The Phantom Barber

Hey true weirdos. I hope you know how much all of us here appreciate you You are the people were 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 true, but at the end of the day. It's you People will walk up to us on the street I had a guy wave at me wearing a true weird stuff t-shirt at the park It just is the coolest thing and that's a hundred percent you and thank you And we're just covering costs to be able to present this to you. We're not really making any money with it So if you could do us a favor and patronize any sponsors that you hear throughout the show that would be great 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 calm and thank you so much for listening Several members of an Amish breakaway group have been convicted of hate crimes in a series of forcible hair and beard cutting attacks Prosecutors claimed Samuel mullet senior along with 15 followers Terrorized this religious settlement in Ohio last year during the trial mullet was portrayed as a man who thought he was above the law and Punished those who challenged his authority by chopping off their hair which carries spiritual significance for the Amish Mullet wasn't accused of cutting anyone's hair himself the prosecutors say he encouraged his sons and others to carry out his plans They say he also mocked the victims in jailhouse phone calls Defense attorneys never denied that the attacks happened, but they argued that calling them hate crimes was overreaching charges against mullet and the others included conspiracy evidence tampering and Obstruction of justice the defendants who were involved in the hair and beard cutting face prison terms of 10 years or more non-consensual hair hacking Hairjacking you've probably never really given much thought to the idea that hair might make you the target of a crime And who expects the Amish to be involved in something so bizarre It happened though in Ohio in 2011 and as you heard in that clip the ringleaders name was Sam mullet Mullet it's almost too much to believe US authorities have raided the compound of a breakaway Amish religious group and Arrested seven men on federal hate crime charges in hair cutting attacks against Amish men and women Cutting the hair is a highly offensive act to the traditional Amish who believe the Bible Instructs women to let their hair grow long and men to grow beards and stop shaving once they marry hair Just strands of keratin there to protect your scalp from the sun's rays To protect your eyes from dust and dirt to help regulate your body temperature But beyond all the practical uses for hair It's deeply symbolic powerfully tied to culture From the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah to Rapunzel in her castle tower To Joe March and the novel little women cutting off and selling her hair to help her injured father Hair is everywhere in her stories and songs How many other body parts have their own classic Broadway show which is playing somewhere right now?

All these years after it's October 1967 off-broadway debut Some people are so obsessed with hair They're willing to break the law just for the thrill of touching it or Stealing it like the man. They called the phantom barber Weird stuff Summer 1942 in Pascagoula, Mississippi What used to be a sleepy little southern town have been transformed by World War two?

Pascagoula was home to the Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation Even today, it's still the largest private employer in the state The company was founded in 1938 and by 1942 Offered so many jobs that the population of Pascagoula tripled from 5,000 to 15,000 Almost overnight what had been a quiet fishing village hammered by the Great Depression morphed into an industrial powerhouse of a city So many newcomers flooded Pascagoula The barracks housing had to be hastily erected and many locals welcomed strangers into their homes workers at the shipyard in Pascagoula put together more than 100 ships and they were credited with contributing to the Allied victory in World War two Life in Pascagoula during wartime though You could say the vibes were a little bit off. There was tension and paranoia With so many unfamiliar faces couldn't any one of those strangers be an enemy spy?

Crazy as that sounds now It was a real fact of life That the US Army imposed restrictions of its own on the town was a reminder that the enemy could be anyone Anywhere and that every single citizen was engaged in the fight for freedom You Blackout regulations were announced across the state of Mississippi The exact time the blackout will be ordered will not be known in advance However, 24 hours notice will be given through the press and radio as to the day Blackouts weren't as simple as folks just turning off the lights all street lights will be Distinguished at the start of the blackout all Transportation must stop at the beginning of the blackout and remain stationary until the end Unless ordered to move by a duly authorized policeman or civil defense warden the blackouts would be Strictly enforced but people weren't expected to just cower in the darkness People must live during the blackout hours It is therefore necessary for each home to have a room available for use during the blackout periods It is not necessary to go to a great expense in preparing this room The government needs your money to buy guns and other materials necessary for our armed forces to use a Cheap paper may be purchased that will serve the purpose and blacking out windows The small red lights used as Christmas tree decorations may be used to an advantage in blackout rooms Those who care to use a flashlight may place two layers of newspaper over the glass lens Provided a rubber band or string is used to hold this paper in place Does it sound a little bit silly to us this fear of German or Japanese warplanes bombing small-town America Like why did our greater great-great-grandparents have such main character energy that they were convinced that the axis powers were gunning for some random Main Street But here's the thing they weren't crazy or dramatic because in June 1942 a Japanese submarine surfaced near Fort Stevens on the Oregon coast and fired 17 shells The only damage done was the destruction of the backstop on the post baseball field But still the intent was clear the submarine aimed its shots at Fort Stevens but the aim was bad One colonel Dhoni told the press that the shells had come close to doing real damage Too damn close for his exact words and close to civilians as well the shell that exploded near Delora Beach landed ten yards from the home of mr. And mrs. Gene Heffling None of the shrapnel struck the Heffling home the Hefflings and their two children were frightened by the explosions Coastal Oregon may have been a couple thousand miles away from Pascagoula But the implied threat was still too close to home Because Pascagoula was an important cog in the American war machine Why wouldn't the enemy do everything in its power to shut down the Ingalls shipyard?

Pascagoula embraced the war effort even before America officially entered the fight within four days of the attack on Pearl Harbor and December 1941 more than 500 residents of Pascagoula packed themselves into a community meeting on civil defense That meeting coincided with Congress officially declaring war on Germany and Italy Pearl Harbor sent millions of Americans into a panic if the Japanese could Successfully bomb the US Navy in Hawaii Who could say that similar attacks on the mainland weren't a possibility?

The best thing you can say about that fear is that it pushed the majority of Americans to accept that certain Sacrifices would be necessary for the greater good By spring 1942 war rationing was underway. There were limits placed on purchases of gasoline clothing and food Posters produced by the United States Office of War Information began popping up everywhere Urging Americans to do with less so that the troops could have more Ration booklets were issued to families special stamps needed to buy meat and butter fruits and vegetables sugar and clothing tires and fuel oil Ingalls shipyard and Pascagoula needed an enormous workforce and with so many men enlisting and heading to the front Women and black people in that part of the world suddenly found all kinds of new opportunities awaiting them Jobs that used to go only to white men good jobs like welder and electrician Not to mention all of the non-war related positions that were suddenly open in businesses and factories and schools The place was an instant boomtown But the mood and Pascagoula wasn't the shiny optimism in a place you'd expect suddenly flush with growth The mood was darker than that was more guarded The old-timers they barely recognized the Pascagoula. They'd been born in and they no longer knew their neighbors Too many new faces now Hard to figure out who could be trusted Pascagoula police chief a a is L has instructed police to check up on all stragglers at night and to redouble the watch for suspicious characters a catch phrase everywhere was loose lips sink ships The way folks saw it freedom was on the line Decency was on the line Curtains were drawn doors were locked eyes were averted on the street. The Office of War Information was pumping out propaganda posters newsreels and radio broadcasts every German is a potential source of trouble Therefore there must be no fraternization with any of the German people Fraternization means making friends The German people are not our friends You will not associate with German men women or children You will not associate with them on familiar terms either in public or in private You will not visit in their homes Nor will you ever take them into your confidence?

however, friendly however, sorry However sick of the Nazi party they may seem They cannot come back into the civilized fold just by sticking out their hand and saying I'm sorry Don't clasp that hand It's not the kind of a hand you can clasp in friendship The Japanese weren't spared this treatment Trust me This clip features an actor wearing very bad makeup to try to appear Japanese While speaking in a caricature of a Japanese accent it is so racist that your jaw drops You have not met our workers have you meet them now and see why I laugh They work longer hours than you do twice as long quite often Why not? They are not working by the clock They are working to win the war So there was Pascagoula a very small town that saw its population explode sevenfold Almost overnight the Ingalls shipyard was a bustle of lights and noise and activity 24 hours a day The war had come to this quiet village on the Gulf. You could feel the tension in the humid air No wonder the people were edgy suspicious They were right to be as it turned out on the night of June 5th 1942 There was the most peculiar and alarming incident at the Our Lady of Victory's convent The Sisters of Perpetual Adoration have been conducting a school at their convent since 1882 Some students boarded at the convent They were tucked into their beds asleep when an intruder crept into their sleeping quarters according to reports the children Edna Marie Hydel age 7 Mary Evelyn Briggs age 10 and Laura Briggs age 8 Were asleep when Mary Evelyn was awakened by someone fingering her hair She was startled and the would-be Haircutter put his finger to his lips saying The child called out to sister Camille and the man made his escape by a window Laura Briggs was the only one to escape losing her tresses the other two girls hair having been Whacked off looking at the girls badly butchered hair. It had been lopped off in ragged chunks Police theorized that the man had used either a razor or a pocketknife The children couldn't provide a description beyond saying that it was a man who might have been short and stout The entire incident was strange and puzzling no one was harmed. Well, not exactly anyway Nothing was stolen Except for the children's hair and there really wasn't much in the way of legal precedent for that in Pascagoula Whoever heard of someone climbing through a convent window to hack the hair off the head of a sleeping child Any hopes the police had that this was one heck of a weird one-off were dashed three days later June 8th 1942 this time the victim was small Carol Peattie Daughter of mr. And mrs. David GPT of Pascagoula Street Ragged handfuls of hair were cut from the head of the child and the hair was Apparently taken away by the intruder the circumstances suggested a perpetrator Who was bold to the point of recklessness?

He'd entered the PD home while adults were present and awake Mrs. Peattie was away, but another couple the Henshaw's were staying to help. Mr. Peattie look after the children in her absence Now at the time of the break-in, mr. Peattie was asleep in his bed. Mr. Henshaw was asleep on the porch But mrs. Henshaw was awake sitting in the living room reading I heard a noise in Carol and David's room But I thought David was having a nightmare as he frequently does David was Carol's twin brother the children shared a bedroom I went to the dining room window, but didn't see anything and when I came back into the hall I turned on the light when the light went on the noise stopped and I thought it was nothing I turn off the light again and went back to the living room despite finding nothing amiss Mrs. Henshaw was uneasy. She went out to the porch and awakened her husband The man worked the night shift at Ingalls and it was time for him to get ready for work Anyway, would he please come with her to check on the children?

at first everything seemed in order and Then mrs. Henshaw saw it on the bed. She herself slept in right there next to the twins Sand on the coverlet. I knew no one had been on my bed with shoes on then I looked closer and saw a big footprint in sand on a mattress pad Folded on the suitcase at the foot of the bed the Venetian blinds and the only window in the room were down and appeared untouched When mr. Henshaw had a closer look though He saw that the window screen had been cut and the window unlatched It was only then that the couple looked more closely at the sleeping twins and Realized that swaths of Carol's hair have been shorn from her little head Mr. Peattie was roused and the police were called Fingerprints were found on the windowsill in the bedroom police compared those prints to the ones left on a windowsill at the convent and found They didn't match According to Pascagoula police officer re Jones there may be two or more working together But they don't seem to be the same Prince. How would you even go about calculating the odds of two hair fetish burglars?

Operating in the same town at the same time It seemed incredibly unlikely that there was more than one perpetrator What about that footprint some in the town wondered that doesn't tell you anything That footprint is no use at all in identifying this intruder for one The man was wearing shoes that print was smeared though I will say it did appear to be large the fingerprints may not have matched but the mo sure did The hair bandit had used a wheelbarrow to reach a window into the convent kitchen He cut the window screen and as he climbed through he left a footprint on the stove He was quiet police said and clearly very gentle since his victims mostly slept through the entire event Carol Peattie said she felt something touching her hair But was so sleepy that it seemed that she just couldn't quite open her eyes I brushed Carol's hair before bed and tied it back in a ribbon That man had turned the child's head and cut almost all the hair from the back Only the pieces at the front were their original length. Oh that poor girl Pascagoula was troubled enough by the fact that an unknown person was creeping about at night slicing through window screens entering homes But it was what that unknown person was doing once inside that kicked off a panic Burglary robbery the taking of valuables that at least made sense but this this Unwholesome attack on the heads of children then on June 13th the perpetrator now dubbed the phantom barber Struck again, and this time his targets were all grown up That next attack came in the wee hours of Saturday, June 13th, and it was nearly fatal the victims were mr.

Their home only when mrs. Heidelberg was struck across the mouth with a heavy two and a half foot pipe Which the attacker later left on the blood-stained bed? The young woman rolled to her side under the impact of the blow and received the next Downward sweep of the weapon on her shoulder at this instant mrs. Heidelberg awoke and raised her right arm Which took the full force of a terrific blow which narrowly escaped?

shattering the bone The man then struck mr. Heidelberg twice on the head leaving long gashes on the sides of his head the pipe just missed clipping Heidelberg on the temple Then the attacker turned his attention back to mrs. Lillian Heidelberg Viciously striking her several more times with the pipe then he dropped the weapon and flung himself through the same bedroom window He'd entered on the dresser by the side of the bed was Heidelberg's wallet and a small pile of change The intruder left both untouched and the Heidelberg's bleeding and unconscious Mrs. Heidelberg came to first and called police Officers on duty were slow to respond as they were trying to apprehend a prowler a few blocks over Of course by the time they arrived The intruder was long gone The injured couple was taken to Jackson County Hospital in addition to numerous bruises Three of mrs. Heidelberg's front teeth were knocked out completely and were found in the bed Her lip was severely cut Doctors who treated her believed that several other teeth were so badly damaged that they will have to be removed She was kept at the hospital Mr. Heidelberg was treated and allowed to leave Clearly whatever this was it had escalated beyond snipping hair into violent assault Bloodhounds were brought in the dogs almost Immediately picked up a scent just outside the window through which the man had entered the Heidelberg home Dogs lost the scent in the thicket of brush at the market in Jackson Street intersection Police theorized that the suspect had hidden a bicycle there and used it to make his escape but the dogs did turn up a little pile of evidence a Pair of bloody gloves dropped by the perpetrator as he fled through the trees The gloves were a woolen knit pair belonging to mrs. Heidelberg They'd been taken from the glove box of the Heidelberg car The dogs also alerted on a pair of pliers and a screwdriver found lying in the street in front of the Heidelberg home The tools had also been taken from the car From our perspective here in the harrowing days of the 21st century when we're all citizens sleuths hooked on the true crime drip This seems like an awfully big escalation One day you're quietly snipping the hair off the heads of sleeping children. The next you're beating a woman half to death with a pipe Is it possible?

The Pesca Gula in the summer of 1942 was being stalked by two different assailants One a hair-obsessed freak with a knack for breaking and entering and the other a more typical thug Police were being kept busy by nightly reports of attempted break-ins numerous houses have been entered or tampered with and many reports of Lurkers have reached the police in only one case was money or anything of value Taken and now along with those three little girls sporting badly chopped hair a couple had been brutally beaten None of it made sense to police chief Ezell. I am reluctant to admit this But I see no other motive involved here than a calculated effort It's sabotaged through the spreading of terror among the families of working men in an important shipbuilding plant here thus Causing them to neglect their work or to stay off the job to protect their families It was true that Terrell Heidelberg worked at Ingalls shipyard It was also true that the people of both Pesca Gula and nearby Moss Point were now taking Extensive precautions for their own safety Windows were nailed closed Bars were installed on doors Applications for firearms permits piled up Folks were sleeping with loaded guns at hand and police chief Ezell requested residents to stay indoors after dark The fewer people are out the easier. It's gonna be to spot a suspicious character Women increasingly feared being out after dark, but they also feared being at home Men were now staying home in increasing numbers to protect their families was Ezell right about the whole panic being Engineered by the enemy to slow down wartime production at the shipyard Authorities at Ingalls acknowledged the spike in absenteeism But insisted that it hadn't reached a point of concern It was the local panic that was more worrisome as an editorial in a local paper That this is a serious situation cannot be denied But the rumors surrounding these facts sometimes bordering on the Fantastic are setting the stage for a wave of mass hysteria Both the police and the sheriff are doing all within their power To catch the criminals and that they will be caught as a foregone conclusion If The so-called Phantom barber had upped the ante by battering Lillian Heidelberg with a metal pipe He was about to do it again on Saturday June 20th a man tried to force his way into the home of one HM Brodess father of Pascagoula police officer Raymond Brodess Mr. Brodess unlike the other victims was wide awake when he heard the sound of his front doorknob jiggling This was followed by the sound of something heavy slamming into the door itself What do you mean with that boy no answer and no one there and then Brodess heard it The sound of a side door scraping in protest as it was forced open He pulled so hard that he broke loose a heavy catch and managed to swing the door open Though it hadn't been used in several years Mr. Brodess was face to face with the phantom barber the spring on my gun was broken But I had a wrench I

Swung at him as he came in the blow landed hard and the two men wrestled for several minutes before the intruder escaped through That same door Slamming it Brodess face Then he was gone sprinting through the darkness by way of backyards Vanishing before police could even arrive and then the next night Sunday, June 21st He attacked again the phantom barber struck again Taking his strange toll of human hair from the head of mrs.

R E Taylor of North Pascagoula Street This time the phantom barber brought along a little helper a rag soaked in what police believed to be chloroform I woke up about midnight with an awful smothering sensation I called my husband and I told him I thought I was smothering to death and then I became violently ill I didn't even know my hair had been cut until I put my hand up to my head and I Discovered that it was a lot shorter on one side than the other when police searched the room They found pieces of hair in the bed and a screen wide open in the bedroom window Mrs. Taylor had been sleeping right next to that window Could the phantom barber have hacked her hair without ever entering the room?

It was a possibility Mr. Taylor hadn't awakened until his wife called out for him Their two married daughters home for a visit with their parents also slept through the incident Unfortunately for the police Heavy rain had fallen all that Sunday late into the night The ground outside the Taylor home was saturated there were no discernible footprints to be found The neighbors didn't see or hear anything Though police noted that the Taylor's bedroom window had been shielded from the street by two cars parked in the driveway The idea that the Axis powers were running an espionage operation in Pascagoula, Mississippi in the summer of 1942 would be pretty hilarious if both the Allied and the Axis powers Weren't guilty of some truly unhinged bizarre and nutty plots and schemes like operation bat bomb to name just one Picture a four-foot-long bomb packed with hundreds of live Mexican freetail bats Each bat has been fitted with a teeny tiny incendiary device created by the inventor of napalm Now drop that bomb over Japan the bats released from captivity would spread out over a 20 to 40 mile radius They'd look for spots to roost Buildings at that time in Japan were made mostly of wood and paper very flammable Let the bats get cozy and then boom there we bombs went off causing widespread fire chaos confusion and destruction and This was no wild idea that got floated And then dismissed they actually built the bomb They made the little incendiary devices and they carefully attached them to the bats The first test of the bat bomb resulted in a fire on an air force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico Next they headed to utah and built a mock-up of a Japanese village This launch of the bat bomb was much more successful And the only reason it never made its debut on the war stage was a little something called the Manhattan Project Research on the atom bomb pushed wacky weapons like the bat bomb aside Though I think you could argue that humanity would be far better off if our most dire weapon Was a metal canister packed with flaming bats Anyhow in a world where military experts dreamed up squadrons of bat arsonists Why not terrorize the shipbuilders of Pascagoula, Mississippi by sneaking around in the dead of night with a pair of scissors?

It took police chief Azelle with the help of a detective from the Pinkerton agency Until the middle of August to make an arrest The suspect's name was William Dolan a 57 year old German chemist educated at Harvard and MIT Dolan as it happened had beef with Terrell Heidelberg's father a local judge That police theorized was Dolan's motive for so brutally attacking judge Heidelberg's son and daughter-in-law Okay But what about the rest the hair cutting the little girls?

Dolan police said was a Nazi sympathizer bent on harming the American war effort Dolan is a German educated chemist his motivation chief as a Charged was to impair the moral of war workers operation great clips Operation super cuts. I mean, yes a bad haircut can be traumatic but traumatic enough to plunge the world into fascism Though Dolan wasn't initially charged in the hair-cutting assaults a search of his home turned up a few pairs of barbering scissors a bundle of human hair including some strands that Appeared to have been taken from little Carol Peattie's sleeping head was found hidden alongside a path near the shack the Dolans occupied Cops had to eyeball that evidence since it'd be another decade before Watson and Crick announced the discovery of the double helix DNA a Discovery they stole from Rosalind Franklin, but I'll shut up about that for now The jury needed only three hours to find William Dolan guilty of the attempted murder of Terrell and Lillian Heidelberg Sentenced to ten years in prison Dolan was remanded to parchment prison deep in rural Sunflower County, Mississippi Roughly 100 humid sticky miles south of Memphis, Tennessee Dolan served six years of that sentence before Mississippi governor Fielding Wright Decided that maybe this was an innocent man who'd been railroaded into prison by a town panicked by wartime propaganda We say we give this Dolan fellow a polygraph exam said the governor Polygraph results aren't admissible in court today back then This was legit science and an outstanding tool for law enforcement Dolan passed his polygraph in 1948 he was released from prison on a limited and restricted parole Three years later the governor argued that Dolan had demonstrated model behavior since release. He deserved his full freedom Governor Wright's successor went one better and granted Dolan a full pardon The man tried to rebuild his life he and his family left Pascagoula moving 60 or miles so west to Waveland, Mississippi and then Dolan disappeared Before he left though, he signed every single thing he owned over to his wife Three weeks later the body of a drowned man was found floating in the Mississippi River near Chalmette, Louisiana Dolan's wife and stepdaughter identified the dead man without hesitation but The fingerprints of William Dolan received from parchment prison do not match those taken from the body Dolan's widow Maybe wife was insistent that the drowned man was her husband Even though she said she didn't recognize the clothing. He was wearing and also she never known him to carry a watch Yet a watch was found on the body The shoes though those she knew plus the scars matched one on the chin another on the leg the relic of an old bullet wound She wasn't alone in her belief that this was the body of William Dolan Old friends made the trip to Chalmette and also identified the body as his The widow Dolan claimed that body and arranged for burial in the Cedar Rest Cemetery in Bay st. Louis, Mississippi and then in April 1954 William Allen Dolan Mourned by his wife when authorities buried at Bay st. Louis a body She said was his was reported today to have turned up alive in Sacramento, California

Sheriff John egg Luff of Hancock County, Mississippi said an FBI check of fingerprints had identified the Dolan picked up by Sacramento police as the Dolan for whom the funeral services were held So William Dolan kind of drowned after all he'd been arrested for vagrancy in, California Fingerprints and mugshot taken before he was released That man told police that he was a New York native no mention at all of any ties in, Mississippi police released him from custody and Ordered him out of Sacramento It was a mess the body lying under the headstone Mark Dolan was immediately reclassified as unidentified but mrs. Dolan Refused to accept that the man she buried Wasn't her husband if that man had gotten out of the casket and apologized for getting drunk I'd be living with him today as for the man arrested in Sacramento The only way I would believe it was him is if I talked to him on the phone or saw him Personally because he would know what to call me Was it grief that made it impossible for mrs. Dolan to accept that the man she loved Was capable of such cruel abandonment and deception was a grief or was a greed the Mississippi State Legislature had been in the process of making a $2,500 payout to the widow Dolan for her husband's unwarranted imprisonment for the attack on the Heidelbergs That was a sum equal to over $30,000 today And mrs. Dolan wasn't pleased to learn that the state had decided to hold that money back Until it could be given to mr. William Dolan himself In February 1955 Mrs. Dolan changed her mind about just who was buried in the grave set aside for her husband Now she believed William Dolan. She called him blackie Was still alive somewhere What convinced her?

the insurance company Flatly refused to pay out the life insurance policy I went to California where they said he was arrested. I looked at his signature. The handwriting was blackies All right, the picture still don't look like him He must have swollen or gained a lot of weight, but the handwriting is his she could offer no Explanation as to why her husband bolted and allowed his family and friends to think he was dead I don't know why he left home He didn't have anything to run away from nobody done nothing to him a mystery Like the mystery of just who exactly was that man buried in William Dolan's grave?

I don't know nothing about that one and the New Orleans police don't know anything either But if anybody wants him can come dig him up if they like The truth of what really happened that summer in Pascagoula is unknown William Dolan hotly denied being the Phantom Barber and he was ultimately exonerated in the attack on the Heidelbergs Yet it's a fact that his arrest in August 1942 Coincided with the end of this strange spate of break-ins and assaults that had terrorized the town for months Was Dolan just a handy scapegoat?

He was German probably so and loud in his support for Hitler At a time when tensions were high in a place where people had reason to be guarded and suspicious of anyone voicing Anti-american sentiments it's easy to see how someone like Dolan could be branded a spy a saboteur an enemy This theory doesn't explain the Phantom Barber's assault on the shining blonde heads of sleeping little girls But honestly, what could?

The answer is trichophilia The deriving of sexual pleasure from looking at or touching or even eating human hair Could be all kinds of hair or a very specific color texture of hair Nothing wrong with that. As long as everyone involved is an adult capable of consent Trichophilia becomes a problem when you're breaking into a home in the middle of the night to snip the locks of a six-year-old child It would be weird and baffling today Never mind in Pascagoula in 1942 At least today a trichophiliac can get their fix watching Pantene shampoo commercials on repeat but in 1942 When a fetish crosses the line into obsession When it begins to cause the individual distress When they begin acting on urges that involve another human being who either doesn't consent or can't consent That's when a fetish becomes a disorder That's when shame and anguish can morph into pathology and even violence You think about it the Phantom Barber had a taste for a lot more than human hair His victims were always asleep in their beds the most vulnerable and helpless a person can be He violated first the sanctity of their homes and then their bodies That had to be part of it part of the thrill his complete power and control over his victims Their utter helplessness as he raised his steel shears Gleaming strands slipping like cool silk into his waiting hand His heart beating so hard. It was a wonder to him that the whole house didn't wait for the sound What must it have been like to live in Pascagoula when the Phantom Barber stalked the streets That's the signal they're calling for a blackout tonight That's nothing like regular darkness the kind of darkness that a person's eyes adjust to The kind of darkness where you can suddenly hear the sounds of the night world No, a blackout is a different kind of dark Because all around you you feel the weight of hidden things Hidden people like prey crouched knowing that the slightest movement may bring down the talons of the circling hawk The threat was everywhere the skies might conceal the enemy plane Submarines lurked off the coast any familiar face could belong to the one building the bomb chambering the bullet igniting the blaze For the shipbuilders of Pascagoula the war wasn't happening in some faraway place It was right here at home, too No place was safe Even the sisters and children at Our Lady of Victory's convent could tell you that And so a man was arrested and then pardoned a funeral was held and then the dead man was found alive And in all of that drama something was almost forgotten The Phantom Barber was never caught never identified never brought to justice Maybe that man was William Dolan Maybe it wasn't We don't really know people not even the people we love it's amazing isn't it the secrets folks can keep Have you ever helped to clean out a person's home after they've died?

It's the strangest experience a mix of sorting through the humble remnants of a life the worn toothbrush The battered spatula the discarded pairs of reading glasses and in all of that everyday clutter You'll almost always find something inexplicable like an old wedding band that no one can account for a Manila envelope stuffed with yellowing paperwork wait was mom's brother in an asylum Photographs of strangers leaning against old-timey cars or standing stiffly posed at what might have been a wedding or maybe a christening an Old unloaded Colt single-action revolver wrapped in oily cloth a creased envelope holding the brittle remains of a single dry carnation a Small suitcase packed with carefully folded little cotton dresses What child were those a?

stack of old newspapers dating back to World War two a Random old fire hazard if ever there was one and what's that? You it's a plastic bag filled with hair You tell yourself that people back in the day who were so weirdly sentimental Saving a lock of hair from every child's first haircut. I mean what else could it be right? It's a bag of human hair Didn't the Victorians make crafts out of hair and stuff?

Yikes The plastic bag is cloudy with age, but when the light catches it just right those blonde Strands seem to almost glow Creepy why would anyone save such a morbid souvenir? That's going straight into the trash you Next time on true weird stuff We're going to take a look at cults and cons and charlatans We're going to pay a visit to unholy City Because when you're a cult leader Why not start your own religion?

Why not build your own town and then why not run it however you please that's on the next true weird stuff special thanks to our voice talents on this episode Carla Richardson Lamar Richardson Heather Elizabeth Erin Cox Kevin Nash Kary "Doc" Bowser and Don Morgan Sherry when you talked about this and they arrested this William Dolan I'm guessing that these bizarre Attacks as it were stopped at that point just like a faucet being turned off I mean you still had you know, but this point Pascagoula was a boomtown and you had You had a lot of transient people coming in and working on the shipyard You said it was chaotic and you still had break-ins. I mean, you know, you still had crime there was the you know vandalism and breaking and entering but but the Snipping of the hair of sleeping people that ended abruptly with the arrest of William Dolan. I Things like this concern me because on the face of it you go. Well, it's it's strange and quirky But if you remember remember the Golden State killer, he started out he was in a place called Visalia If I'm saying that right? Yeah, and he was the Visalia ransacker So he'd go in and ransack homes and that's kind of that was his first level in this And then he got into a higher level until now. He's raping and killing And so it's possible that this was an entry level to something that could happen. That would be far more sinister somewhere along the line And I think if you if you look at just what we know right of this unsolved cold case There was there was the definitely the appearance if there was a single perpetrator There was the appearance of escalation But the escalation was so abrupt like we literally went from snipping someone's hair to beating this woman almost to death I mean she was so disfigured with a pipe So there was no in-between step and like if you if you look at like FBI Profiling and stuff, you know that you can see the gradual Escalation which is why many people don't think that the The the attack on the Heidelberg's was the same person who was cutting the hair. Mm-hmm But what are the odds that you had two?

perpetrators At the same time. I mean, I guess so let's say it was William Dolan So the attack stopped after he was arrested so that would point to perhaps that it was him And then there is all of this bizarre behavior afterwards now that doesn't mean that he necessarily was guilty of those crimes, but Certainly, it does point to some Head-scratching behavior. Let's put it that way Dolan if Dolan is an innocent man. He sure made himself look guilty Hmm. He surely did now You could say that Maybe okay. Here was this guy was a big-time Hitler fanboy Nazi sympathizer There were a lot of them by the way There were a lot of them in this country and either still are we didn't eradicate them when we should have and so, you know Here they are. I mean you got a you know, you got to deal with the problem Decisively in the beginning, but okay. So here's what I'm thinking about William Dolan He he lived here, but he was not he lived in America, but he was not an American it and I don't mean that by His citizenship status. I mean his his ethos was not he he wanted the final solution to come to these shores He was an unapologetic Nazi. He was an unapologetic Hitler Sympathizer so he gets arrested and he goes to parchment prison now I cannot even begin to describe to you how you much you don't want to go to parchment It's a terrible at no time. Did you want to go to parchment, right?

And now now he's been he's had his freedom taken away from him by a government that he does not view as Worthy a legitimate thing. He gets out. He's pardoned and He just can't go back to Living, you know in in the small town and playing the game anymore. He's so pissed off. He's furious He's bitter prison has changed him parchment would do that to anybody He walks out of his life and basically begins riding the rails and you know living by his wits that the fact that he abandoned his family in Mississippi is Not proof to me that he's guilty of anything other than being just destroyed by his time at parchment Can you talk to me about?

The money so there were two different money situations here My correct one was a life insurance policy and another was something from the state because he wrongfully imprisoned Yeah now His wife couldn't get her hands on any of on any of it. So it's possible I mean, I know it's hard to believe anybody would hold a kind of grudge against somebody that they would Not permit them to get money. But is it possible that that was what that was all about where he was saying?

I I'm so angry at her for whatever. I will do whatever I can to make sure she doesn't get the money. I Mean, maybe although in her defense, I mean who knows right? She she is in the story, but the the at the time very little attention was paid to her Maybe she was the most wonderful person ever Maybe she was a monstrous shrew, but I got to tell you if my husband walks out of here and fakes his death Bitch better have my money Cuz I am gonna be wanting I am gonna be wanting to get back at him for that putting me through that anguish So want to break here you want to break? Yeah. Yeah No, I have things to talk about. Yes, we can break here This one is such a mess and so and so Baffling because it was never solved to this and it's never going to be solved unless we find a written Confession in someone's attic max. This is not going to be solved and I think that we did have more than one perpetrator operating in Pascagoula There were so many break-ins if people were opportunistic because of them and I want to talk about I want to talk about World War Two on American soil because we we have memory hold that in this country. We're not You and I are history nerds and I can tell you we were not really taught in school What the war was like for the when the rationing the blackouts all of it If you were lucky enough to have family that were alive at that time who would tell you stories about it How much of that did you learn in school? I didn't learn a lot about that. No, I didn't learn about that in school I mean, I do know that there were there were German subs off the outer banks of North Carolina In fact, they they they killed some British sailors who were out there Those British sailors are buried out on Ocracoke now I do know that and that is from World War two then the Japanese of course we talked about this before since the balloon bombs over that went all over the place and They still have they're still finding the balloon bombs all these years later. So There was there was a sense of a threat It's not like there was an army at the Canadian border that was going to come get us but there was the idea that there was Sabotaging things there were Germans who were dropped off in New York who?

Ended up getting caught but they were there to sabotage the the shipyard So there was a sense of we were not protected just because we were far away from what looked like the the main action There was an idea that we were at war and the other part of it was to you're talking about a country that it had Just come out of the Great Depression where people were just aching out of living now They're being asked to make sacrifices for the greater good With these coupon books where you could get the rationing with gas and sugar and meat and all that other stuff it it was a Sometimes I think that we don't really teach that part of our own history because it argues for Collectivism, you know people banding together for the greater good and at this moment in our culture We're anti-collectivist. We're very pro-individual like I'm gonna do it my way and I don't care if that hurts you right very liberty Libertarian oriented as opposed to well I'm gonna make all of these sacrifices for so that you know for the cause of freedom and democracy We're not really do you agree? We're not really about that. No, I don't think Anymore, and and so I think that I think that there was there's been a lot of like just Whatever, but there's also been a lot of intentional Choices made in terms of what what what's what version of the American story?

We tell the only time we've had an inkling of that in our lifetime was right after 9-eleven There was there was a sense of that. There was a sense of let's pull together right after that It didn't last terribly long. I remember I remember we were we were all like wow This is really gonna change things and then shortly afterwards like no hasn't changed anything But if you remember that feeling of all being in it together how that that was like medicine for people's souls how good that felt to feel like they were all in it together and You know the powers that be don't want us to feel that way because then we might turn our attention to them and go listen Up you cockroaches, right?

So it's important to keep us divided and furious and suspicious and fearful of each other in many ways that the vibe in Pascagoula in the summer of 1942 is a micro version of the vibe of the United States in 2026 where these are foreigners. These are strangers. These are not real Americans They're coming here to take our jobs and undermine our way of life. Tell me what tell me how that doesn't sound familiar. Okay?

so the what we had in Pascagoula that summer was Because of the blackouts and the extreme Paranoia and security around the Ingalls shipyard, which you can read about it. It's a very very Important piece in the American war effort the people of Pascagoula, you know Contributed mightily to the Allied victory in World War two But anyway, the blackouts created an environment that was perfect for opportunistic, you know The blackout is not the same thing as people turn their lights off and it's bedtime Everything was just submerged in darkness. You were not allowed out on the street It and when people were scared while they were in blackout They believed that they were in blackout because there was the potential of an enemy bomber going overhead, right?

Right, so you weren't just sitting in the dark being patriotic. You were scared now Criminals people that don't give a shit about any of that What did a what was a blackout other than a chance to nip over and break into someone's house? there was a lot of Opportunistic petty crime and and you know what my guess is we're talking about Pascagoula But my guess is that was true everywhere. There would be a blackout because people are people right?

So I think you had multiple perpetrators in Pascagoula, I don't think one individual or was responsible for all of that mayhem And I think it's possible that the hair cutter and the pipe attack two completely different people Because the fingerprints didn't match remember right fingerprints didn't match They got Dolan for the pipe attack But the fingerprints at the Heidelberg crime scene didn't match any of the other crime scenes that tells me we have two completely separate Perpetrators and it's possible that after Dolan was arrested the person who was the actual phantom barber realized that God had given him a freebie free pass and you best take it you best find another way to scratch this itch And it seems like so so some were saying that it was some sort of oh I don't know terrorism against the people that were working there As an anti as an anti-war thing that they were doing. Yeah, it's that was one theory It's that theory doesn't hold much water. Does it if you're thinking how are we gonna terrorize this community?

Hey, let's cut the hair of people in the middle of the night. That's not what I would do I'd be setting up charges and explosives and that sort of thing, you know No, I'm with you, but you have to like you have to under like put yourself back I mean operation bat-bomb and that wasn't that's just like one of the You know, it seemed and and we today as modern people we have a Vocabulary and an understanding and a way to talk about things like trichophilia that that our ancestors did not Right, you know, we we have a we were more, you know Thanks to people being more open about mental health and you know We're more comfortable talking about these kinds of things I can only imagine what a poor trichophiliac hair fetishist and Pascagoula did back in the day and they did find so I They did find a bag of hair along some train tracks Near the very dilapidated Shack that Dolan and his wife lived in But that does not mean that the Dolan put that hair there if I find evidence of a crime In the parking lot next to where you live max Can I is it really like a given that you put it there No So we have different like we have a whole different we're more sophisticated about criminal forensics and and all of that now than the people were back then and I also think you alluded to this during the narration there is a there's the thrill of the control of the situation and the hair is a trophy from The fact that you had that control in that moment and I Suspect that that's what the hair was all about it. It might not even been about the hair It was about the trophy that they could take. I Think it was as much about the vulnerable Sleeping child as it was about the hair. I'm with you This is why I think and we can since it's an unsolved case we get to we get to have our own Theory, I think we had two distinct perpetrators. I think it's possible that the pipe-beating perpetrator Was involved in some of the other burglaries maybe mm-hmm. I think we have two separate perpetrators I think we have one person whose motivation is deeply psychosexual And the other person is violent is you know, I'm a violent person And I think it's two different things because when we look at So the the hair fan the phantom burglar breaks into the Our Lady of Victory's convent if you have a Psychosexual fixation on the hair of little girls the purity of little girls living in a convent Can you even control your excitement, yeah Yeah, I can see where that would be I Would play a part in it. I certainly could see that And then think about the incident where police believe that the phantom barber didn't even enter the home he just cut through the window reached in and Cut her hair. This is someone that just gets off on touching sleeping people and taking the souvenir I I don't know like not to be an amateur FBI profiler Although what else are we what else are we at this moment? Yeah, I know um not to be an amateur profiler, but when I look at the individual who is just he just wants to kneel by your bed while you're sleeping vulnerable and helpless and

Take a little bit of your hair. It's that doesn't seem like the same guy as the one that went into the Heidelberg house Yeah Probably not. I mean it seemed like different things were going on with the two of those situations Well, I'll tell you what else I think I think that whoever showed up at Brodess's house the father of the cop I Think that was pipe man. Cuz ain't no sleeping ladies or little girls in the Brodess house And not one of the victims of the phantom barber were men and he would not have gone to a house Unless he was sure that I'm sure he would have done some reconnaissance on where is the best place to go to be able to find his victims?

Yeah, you're not going to Brodess's house. You've got it. You've got an older man who lives with his unmarried son And there's no ain't nobody there whose hair you're gonna want to touch I think pipe guy might be the same guy because they're Even though he didn't succeed in getting into the Brodess home. The attempt was much more violent and much more Less covert, I guess than what the phantom barber. So let's talk about William Dolan again for a moment The the governor was that the governor that gave him the pardon. It was the governor that gave him a full part So they decided to give him a pardon So I'm wondering what kind of demeanor did he have as a person?

What kind of a guy was he because I have to think that However, he acted once he got to prison all of that stuff led somebody to believe, you know Maybe we should pardon this guy. We should let him go Well the descriptions of William Dolan are so much of their time Because by the time he was arrested He wasn't a well-liked guy And that by the way, if you're if you're wondering why you don't have any friends Is it perhaps because you're yelling at people about how great Hitler is that is gonna be that's gonna make it harder to make a problem Yeah during World War two while we're at war with Germany Yeah, so all of the descriptions of Dolan aren't really negative a sour Angry German, you know red-faced rage Yelling about Hitler. He hates America. So who knows what this man?

Was actually like he didn't get The benefit of the doubt So he he was that, you know, so he was yelling at people about this I just Usually when a court usually when a court convicts you they They throw away the key. So somebody must have been fighting on his behalf in order to make this happen well it there was no getting around the fact that the Fingerprints like that. It was a match. Yeah, that's true But but you know, but still nonetheless somebody had to be fighting on his behalf in order to make that happen They didn't have the you know, the Innocence Project the Mississippi Innocence Project wasn't around yet. I Think it might have been is so glaring That somebody was getting railroaded here. There were a couple of things that happened Like the biggest evidence against him was that the attacks ceased after he was arrested Now today you would not be able to get a conviction based on that. You just you couldn't know But yeah, that's a different time the Golden State was it he the Golden State killer merely aged out of it People always say they stop until they're caught or killed. Well now sometimes they age out Too old, you know that the bursitis is acting up. It's harder to swing the axe So that went against him that the the incidents immediately and abruptly stopped But we had I think that we were looking at two separate Situations I think we were looking at an opportunistic breaking and entering crime wave and The the sexual fetish with the trichophilia and then in there somewhere we had this brutal attack with a pipe That so here's the motive for that according to the prosecution and the police Dolan had had an unpleasant encounter With mr. Heidelberg's father who happened to be a judge That's it that was the motive for this violent attack that left this woman Absolutely distinct it seems pretty thin I mean it really does you'd have a hard time today making a case on something. So flimsy. I Think there's a lot of cases where you don't even have to have motive as long as you have evidence and they had neither I mean they've had some some motive maybe but they didn't really have evidence against him, right?

It was a thin motive and then you know, they found the bag of hair, but the hair was not in His possession The hair was found alongside the railroad tracks on a path in the woods Anybody could have put the cops could have put it there. I mean anybody could have put it there So that again, you know, like our system is flawed, but you you still wouldn't want to be in a different system because at least like now and all of our true crime maniacs know that You kind of really work to put somebody away on no evidence So it's harder to do now than it was back then and the thing that Dolan had going against him His German accent his Nazi sympathies and the fact that Pascagoula was so critical to the war effort The end everything went against him. He was guilty of something at minimum He was guilty of being German and they were gonna get him. Is it possible that the perpetrator of this crime had a Relative who was a hairdresser because one thing that I thought about with all of these was Somebody's gonna have to clean somebody's gonna have to make these people look presentable in public with their hair Oh, wouldn't that be funny? I mean wouldn't that be funny if this was someone who's just trying to drum up business for the barbershop I Guess children a lot got their hair cut at home, but for adults any adults involved with it, you know, I Think it's entirely possible that a person So that this person this individual the our theory of the cases is that they had trichophilia a Psychosexual obsession with hair now how they pleasure how they derive pleasure We don't know but we know that we know that there there was a Vulnerable sleeping component to it. We know that the preference was for children and women and he liked light-colored hair So this is what we know We know that that can escalate and become violent But it doesn't usually if you look at the data on fetish Behavior very seldom jumps that line You know people can go their whole life being so turned on by somebody's hair and never behave violently, yeah so That's why I say the escalation seems abrupt like I'm gonna get your hair. I'm gonna get your hair and I'm gonna get your hair. I'm gonna beat you half to death with a pipe Like we skipped a bunch of steps. Like there's a missing link and this is kind of like Did it be kind of like if you if if let's just say you found Men who were had hairy chests that you found that attractive Then that's one thing. But what's going on? Here's almost It's it's almost like a rape of some kind. Do you know what I mean?

I don't mean to minimize rape, but you see what I'm saying the virus. Yeah, the violation is such that it is It's troubling well that whatever whoever this individual was their their trichophilia had Escalated to the point of breaking into the homes of people who were sleeping to steal their hair So let me be clear there had there was obvious Escalation it's just there seems to be a big missing step between I'm gonna break in and cut your hair I'm gonna break in and beat you in the face with a pipe There's something missing in between those two things for me But yeah there I mean there's a clear We did an episode. Remember we did a foot fetish episode on true words. We did that right? I didn't write it Okay, the foot the foot fetish is the most common fetish. It is absolutely and it takes a million different shapes and forms have you ever heard of a Foot fetishist who escalated to the point where he had to kill you and cut your foot off Take it home. No, I've never heard that. No Mm-hmm so it's rare like a lot of people there are people listening right now who have a fetish and I want them to feel very safe and welcome because it's so rare that these things You do you everyone's consenting? You're not hurting yourself or anybody else?

Absolutely, none of our business in This case there was it did escalate to breaking and entering. Okay that you can't there's no getting around that and where might it have gone right where Would we eventually want to curl up in bed next to the sleeping child? Would then we need more and more and more to achieve that satisfaction Who knows?

Who knows and I'm good with it We don't know because it stopped when it did if it was just about getting hair then you just you'd You'd go to the barber shop and their dumpster after hours and get the hair, you know, yeah It was a specific The sleeping victim I think was as much a part of this as the hair In fact max it's possible that the sleeping victim was the fetish and the hair was the souvenir That would that would almost make more sense to me So now let's go with that right the fetishes for the sleeping vulnerable Helpless, what is how is a victim more helpless than when they're asleep and unaware that you're even there I mean you have a power. It's like being a god, right?

Mm-hmm But how do we get from that to beating mrs Heidelberg Lillian Heidelberg in the face of the pipe with not no step in between the only thing that I would say is the Golden State killer accelerated however I don't see the line as clearly with this as I did with that one Well, didn't didn't he go from breaking and entering?

Assault rape into murder. Yes follow like Yeah, he he was he went in he was the the ransacker the Vasilia ransack Are you going to ransack and he would take some trophies from that? He wasn't necessarily a burglar He was he was getting some sort of weird satisfaction out of that and then it escalated to the next thing where he's going in and he's leaving us he's doing assaults and Then he has his victims He doesn't kill his victims and then it's the next level where he is going in The assaults and then he's killing the victims afterwards. Not only that he loved he was So twisted if he didn't kill them He would get their phone number and he would call them and torment them after you want them that is before we Call her ID, obviously So But you can see like he followed a more logical follow with this it that's why I go back to saying you're probably right about that that it's two different people and given the Situation you you you know that if we were to face this sort of thing today that people would take advantage of it all over So you I mean with 15,000 people living there. Was that what it was during the war?

Yeah with 15,000 people you're sure to find some people in there. They're gonna want to take advantage Why not the entire town is plunged in an inky darkness and no one's on the street Who's gonna see you break a window at the gas station and empty the register? You know, it was that kind of like there was this and probably in other parts of the u.s There were similar things. We just focused on Pascagoula So that I think it's a fair question to say Okay If you guys are right and there were two separate perpetrators and William Dolan wasn't guilty of any of this He just was the wrong Hitler sympathizer in the wrong place at the wrong time then Why did it stop so the pipe-beating incident on the Heidelberg's I think that was a separate perpetrator a violent the kind of burglar that breaks in and commits violence and I Would invite you to dive into the local law enforcement records and newspaper archives and you'll find other People who got their homes broken into and got their faces punched That is a more regular garden variety sort of criminal Why did the hair phantom stop I think it's possible even though it's unlikely Because human beings we don't seem capable of learning from other people's mistakes But is it possible that in Pascagoula, Mississippi in August?

1942 there was an individual with a God help me unholy obsession on the sweet unspoiled innocence of a sleeping child and It was all this man could think about it was all he could do to restrain himself But he saw what happened when they arrested William Dolan and he looked hot to the skies and said Message received God. I'll never do it again and didn't and and that is possible It's rare. I think but is it possible?

Is it possible if if there was some element to this where he was taunting the police I would say no, it's not possible, but there seems to be no There's none of that. Look at me kind of behavior that a lot of these serial killers love to have There seems to be none of that. So that's why I'll go with you on that. Yeah And so when I thought about it, okay, let's say That the pipe beating person just continued their life of crime until they met with an unfortunate end as is often the case for those folks and William Dolan is just a Nazi Who got pissed off at the way life treated him and abandoned his wife ain't nothing all that shocking about that, right?

The Phantom Barber though He realized he was not a professional criminal. He was a person in the grip of a consuming obsession and he realized that The chances of continuing to get away with it we're close to zero so stopped and he had the hair that he had Or not depending on that bag of hair that they found in the woods that may have been that may have been planted Okay, we don't know that because we need it an arrest. We need it an arrest and there was a bloody glove nearby And so I imagined that gentleman because I'd some man We know it's a man, right?

that gentleman Living out the rest of his days in Mississippi with a secret But you can't live forever and somebody eventually has to empty out your house But they'll never know I mean I found emptying my grandparents house. I found a bag of hair Of course I did they saved the day when they cut the baby's hair I feel like there was a little curls. I have a baby book somewhere with my hair in it Yeah, a lot of families have a bag of hair floating around meemaw's attic and So I just tried to imagine Going through this person's stuff and there's always something that you can't explain Something you'd rather not know the backstory, you know And maybe this person the Phantom Barber Took that secret to the grave I think that there is This is one of these things, of course one we're never going to find out but William Dolan was a twisted guy Phantom Barber or not. He was a twisted guy Yeah, he was but see that's the um That's the problem with a guy like William Dolan because You can look at like this guy's an asshole and he's a Nazi like all bets are off He's an actual look at him. Look at him. He loves Adolf Hitler He's a terrible person and so it's easier to attribute terrible behaviors to people We think are terrible, right? And that's why charming Silver tongue Psychopaths have an easier time getting away with it because we just don't want to believe That this wonderful person is capable of something terrible But if we think you're a dick, I have no trouble believing you're capable of something terrible. I Think that I think William did Dolan might have gotten caught in the dick factor Effect So for me the big there's a big piece of this that It it's unsolved It's this thing that happened It's this thing that happened the entire town was in a fever for the summer of 1942 And then it just end it and it went away And We've have a lot of these kind of cases in America, don't we we're the whole town?

the whole town look at the Texarkana phantom killer. Oh, yeah, the whole town is afraid to go to bed at night and Then it's just over and there's no answers and no No justice maybe the people of Pascagoula thought that William Dolan was the culprit and They didn't like the fact that the governor pardoned him but You know They accepted that he was guilty Whereas I think the governor of Mississippi knows or knew because of course he's dead I think I think governor Fielding Wright knew they never got the guy and they'd gotten the wrong guy Yeah, and once upon a time we did elect people to hold public office Who had strong moral convictions things like we shouldn't send innocent people to parchment prison We should write that wrong. And that was the governor of Mississippi at that time He saw a wrong that he and his successor agreed with him, which tells you that there was a case there max Because Wright left office and the one that came in after him was like, you know what we need to pardon this man What does that tell you it tells me that whoever was the perpetrator was working there?

Did really important work and they said we'll move him somewhere else And when the information came to the governor went by the way, this is the guy who did it but we needed him over here to take care of this whatever had to do with the war effort and that's Eventually is how this other guy William Dolan got released and the governor and you know what it's to the credit I don't know anything about Fielding Wright the governor, Mississippi of that of the time and if I probably shouldn't dig into him because I'll find out he used to eat puppies on the crackers or whatever, but He could not live with what seemed to him a terrible wrong a Terrible miscarriage of justice that is a moral and principled stand. It would have been easy for him as a politician to Do nothing Like what does he care about some random Hitler sympathizer? Why does that why why why look out for that individual?

Mm-hmm. A lot of people wouldn't But he did and that I think there's I think that tells us something important about this case Not sure exactly what? But I I believe that William Dolan was not the perpetrator of any of these crimes. What do you think? No, I don't think so. I don't I Yeah, I don't think so just because you're an oddball or you look good for it doesn't mean you did it And I think he's a terrible I have no Like as soon as you tell me I'm really into Hitler. We have no basis for friendship I do not have any warm feeling for this man, but that doesn't make him guilty And I do think that whoever the Phantom Barber was god bless I can't imagine how hard it is to live in the grip of such an obsession that you have to Cut a screen and go into a convent to touch a little girl's head, please get help if that's you I'm cutting it. I heard I heard Merck's and Sherry a true weird stuff podcast and I'm getting hope for my problem now Yeah, I mean I listen I'm all for like it makes Pete it makes the world interesting I mean, I don't know where some of these fixations and fetishes come from. But absolutely if you're not hurting anybody, I don't care Ain't none of my business but the minute I have to say to you the minute that you prop a wheelbarrow next to a window and stand on it and cut the screen and climb inside and tiptoe upstairs and kneel next to the bed of a sleeping six-year-old child with a pair of Haircut scissors. I need you to hear me Do Not because you like hair But because you just broke into someone's house and you're crouched by their sleeping child and that is a sign That you might want to talk to somebody Or at least download the call map and see if you can't distract yourself and suffer for fashion Huh?

All right. Well We leave another cold case unsolved even though Max and I are pretty convinced we think we know who didn't do it Yeah, if not who did Thank you so much for listening to true weird stuff this we love making this show and We do if it wasn't for you if it wasn't for you It would be an act of extreme masochism and we would also need to maybe get help. So thank you for listening to it. Oh Did some digging on the governor of Mississippi Fielding, right who pardoned William Dolan and and Set up the opportunity for the state to give him reparations for being unjustly imprisoned. Take it away Max Well, he was an avowed racist He ran that might explain it then from Thurman on president he fought with Truman against the whole civil rights thing, so he He certainly might have been more sympathetic to somebody like William Dolan who was you know a Nazi supporter Oh a lot of those cake He was a supporter of KKK people to a lot of those KKK people and they and the Nazis are don't like yeah They don't like each other and yet a lot of them are fellow travelers, you know there was the American Nazi part like I Would you know if I if I was in a hurry to get taken away in the unmarked van?

We would do an episode on the American Nazi Party and the KKK but Yeah, that never went away. So I think I'd rather not at this point Perhaps we will but not today. Yes, so that would explain why Dolan was pardoned. I still don't think he was the Phantom Barber. I just don't I don't I think this there is a lot more To that part of this story that we don't know Ah, well at least none of the people whose haircuts were butchered were harmed Right, right At least the Phantom Barber didn't get a chance to escalate into you know hair violence Because having someone having a stranger crouched next to your bed with sharp scissors while you sleep But that could end differently than it did. Yeah Okay, so that's the postscript fielding, right?

unrepentant Racist who did a solid for a Hitler fanboy See you next time 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 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 Calm 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 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 copyright 2026 Now! Media all rights reserved all wrongs remembered You