The Perfect Baby

Hey true weirdos, thank you so much for all your support. Because of your support we were able to win some awards with this podcast in the past year. And be sure to stick around for the conversation we have after the episode. The Folsom Swamp in southern New Jersey is a densely wooded boggy quagmire today. Back when it happened, searchers had to cut and hack and pick their way through a thick knotted underbrush that snagged and tore at their clothing and tripped them at every step.

This was wild unmapped country that according to the New Jersey State Police no one but the Indians had ever penetrated. What they were searching for was something they prayed they wouldn't find. In the end it was a local hunter and his dog who made the discovery. When something or someone is lost there's more than one kind of finding. Joy and the rush of relief that's what we hope for.

The finding can also mean the end of hope and the bottomless howl of grief. Which way does this story go? This is an ad that ran in the classified ad section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Sunday, April 9th, 1916. For adoption to extremely wealthy family only. Baby girl, three months. Known and pronounced as the perfect baby in Pittsburgh. References exchanged.

Conditions and reasons on request. The perfect baby, that was a real thing. And there were lots of babies all around the country who were earning the title. This little miss was, and let's be very blunt and honest and face the facts, she was put up for sale in a newspaper classified ad. And who knows, maybe she found that loving home with an extremely wealthy family. That'd be a fairy tale happily ever after.

A Disney-fied fairy tale. Because what happened to another perfect Pittsburgh baby, born just a few months after this ad ran? That was another sort of fairy tale. The sort that's steeped in darkness and foreboding and ends with a terrible lesson in tempting the fates. Results of the medical examination of several hundred babies in connection with Better Baby Week showed rapid strides made in child welfare work. The results will be published this week and prizes will be awarded to the babies averaging nearest perfect.

The Better Babies Movement and the Perfect Baby Contest began with the best of intentions, as wretched notions so often do. A national magazine called the Woman's Home Companion was inspired by the wild success of a scientific baby contest held at the 1908 Louisiana State Fair. The organizer, Mary DeGarmo, well known in the state as an advocate for child welfare, got a local doctor to help create a set of scientific standards for the ideal American baby.

Strong and healthy and, you know, white. That last part was implied, not stated, but heavily, massively, blatantly implied. DeGarmo herself later wrote, Much interest was shown as to the blood will tell theory. It did tell. The good intentions part of this whole circus was built on a simple truth. Babies were dying in the early part of the last century.

The infant mortality rate was staggering. The reasons were pretty basic. Poor hygiene, inadequate nutrition, lack of access to routine medical care. So the Woman's Home Companion developed a scorecard, formed the Better Babies Bureau and launched a campaign encouraging communities to hold their own better baby contests.

We actually did an episode on these contests back in August 2025. It's called Human Livestock, and it takes you to the fairs where human infants were judged like prize hogs or goats. We make the contest a social event because we want to know these mothers of little children and draw them into our organization, the Congress of Mothers.

And so you see science, social life and sentiment mingle in the Better Babies movement. As the southern woman sees it, white. Oh, I mean, right. You are married to Garmo. Worries over the failure of America's babies to thrive reached the White House in 1909. President Theodore Roosevelt hosted a conference called the Care of Dependent Children.

Three years later, in 1912, the Children's Bureau was founded with one in 10 babies dying before their first birthday. Orphans living in crowded institutions with little care and less attention. And many kids kept out of school and made to work in unsafe conditions to help support their families. Life for American children could be one of brutal hardship.

The Children's Bureau made progress, created real, positive and lasting changes that benefited the lives of kids and families. Looking back now, the Better Babies contest sound bizarre. Who would ever think to measure, judge and rank human children like livestock? The people of the time didn't see it that way. They were all in on the science.

Of course, the science they were so enamored of was the scientifically flawed and rancid theory we call eugenics. These are the people who believe that abstract qualities of personality and behavior, as well as diseases and disorders, were all inherited. American eugenicists were utterly obsessed with eradicating so-called feeble mindedness and antisocial behaviors.

But they were also darkly fixated on what they called race suicide. Now, this is about to sound very familiar to anyone paying attention to current events. But these folks were nearly out of their minds with fears over birth rates. They all but foamed at the mouth over how many babies were being born to immigrants and what they referred to as the non-Nordic races.

This drove policy decisions leading to anti-immigration laws and forced sterilizations. Compared to that, a Better Babies contest sounds like a wholesome good time for the whole family. That's what little Billy Dancy's parents probably thought. And it has to be said, their baby really was something special. Just a total cutie, chunky and sweet with sparkling eyes and little plump dimpled hands.

You could have just eaten this baby up. So naturally, they entered Billy into one of the many, many, many Better Baby events and he won. Billy Dancy was declared a perfect baby. Folk tales and fairy tales have been trying to warn humanity about the dangers of having too beautiful child for eons. Take Sleeping Beauty, for example.

What knocked her out? It's not like she took too much melatonin. The original tale from the Brothers Grimm goes like this. The queen bore a daughter so beautiful that the king could not contain himself for joy and he ordained a feast. Not only did he bid it to his relations, friends and acquaintances, but also the wise women that they might be kind and favorable to the child.

There were 13 of them in his kingdom, but as he had only provided 12 golden plates for them to eat from, one of them had to be left out. Wise women code for women who had the gift of healing magic. The Disney version changed the story and called the women fairies. However, the feast was celebrated with all splendor. And as it drew to an end, the wise women stood forward to present to the child their wonderful gifts.

One bestowed virtue, one beauty, a third riches, and so on. Whatever there is in the world to wish for. And when 11 of them had had their say, in came the uninvited 13th, burning to revenge herself. And without greeting or respect, she cried with a loud voice. In the 15th year of her age, the princess shall prick herself with the spindle and shall fall down dead.

Too bad Princess Aurora's folks didn't think to spit on their baby daughter to protect her. That's an ancient practice meant to ward off the evil eye. And the evil eye is particularly drawn to babies because of their purity and innocence. Three rapid spits are generally all that's required to wrap an invisible cloak of protection around the child, effectively staving off disease, deformity, and death.

For the ancients, and I include my own grandmothers and great grandmothers in this, it would be lunacy to hold a baby up in the public square and announce its perfection. I was just asking for trouble. But maybe Billy Dancy's parents didn't know about all that. They were modern people, not superstitious peasants living in a time before electricity and cars.

Their toddler was lovely and they were proud of their boy. They did what so many of us would do in their shoes. They showed that baby off. Billy's photo was featured in the magazine. He was seen by thousands of eyes, some of them admiring, most even. But not all. Some of the eyes that feasted on that beautiful child were narrowed in jealousy and darkened by spite.

Search parties explored the Cranberry Swamps in the vicinity of Hemmington, New Jersey, trying to find two-and-a-half-year-old Billy Dancy, who disappeared from his home on First Road in Hemmington on Wednesday morning three days ago. There wasn't much to go on. Tiny footprints that meandered a few hundred feet from the family's home toward a neighboring flower farm and into the swamp.

Persons living on the outskirts of the borough said they had chased away a party of gypsies camping near their homes early Tuesday. The gypsies, according to reports, fled toward Hemmington. It is believed they may have kidnapped the child. The gypsies, and that's a slur, were the first to be accused of taking Billy Dancy, though they wouldn't be the last.

There wasn't a scrap of evidence to support this accusation, but the Romney people were, as ever, a handy scapegoat. Police authorities of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, are chasing a band of gypsies who are said to have in their possession a boy whose description resembles that of Billy Dancy. Chief of Police Hendricks of Doylestown said that the camp of the gypsy band was searched without revealing any trace of the child, yet a band of gypsies is known to have left Hemmington before the authorities could reach them, and the nomads of Doylestown had horses which had been pushed hard and far during the last few days.

All it took was a little bigotry and some tired horses, and suddenly an entire community falls under suspicion of stealing a child? Billy disappeared on October 8th, 1919. One week later... A Mrs. Burhouse of Hemmington told the police that last Wednesday morning a stranger in a fall-top buggy drove across her place and toward the Reading Railroad tracks.

Her husband followed the buggy tracks and today pointed out to the police the course taken. A stranger in a buggy... And a lead that came to nothing. There were a whole lot of leads like that keeping police busy. Miss Rose Gardner, daughter of the Reverend W.H. Gardner, said she saw three rough-looking men in an old automobile with a child that strongly resembled the missing boy.

A report was also received by the police of Rahway, New Jersey that a boy resembling Billy Dancy got off a train at that place several days ago with a rough-looking man. The boy, it is said, accompanied the man unwillingly. The authorities paid real attention to Miss Gardner's report, though like every other story of a toddler and a rough-looking man, it failed to turn up the missing boy.

When the remains of a loaf of bread were found in an old abandoned house roughly a mile from the Burhouse home, detectives pounced. Witnesses have reported seeing three men near that derelict property. Locals called it the Red House. And those reports lined up with Miss Gardner's account. Promising clue, but another dead end.

The postmaster in Pleasantville, New Jersey, went to the authorities with a letter he'd received from a gentleman named Calvin Eberhardt. Eberhardt lived alone in a log cabin deep in a swamp about five miles from the town of Egg Harbor. Eberhardt had written the postmaster looking for a detailed description of Billy Dancy.

So the police made their way to the log cabin for a chat. Eberhardt declared that the reason he had written the letter was so that he could be on the lookout for the boy and also get a part of the reward should he chance to see him. The hermit also claimed to be an astrologer and promised that he would be able to tell by the stars where Billy was hidden.

Airplanes took to the skies, flying low over the countryside, searchers scanning farm fields, forests, and acres of boggy soil, hoping to spot some sign of the child. A neighbor says he saw a huge eagle soaring over the neighborhood on Wednesday, October 8th, the day the boy disappeared. The eagle had a wingspan of seven feet, said the man.

It would be capable of carrying a 40-pound sheep. Little Billy weighed only 30 pounds. Boy scout troops from Mays Landing, Hammonton, and Camden County were invited to join the search. This feels like the sort of thing that might not happen today, with the risk of having the scout stumble across a body. But as merit badges go, how do you beat solving a missing persons case?

Also, for anyone who grew up in New Jersey near the bogs and the pine barrens, the whole hermit astrologer living alone in the swamp angle of this story is like, oh, yeah, of course you bet. Listen, the woods and the Garden State are full of things that are absolutely none of your business. Just ask the Jersey Devil. The day he vanished, two-and-a-half-year-old Billy Dancy was dressed in faded blue britches, a brown sweater with pockets, and little black button shoes.

On his head was a little ball cap, gray stripes with a blue brim. The boy was playing in a peach orchard owned by the Dancy's neighbors, Charles White. White's son was the same age as Billy, and the two little boys were best friends and playmates. Charles White was a flower farmer. He grew red dahlias. Billy's parents, Stella and Hercules Dancy, met and married while living in Pittsburgh.

Stella was a beauty who'd been much pursued before Hercules won her heart. He'd had competition from at least three other men who all wanted to marry her. One of those men didn't take well to being rejected. He was more than a little enraged and began following Stella, harassing her on the street and threatening revenge.

It was a bad situation and a big factor in why the Dancy's made the move to New Jersey. Police jumped all over this lead but could find no connections, no evidence at all that the spurned ex was involved in any way. Stella Dancy was inconsolable, out of her mind with fear and hope alike. She joined the organized searches.

She searched alone day and night in every kind of weather. Neighbors described finding her wandering in the woods, soaking wet from heavy rain, eyes swollen from weeping, calling her baby's name over and over and over. He's all that I have to live for. I cannot sleep all night long. I hear his baby cries. In my day, I'm tortured by the sight of his little toys.

The community mobilized for Billy Dancy. Volunteer search parties expanded to four states. Sightings and tips poured into police stations and newspapers. You can only imagine how devastating it was for Stella and Hercules for stories like this one to be splashed all over the press. A woman kidnapper is in possession of Billy Dancy somewhere in the Midwest.

And the person reporting this, Edmund C. Gaskill, junior prosecutor for Atlantic County, New Jersey. The kidnapping mystery will be cleared up in a short time. A woman in the Middle West has informed our investigators that she saw another woman with a little boy answering to Billy's description on a train. The boy, who wore a ball cap, attracted attention on the train by calling constantly for his mother.

Our informant said she asked the boy what his name was. The boy answered, Billy Pittsburgh. This, I am informed, is the answer that Billy Dancy frequently made when persons asked him his name. Gaskill dispatched two detectives to follow up on this lead. And just 11 days later, announced... We have not abandoned hope, but we have no information which promises the recovery of Billy Dancy.

Several persons were found who had seen the child supposed to be Billy and all agreed that he answered the description of the missing lad. But Detective Nussbaum, after a thorough sifting of the facts, concluded it was a case of mistaken identity. Gaskill bluntly shot down any notion the public had that the authorities were withholding information.

We are just as much mystified today as we were when this case was first brought to my office. We have not given up the search, however, and we hope to solve the mystery eventually. Eventually is a heavy word when it comes to a missing persons case. Eventually is a word that hints of the sorry knowledge and grief to come.

We have not arrived at any certain conclusion as yet as to what has been the exact fate of the boy. It took only 13 days for the law and the public to turn a suspicious eye on Billy Dancy's parents. Sleuths are now working on the theory that somebody in the Dancy home aided the kidnappers. The new theory, remember that Mrs. Burrhouse of Hamilton who told police that on the morning Billy disappeared, a stranger in a fall top buggy drove across her place and toward the Redding railroad tracks?

That buggy was at the center of that theory. And Atlantic County Chief of Detectives John T. Wilson has satisfied himself that whoever stole Billy Dancy took him away in a light buggy, the tracks of which ran to the Dahlia farm, then on the byroads to the main pike leading to Egg Harbor where the tracks vanished. And in an extra cruel flourish, Detective Wilson suggested that Mrs. Dancy, fully intending to hand her toddler over to his abductor, had dressed Billy in all new clothing.

Stella Dancy denied this. She told Wilson she was alone in the house that morning, that Billy had gone outside to play as usual. She said she was in her bedroom shortly before her son disappeared and that the window in that room overlooked the wagon tracks. If anybody had driven under that window, I certainly would have seen him.

Wilson pushed Stella, insisting that he knew that she was keeping something from him, hiding information from the police. No, no, I've told you everything I know. Three weeks to the day after Billy vanished, the Atlantic City Gazette Review offered a $1,000 reward for the boy's return. A reward worth more than $18,000 in today's money was bound to flush out a clue or two.

The paper claimed that police in 200 cities were working the case. Four theories advanced so far, that Gypsy stole the boy, that a former suitor of Mrs. Dancy took him, that a childless woman attracted by his fame as a registered baby and his widely published pictures kidnapped him, that foreigners in Hamilton ran off with the boy, mistaking him for the son of Charles White living next door, with whom they had had trouble.

Who were these so-called foreigners? And what beef could they possibly have with a New Jersey flower farmer that would justify harming a child that wasn't even his? Then there was the theory that Billy had been struck and killed by a car. The driver scooped up the child's body and drove it some distance before disposing of it.

There was no evidence to support this, beyond the fact that the Dancy home was on a main road, which sounds like a pretty wild stretch, but the street the Dancy's lived on fed directly into Wheat Road, the main highway between Hamilton and Vineland. At the time of Billy's disappearance, construction on the nearby Whitehorse Pike created a detour through Hamilton, which temporarily turned Wheat Road into the main road between Atlantic City and Philadelphia.

Traffic was far, far heavier than normal, which made it seem reasonable that Billy could have lost his life in a car accident. The panicked driver too frightened to report the terrible incident? Every day, the mail brought fresh pain to Stella Dancy. Letters from strangers all claiming to have seen the missing toddler.

Hercules Dancy, along with a New Jersey police officer, chased what seemed like a promising clue back home in Pennsylvania, but it didn't lead anywhere. Stella's ex-boyfriend, that early suspect, was swiftly cleared when it was learned that he had a rock-solid alibi for the time period in question. On October 29th, 1919, detectives reported to the office of Atlantic County Prosecutor Edmund Gaskill.

They'd chased their last kidnapping clue all the way to Newark, Ohio, and came up empty. Detective Finn Wilson declared that it just wasn't at all likely that two-and-a-half-year-old Billy had wandered off into the woods and died. He insisted that every foot of swamp, woods, and underbrush in Hamilton had been searched.

The countryside for miles in every direction had been searched. Bloodhounds had been brought in. The child isn't there, said Detective Wilson. As for gypsies abducting the boy? Nonsense. There were none within miles of the Dancy home at the time Billy vanished. There were those who whispered that Stella and Hercules perhaps knew more about their missing boy than they were letting on.

But that's the way of it when a child disappears. Sympathy can very quickly curdle into suspicion. I do not know the whereabouts of my son. All I know is that he's gone. Will I ever see him again? How can I tell? He walked away. Maybe he will come back the same way. Had an earthquake suddenly opened a deep chasm in the Dahlia fields in which Billy was last seen playing with his little chum Charlie White and swallowed Billy up, he could not have more completely disappeared.

Small game hunting season in New Jersey opened that year on November 11th, 1919. The same woods, fields and bogs that had been searched for little Billy Dancy would now belong to hunters and their dogs. And there were plenty of locals who were convinced that if Billy's remains were out there, this is how some trace of the boy would be found.

When it comes to wilderness, New Jersey may be small, but its wild places are truly wild. Impenetrable labyrinths of pine, too many spots where the sandy ground looks solid, but isn't. Locals who'd grown up stalking rabbits and birds and deer through those woods knew the place in a different way, a way that had nothing to do with maps.

Police understood that, and so they asked hunters to report anything they found, however small. It will be an unhappy Thanksgiving Day for us this year if we have not Billy with us. Billy is just getting old enough to look forward to Thanksgiving. Last year the little fellow didn't know what all the fuss was about. We had picked out at a neighbor's our turkey to be fattened up for the dinner.

We won't want that turkey now unless Billy comes back. Reporters describe Stella Dancy as spending most of her time on the family's front porch, pacing, watching the road anxiously for a visitor with news of her son. And now she wouldn't have long to wait. Six days before Thanksgiving 1919, a neighbor of the Dancy's named George Eckert was out hunting quail with his dog, deep in the woods, roughly three miles from the Dancy home.

When the dog began baying, Eckert carefully picked his way through the dense and boggy landscape, eventually making his way to a dense thicket of pine. His attention was caught by something lying on the ground. Is that a sweater? Eckert picked up the garment and hung it from a branch. Then he moved closer to his frantically howling dog.

The dog hadn't treed a raccoon as he thought. It was barking furiously at something on the ground beneath the pines. Eckert knelt and looked. It was a small, small skeleton. The bones clearly picked clean by birds and other scavengers. Eckert rose and scanned the ground around him. There was a small cat, dirty and now bedraggled.

And about 50 feet away lay a faded blue romper. The hunter immediately knew and grieved what he'd found. Billy Dancy's description had been in newspapers across the country. But this child was no stranger. This was the child of Eckert's neighbors. The scene was a puzzle as well as a tragedy. It struck Eckert as impossible for little Billy to have made his way here, so far from home.

Any route he might have taken would have crossed multiple fences. And the terrain itself, it was difficult enough for Eckert, who knew the land and was properly equipped and dressed for it. How had a two and a half year old child come to this place? To his death? A single glance was enough to show that Billy had been the victim of foul play.

The child's clothing, torn from his body by his slayer, were scattered about him within a radius of 50 feet. All indications point to foul play. And all theories hitherto held by Prosecutor Gaskill and his force of county detectives have, as a consequence, been abandoned. Billy's skeleton was found on the border of the Folsom Swamp.

That's some of the most dangerous and impenetrable land in Atlantic County. It's quicksand country. It's easy to step forward, only to be swallowed up to your knees. It was feared that a search party could be literally engulfed in moments. Had the boy wandered here by accident? Or had he been lured? Was he lost? Or had he been taken?

As news of Eckert's heartbreaking find spread through Hamilton, the townspeople looked at each other in dismay. Remember the buzzards, some said? Remember how the buzzards were seen circling over that very area just a few days after the dancey boy disappeared? And now there were signs that the child's body had been attacked by birds of prey.

Why had no one paid attention to those hovering vultures? How had they not understood what they were seeing? Stella Dancy collapsed when it was confirmed that the remains found by George Eckert was the body of her missing child. A nervous breakdown. She was placed under round-the-clock medical care. Her condition was described as serious.

The search for the child had now turned into the search for his killer. Because Billy's clothing was found strewn around the thicket, the working theory was that he had fallen victim to a pervert, a degenerate. Their words. There was also some controversy around the bones themselves. Their condition suggested a child who had been dead much longer than the six weeks Billy had been missing, which was confusing.

And DNA testing was still decades in the future. Yet the clothing at the scene had been identified as Billy's. The coroner in the case was no help. He agreed that, yeah, the bones were kind of weird. To be fair, though, you know what else was decades in the future? The wealth of scientific study and data on the impact of environmental factors on the decomposition of human remains.

Everyone was doing their best, but the limitations of the time made for a whole lot of guesswork. Anyone who lived in the vicinity of where the body was found was hauled in to testify at the coroner's inquest. One man declared that while it wasn't impossible for the boy to have made his way to that desolate spot on his own, it was highly improbable.

A Mrs. Bernice Koff testified that she saw a suspicious man carrying a club on the day after Billy disappeared and that she'd also heard a child's voice. And Mrs. Margaret Coons reported seeing the buzzard circling above the area where the body had been discovered. She told a search party about it, she said. She insisted they go have a look, but those men didn't pay any attention to her report of buzzards.

Thought it was just country superstition and silliness, maybe. Even Stella Dancy, fragile as she was, faced questions from the coroner. She shared a conversation she'd had with Mrs. Charles White, her neighbor, mother of Billy's best playmate, wife of Dahlia farmer Charles White. Mrs. Blanche White expressed to me that it was her opinion that my Billy had been kidnapped by mistake, that the kidnapper intended to take her boy, Charlie, as there were some people who held a grudge against the Whites.

What happened next shook and shocked Hammonton. Police arrested Charles White, the 29-year-old Dahlia farmer next door, and charged him with the murder of Billy Dancy. Edith Jones, housekeeper for Charles White's father, who was a Hammonton councilman and wealthy merchant, was also arrested and charged as an accessory after the fact.

It was a breathtaking development and a scandal of such magnitude that the arrests were handled quietly and with extreme discretion. Both White and Jones were removed to custody at the county jail in Mays Landing. They were far too well-known in Hammonton to risk keeping them there. Prosecutor Gaskill initially refused to give any details into the investigation that led to the arrests, beyond acknowledging that Charles White, by his own account, was the last person to see Billy Dancy alive.

Whatever had led his detectives to this theory of the case, whatever probable cause justified those arrests, Gaskill refused to say. The grand jury promised for January 1920 failed to happen. February wasn't looking good either. The case was described as being at a complete standstill and cursed to boot. Charles White's father, Hammonton councilman Edmund White, was said to be stricken with nervous prostration as a result of his son's arrest.

Prosecutor Gaskill, overworked and facing a breakdown of his own, retreated to Florida for a rest in the sunshine. Remember Margaret Coons, who tried to convince a search party to pay attention to that flock of buzzards? Her home mysteriously burned to the ground. And Billy Dancy? No more was known about his terrible fate than on that day four months earlier when he had wandered right out of his life.

Gaskill returned from Florida at the end of March. He was running out of time. The law required that he either prosecute White and Jones for the murder of Billy Dancy or dismiss the case against them. April came and went and then May and then June. In July, Stella and Hercules sold their home in Hammonton. Stella's health continued to decline and the memories in that house were simply too painful to endure.

By late August, prosecutor Gaskill confirmed that the state was not yet ready to act in the Dancy case, that his detectives were still investigating. And there had been a number of reports of Billy being spotted in Oklahoma, Kansas and Ohio. Again, all were checked and debunked. Still no grand jury, no indictments. Just a strange and terrible limbo for the accused, Charles White and Edith Jones.

Finally, on the one year anniversary of Billy Dancy's disappearance, subpoenas to appear before the grand jury were served. Gaskill had still not released any information to the public regarding the investigation. And that might be because he didn't really have much of anything to go on. The death of little Billy Dancy a year ago has passed into the list of unsolved mysteries by the action of the Atlantic County Grand Jury in casting out the murder charges against Charles D. White and Edith L. Jones.

And just like that, Gaskill announced that he was satisfied to have White and Jones freed from suspicion and as far as his office was concerned, the case of Billy Dancy ended with no resolution. If the child had gotten lost and died by accident or exposure, there were no answers. If the child had been taken and killed, there was no justice.

For Stella and Hercules Dancy, there was only an impossible absence. It was a loss so profound that neither would ever truly recover. They were left with a handful of memories and the absolute conviction that their son had been murdered and that his murderer was free. So I'm going to tell you Edmund Gaskill's working theory regarding Charles White and let you decide for yourself if it sounds reasonable or so crazy lame that even Gaskill insisted it be kept a secret.

Billy often played with his dog Jack in White's dahlia fields. Jack was notorious for his terrible manners. He'd bother workers and dig holes in valuable planted flowerbeds. According to this theory, White got fed up with the unruly terrier. Friends recalled that White complained about the dog and said that he wanted to kill him.

Prosecutors believe White either shot or threw a rocket Jack but hit Billy instead killing him. In a panic, White tried to hide the corpse and then came up with an elaborate scheme to make it seem like the boy had been kidnapped and murdered. Jones helped him. People have committed murder for less, I guess. The way it all turned out, Gaskill's theory ended up carrying about as much weight as the notion of a giant hawk or eagle snatching the boy away.

Ideas are great and theories are awesome. But when lives and freedom are on the line, facts and evidence are what matter. No one gets extra points for creativity or good intentions. A child was dead. A family was broken. And so many lives were upended, ruined even, for nothing. Billy Dancy, a perfect baby, according to Ladies Home Journal, would never get the chance to grow up to be just a regular boy, an average guy, a man.

His parents would continue to be tormented by reported sightings of their child. Hundreds of Hamilton residents were inclined to believe those reports. The skeleton found in Folsom Swamp be damned. It was a story that refused closure. A story that wouldn't die. Why would it? There'd never been any answers. Billy's name was dragged into the news again and again.

Sometimes in the obituary section. Mentioned regarding the passing of a neighbor who participated in the searches. Trotted out every time another child was kidnapped. And America has quite a list of stolen children. Some recovered alive. Many never recovered at all. It took another missing child in the state of New Jersey to push Billy Dancy's story off the front pages.

And that's a kidnapping that you've heard of. That everyone's heard of. Charles A. Lindberg Jr. Infant son of famous aviator and hero, Charles Lindberg. That baby vanished from his nursery on March 1st, 1932. 13 years and 221 days after Stella Dancy buttoned her son's little sweater for the very last time. The Lindberg kidnapping ended in heartbreak.

But also inaction. On June 22nd, 1932, Congress passed the Federal Kidnapping Act. It's known as the Lindberg Law. Passed on what would have been baby Charles Lindberg's second birthday. The law made kidnapping across state lines a federal offense. That not only cleared the way for federal law enforcement to step in immediately.

It paved the way for the possibility of the death penalty to be imposed. Which might have been some comfort to the Dancy's. Who continued to face reports of their child being seen alive with his abductor well into the 1940s. Can you imagine the pain of that? That cruel flicker of hope? Those reports must have sparked.

Who could be strong enough to resist that over and over and over? Hercules Dancy died in 1969 at age 78. Stella Dancy passed away in 1976 at age 85. Both obituaries name a son and two grandchildren. That son Walter was born in 1926. Seven years after Billy was lost. He's gone now too. Dead since 1993. But we can hope that Stella and Hercules somehow found their way to a place of healing.

To a second chance at having and being a family. Of building something new and good out of the wreckage of unfathomable grief. That's a pretty extraordinary thing that humans can do. Even though we're very small and weak and often stupid and sometimes monstrous. But we can be such beautiful creatures too. Always looking for a place to pour out the messy chaotic emotions that rule us.

Always looking for a place that all that love can finally call home. Next time on True Weird Stuff. When it comes to miracle cures, quack elixirs and peculiar diets. America is the undefeated hands down champion of all time. Tell us something will keep us forever young and strong and beautiful. We'll swallow it. We'll swallow anything if you sell it hard enough.

And if it rots our bones and makes us glow in the dark. That's just proof it's working. Internal sunshine on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Bridget Goolsby, Don Morgan, Erin Cox and Kary "Doc" Bowser. Sherry, I have lots of thoughts about this story. The first of which is I am hearing this story as the listeners are hearing it.

So I didn't know that the body was found. There were lots of things that I was thinking. There's two striking things about this to me. One is the parents of this child were contemporaries at the same time that my grandparents were living in southern New Jersey. That was one thing. So that made it seem less like old people far away, no connection.

And the other thing is their son, the son that was kidnapped, was probably about the same age as my uncle who was living in New Jersey at that time. And then my father was born a few years later in the 1920s. There was something about that and the fact that I could close my eyes and see these thick woods from having been to that area in southern New Jersey.

All of this felt so very real to me. And the only thing, the one thing that stuck out to me, and I don't know if this is the way things were at that time. This child is two and a half years old and he's playing by himself in the yard now, but she could look out the window. But can you imagine doing that? Is that something they did then and didn't think about it?

Yeah, it is actually. And that's one of those things that like you'll see a lot of like cranky old baby boomers bitching about on Facebook. When I was a kid. Well, it's a different world. It's a different world now. People used to. They called it like, for example, there was a big thing that I think probably went right through the 1960s and some families airing out the baby where you would put the baby in the carriage and leave it outside in the fresh air to sleep.

Right. It would take a nap out there. Another baby was kidnapped from a baby carriage in New Jersey. It's a whole different two weird stuff episode. Yes, we we understood that, you know, the world was not a perfect safe place. But a two and a half year old playing outside in the yard by himself was not unusual. In fact, so not unusual that in not one of the news stories about Billy Dancy's disappearance that anybody questioned that.

Which is interesting, isn't it? It is. I mean, we question it, of course, because we look at it. Modern people. And it was interesting that nobody said that when you were going through the story. I went that was the one thing that kind of stuck out to me. The other thing is this reminded me of some. Do you remember Madeleine McCann, the little girl?

Yes. And so this reminded me of that story, because as it turns out, I don't remember what the resolution on that was or if there was any resolution. But her parents ended up coming under suspicion and those people clearly had nothing to do with her disappearance. There are some people that think that Christian Bruckner, who was the leading suspect in the McCann disappearance, did take the child, harm the child and will not reveal where the child's remains are.

There's a whole other category of suspicion that Madeleine McCann was trafficked into the same child trafficking network, the Epstein files. And that apparently one of the police sketches released at the time bears a startling resemblance to Ghislaine Maxwell. But there are also people that will tell you that JonBenet Ramsey is the death of JonBenet Ramsey is connected to that, too.

And there's a photograph that makes its way around the Internet where it's JonBenet in all of her pageant glory. And in the background is a woman who, if it isn't Ghislaine Maxwell, sure looks like her. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. And I thought about the JonBenet Ramsey case because you do think about cases that are modern that might be similar to it.

That was different in that she was found dead in her home where this child was found in the in the in the woods. So any one of a number of things could have indeed happened. You know, the prosecutor's theory that the neighbor may have accidentally killed him, it sounds kind of farfetched. But at the same time, a lot of times some weird accidental hapless things happen that cause people's deaths that you would go, really?

That's what happened. So as I listen to it, I want it seems a little farfetched. But at the same time, I've heard of situations where that sort of thing could have happened. And I'm wondering what evidence they had against him and the woman, Joan. None. They had none. So they just sort of that was just their theory about it.

And I guess the prosecutor, I guess they hoped that they would get some sort of a confession from them if they pushed enough on them. This case was so high profile and it's a missing child. And it's it's the missing child who was declared by Ladies Home Journal to be the perfect baby. So you can see the pressure on the prosecutor's office and on law enforcement to get some freaking people arrested here and to solve this.

So that was one challenge is that Gaskill was under so much pressure to come up with something. But the the 11th hour Hail Mary theory that Charles White threw a rock at a dog and killed the kid by mistake and that his father's housekeeper helped him hide the body. Like, did you literally make that up from like whole cloth?

Because that does not sound like completely manufactured. Well, it does. And I'm just wondering, did he have any? He had no evidence. He just he kind of came up with he just kind of cooked up this story. He did. He I think that, you know, you sit around racking your brains like there must be what what could have like they all think they're I don't know, Benoit Blanc or something like they're all.

Oh, what could have happened here? But we have to remember a couple of things were very spoiled in the modern world by forensic science, which we won't have for too much longer because y'all are so afraid of science, medicine and reality that you're rocking us into a new dark ages where we're going to be reading chicken entrails to know what the weather is.

But I digress. We have DNA. We have so much technology and so much. We have decades of research and knowledge and forensic law enforcement. They didn't have any of that. They didn't have it. So they're sure that are they sure? And I guess we can ask this now that the body they found was indeed Billy Dancy. I'm going to guess that it would because unless somebody else had some missing children, but at the same time.

Well, we have to it's very it's as we arrive at that conclusion without the benefit of DNA. But the remains, the skeleton was the right size and the clothing was all Billy's clearly identified. I mean, you have to ask yourself, what are the odds of another little boy wearing the exact same outfit down to that faded ball hat?

Yeah. What are the odds? There are two of them wandering around the New Jersey bogs. So it's a circumstantial identification. But now a couple of things, something else that we know now that they didn't know then. The clothing was scattered around where the body was found. And so they assumed that some pervert in a frenzy of degenerate violence and lust tore the child's clothing off and threw it to the winds.

Today, I suspect the story would be there was not foul play. That was animal activity. That was scavenger activity. Yeah. I think the child was not murdered. Yeah. And as far as like when they said, you know, the condition of the bones implies, you know, someone that's been out there longer than Billy's been missing. You're using your eyeballs to make that determination because we didn't have like, you know how we have like, they can use like microscopic spectrography and stuff to completely lock down time of death and the amount of time.

Oh, yeah. You know, the bone has been out there. They now know by insect activity. Like, thanks to the people who've donated their bodies to science and their bodies end up at the body farm in Tennessee, where we study the processes of decomposition under all sorts of environmental conditions. Like, we know so much now that they didn't know then.

That's why I'm gentle with the people of the past. Sometimes they're batshit, racist, terrible monsters. Like, they're the worst. And you can't even believe we're descended from them. But other times you have to be sort of gentle with them and go, they they don't know what they don't know. And they can only they only have the tools they have.

So he was 30 pounds. Right. Which is Billy Dancy. Can I just do a little aside here? Billy Dancy was two and a half years old, was 30 pounds. I was 30 pounds at a year. My mother said my mother said you were so heavy to carry. I just was like, please start walking. Anyhow, 30 pounds is really heavy. And I'm just wondering, you would have to have a bird that really was big in order to take 30 pounds far into the woods.

Right. Yes. And that OK, that that person who said now that eagle that seven foot that that could carry Billy away. There wasn't one person who went. That sounds like probably what could have happened. Nobody really believed that. But again, when it comes to a missing child, all bets are off. And there's a special cruelty for families of missing children.

Well, missing adults, too. The phone never stops ringing. And it's so much of it is not just bullshit. So much of it is people messing with you on purpose. Oh, and there. And, you know, that's true. There's so many instances of that. There are some tragic cases as somebody who has watched Unsolved Mysteries. It was a woman who had a daughter that was missing.

And somebody played her for years, saying that she knew where the daughter was and was taken by bikers or whatever the story was. I can't remember. But this person played this woman for years and none of it was true. None of it. Yeah. There's a kind of a sick individual who will exploit a tragedy that way. And this was as true then as it is now.

What would happen when a child goes missing? Now, look at what you brought up, Madeleine McCann. Her parents have been through hell for 20-some years. Is it 20 years now? I'm going to guess, yeah. Damn near close to. I don't know what kind of sickness it is. I don't know what the name for this disease is where you want to be a part of someone else's story.

These people who called in tips, I know where your boy is. We've seen this over and over with missing people and missing children. The Dancy's suffered terribly. I looked so hard for Stella and Hercules because Stella had a nervous breakdown after they found the remains. And I just – my heart was so broken for this family.

And they were – seven years later, they had another child and they were able to go on. They lived very quietly and very privately. I don't know what hell they lived with, by the way, because I don't think it ever really went away for them. There was always, oh, we think it's Billy Dancy. Now imagine with – you know that technology we have now where you can age people?

Can you imagine the nightmare that this family would have getting emails or direct messages on Facebook with aged-up pictures of their missing child? So – In the JonBenet Ramsey, there was a guy who – oh, Mark David Carr, I think his name was. Remember he said he's the one that did it and they brought him in. There was a big thing, you know, oh, you know, all right, we finally have solved this.

And it turns out the guy couldn't have done it, but he just – for whatever sick reason decided to inject himself into the story. The neighbors all said that it was incredibly unlikely for Billy to have gotten to where he was on his own, but I dispute that. Based on nothing other than I was a child and I had children and brothers and you wouldn't believe what kids are capable of.

The distances that – like when I was a kid out west, the distances that I would travel on foot, the shit that I would get up to, the places I would go. There was – in the little town I lived in, there was a community of vacation homes because we lived in a little town like 30 miles east of Jackson Hole. So if you've ever heard of Jackson Hole, that's where rich people go to do fun things.

So we had a lot of rich people that had second and third homes in the mountain ranges at the mouth of the Snake River Canyon where I lived. And we used to – as kids, we used to break into those houses all the time. So I'm – here I am. I'm like a 10-year-old girl and I've got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I'm hiking up into the Gray's River Range.

There's bears, coyotes, wolves, snakes, and I'm breaking into rich people's vacation homes and sitting on the hillside looking down at the town below while munching on a PB&J. Don't tell me that two-and-a-half-year-old Billy couldn't get where he got. Kids are like liquid. They ooze through cracks and go under and over obstacles and don't have any sense of danger, any knowledge of consequence or risk.

And once a child gets lost, the chances of that child – two-and-a-half-year-old – the chances of that child stopping and trying to navigate by the stars, please be real. It's interesting, Sherry, that in going through this, nobody seemed to have that theory. Everybody wanted to blame something, something the child couldn't have done that by themselves.

That was the thing. When anybody says the child couldn't possibly have gone that far, I'm always like I'm suspicious of that because as you say, he very easily could have. But I'll go back to this again. So how long in between her being at the window and looking out at him, how busy was she? Did she not – wouldn't – okay, it's a different time, but wouldn't you think she'd be checking on him every 10 minutes?

You are a man who has never had a child, so you don't know how quickly they can disappear. I was at – when my girls were little, so Olivia was four and Karami was two, and we were doing some Christmas shopping, and we were at Saks Off Fifth at the Outlet Mall. And I am pulling – we're in this clothing area, and I'm looking at hoodies for their brother.

And I – in the amount of time it took me to pull a hoodie and turn around to say, do you think he'd like this one, Olivia was gone. I called her name, no answer. I mean gone. I felt my entire body dissolve and turn into liquid. I mean I was – I went from how about this one to blind, irrational panic in the blink of an eye.

That child was hiding from me inside one of those round racks of clothing and giggling while I called her. It was a game. So I got lucky, but there are people who in the amount of time they turn, their child disappears and they're gone. Kids – like I – I mean I've been dealing with kids most of my adult life, and I tell you.

You're like, all right, I'm going to go get your snack. Don't move. And you come back and they're gone. They disappear so quickly, Max. She looked out the window and there was Billy down in the yard. She turned around, made the bed, looked out the window again. Billy was gone. It's that quick. It's that fast. And parents of missing children are always under suspicion and judgment and scrutiny, even as everybody else who's ever been around a human child knows how quickly shit can go bad, how quickly they can get hurt or vanish.

So I have compassion for Stella and Hercules and frankly for Charles and Blanche White because that man was accused of murdering a toddler with a rock and then hiding the body. Like what kind of twist is that? So I do think that he – I think he set about to walk in and he got confused and turned around and he kept walking.

And he was probably terrified and crying and calling for his mommy and wetting himself and scared out of his mind. And he curled up on the ground because he was exhausted and dehydrated and hungry and he died of exposure and his body was scavenged by animals. I think that's probably what happened to Billy Dancy. But I don't know, right? We don't know.

Yeah. Everybody wants to find somebody – that it's somebody's fault, that it's somebody did something. It's very possible, Sherry. I would love to see how far away from the home exactly, see it, not hear it, but to see it and see what all would be involved with that. I would love to be able to see that. So at the time – Hamilton is a pretty hopping place now. At the time it was a very small town.

At the time that it happened, there were two ways to think about the distance. There was how to get to where Billy was found like in a car or a horse-drawn buggy. And then there was as the crow flies because Billy wandered off as the crow flies. He didn't follow. Remember, it's 1919. We don't have paved – this isn't the time of the car yet. It's not car culture yet.

There's still a mix of people in buggies and on foot and horseback. So we didn't have like sidewalks, greenways, walking trails like we have now. It was a very rural country. So much of New Jersey is rural and people don't know that. The Garden State. Yeah, the part of Jersey where this happened bumps up into the Pine Barrens, which is this vast wilderness in some places.

I'm not sure a human foot has been in a minute. So Billy, like the hunters who knew what they were doing, Billy just walked into the world and disappeared from his life. He didn't follow paths or trails or roads. And that's another thing that as adults, we have to kind of try to remember what it was like to be a child and the way your mind worked as a child.

Didn't you do stupid things? Reckless, crazy? I know, Sherry. I didn't do any stupid things as a child. Yeah, I'm sure that there were times that – I'm trying to think there were times that I would get – that I would – I grew up in a department store while – and so it's funny now you're saying that I was the kid that you would turn around and I wasn't there.

And then they were always having to get on the PA of the department store. We're looking for a lost little boy. Kids don't have – okay, your prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain, that neighborhood of your brain where judgment lives and the understanding of consequences lives, where we weigh factors in making choices and decisions, that doesn't even really finish baking until like your late 20s.

What in the world is a two-and-a-half-year-old working with? A two-and-a-half-year-old is all id and sensation. They don't have any – they don't have any sense and you can't expect it of them. And the idea that Billy – Billy was used to walking across the ground to his little friend's house at the neighboring farm and the fact that it was a flower farm.

There's an added level of pathos to that for me. And is it possible that he may have taken off with the dog and the dog just merely came back? Absolutely. Because Billy is thinking, I'm just like the dog. Let's go together. Oh, the dog is going this way. I'll follow the dog. And so – but the dog knew how to get back, but Billy didn't.

And I think that you just don't – like I don't remember. I have a pretty good – my childhood is very accessible to me. I have big, long, detailed memories and I can remember – I actually can remember some of what I was thinking when I made some pretty stupid choices. But I can't get back to two-and-a-half when the world is just a blur of colors and sounds and sensations.

I can't even imagine what that child went through. There he goes. He's heading to get his friend, Charlie. The other thing that I am – that I don't buy is when they said, look, we went every square inch of this thicket and we didn't find him. When they had said that, when you were reading that part of the story, I went, I'm sorry.

I don't buy that. You remember they did that with that poor woman that was murdered up in Washington, Chandra Levy. They looked everywhere. They looked everywhere. It wasn't until long after the fact that her body was found somewhere. You see – like you see it in TV shows and movies when there's a missing person, how people form those lines where everybody is walking in parallel and they comb the field.

You know why they do that is because it is incredibly easy to miss. Like you can walk right past remains, literally right past a set of human remains and not know they're there. Nature swallows us up so fast. And honestly, it's kind of just a lucky, miraculous bit of chance that George Eckert found Billy because the world was very close to swallowing all evidence of that baby up.

If you think about the condition that the remains and everything were in. Because one of the things that if you are the person who finds the remains, you are under suspicion because you wanted to, once again, inject yourself into the story and look like a hero and you knew where it was. I mean why not at that point? The prosecutor went after Charles White and the housekeeper.

Why not go after George Eckert? Why not go, hmm, isn't it interesting? Who else could have found the remains but the killer? It was all so arbitrary and sad. I mean I feel like almost everyone or anyone who has two brain cells sparking off each other knows about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, right? And yet this one, every bit as big a story.

What was the difference? Let's say it together because it's the same difference we live with now. Ready? Celebrity. The Lindbergh baby was the child of a wealthy celebrity. And so of course, not only did that crime get quote unquote solved but a law was passed so that future children of wealthy celebrities would not suffer the same path that little Charles Lindbergh Jr. did.

Billy Dancy, not the child of wealthy celebrities. Big story. You know, a national news story but nothing happened. They ended up ruining the lives of a couple of families and then it just fizzled away and nothing ever happened. No justice of any kind, no apologies, nothing. That's because without our wealthy celebrities engineering positive change, we'd all just be picking ticks off each other I'm afraid.

If it ain't a celebrity, it ain't getting done. So can we chat for just a second? This is very tinfoil hat. This is the part where it's complete and total speculation and we don't have any proof of anything. Okay? Here we go. I find the conversation around Madeleine McCann and JonBenet Ramsey and trafficking to be very compelling.

It's what are the odds that one of your witness police artist sketches would so closely resemble Gleen Maxwell? I mean it's just like what are the odds? Have you seen this by the way? I had not heard this at all. And the JonBenet Ramsey thing, what was up with that? There's – I don't know. You want things – sometimes you know your brain.

The human brain loves for things to connect and make sense. The human brain is built for two things. One of them is patterns and the other thing is faces, pareidolia, right? So we see faces where there aren't and we see patterns where there's just data. And so I know that it's my pattern addicted brain looking for something.

But the Madeleine McCann case, how is it that we still have nothing? I don't know. I mean they have the man they think did that, right? Well, they had the man. I mean Christian Bruckner. But what's ever coming of that? And he's one of these like sick psychopaths that likes to toy with humans and their suffering. I don't know if he's guilty.

He wants the McCann parents to think he took their child and hurt her. He wants them to suffer. He's a sadistic psychopath who gets off on the manipulation and the power. It's a power trip. He has power over these people. As long as he keeps the cops busy and doesn't give them what they want, then he's in control of law enforcement too.

Do you see how like that power trip that he's on? I don't know. I don't know. We have an awful lot of – there are an awful lot of children that have just vanished in this country. Like Billy Dancy, mom buttoned his little sweater and tugged his little hat down on his head and he ran out into the sunshine and disappeared never to be seen again.

There are so many children that we lose that way and we don't find most of them. We don't find their remains in their sweaters. They just vanish like they were swallowed up into another dimension and it's haunting. And the pattern of what happens when a child disappears, you see it with Billy Dancy's case. You see all the common things, the neighbors volunteering to search, the parents under suspicion, the wild goose chases, the assumption that some other has taken the boy, the bigotry against immigrants.

In Billy's case, it was the Romney people, the so-called gypsies. It's the same. We dust off the same freaking ingredients to build these narratives every single time. In Billy's case, we see this in True Weird Stuff. Not often, but enough where it makes you like, what? The way that they'll mount these enormous campaigns against people, accusing them of guilt, arresting them, jailing them, and then it all just goes away.

It all just goes away and there's never even a mention of it again. Not even an apology like, oh, sorry about that, ruined your life, accused you of murder. Because that doesn't go away. I would imagine for the two people that were jailed on this crime, the only two people jailed on this crime, who were then later exonerated, it doesn't go away.

That exoneration, people don't go, oh, they're going to go, there must have been something they thought. There must have been something. There's something we don't know. It just makes me sad. I got a DM on, I think it was Facebook Messenger, from someone who said, she's like in Oregon, and she said, I love when you guys do stories like in New Jersey, because I don't really know anything about New Jersey.

I had no idea New Jersey was so weird. It's not this exotic place. Listen, New Jersey, eventually we'll have enough episodes of True Weird Stuff where we can have categories of the New Jersey stories, right? Because I've got another one coming up for you in, I don't know, a few weeks, a month, who can say, about a doctor in New Jersey who believed that insanity lived in your teeth.

So let's follow the math. What's a good way to get rid of insanity? Better be remove the teeth, Sherry. Yeah, let's get all them teeth out your mouth so you're not crazy. That's New Jersey. New Jersey, it is small, but it is beautiful. Its people are mighty, and it's as weird as the day is long. There's no end to weirdness.

Oh, and I loved hearing about the White Horse Pike, because my grandparents lived two blocks off of the White Horse Pike. I had the same. I can remember, I didn't learn how to drive until I was like 21, I think. So I didn't drive around that part of the state as a teenager, but as a college student, when I finished college and before I moved to North Carolina, I would routinely be burning up and down the White Horse and Black Horse Pikes.

I had a friend who lived in Hamilton, and my brother lives in Woodbury, where we had a True Weird Stuff episode where the criminal was tried in Woodbury and hanged and then buried in an intersection, remember? Oh, yeah. So that he would not rest in peace. He'd have traffic driving over. Right, I remember that. New Jersey?

New Jersey is a place where they're like, killing you ain't enough. We're going to need to make sure that your eternal soul suffers for all eternity. Most people think New Jersey is like the mob. There is mob there, there's no question, but that's just what we get in movies. There's so many other things there. Oh, there's so much good stuff in New Jersey.

We did a really fun episode on the Jersey Devil. We've done a couple episodes on the Pine Barrens. We've got this thing coming up with your teeth. I mean, you wouldn't believe how many fun stories live in New Jersey. Sometimes I have to slap my own hand and say, girl, you need to get back to Kansas for a minute because you're picking on the Garden State.

So yeah, I want to say one last thing before we leave this. When we're in our lives, our stories are so compelling. Your own life story is so compelling and so overwhelming. Your sadness is so deep and your joys are so high and everything that is happening to you and around you is life and death. And then it's just over and forgotten.

So I want you to look at Stella and Hercules. They met in Pittsburgh. They fell in love. They got married. The ex-boyfriend just couldn't let it go. He drove them so crazy that they left their home and their families and moved to Hamilton, New Jersey. And then they lost their little boy. They blamed themselves. If they had stayed in Pittsburgh, that might not have ever happened, right?

I'm sure they did, yeah. And they were both under suspicion. Stella had a breakdown. They had to leave their home again because it was too painful to remain. And yet somehow they stayed together. Who could support Stella and understand her loss like Hercules? And who could be there for Hercules and understand his grief like Stella?

Losing a child can shatter a marriage, but they stayed somehow together despite all of this. They weathered decades of looky-loos and freaks and creeps, torturing them about their lost child. They had another son. And they went on and they had Christmases and birthdays and fireworks and Fourth of Julys and ice cream and all the things.

And now they are all gone. They're all gone. Like it never happened. We spin our wheels on such stupid crap. We really do. I'd like to think in regards to that, that even if I'm gone, perhaps some energy I've passed, some positive energy I've passed to somebody, that they've taken that and taken that energy and then passed it on and passed it on and passed it on and passed it on.

And some kind of ripple. That's what that's my hope. That's my hope with that. Well, I always I love. When we tell a story of someone who's been forgotten, we bring them back into the world and they live again. And everything that Stella and Hercules and Billy went through, we bring them back into the world again. And now, you know, maybe one person will hear this and it will change the way they think about a story like this.

And maybe that's enough, right? That we brought them back into the world and their story could be good for someone. It could bring someone something good. The other thing I think about is this account of a near death experience that I read. This person was dead for a couple clinically dead, medically dead for a couple of minutes.

And they had a pretty classic near death experience. You know, the tunnel, the light, the feeling of unbelievable bliss and peace and warmth. And the family members that have gone before waiting to greet you. Right. You know, the classic ingredients of the near death experience. Right. And this person's mother was there.

She'd lost her mom years before. And the entity that was her mother said to her, you can't stay. It's not your time. And the woman did not want to go back into her body. She did not want to leave the light and the warmth and the peace. She certainly didn't want to leave her mother who she had grieved so much. And her mother told her.

And this was right before. And she described the sensation of not just being back in her body, but slamming back into that heaviness and pain. That physical, that physicality of the body. Her mother said to her, you'll see soon enough that life is the dream and this is what's real. And then she slammed into her body. And so I think about that, you know, that stayed with me.

And I think about Stella and Hercules and everything they went through and their grief and the horror of your little boy just vanishing. And I think wherever they are now, that was the dream. And it was a bad one. But wherever they are now is what's real. And we have to hope that for all of us. I like that. Because this sure as shit ain't heaven on earth.

No, sir, buddy. All right. So let me tell you what's coming up next week. And I just realized it also happens in New Jersey. I didn't think about that. Okay. So, so, so, you know, the whole like, you know how Americans, man, we love bullshit. We like to supplements and and drinks that are going to make us like younger and stronger and fitter.

If we can eat it, drink it or put it on our face, we can't buy enough of it. We love that stuff. Even when that stuff was purely poison. Next week, we're going to tell the story of a medical supplement called Radithor. What was Radithor? It was radium. And you're supposed to eat that. They called it internal sunshine.

And that's the next true weird stuff. We'll see you next week. Bye. 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 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. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

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