Episode 13: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. Today I’m sharing the final episode of our series on Halloween Homicides just in time for Halloween. Listen in to hear about a dark dentist, a sociopathic child and stories of the dangers of trick or treating.
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SHOWNOTES:
• It was so strange because this dentist, y’all was actually old as the hills, he was my mom’s dentist when she was a kid. He pulled all of her teeth when she was 16 years old and gave her dentures because she had really bad teeth. I remember her telling me how bad it hurt. I thought to myself, why is she taking me to him if he caused her so much pain as a child? But nonetheless, she did… I just remember he had the most awful furniture in his waiting room, it was covered in plastic, the really thick plastic that you stick to. And then the music that he played was literally what you hear in a funeral home, it was horrifying. I can remember him filling several of my teeth without using anesthesia, so I felt every bit of it, and I guess I could thank him for my high pain tolerance, because that very well could be the reason why I can literally pass a kidney stone with a smile on my face. But this guy was evil. And it was the weirdest thing I know that many times, if you’re a good kid, when you leave the dentist’s office, you get some sort of gift… I found it really strange that my dentist had a ceramic workshop of some sort in his office, and he would make a plaster of Paris gifts to take home and paint. So we only had two molds, they were a rattle snake and an owl, and the owl was a bookend. (01:10)
• I ran across the story of a little girl named Lisa and French, and looking back at her pictures that I was able to find, it reminded me very much of the pictures that they took of us when we were in kindergarten, in first grade. So she was only about four years older than me, so I was five when this happened, and of course, I never saw it on the news. It may not have ever made the news, but then again, I’m sure that my parents probably protected me somewhat from stories like this… Because I had no idea when I was younger that all these things go on in the world. Which was crazy, and I think to some extent, it’s great that our parents protect us from some stuff, my kids probably wish I had, they’re probably grown up paranoid because they’ve heard all my death stories and the worst stories ever, but somehow they survived. Lisa French was a little nine-year-old and she lived in Wisconsin, she was murdered and sexually assaulted by one of her neighbors. His name was Gerald Turner, and he lived about half a block from her and her family. On Halloween of 1973, she was trick or treating by herself, she was supposed to have a friend with her. She had left her house at about 5:45, she had a hobo costume on, so I can imagine that she looked adorable,. She had little dotted freckles on her cheeks, and her friend Ann Parker was supposed to go with her but and got grounded, so… Ann wasn’t able to go with her. Lisa went alone and on her way to this party, she actually stopped at the classmates house and trick-or-treated, and then she stopped at a teacher’s house and did the same… Before she went to Turner’s house. (07:38)
• Of course, a lot of those forensic mental institutions, their goal is to release those people eventually back to prison and not to home, they just can’t live in the general population with everyone. So, they would not go from a forensic mental institution directly home or out in the public, they would go from there to a prison… I mean, if you could only imagine this poor little nine-year-old trick or treating on her own, it sounds like she was very trusting. I know that bad things happened back then, but I just think that they were less likely to happen then than they are now. I know that I had discussed before, but back when I was a kid, we waited till dark and we trick or treated by ourselves, our parents stayed home and handed out candy, and we went trick or treating. Now, rarely were we alone. We were usually with a friend or with several friends or even a sibling, but the plan was for her to have a friend with her, and I’m not even sure if her mother knew that the friend ended up not being able to go. But I found this a very interesting story, he basically just discarded her and he only lived half a block, so he could have been watching her for quite sometime. (15:38)
• So the fatality rate, in reality for child pedestrians, is two to four times higher on Halloween. Of course, not just children are at risk, Halloween is the third deadliest day of the year for pedestrians, and we always have a lot of auto-pedestrian accidents. A lot of people any time of year trying to cross the road where there’s not a cross walk or trying to beat traffic running across the road, and especially at night wearing dark clothes and trying to beat a car is not a good idea. So, it’s always good to give your kids a small flash light or a glow stick, put some sort of reflective tape on their costumes or their shoes or even their bags of candy. And then before you go out, of course, remind the children to across the street only at intersections and always look both ways. So if you’re going out or driving anywhere, always be particularly careful of intersections, especially before you turn, not everybody waits for the red walk sign before they try to cross the street at a crosswalk. And stay off of the side streets or even neighborhood streets,. Your phone is going to cause major distractions, and all it takes is not paying attention for a split second and something really bad could happen. (27:11)
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