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Short Stuff: Killing a Dead Body · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. It's Josh, it's Chuck,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: and we're both alive for now.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you what, buddy, if I was ever dead,
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: I would I would want you to make sure of
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: it by killing me again.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but you'd be setting me up for a real
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: legal quagmire that probably would not break in my favorite Chuck.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: So I don't know if I can guarantee that.
• 0:27
  Speaker 3: I wish I could do.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: A good impression of the late actor slash magician, slash
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: kind of comedian Ricky j because anyone who's ever seen
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: the to my mind great pt Anderson movie from nineteen
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: ninety nine, Magnolia, it is great.
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: We'll recall and if you're interested.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: By the way, our friend of the show, Josh's boyfriend
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: Adam Pranica, was on my pt Anderson series on movie Crush,
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: so we covered Magnolia and all the pt Anderson movies
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: before the show ended.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: That is, I've got one even better than you.
• 0:59
  Speaker 3: What's that.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Are?
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Another friend of the show, Paul F. Tompkins.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: P F.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Tompkins, not pt Anderson. He did a script reading for
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Magnolia at the table with all the actors and apparently
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: was not doing well enough for Tom Cruise not to
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: say something like can we keep getting this right or
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: something that's a hilarious sorry, I've never heard where Tom
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: Cruise is essentially like being mean to PF. Tompkins for
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: not doing good job script reading.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: Well that I sort of like Tom Cruise until then
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: because Pauluck Tompkins is a national treasure and he was
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: actually in the movie There will be Blood because I
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: don't know, maybe he did such a good job at
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: that table reading.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's another pt Anderson film, right, yeah, where
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: he goes I'm done with drinking milkshake or something.
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: That's it. I don't want any more milkshake, thank you.
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: I think it's the line.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Why are we talking about Magnolia.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: Because once again, at the beginning of that movie, there's
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: a series of vignettes. Ricky Jay narrates them, and the
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: first I think it's the first one I don't recall,
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: but it's it's a very kind of cool sequence where
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: there's this story is told where a guy named Sidney
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: Barringer attempted suicide but it became a suicide. The long
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: and short of it is he jumped out of a
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: window his parents lived in the apartment or in an
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: apartment below him, and as he jumped and was falling
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: to what he thought would be his death, his mom
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: and dad got into an argument. His mom aims a
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: shotgun at the dad, the gun goes off, It goes
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: through the window, missing the father, and kills the son
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: on his way down to land. The guy didn't know
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: this when he went to jump off the building, but
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: there was a net down there that would have caught
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: him and saved his life.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so it went from him taking his own life
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: to his mom murdering him, to his suicide being ruled
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: an attempted one. He couldn't have completed it because of
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: that net. But it gets even crazier because when the
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: police show up, the mom and dad say, we have
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: no idea how this shotgun was loaded. We use it
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: to threaten one another all the time, so we know
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: not to load it. And upon more investigation, they found
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: that Sydney had loaded it. So he loaded the gun
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: that killed him, and so the medical examiner ruled it
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: a suicide.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: After all, that's right, This story is not true, as
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: it turns out, it was based on the story of
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: Ronald Opus, which came from an oral story of the
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Don Harper Mills,
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty seven.
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: He told the story at a banquet.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: Eventually found its way to the Internet, but Mills maintains
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: that he made it up to illustrate how turning up
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: new evidence can completely alter the outcome of a coroner's ruling.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Right, And it's a really good example of just how
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: strange turns of events in evidence collection can completely alter
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: a medical examiner's ruling on the cause of death. And
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: that also applies to an entirely like niche I guess
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: area of legal legal scholarship, which is can you murder
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: someone who's already dead? And it turns out it's not
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: nearly as straightforward as you would think.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: All right, let's take a break, what a tease, and
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: we'll come back with more talk of boogie nights and
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: heart eight right after this.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: Definitely should know.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: Y s k as Why why s k as good?
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: You should know? So, Chuck, we were talking about whether
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: it's possible legally to murder a dead body. Obviously physically
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: it's not. And there's actual case law where people have
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: done something like this, and legal scholars, prosecutors, defense teams,
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: juries have had to sort this out, and one of
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: the best known ones came in France in nineteen eighty.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: Six, that's right, with the death of Monsieur Wilkins. Monsieur
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: Wilkins got in a brawl with Monsieur Charro.
• 5:17
  Speaker 3: Is that right? Okay?
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: But I mean it's messieurs charrow What I say, monsieur?
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: How do you pronounce it monsieur? Really? Why is it
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: mon Is that all silent?
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: It's just the French doing their French thing.
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: So Monsieur isn't isn't anything at all?
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: No, it's monsieur.
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: I've heard of monsieur. I just thought this was a
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: more formal title or something. No, No, I know that's
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: it spelled in.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: That's weird, that's the famous monsieur.
• 5:41
  Speaker 3: All right, So monsieur all right.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: So Monsieur Charro was in this brawl with Monsieur Wilkins.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: Wilkins was knocked unconscious by an iron bar by Monsieur Charro,
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: and then Monsieur Charro used that same iron bar to
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: strangle Monsieur Wilkins. The next day, another dude, Monsieur Pied
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: deer Rot came along and it was like, Hey, this
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: Wilkins guy's still alive, and so I'm gonna I'm gonna
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: beat him to death with a glass bottle and strangle
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: him just to make sure that he's dead. The medical
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: examiner found that Chirou had actually killed him, so he
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: was dead. So then the question remains what happens to
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: Pederot when he commits this seeming active murder on a
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: dead body?
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Right, So there's an actual answer for this, And before
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: we get to the answer, we have to talk about
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: a couple of illegal things in another case. Yes, okay,
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: so the people who are arguing against Pedderow's guilt, so say,
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: his defense team said he cannot be charged with murder
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: or even attempted murder because murdering Monsieur Wilkins was a
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: legal impossibility. It was impossible for him to complete this act,
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: which means that he can't possibly be guilty of it.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: And that was apparently a longstanding idea in law of
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: this idea of a legal impossibility and guilt, right, And
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: so some people said, Okay, that's actually a pretty good explanation.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: I think he might not be guilty, and other people said, wait, wait, wait,
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: forget this legal impossibility, mumbo jumbo. What we think is
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: more important is intent. What did he intend to do?
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: He thought that Willikins was still alive when he tried
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: to murder him, so his intent was to murder this man.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: Therefore he's guilty of attempt to murder. And everybody said,
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: what to do, what to do? Sacrobo, that's right.
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: I thought that was sacred blow.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: So they said we must look to see if there's
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: any precedent that was in the eighties. And I don't
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: know if they actually looked at the American case or not,
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: because you can't really say president on someone else's country, right.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: No, No, it's not precedent necessary, but I think like
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: it's out there. Sure, yeah, okay.
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: So New York City, nineteen seventy five, eleven years before
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: the French incident, as it's known by me only, there
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: were some dudes drinking and an apartment. Three guys drinking.
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: The guy's apartment was Michael Geller and another guy, Joe Bush,
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: had been staying there kind of free loading, staying with
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: the guy, and they're sitting there getting a little more drunk. Obviously,
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: some hot heads. Hot heads kind of guys, and Geller
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: started saying like, hey, dude, you've been crashing here. I
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: need some rent. Why don't you start chipping in on rent.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: This thing escalated such that Bush eventually shot him three
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: times in the chest and the guy falls to the floor.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: And then the third guy comes in, Melvin Dlugash, and
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: stands over Geller and fires five more shots into his head.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: Both of these guys are charged, obviously with murder, but
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: once again, Delugash his was, Hey, this guy was already dead,
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: or at least you can't prove that he was alive
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: when I shot him five times in the head. He
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: wasn't initially convicted of murder, but it was overturned, saying
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: that you can't prove that he was dead, so you
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: can't charge me with.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: Murder, right, And I just want to say, this seems
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: like a fairly shocking crime. But this took place while
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: there's still lead in America's gasoline. Yeah, so, yeah, like
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: you said, blue Gash, that's the best way you could
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: say that horrible name. Yeah, he got off because, yeah,
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: the prosecution couldn't prove that Geller was still alive, and
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: New York Supreme Courts had done up not so fast.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter whether Geller was still alive. You thought
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: he might have still been alive, which is why you
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: shot him five times in the head. And we're going
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: to throw out this idea of legal impossibility and adopt
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: basically a new framework, or at least we're going to
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: take an existing framework and basically make it the framework,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: which is intent. Yeah, that is that, like, what you
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: intended to do determines your guilt or innocence, not the
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: actual fact or possibility of whether you could have done
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: what you were trying to do.
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: Specifically, the charge is attempted murder. What you can't do
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: is charge somebody with murder, right, because you can't murder
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: a corpse. It's just not scientifically. Forget legally it's not
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: scientifically possible, right, kill something that is already dead. But
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: attempted murder you certainly can. So the French High Court
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: weighs in on the Pardrieux case with monsieur.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: What a dope this is? This is an an instant
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: classic because of that, and.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: They came to the same conclusion and they said, all right,
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: you're guilty of attempted murder. Then, because our friend the
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: Yanks across the pond. They informed our opinion on this.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Perhaps, yeah, perhaps, so there's at least one more that
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: we want to call out. This actually happens with surprising frequency.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: I would not think that there would be more than
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: one or two cases, but there are some here there.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: One that I saw was that it's sometimes used to
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: prosecute cops who shoot people a bunch of times. There
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: was a cop in Toronto who a guy came at
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: with a knife and he shot him three times and
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: the guy dropped, and then he went up and shot
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: him a bunch more times when the guy was on
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: the ground, and the jury said, nope, that was illegal murder.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: We can't convict you of murder because this is in
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: the line of duty and it was the bullets after
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: the shots. After that, we can now convict you of
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: attempted murder.
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: It also happened to our dear friends in Australia in
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: the case of what looks like a mercy killing in
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: twenty fourteen near one of our favorite cities, Melbourne. Two guys,
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: Daniel Darrington and Rocky Spartacus Matt Scassey what a name. Yeah,
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: they got in a fight. We're struggling over a gun.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: The gun went off, well, I was about to say killed.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: It struck Matt Scassie in the head. His bodies on
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: the ground, twitching around and stuff, and Darrington shoots him.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: He's like, hey, I don't want this guy, and the
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: quote was didn't want the blokes suffering and killed him
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: for sure, then went back got more bullets and then
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: shot him again. And he was charged with murder. And
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: the jury said, you know, we can't find him guilty
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: because the prosecution didn't kill that you intended to kill
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: him when the gun went off to begin.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: With, right, But they did find guilty of attempted murder
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: because he demonstrated quite clearly that he thought Matt's Cassie
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: was still alive and shot him to kill him. However
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: merciful the act was supposed to be. And he got
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: convicted of attempted murder for that one.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: Had I not had he not tried to be merciful
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: and put Matt's Cassie out of his misery and just
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: the initial shot had killed them, he wouldn't have been
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: convicted of anything at all.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it would have been I guess a struggle, maybe
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: even self defense. Who knows how they would have framed it.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, So I guess that's the that's the
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: takeaway here. If somebody is potentially already dead, call an ambulance.
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: This kind of thing, I feel like is in movies
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: a lot. I feel like it often comes up as
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: like to prove your loyalty to the organization, like someone's
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: in there, like I killed most of them. You got
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: to finish them off so we're both liable or whatever.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I see that a lot of movies. I
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: feel like, Sure, short stuff, I guess it's out.
• 13:44
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• 13:47
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