visited them during their stay here in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lyle Herbert.

13:27

In Michigan, at least, the quads seem to belong to everyone. Carl Moorlach was born in Germany on September 8th, 1888. The family emigrated to the United States when Carl was just three years old. They settled in rural Odessa Township, Michigan, near an uncle who made the journey a few years earlier. The family didn't make much effort to assimilate.

13:53

Their native German was the only language spoken in the home. Sadie Moorlach, née Lyon, was born in Ohio. Sadie's father had wanted a son and never got over his disappointment in having a daughter. He loaded her down with farm work and chores, some of it beyond her physical abilities. At age 14, Sadie ran away to the home of her maternal grandmother.

14:16

Her father showed up with a shotgun a handful of times, but was firmly turned away by his very disapproving mother-in-law. Eventually, Sadie headed for high school in Yerkesville, Ohio, where she lodged first in a rooming house and then with a classmate and finally in the home of a doctor and Mrs. Zellers. To thank Sadie for her donation of four pints of blood for his ailing wife, Dr. Zellers offered to pay her tuition to become a licensed practical nurse.

14:46

She spent a couple of years on staff at the Ohio Valley Hospital in West Virginia and accompanied Dr. Zellers on many obstetric cases, skills that would come in extra handy once she was married and caring for quads. Then she spent a couple of years working as a cook, first for a wealthy family in Virginia, then for another in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. All skills, again, that would come in handy when she found herself married and raising quadruplets.

15:13

And speaking of marriage, Sadie met her future husband in 1925. She was working as a nurse at a hospital in Michigan. He was an extremely grumpy and disgruntled patient there for an appendectomy. The nurses were giggling at his antics, all of that complaining and grumbling in German. Sadie joined a few co-workers who were standing just outside his room, listening and laughing.

15:38

Sadie later said, I would never have imagined myself married to that grouchy German. Until she bumped into him a few months later at a baseball game. Carl Moorlach approached and that's when Sadie realized who he was still sporting the same stern buzzcut he'd worn in the hospital. For Carl, it was love at first sight. Sadie was less certain.

16:00

It was January 1926 before she even agreed to a date. Nine months later, the couple went to the Ionia County courthouse to apply for a marriage license. Many years later, Sadie told her daughters, she wasn't fully convinced that Carl was the one. She described sitting on a bench outside the courthouse, asking herself, why am I doing this?

16:24

It was Carl's brother, Bill, who persuaded her to go through with the marriage. Carl loves you so much, Bill insisted. At that point, Sadie was 27 years old. Carl was 37. Marriage did seem like the next step. And so on September 15th, 1926, the couple exchanged vows. Education was a priority for Sadie and she wanted to settle in a place with outstanding schools.

16:52

Carl took a job as a shipping clerk at the Atlas Drop Forge in Lansing and the couple settled into a rented apartment. Hospitals always need nurses. So I found work in Lansing. And then there was my husband's family. A number of his relations needed care and I was happy to help. Carl picked up side jobs, roofing, painting, that sort of thing.

17:15

They were happy or happy enough. And then in March, 1929, Carl asked Sadie what she might like to have for a birthday present. I'd like a baby. A baby is my heart's desire. By autumn, 1929, Sadie was pregnant. Just in time for the October, 1929 stock market crash and the start of the great depression. Within two weeks of the stock market crash, well over 2 million Americans lost their jobs.

17:53

That unemployment number would climb to between 12 and 13 million people out of work by 1933. Carl Moorlach lost his job in that first wave at roughly the same time that Sadie began worrying about her pregnancy. She was a nurse, remember, and she'd loved many hours in obstetrics. She was getting too big, too fast. She told Carl.

18:18

She suspected twins, though there was no way to be sure back then. Her physician, Dr. Howard B. Haines, chuckled and told her she was just nervous because it was her first baby. Go home, he said. Relax, he said. Your imagination is running away with you, Sadie, he said. Meanwhile, Sadie and Carl both were beginning to panic.

18:41

Sadie was so large, so off balance that Carl feared she might not make it down the steep stairs of their second floor apartment. When the time came, of course, it was raining the day Sadie went into labor. She made it to the hospital just in time to prove Dr. Haines dramatically wrong. Baby A born 1025 a.m. Baby B born 1030 a.m.

19:04

Baby C born 1032 a.m. Three minutes later, a very startled Dr. Haines yelped. Oh, my goodness. There's one more. Baby D born 1035 a.m. Now whose imagination is running away, Dr. Haines? Since this was back in the day when fathers were not permitted in the delivery room, Carl was pacing and waiting for news of the birth.

19:32

It was clear to him that something unusual was happening. Twins, he thought. Sadie had been right about carrying twins. Quattro Blitz, though, that fell into the category of medical miracle. So rare, so unlikely. And, you know, it had to be so utterly overwhelming for Carl Moorlach to even comprehend how life was about to change.

19:56

Soon, callers at the hospital exceeded all reasonable bounds with prospective visitors thronging the corridors. Mr. Moorlach, realizing the possibilities of the situation, charged an admission fee for visitors who came to his home to see the wonder of reproduction. The first year of the quads lives flew by with all four girls and reasonably good health, though Helen, the last born and the smallest, lagged somewhat behind her sisters.

20:29

Carl Moorlach made the decision to run for the office of constable and won his election. His campaign and credentials basically consisted of fathering the Moorlach triplets, proof that in America, a little bit of celebrity can get nearly anyone elected. Carl was sworn into office on Monday, January 11th, 1932. The whole world was watching the Moorlach quads grow up, but raising them brought challenges that Sadie had never dreamed.

21:01

When Mr. and Mrs. Carl Moorlach have trouble distinguishing between their five year old quadruplet daughters, they will need merely to call in the police Fingerprint records of the little girls taken by request of the parents were entered in state police files and duplicates sent to the Department of Justice. The parents said the quadruplets are so nearly alike that they want to have a means of positive identification from the memoir written by an adult Sarah, a.k.a.

21:34

Baby C. Moorlach. Nearly every afternoon, the four of us sounded like a bad chorus with our afternoon crying spells. And our father just couldn't stand the concert. So off he would go to our neighbor's house and there he would sit for hours on her back porch steps. Whenever our neighbor asked him why he was sitting there, he would say, all four of them are whooping it up over there again.

21:57

Her mother told us that our neighbor was quite amused that our Papa Moorlach wasn't enjoying this musical contribution by his little songbirds when he wasn't exhausted by his children being, you know, children. Carl Moorlach brooded about their safety. Kidnapping was on the minds of thousands of people around the world.

22:21

That was the year the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped from his bed on the second floor of his parents home in New Jersey. There were lots of stories in the newspaper and on the radio. My parents, like many other parents with young children, were concerned about the possibility of someone kidnapping my sisters and me. Carl had reason to worry.

22:39

His mother, who moved in with the family when the quads came home from the hospital, once opened the door to a pair of men who she assumed had come to pay their quarters to view the babies. All of a sudden, they grabbed up two of us and darted toward the front door. But just then, as we later learned, our mother came into the house, saw them and signaled quickly to our dad.

23:02

He was large, burly and solidly built. And he stomped in and curtly ordered the men to put his babies down immediately. And that soon ended any dreams they had of kidnapping us for any reason. When the quads were five, Sadie and Carl enrolled them in the Virgiline Simmons School of Dance and the Frida Marie Kildson School of Dramatics, Voice, Musical Comedy and Pantomime.

23:35

The quads were soon an opening act for minstrel shows, you know, white performers in blackface performing the most racist stereotypes of black people that you can possibly imagine. Our entertainment years began when we were three and dressed in costume for the very first time. Our mother would sit in on our lessons and encourage us, while sometimes taking notes to help the teacher.

24:00

We took tap dancing, ballet and acrobatic dancing. Our worldwide exposure was not limited to the newsreels and local theaters. We also appeared on the radio at the National Auto Convention in Detroit in April of 1937, as well as other national and local radio programs on numerous occasions. The Morlock quads were used as puppets to tell a story about America that hid segregation, racism and genocidal violence.

24:32

Predictably, they were beloved by the white audiences they performed for. But that adoration never translated into real regard for their well-being. Once upon a time, someone asked me when I first realized that I was a famous person. Well, I replied, I think it was in our dancing chorus rehearsal when I glanced to the right, then to the left and saw three other people who looked just like me, danced just like me and sang like me.

25:02

I think then I realized I was part of a famous team. This is what the outside world saw when they looked at the Morlock quadruplets. The miracle of four identical girls. Beauty's all blessed with talent and charisma. And that it factor. By age seven, the girls were touring music halls in matching dresses, singing patriotic tunes to paying audiences.

25:32

Devoted parents, a supportive community. The Morlock quads couldn't be more charming or more blessed. Fairytale really being how it is with fairy tales. The more golden the light, the more perilous the dark. Instead of one princess imprisoned in a tower, there were four and questionable, distasteful, even terrible things were happening now in the Morlock home to the Morlock quads.

26:03

You might say that Carl hoarded his daughters like a dragon hoards his treasure. Offstage, life was an endless list of restrictions. No friends, no parties, no holidays, no boyfriends and no swimming lessons. Carl's obsession with their chastity led to invasive, abusive monitoring, included removing the house's doors so he could watch them dress or use the bathroom.

26:36

Our father never let us try our hand at swimming, much less go to a park. So we were mostly sheltered and kept too busy in our stage life to even think of seeking recreation. Our father made rules. He never explained anything. You'd only say, don't do as I do. Just do as I tell you. 20 rules to be exact. There was to be no conversation on the part of the four of us at the table during meals.

27:02

There will be no vacations or weekend enjoyment. There will be no girlfriends or boyfriends. There will be no playtime or talking with your young cousin. There would be no allowances per week as youngsters or in adolescence. We were told to never go to the library or touch any books there. They have germs. Likewise, he told us, don't answer any telephone or call up any friends.

27:22

There will be no cooking or snacking. You will never go to the movies, not even a nice one, or attend a sports event or a circus. Carl was just warming up. You are never to smoke. You are never to drink. You are never to go out dancing. You are never to gamble. Never wear slacks. Never drive an automobile. Never date or marry.

27:40

Never have children or grandchildren. Sadie didn't agree with most of Carl's rules, but didn't feel there was much she could do. He was the man of the house, the father of these girls. His word, like it or not, was the law. Sadie had been grown up with a domineering, abusive father who was primed to marry a man just like him.

28:03

Mother would try to talk to him and keep him under some sort of control. But by being Lansing City Constable, he was permitted to own and carry a registered Colt 32. And he had a Smith & Wesson 32, as well as a footlong billy club. When he got nervous about something, we knew it was always wiser and in our best interest not to provoke him.

28:25

We seemed to always hold a certain fear of his wicked weapons. Carl Moorlach was the kind of man who presented an agreeable face to the world while saving his true face for his family. The Lansing Police Department had no idea that their constable was not only terrorizing his wife and daughters. He was also shooting the neighborhood dogs and cats with a BB gun, killing many of them.

28:52

We were really like Littleton soldiers with tunnel vision. And we marched to every beat. His future vision for the four of us was to just work our jobs and immediately return home to take care of him and our mother for the rest of our lives. Carl used his fists just as much as he did his voice. He would strike out, especially toward Helen.

29:15

What time he kicked her mop pail into her face, breaking her front teeth and bloodying her mouth. He would also switch her with his belt, often leaving welts, and also reached over at the dinner table, hitting her on the head with the blunt end of a dinner knife when she was slow to respond to a question. Carl had rules for his wife, Sadie, too.

29:34

He forbade her to attend the funerals of her parents. The last time she saw them alive was August 14th, 1937, when they visited our home. And the first and only time we saw our maternal grandfather and grandmother was when we were seven years old on this very same visit. I've often wondered how we four quads coped with all our father's edicts and still remain so compliant and pleasant.

30:00

Like the old adage, our mother would sometimes say, when you live with the lame, you learn to limp. Carl, according to his daughter, was less a father than he was a dictator. As it happened, Carl deeply admired another dictator, Adolf Hitler. Carl fervently rooted for the Third Reich to prevail in World War II so that Hitler could make the trip to America to root out, he said, the defective spoiling this country's promise.

30:29

He'd sometimes go off on a real pro-Hitler tangent while out in public. Hush! You're American now. They'll deport us if you talk like that. Carl was literally a Nazi, though this was carefully tiptoed around the way it is now in some families. Oh, that's just Carl. He's got a little obsession with Jewish doctors trying to seduce his wife, and he's fixated on his daughter's purity.

30:56

And he has some unhinged notions about racial superiority. But other than that, he's a good guy. Except, no, he wasn't. Early on, two of the girls were circumcised to prevent excessive masturbation. As they entered puberty, their father would squeeze their breasts and buttocks to see how they would react, telling them this is what boys would do to them on dates.

31:22

OK, first, circumcised here means clitoridectomy, female genital mutilation. It was a procedure common enough in this country. The Blue Cross Blue Shield covered it until 1977. People were terrified of masturbation, believing it caused insanity and criminal tendencies, so much so that they went with a treatment that was both intensely painful and disfiguring in order to prevent it.

31:55

This was a truly psychotic chapter in American medical history. And where was the quad's mother in all of this? Where was Sadie? Passive, mostly complicit in the abuse of her daughters, herself a victim of Carl Morlock's need for control, his paranoia, his anger. He was hyper fixated on racial purity and sexual purity and was a true believer in eugenics.

32:23

Remember how dismayed he was by the prospect of having even twins, how he thought that multiple births were a byproduct of inferior breeding? Yep. Carl Morlock was a staunch advocate for the bogus and discredited theory that the human race could be improved by the enforcement of selective breeding. There's a reason we know these things, things that happen behind closed doors, private things, because in the early 20s, the girls, Edna, Wilma, Sarah and Helen all began displaying symptoms of a serious mental illness, delusions, long periods where they'd sit catatonic for hours.

33:06

The diagnosis was schizophrenia. Edna was the first to be diagnosed, the first to be institutionalized. She was treated with multiple rounds of electroconvulsive therapy. A year later, Wilma was diagnosed, followed by Sarah and then Helen. Both Wilma and Helen were also treated with electroconvulsive therapy. Schizophrenia is a serious psychotic disorder, but it's rare, affecting fewer than one percent of the population of the United States.

33:37

There's no single gene that causes it. There's no definitive test to screen for it. Heredity plays a part. If you have a sibling or a parent with schizophrenia, your risk is six times higher in identical twins. If one has it, the other twin has a 50 percent risk of having it, too, which is one way we know that environmental factors must play a significant role as well in activating the genes that trigger schizophrenia.

34:06

And the Morloks quadruplets, one single egg for baby girls, all showed symptoms. All were diagnosed. Now, not much was known back then about schizophrenia. And so when the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health, the NIMH, approached the Morloks about studying the girls, Carl leapt at the chance, mostly because it wouldn't cost him a dime.

34:33

Plus, he was having health issues of his own. In 1954, doctors told our mother that her father's health was declining from cancer. The doctors said they had done all they could do to help take care of his problems with diabetes, hardening of the arteries and possible cirrhosis of the liver. Carl was told that he must either go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, or to the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

34:58

A physician in Ann Arbor who consulted on Carl's case suggested Bethesda because there was tremendous interest there in Carl's four identical daughters. The doctor explained the research would help medical science in its study of monozygotic quadruplets, as well as provide further testing and treatment for our father, and they would pay for his care.

35:24

Life with father was almost unbearable, and I was instrumental in siding with our mother to agree that we go. The girls resided on the Baltimore campus for three years from 1955 to 1958, where they were observed by more than 45 practitioners and staff members who recorded their every move and interaction. In addition, the Institute sent researchers to Lansing to interview the girls' parents, friends, teachers and other community members.

35:59

Lead NIMH researcher David Rosenthal spent three years studying the quads. We all had physicals and interviews with as many as 30 medical physicians, interns, physiotherapists, sociologists and others. We got really used to the routine. Psychiatric evaluations, doll play, handwriting analysis, Rorschach tests, electroencephalography, galvanic skin response tests and more.

36:30

Rosenthal outlined his findings in his 1963 edited book, The Ghanian Quadruplets, a case study and theoretical analysis of heredity and environment in schizophrenia. Rosenthal attempted to give the quads some privacy by changing their surnames to a word he borrowed from the Greek language. Janine. It means dire birth.

36:52

The sisters suffered from an unhappy collusion of nature and nurture. They'd inherited some predisposition to illness, then been subjected to a thoroughly pathogenic home. Both of their parents practiced irrationality and wielded control over every aspect of their lives. There were also vertical and horizontal identification patterns within the family, meaning that the quadruplets over identified with their parents and one another.

37:20

Horrors that had been carefully hidden behind closed doors and drawn curtains were now spilling out. A father obsessed with his daughter's virtue made their home into a prison which he patrolled with a shotgun behind the always drawn blinds. He permitted them no privacy watching as they undressed and even fondling them.

37:43

He claimed he was only testing how they'd later react on dates, though when the time came, he forbade them from going on such dates. When he and his wife caught two sisters masturbating, they took them to a doctor who surgically mutilated them. Following their high school graduation, three of the quadruplets were assaulted outside the home and their father did nothing about it.

38:06

And all of this was happening at the same time that newspapers all around the country were busy running sweet little stories of the lovely, dancing, singing, perfectly identical Morlock for candy coated quasi fictions, not unlike Rosenthal's report, which managed to leave so much that was relevant out. Karl Morlock's Nazi ideology, for one, his obsession with race didn't make the cut.

38:34

Of course, back then, schizophrenia was thought to be caused by a mother whose parenting style mixed with warmth and hostility in ways that left a child confused and ultimately broken. The fact that the Morlock girls arrived in Bethesda with a near paralyzing phobia of contamination via penetration. No alarm bells ringing.

38:56

No giant red flags snapping in the wind, nothing. Still pointing the finger of blame at Sadie. Well, not just Sadie. Karl's mother was also in the hot seat. Bunch of Freudians, obviously, I mean, definitely scrutinize the mothers and pay no attention at all to the man swinging the billy club and running his hands over the breasts and bodies of his teenage daughters.

39:21

There's no evidence to suggest that Karl Morlock raped his own daughters, a fact for which we can be grateful and relieved. Yet every aspect of their lives under his roof was shaped by his manipulations, his distorted ideas about the body, sexuality and control, though none of the quads publicly expressed relief at his death.

39:45

You couldn't blame them if they did. Karl Morlock, 68, father of Lansing's Morlock quadruplets and a longtime constable, died at a hospital on Friday, August 9th, 1957. A native of Wittenberg, Germany, Morlock had been elected city constable 16 times after he first ran for the office in 1931, shortly after the birth of his four daughters.

40:14

The quads, now 27, are at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Quad Sarah, baby C, thrived in Bethesda. She'd made friends among the staff and she volunteered as a stenographer in the Laboratory of Nutrition and Endocrinology. I thoroughly enjoyed this experience and was up every morning, fixed my own breakfast in the kitchen, donned a white lab coat, then sailed up to the ninth floor.

40:46

I worked half days as well as participating in the research tests given to us quads. I also typed two doctoral theses for members of the research team, one of which was on the subject of amoebic dysentery. It was a very interesting and educational experience. Two months before her father's death, Sarah took the federal civil service exam and passed.

41:08

She was hired as a medical transcriptionist at what is now the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. My sisters were kept busy participating in various laboratory tests, having therapy or conferences with psychologists, psychotherapists and social workers. Wilma and Helen were involved in crafts and occupational therapy classes, as well as working in the clinical center beauty shop doing shampoos and cleaning.

41:34

Edna enjoyed playing the piano, going to church and movies, taking bike trips around the campus or visiting points of local interest. In January 1958, the National Institute of Mental Health Research Project into the Morlock quads was finally complete. Sadie came to Maryland to fetch her daughters, but Sarah stayed behind.

41:55

She moved into a boarding house, found a new job. She began attending services at the Luther Place Memorial Lutheran Church. She joined the choir. After all, she'd been performing in public since she was a toddler. She joined a folk dancing group. For the first time in her life, Sarah was living as one of one, an individual, independent, free to explore and experiment and discover.

42:21

There was even a young man pursuing her. Oh, I played hard to get, but that didn't seem to deter him one bit. His name was George Edward Cotton Jr. And he proposed. I wanted to invite my sisters to be my bridesmaids. But mother reminded me that Wilma and Helen had moved to Detroit, where Wilma had won a scholarship to go to the Virginia Pharrell Beauty Academy.

42:43

And Helen and she were living together. So the only sister I could count on was Edna. Just like her mother before her, Sarah had real doubts about marrying George history repeating. She met with the chaplain at Bowling Air Force Base where George was stationed. He said it would be better to join George as his wife, as he would have to find a place for me off base if I were only a girlfriend.

43:06

Besides, he said, the Air Force doesn't look after girlfriends like they do after a real wife. It wasn't the most romantic approach, but Sarah, like her mother, was persuaded to take the leap. George was almost immediately stationed in Saudi Arabia while Sarah tried her best to live with her new in-laws, who were heavy drinkers on most days and overbearing every day.

43:29

When George was packed off to England, Sarah boarded a plane and followed him there. She found work, developed a passion for afternoon tea and eventually gave birth to her first child, William Cleve Cotton. George's Air Force career kept the couple on the move, Japan, North Dakota, and eventually back to Lansing. Sadie Moorlach passed away in April 1983.

43:53

Five years later, Sarah and George divorced. But Sarah, the most high functioning and resilient of the Moorlach quads, Sarah kept going, kept taking classes, earning certifications. She was alone, but her independence and positivity propelled her forward until January 21st, 1994. Her firstborn, William, died in the hospital after a lengthy illness.

44:20

According to his death certificate, William had been battling acquired immune deficiency syndrome, AIDS, for four years. He died of acute congestive heart failure. Sarah soldiered on until 1999. She missed her sisters. They'd lived apart for so long and all four yearned for time together. They wound up living in the same apartment complex in Lansing and were inseparable for the next three years.

44:50

Wilma, baby B, died of pneumonia in January 2002. She was 72. On Halloween 2003, Helen, baby D, died. Now it was just Sarah and Edna. On May 19th, 2010, the sisters celebrated their 80th birthdays, an event commemorated by the Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, where they'd been born. The marvelous display featured the story of our historic celebrity birth at Sparrow, along with photographs and artifacts from the early and later years of our lives.

45:23

Edna and I received 25 birthday cards, including ones from a set of twins in Chelsea, Michigan, some quads in Armada, Michigan, and some quads in Murphy, Texas. So all in all, it was a very, very happy 80th birthday. Edna, baby A, passed away on April 10th, 2015. She was 84. As I look back, life was difficult at times because of our father and the way he treated us. But our brave mother tried to maintain a happy and exuberant spirit in our home to the very end.

45:59

Yes, it has been interesting to have three sisters who looked like me and acted like me as I was growing up, but in some ways we were very different. That came out when we were together, sharing our interests and talents and traits with each other. Each of us had been blessed with a gift of our very own, which we shared with each other.

46:19

By the simple, rare and unexpected miracle of one egg dividing four times, the Morlock quadruplets were born into a world that treated them like a sideshow. It was as though the girls were the property of everyone but themselves. A father with twisted ideas about race and purity, a man for whom daughters were objects to be manipulated and controlled.

46:48

There's nothing terribly exotic about that. Ditto the passive mother, herself a victim, cowed into silent acquiescence because, oh my goodness, what would people think if they knew? Nothing unusual there. It's a story playing out behind closed doors pretty much everywhere. It's only because there were four Morlock girls that what happened to them is of any interest at all.

47:15

Sarah Morlock, baby C, died at age 95 on July 7th, 2025. The only one of the Morlock sisters ever able to live independently. The therapy she received during her years in Bethesda had served her well. You'd never know, reading her sunny autobiography, just how dark and restricted the quad's lives actually were. She saved those revelations for the end, sharing the truth with a writer named Audrey Claire Farley.

47:48

That book is called Girls and Their Monsters, The Djinnian Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America. Yes, as I look back, together we made quite a team. When the quads were children performing together on stage, one of their signature songs was called Alice Blue Gown. I once had a gown, it was all so new. Oh, the dainty thing, it was sweet Alice blue.

48:17

With little forgive me, not safe here and there. When I had it on, I walked on air. And it wore, and it wore, and it wore. Oh, the thinnest wind, and it watered no more. In my sweet little Alice blue gown. When I first wandered down into town, I was both proud and shy, as I felt every eye. But in every shop window, I'd print, passing by.

48:59

Then in a matter of fashion, I'd frown. And the world seemed to smile all around. Till it wilted, I wore it, I'll always adore it. My sweet little Alice blue gown. Next time on True Weird Stuff. He was the prototype of a suburban dad tooling down the interstate in his two-year-old bronze Chevy Malibu station wagon. Windows down, whistling a tune, eyes on the future.

49:43

And in the back of that station wagon, under a tarp, were the bludgeoned bodies of his entire family. William Bradford Bishop set them ablaze and disappeared, never to be seen again. The Bishop murders on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Wendy Tonetti, Erin Cox, Kary "Doc" Bowser and Don Morgan.

50:15

So, Sherry, I had I've never heard anything about the Morlock quadruplets. And how did you come upon this story? Well, so schizophrenia, even to this day, schizophrenia is a puzzle and a challenge for science and health care. And I was aware that there had been this like multi-year study of a group of quadruplets out of the Midwest.

50:42

And and I only had known them as the Janine quads, which was the sort of pseudonym that Dr. Rosenthal at Bethesda gave them. And so I, I, I, you know, like you learn about it when you're in school. I went for my MSW and worked in mental health. So obviously, you know, that was where my area of interest was. And I forgot all about it.

51:06

And I was working on something else. And the name Carl Morlock was on the screen. And so I zoom, zoom, zoomed. I was like, where do I know that name from? Oh, the Morlock, that's the real name of the Janine babies. Well, what I've read in that little snippet was like, what what in the Hitler sympathizing did I just see?

51:30

And so that I just and then I couldn't believe it, could not believe the backstory on these girls. And schizophrenia is terrifying because it's generally the symptoms and signs will appear in very late adolescence, early adulthood. And it. You know, it's at varying degrees, right, you've seen people with schizophrenia who are fully catatonic and people that are pretty functional, their medications and some treatments that are available.

52:02

But it's a scary and confusing and puzzling, puzzling disorder. And the thing about schizophrenia is there's a genetic component, but the genetic component is not enough. There are all these other things that have to happen. Like there's no single gene for schizophrenia. There's a genetic vulnerability. And then life and your environment turns on or off epigenetics, right?

52:26

Certain genes that then begin expressing, which is why it's fascinating for the Morlock quads, Max, because one egg split four ways. They all had the same basic genetic vulnerability. And and they all had the disease. They all had schizophrenia. But you'll notice that they they were resilient in different ways and functioned in different ways.

52:52

And Sarah was by far the most high functioning of the four girls. So, yeah, I mean, so I wanted to ask you about the other three girls. They did they require care? Did somebody have to mind them? What do you know anything more about the other three sisters? They only so Sarah alone married and lived independently. But the other three sisters, they were not institutionalized for the bulk of their lives.

53:25

They did live independently. They lived together and they had very structured employment. They thrived. They did as well as you could hope to do under the circumstances of their lives. Everything that they had endured on top of a serious chronic mental illness. Right. So they did they did super well. Don't get me wrong, but only Sarah really had the capacity to live in the world.

53:53

The other sisters managed, but Sarah thrived. And it was so interesting because even when the girls first got to Bethesda, they were patients, you know, quote unquote patients, they were research subjects. But Sarah, you'd have thought she'd arrived on the campus of her of her school. Right. Sarah Sarah's orientation to the whole experience was different.

54:17

Sarah viewed herself as a partner in this research, not as a subject. So when you look at like her orientation to reality, her perception of her own strengths and abilities, you can see how all of these things sort of fed and snowballed and gave Sarah tremendous momentum. She was she was a very courageous and adventurous and brave individual. Right.

54:43

And this was at a time, too, when, you know, when life was a little harder for a young woman on her own to just decide, well, I think I'm going to take the civil service exam and and find myself a place to live and get a get a job. Like, do you understand how crazy hard that was? Right. For anyone, much less for Sarah Moorlach.

55:05

So it's fascinating in that way because it gave us that it gave us that rare thing. It gave us a chance to study genetics and nature and nurture genetics and environment across four individuals who had come from one egg. Like it was it was truly a scientific marvel. And that's why the government could not haul those girls to Bethesda fast enough.

55:31

So, Sherry, in doing your research for this, did you find that there was any correlation with the nature of their birth and the schizophrenia and the mental health issues? There's because of how complex schizophrenia is, I don't I don't know that you can answer that definitively. Yes or no. I mean, the girls didn't have a particularly traumatic birth.

55:59

They were they were preemies at twenty nine weeks. But that's not uncommon for a multiple pregnancy anyway, right? Even today, multiple pregnancies, whether twins, very, very fragile, very, very high stakes pregnancies. So you have to kind of like marvel really that these girls were born in the early 1930s, at twenty nine weeks before NICU was even a twinkle in anybody's eye.

56:27

They were in what they called them, you know, hot box, warming boxes and heated incubators. But they were basically heated plastic boxes. I mean, we didn't we didn't have what we have now. The fact that all four girls survived their birth and their infancy should tell you that they had they came from good, sturdy stock.

56:48

Right. Because of the way. So schizophrenia, schizophrenia is so scary. Because you you can know that there's a vulnerability, but you can't predict it. And and you can be diagnosed with schizophrenia without a family history, too. So it it it just is this thing that can this thing that can happen to you in your late teens, early adulthood, that turns your life upside down and inside out.

57:19

The girls were not deprived of oxygen during their birth. Like there was nothing. There was no known factor that would have suggested anything. Now, Carl Morlock had family members who were described as having sanity problems. But you have to think about when all of this is happening. People were people thought mental health, poor mental health was a moral failing or a character failing.

57:47

People were ashamed. Family members that struggled were often like hidden away. People didn't talk about it. People didn't have a vocabulary to talk about it. So there's there was clearly some family history of mental illness on the Morlock side that we know of. Harder to say on Sadie's side because she ran away from home and kind of got ties with her family, what her father looking for with a shotgun.

58:18

So that's not normal. Let's put it that way. Go ahead. I love I love stories like this for that reason. Like, oh, please do tell me some more about the good old days. People, you know, when people were so good, tell me more. And you touched on this some. So was this nature or nurture? And the reason that I bring this up is you have Sarah, who you know, genetically shares all this with these sisters, grew up in the same, incredibly dysfunctional situation, and yet she seemed to thrive.

58:54

And she did. She did well in life and in fact, seemed to have a really sunshiny disposition, as you said. And I just think that's probably one of the most fascinating parts of this story is you had the four of them in this situation. And, you know, we I think we think, well, they're identical, then they're exactly all alike.

59:18

But the fingerprints are different. Right. And apparently, apparently each of them, as you mentioned in the story, had their own gifts. You know, despite dealing with the schizophrenia, they still had some kinds of gifts that were different than their siblings. Well, this is what is so fascinating. And you would need to get like we would need to lay our hands on a geneticist to really talk about this.

59:44

But what's so fascinating about the studies that are done of twins, identical and fraternal and, you know, and multiples in general, when we have identical twins or in this case, identical quads, we have this really unique and special opportunity to study the impact of nurture on nature, because we have in this case, we have four human beings who launched from the same genetic canon.

1:00:11

They are identical. They came in those four girls, those infants came into this world absolutely identical. But the moment they arrived, that's when the differentiation began. It's called epigenetics. And I think that there's another word that when when genes experience changes, methylation, the methylation of your DNA, when your DNA undergoes changes.

1:00:35

Right. You've heard about that. So epigenetics, the impact of environment on genes, because we we all have like all of these genes and some of them are turned on and some of them are turned off. Some of them are expressing and some of them are silent. And it's the my understanding of this is it's the environmental factors that are most influential on which genes express and which genes go silent.

1:01:05

So in the case of the Morlock quads, this is so magical. You guys, this is so magical. We we we shot four little stars out of the cannon. And the minute they came out of the cannon, they each began changing in her own separate and unique ways. So we had Sarah, who was so sunshiny and ambitious. She was ambitious. She wanted things.

1:01:34

She would see something and instantly begin making the connections and how she could grow and propel forward from that. Helen, the smallest of the quads, the last born baby D, only three pounds. Helen had some developmental delays and some learning delays, which are not uncommon with children that are born, you know, she eventually kind of caught up.

1:02:02

But the advantage that baby Sarah had, baby C over baby D was Sarah wasn't developmentally delayed. And so she right from the very beginning, we started off on the same starting line, but right in that instant, you can see how things are going to move faster and differently for Sarah than they are for Helen. They're already not identical anymore.

1:02:25

Well, you could in that first moment. It's fascinating. You could almost make the case that even prior to their birth, the things were different because it might have to do with where the placement was in the womb and that sort of thing. You know, it's one of the things, you know, when we talked about the cloning, the episode that we had about cloning, that you you can take something that's identical, but you can't you can't because the conditions are a little bit different.

1:02:56

Maybe one of those babies was how it was positioned in there, the way the nutrition came might have been a little bit different and that sort of thing. So you could almost make the case to say they were different even before they were born. I think that is so genius. And you're right. From the moment that egg divided four ways, they began differentiating.

1:03:18

Like something we know now because of the imaging technology we have and the monitoring technology we have from multiple pregnancies, we can know we can have a pretty good understanding of what's happening in utero. So like my daughter, Maggie, has identical twin boys and they had growth restriction in the womb, meaning one twin was was basically through no fault of his own, like getting more nutrients. Right.

1:03:46

And, you know, and he was thriving in utero to a degree that the other twin was not. Now they're, you know, they're born and everybody's sort of caught up. But you're right. From the moment that egg divided, those were four very separate human beings. But we didn't know that back then. That's, you know, we didn't know that.

1:04:07

That even though they looked exactly alike, that they were so completely different because DNA hadn't even been discovered yet. Right. So how could we how could we we didn't even have we didn't have a way to even talk about the Morlock quadruplets when they were little girls. You know, you hate to I don't know what I would do if I am pregnant with quads as the stock market is crashing and the Great Depression is launching.

1:04:38

I like there's a part of me that's looking at Karl Morlock like you Nazi asshole. But but then again, you know, you got babies to feed. And if folks want to stand on your porch and give you 25 cents just to look at them, I guess you're going to take it. Like, I don't want to be too judgy about that because there's plenty to judge with Karl Morlock.

1:04:56

He was Karl Morlock was mentally ill. Karl Morlock was paranoid. He was controlling. He was violent. He was perverse. He had such a weird fixation on racial and sexual purity like every good Nazi fascist does. Right. He had his hands all over his girls. It is indefensible what Karl Morlock did to his daughter. Just the kind of person you want to have leading your police department.

1:05:24

You know, it's the thing about the story is we're still fascinated with this. I mean, I was thinking about John and Kate plus eight. And while those those children were not obviously they weren't identical, but we have a fascination with this. And the other thing that I was thinking about was that movie Three Identical Strangers that you and I both like.

1:05:42

And if you haven't seen it, it's. Watch this. It's a fascinating story. These these guys were identical triplets who were born and they were separated at birth and went to different families and two of them ended up at the same college and somebody and they were getting confused with one another. And then they they met each other and it was like looking in a mirror, you know.

1:06:07

And so there was a newspaper story. And then one other guy determined that he was the other the other sibling of these two. And there was and the reason I was asking about this earlier was if there was any connection between the mental health problems and and the way they were born is because that has come up with the three identical strangers.

1:06:33

I mean, one of them really suffered very badly from depression and ended up committing suicide. And I think the other two have had some issues as well. They have. Yeah, so there's there are so many things that even now, like in twenty twenty six, that we just don't know, you know, there's so much we we know almost as much as we now know about schizophrenia, which was the Morlock quads.

1:07:02

We know very little and everything we know about schizophrenia, we know because of the Morlock quads. See, that was the other thing about this, this story about their lives. Although their names were shielded in the National Institutes of Mental Health Research program, so much of the understanding of schizophrenia and the treatment for it is derived from the years that these quadruplet girls spent as guests of the United States government.

1:07:33

That's fascinating. And I think that, you know, that should that should be recognized and I think they should be recognized and I think we should have some gratitude. I think we owe them a thank you because they traded their freedom. They weren't prisoners, Max, they weren't inmates, but they were they were living on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, for years, studied every single day, everything they ate, every hour they slept, everything was noted.

1:08:13

They went through psychotherapy. They they were viewed from the inside out. Their bones were x-rayed, their souls were x-rayed and all of that. So that incredible generosity of just giving your years of your life. To a collective knowledge base, I think we could say, thank you, I don't know. Well, you know, their living situation was certainly better than living living with their father.

1:08:42

Well, you heard what Sarah said. Sarah said life with father was intolerable. You guys, it was a mercy for them to become human research subjects for the government. I want you to think about that. We don't know what happens behind closed doors. And people people's children, they people view children as their property to do with as they will.

1:09:08

And Karl Morlock certainly did. And I I am I'm less critical of their mother, Sadie, only because I am very I grew up with domestic violence and I know that. You could say, well, their mother should have done X, Y and Z. She was a victim, too. She was terrorized. And this was in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s. Society wasn't mobilized to help a woman and her children in that way.

1:09:38

You know, it's a man's home, his castle, his wife, his family to do with as he saw fit. And it was so sick that Karl was also the cops. He was he was Lansing law enforcement. He was no more qualified, by the way, to be the constable of Lansing than you or me. Somehow he kept getting elected. Well, because people knew his name.

1:09:57

People vote for a familiar name and politicians know that celebrities know that it's always been true, it's always going to be true. So, yeah, I I think that the part of the there are so many aspects of the Morlock story that tear at your heart. But there are so many things here to be to be to admire, like I admire Sarah, I admire the life she made for herself.

1:10:25

She lived abroad. She was she navigated a very complicated life. She you know, her husband was Air Force. He was stationed all over the place and she was she was living overseas. That's daunting for anybody. Right. But, you know, here's someone who grew up in a very peculiar way and had a very serious mental health diagnosis.

1:10:47

And yet she's out there doing it. She's working. She's parenting. She's throwing dinner parties with jello molds and like doing all the 50s and 60s stuff. And then she loses her her son to AIDS. And and still she manages because of that deep resilience, that strong, deep positivity that was just in her. She manages to somehow.

1:11:14

Keep going. And she died last summer, Max, I mean, this is an old ancient history. No, she died last July in her, you know, like these are not the stories of a thousand years ago. This is last July in the United States of America. And I feel like I feel like I say this a lot on this show, like I feel like these people deserve to have their names known and spoken, because when I look at what those sisters did, what the Morlock quadruplets did for all of us by allowing themselves to be studied for years.

1:11:54

Anyone listening right now that has a family family member who struggles with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. The Morlock quadruplets are a big part of the reason why we know what we know and have the treatment options we do. So I just feel like we should know their names and maybe say them out loud with a thank you. Thank you. Now, now, if we could talk for just a second about Carl Morlock.

1:12:22

There are some interesting contemporary echoes, resonances in this story. There is the when whenever you see the convergence of a fixation on breeding and purity. Be looking for Nazis and the Klan and fascism. Because a fixation on purity and breeding is baked into those ideologies. And Carl Morlock was watching. So keep in mind, his daughters were born in the 1930s before the rise of the Third Reich and Hitler and World War Two and all of that. Carl Morlock was beside himself that the Third Reich would prevail so that Hitler could come to America and purge this country of its defectives.

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And if you're thinking, oh, my God, how bizarre. Good thing he was alone in that, except he wasn't alone in that. He had a lot of company. No, there were Nazi rallies and stuff in this country. Yeah. People in the United States of America supported Hitler and wanted an American version of the final solution here. And we never quite we never quite eradicated that darkness.

1:13:50

We never got the bleach into every filthy corner, which is why it came roaring back in the modern era as it has, because we never purged it the first time. Because as you, a listener of True Weird Stuff, a twerdo, if you will, now know this country has a river of eugenics running through its history. How many times does it come up in these stories?

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And this isn't even a podcast that's looking for them. How many times do we come across eugenics? Many times. Over and over again. So that's the fun thing about, like, history. And this is our very recent history. This is our kind of right now-ish history, because, again, Sarah just died like a minute ago. That's the fun thing about it.

1:14:40

It's not a bunch of boring, dusty old dates and facts. It's a mirror. And when you look into it, you can see your younger self looking back at you and you can realize all the ways you didn't learn. And it's the collective mirror. So we want to we just want to take a moment and thank those Morlock quadruplets who sacrificed their everything so that we could know a little something something.

1:15:08

And although it was right to shield their name to protect their privacy, doing that protected their privacy and then robbed them of their legacy, which seems unfair, does just a little bit. Yeah. So next time on True Weird Stuff, we're going to tell the story of a case that has obsessed Max since his boyhood in the Washington, D.C. area. Take it away, Max.

1:15:36

This is about Bradford Bishop and Bradford Bishop murdered his family in the Washington, D.C. area and then drove them to North Carolina and burned the bodies and then disappeared into the ether, never to be found. However, there are some people that think that they saw him from time to time and there's reason to believe that they actually did. And this is he's been on he was on the FBI's most wanted list and then he was on like America's most wanted number of times, too, because I think they thought they were going to solve this like they did.

1:16:13

The John Liss murder, another man who murdered his entire family and seemed to disappear into the ether. They call them family annihilators. So the thing about William Bradford Bishop, Brad, to his friends, the thing about Brad is Brad. Brad was he was in the Army. The Army sent him to Army Intelligence School. Then they sent him to language school.

1:16:40

Then he went to work for the State Department and he was posted overseas. Then he came back to Maryland and was working as a diplomat in the state and the State Department stateside. He was handsome. He was brilliant. He was educated. He was married to his high school sweetheart. They had three beautiful kids. And for whatever reason, one day he just snapped.

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Brad is the only person to ever be removed from the FBI's 10 most wanted list, not because he died or got caught, but because they never got him and they needed to make room for somebody even worse. Mm hmm. It's a I cannot wait. I cannot wait for this. And the thing is, this is I mean, I'm just going to tell you right up front.

1:17:33

No one he got away with it. He got away with it. He did. We're not going to solve this mystery for you any more than the FBI. But what kind of a man? Snaps and does what he did. It's one thing to kill your family. It's the way he did it. What happened next? Horrifying. So, yeah, so we're going to take us a little journey to Max's childhood.

1:18:06

And next week is the story of William Bradford Bishop. Call me, Brad. We'll see you on the next true weird stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review true weird stuff, hit our website, true weird stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos.

1:18:34

When we have it and bonus content, everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff dot com. And follow true weird stuff on Instagram. True weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten.

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Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2026.

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Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.

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