HeavyweightIn 1968, Jonathan’s mother-in-law Becky spent one of the best summers of her life with a woman named Barbara. But then they never spoke again. Now, over fifty years later, Becky learns something about Barbara that makes her question whether she ever really knew her at all.
Credits
Heavyweight is hosted and produced by Jonathan Goldstein.
This episode was produced by Stevie Lane, along with Mohini Madgavkar. The senior producer is Kalila Holt.
Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Blumberg, Brendan Klinkenberg, Mitch Hansen, Phia Bennin, Justin McGoldrick, JT Townsend, Rachel Strom, Mark Barlett, Jason Alexander at the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts, and Jackie Cohen.
The show was mixed by Bobby Lord.
Music by Christine Fellows, John K Samson, Blue Dot Sessions, Hew Time, Lullatone, Shanghai Restoration Project, and Bobby Lord. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Hello, Did you just butt dial me? Because I have on my call display that a call from your number but got my numbers blocked. That's how I know it's you. You're the only person I know with a block number.
Is it where we have to go today?
Wait?
A couple of days ago, I think it was like yesterday morning. Were you thinking about me?
No?
I just thought that would be weird because I was thinking about you, and I thought, huh, wouldn't it be funny if she was thinking about me at the same time? Shut from Gimblet Media. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode the first in a two part series, Barbara Part one. Barbara shut right after the break. Hello, Becky, Hi, this is Becky, my mother in law. Last April, at the start of the pandemic, my wife Emily told me that her mom had a mystery to solve. Phoner. Emily said immediately it was all very dramatic. How are you? I'm fine, Becky, it should be said, is not the dramatic type. There's a famous story about how while making brunch for the family, her oven caught fire and as everyone ran around phoning nine to one one searching for the instruction manual to the fire extinguisher. Becky sat at the dining room table silently, eating fruit salad. So while Becky may not have a flare for the dramatic, her daughter does. There's no time to waste.
Emily said, these events happened fifty two years ago. By the way, so wait a second.
Emily said that they have like She was like, you better pounce on this.
There were new revelations today.
Oh, I see.
Okay, how about an hour or two hours ago? Yeah, did she tell you anything about it?
She told me nothing. She should just call just call my mother.
Okay, you want to hear this story from the beginning.
Yes, that's a good place to start.
Okay.
I'm trying to help out with CEO's homeschooling just a little bit.
THEO is my nephew and Becky's grandson. Last April, his school shut down because of COVID, so Becky stepped into tutorim over zoom.
So THEO.
Do you know what the word biography means? Biography is a book written by the person that it's about.
No, yes, if I wrote a book. Becky and THEO met weekly, and for each lesson she gave him a small homework assigned.
So the first assignment was to write a description you know, a person, a place, to thing, just you know, a couple paragraph descriptions.
THEO and Becky each did the assignment and then shared their essays. THEO wrote about a World Cup soccer game, and Becky, what.
Popped into my head was this friendship that I had in nineteen sixty eight, before you were born.
In nineteen sixty eight, Becky was nineteen years old. She lived in smalltown Minnesota and had never been out of the country. She wanted to see Europe, so she linked up with a work abroad program that got her a job at a commercial laundromat in Copenhagen.
But it was kind of lonely because there was a language barrier and there was no one else my age, so it was kind of lonely. And then the third week another American girl came.
What is her name?
Barbara shut.
My wife, Emily says that when she was growing up, about once a year, Becky would remove the pictures above the living room couch and project slides from Copenhagen. Emily called this Becky Time a journey back to when Becky was Becky not Mom, And right there with Becky. Hovering above the couch was Barbara Shut. Becky and Barbara Shut on a park bench eating sandwiches, Becky and Barbara Shut partying in a room full of young Danes. Do you have it in front of you, the thing that you.
Write my story? Yeah? I do.
Would you feel comfortable reading it?
Yeah? Here it is Looking for adventure. In the summer of nineteen sixty eight, I found a job in Copenhagen, Denmark. The first two weeks were lonely, but when a new worker started the factory, everything changed. Her name was Barbara Shut. She was thin and wiry, with short, dark hair and big eye. She was twenty one years old and had just graduated from college. She was rich. Her mother was a doctor and her father a retired college professor. Because her mother was a doctor, she loved dispensing medical advice, whether it was asked for or not. The only advice that stuck with me was how to pop a ZiT with a razor blade, something she did regularly. She loved checkers, and when she couldn't find a checker set in all of Copenhagen, she made the board in pieces out of cardboard. I hated checkers, but in the way that rich girls who are doted on by their parents can be. She was very persuasive. Barbara always knew what she wanted, so we played checkers. She bought a bike as soon as she arrived and rode all over Copenhagen. She only managed to persuade me to ride with her once, though I was terrified of the traffic. We spent a lovely Saturday biking all over the city until the bike she had borrowed for me gave out. For eight hours each weekday, we were at the same table folding bath powels. It was a boring, mind numbing job, but I loved it because we had so much fun. We had silly nicknames for all the other workers. We sang to the pop music coming over the loudspeaker. We laughed our way through each day. As the time in Copenhagen was coming to an end, we were excitedly planning our next adventure. Barbara, who loved horses more than anything in the world, was going to a fancy riding cap in England. I left first, riding the train across Italy, Austria, Switzerland. I missed the laughter, the singing along to Winchester Cathedral a dozen times a day, our endless checker games. She was my best friend. But it wasn't forever.
That's lovely, Becky. It wasn't forever, Becky says, because at the end of the summer, in spite of their closeness, we.
Never exchanged any information, anything, phone numbers or anything.
Why do you think that was?
I think it was because we we didn't. Our lives seemed so different.
Becky was from Waconia, Minnesota, population two thousand. Barbara was from Cincinnati. Her parents were professionals. They had four cars, five TVs, a horse. But Becky wasn't envious of Barbara's material possessions. What she did envy, though, was Barbara's close relationship with her dad. Becky had lost her own father a few years earlier.
She was very close to her father. She talked about him a lot. She just was so in love with her father, and he wrote her these long, beautiful letters every single day.
When Becky left for Copenhagen, she was still feeling grief over her father's death. For Becky, those letters had to have seemed every bit as magical as Tivoli guard lit up at night.
So I was writing about her, and I thought, you know, in all these years, I've never tried to find out what happened to her, and so I googled her and I found her immediately. It's easy to find people who are.
Dead, and she is dead, which brings us to the mystery. Becky stumbled upon.
She died in twenty twelve at age sixty seven, and I read the obituary and I thought, wait a minute.
Becky's sadness over the death of her long lost friend was suddenly overshadowed by another feeling confusion. The more Becky read, the more the obituary seemed to contradict everything Barbara had told her that summer. There was no mention of growing up in Cincinnati, no mention of her doctor mother, and most of.
All, there is no mention of a father whatsoever. You know, it had the people that preceded her in death no father, the people who survived her no father, And there is no mention of a father. And that is what she talked about constantly. She was and I'm reading this to you now from the obituary. She was raised at the Galileean Children's Home near Corbyn Kentucky, where she also attended primary school and had numerous friends. Does that sound too like she was raised there? I mean it says raised. Does that mean orphanage? To me, it sounded like orphanage. So it doesn't sound like anything I knew about her. My thought was, wait what? I was kind of stunned when I read this. The details were so different from what I would have expected. Then I started thinking, well, I'm stupid. Why didn't I figure out if she was so rich, why was she working this menial job she could have probably afforded to. Yeah, yeah, I think that what she had told me was mostly fiction. I don't know how I should think about it. Yeah, was she just playing me for a stap? I mean, why if that's it, it's a cruel thing to do.
If you were able to find somebody who is still around who can speak about her and tell you about her, like, what would you want to know?
Well, first of all, I want to know the truth. You know, what was her life? If it wasn't what she was telling me it was, what was it and why was she telling me the things that she was I don't know.
At the bottom of the online obituary is a comments section where several people have posted short notes about Barbara. Becky figures there must be someone among them who knows the truth. If only some brave soul would reach out and ask, some brave soul other than Becky.
I would never, in a million years do it, Jonathan, how well do you know me?
Becky doesn't like to make a scene, and if there is a scene, that's when she reaches for the fruit salad I want.
But okay, else to get it?
Sure? Sure shirt? You know if at any points you're made uncomfortable and need to hide behind my skirts, I'm very happy to supply the skirts.
Oh yeah, I need skirts.
A biography is a book that someone else has written about another person. Yes, if an obituary is a kind of biography, then an online obituary is a collaborative one. People leave comments that exist as windows onto a life. But the comments on Barbara's obituary page contain no stories or anecdotes, nothing to shed light on who she really was. There is one comment, though, that feels like a lead. It's from a guy who would have known Barbara around the same time Becky did. He says they were good friends from college. His name is Chris. I have questions for Chris, so I send him an email telling him about Becky inter connection to Barbara. But after about a week without any response, I dial a telephone number I find online. Someone picks up on the fourth ring, and what ensues is one of the stranger conversations I've ever had. Is this Chris? I ask yes? Chris says, I sent you an email last week? Do I have the right person? Yes? He says, I got your name from Barbara's obituary page. I say yes. He says, Chris isn't what you'd call chatty. When I ask a question, he replies with only yes or no. When I ask if he can elaborate, he bristles. I won't give you things, he says, but I will verify what things are true or not true. There's a deep throat quality to the interview. For whatever reason, Chris has cast me as the intrepid journalist, himself the shadowy source. In fact, when I ask Chris if I can record him for broadcast, he brings up Watergate and threatens legal action. But in spite of that, there were moments when Chris seems eager to talk, like this is the call he's been waiting, eating by the phone four for fifty years. In the end, Chris and I talk for over an hour and a half during that time, and almost in spite of himself, he reveals details about Barbara's life that are precise and top of mind like. At one point, in response to a question about Barbara's childhood, Chris points me to a nineteen forty's issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It features an article about the Galileian Children's Home. The Galilean Children's Home, he says, is the orphanage in Kentucky where Barbara was raised. So it seems the obituary was right. Contrary to what Barbara told Becky and Copenhagen, she was actually an orphan. She had no fancy home, no doting father. I'm not looking forward to telling my mother in law that her friend Barbara lied to her. But then Chris tell me something else. At the age of seventeen, Barbara was adopted by a couple named Charles and Jane Shutt. The Shots were wealthy, They lived in Cincinnati and had a horse. Her adopted mother was a doctor, and her adopted father, who Chris tells me Barbara was very close with was a college dean. Those were the parents that Barbara always talked about in Copenhagen, her adopted parents. So while the story from the obituary is true, the story Barbara told Becky is also true. I asked Chris if he knows why Barbara's adopted family wasn't mentioned in her obituary, not that I would talk about. Chris says, would you say that Barbara's life after the adoption was a happy one? I ask until she graduated from college, Chris says, And what happened around graduation? I ask that I won't discuss. Chris says, I feel like he's baiting me, but I've no idea why or for what. Whenever any of this stuff happens, Chris continues, you have to ask yourself what's in the public domain and what isn't. You could look up legal information about Barbara, he says. He pauses, Well, this part I can tell you because it's in the public domain. In May of nineteen sixty nine, Chris says, Barbara killed her mother. For a few moments, we sit in silence, Chris waiting for me to react, Me not knowing how to her adopted mother. I finally ask that is correct. Chris says, how is the murder committed? I ask, gunn. Chris says, do you know the circumstances? I ask, And this next part, Chris says like he's proud. I knew some of the details that the police never knew.
Oh my god.
After hanging up with Chris, I try to unpack what I just heard with my producer Stevie. Oh my I can't. Yeah.
Yeah, I was not expecting that, Like, it just froze me. Yeah, I don't know that I even want to share that with Becky. I have to admit that when my mother in law tasked me with looking into Barbara's obituary, I assumed I discover the story of a fabulous someone from humble origins who thought Europe a good place to reinvent herself, if only for a summer. I never thought murder would be an my report, and now that it is, a part of me feels protective of Becky. Her summer with Barbara is a memory she cherishes. I don't want to compromise that. But at the same time, I know Becky is someone who flips to the end of novels because she just can't wait to know what happens. She's curious, and so am I. So I start digging. Over the next several days, I'm buried in news clippings with headlines like this woman doctor found slain in her office home. At the time, the trial of.
Barbara shut for the murder of her adopted mother Jane dominated Cincinnati headlines. And just a quick warning, some of the details I'm about to share are disturbing. The newspapers describe the murder in gruesome, nearly pornographic detail. Her almost nude body was found lying face down, says one article, a full blown blood path says another. As well as being shot, Jane was also beaten with a fireplace poker, struck seventeen times in total. Just a few days ago, I'd thought of Barbara as my mother in law's European summer friend, with whom she gossiped and rode bikes. Now I was reading about her violently beating her mother to death. It's like their two different women. In the photos I've seen of her, Barbara is striking, and the papers couldn't get enough of the mysterious twenty three year old who's referred to as Slender olive skinned, elfin faced, pixie faced, and gammon faced. One headline, rather than referring to the trial as a murder trial, refers to it as a waifs trial. The newspapers carry descriptions of Barbara's hairstyle and clothes. On her first day in court, The Cincinnati Inquirer calls her dress quote fashionably short, but not mini mini. It's almost like Barbara is a movie star. From the papers, I learned that Barbara had initially confessed to the police, but recanted her confession a few days later. Why would someone admit to a crime only to take it back immediately? To find out, I contact the Hamilton County Court in Ohio and request the trial transcript. What I receive is a document over twelve hundred typewritten pages long. From it, I learned that the prosecution's case was mostly built on Barbara's confession, which told the following story. On the morning of May twenty fifth, nineteen sixty nine, Jane told her that she and Barbara's adopted father, Charles, were separating and it was time for Barbara to go out on her own. An argument ensued. Barbara grabbed a gun from her father's dresser and shot Jane. She then dragged her down two flights of stairs to the basement, where she beat her to death with the poker. If she was alive, Barbara explained in her confession, she was going to tell everybody and I was going to be in a jam. The defense's case, on the other hand, was built around the fact Barbara later recanted her confession. Barbara maintained her innocence throughout the trial, claiming the confession was given under false pretenses. According to her lawyers, Barbara was horseback riding that morning and came home to find Jane dead at the bottom of the basement stairs. I was thinking that Daddy had done it, Barbara testified on the stand. She feared Charles had committed the murder, and so she confessed in order to protect him. I was going to do anything that I possibly could to take the guilt off him. Barbara said anything. This meant cleaning up the crime scene and disposing of the gun in the Ohio River. It wasn't until later that she learned her father was innocent. During the investigation, police found blood on Barbara's riding boots and gunpowder as a jew on her hands. Also Barbara had no defensible alibi. She was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for murder in the first degree.
I hope my voice is okay. You know, we're very froggy around here because the allergies. I'll sound like Demi Moore.
Late one Friday evening, my mother in law, Becky, and I meet up in here Den. I've been looking into Barbara's life, and I'll just get in front of it by saying that some of it is shocking. Really, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The interesting thing is in the end, I think generally the things that she told you are true. And I begin with the information Becky had asked for. I tell her that Barbara had not played her for a sab so she grew up an orphan. She was adopted by a wealthy family three months. But then I tell her the other stuff I learned. In May of nineteen sixty nine, Barbara murdered her adopted mother, Jane.
Yeah really, yeah, yeah, oh my god.
Yeah.
I last saw her in August of sixty eight, so this was, you know, nine months later.
Yeah. Becky says that in Copenhagen she never saw any evidence of violence or temper.
Boy, I never saw that would have been in her I can't wrap my head around it. I don't know what to think of it. What should I think about that? I thought she was a really nice person. We had so much fun together.
In fact, the time Barbara and Becky shared in Copenhagen came up in the court transcript. Barbara's lawyer asked her about her trip to Denmark and the work she did at the laundromat. Reading it, I half expected my mother in law's name to appear, but Barbara doesn't mention Becky. But while Becky's name doesn't make an appearance, another familiar name does, someone I'd spoken to just weeks earlier, Barbara's old college friend, Chris Chris, who wouldn't let me record our call. A week into Barbara's trial, Chris is called to the stand for questioning. Were you in the vicinity of one twenty two Glenn Mary in Cincinnati? The defense asks, on the morning of May twenty fifth, nineteen sixty nine, I respectfully declined to answer that question, Chris responds, taking the fifth. Did you kill doctor Jane Shott? They ask again? Chris takes the fifth. Chris and I spoke for an hour and a half, and at no point did he ever say anything about being questioned as a suspect. What the hell was going on? Was this why Chris had been so cagy with me? Was this connected to what he knew that the police never knew? Becky wonders too, What does Chris have to do with all of this?
What did he have to say that he didn't feel he could say because it would be incriminating. Why did he do that? Does he know something that nobody else knows?
I respectfully declined to answer that question, for the answer that question might incriminate me in this jurisdiction or any other jurisdiction in the United States.
This is Chris reciting the Fifth Amendment for me, now, fifty two years later, I remember it today. A month after our first conversation, I received an email from Chris that I didn't know what to make of. In it, he told me he now wanted to talk to me, and if that wasn't surprising enough, he also said I could record the conversation. I think maybe we could achieve more, he wrote, if you're still interested, Hey, Chris, I'm.
Glad we finally made contact.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, I asked Chris My burning question, why did he take the stand?
It was to protect Barbara, and it was suggested to me by Bernard Gilday Junior, who was her attorney. Gil Day said they needed another suspect. It didn't have to be somebody who actually did.
The effect Barbara's lawyers were looking to achieve was exactly the one it had on me. Chris pleading the fifth raised suspicion with all the evidence against Barbara, Gilday was just hoping to cast a shadow of doubt. So her lawyer, Gilday was just looking to sort of to muddy things somehow.
Yeah, and have a second suspect.
But why would Chris, Barbara's college friend, implicate himself in a murder trial. It turns out that while they were friends in college, they weren't just friends.
We were engaged. She sat right in front of me in the German class in the summer of sixty seven, and one time I made a joke or something and she turned around and smiled at me, and that's when I started talking to her. That was the beginning, and it went pretty quickly.
The end came pretty quickly too. Chris was going away to California for graduate school, and the relationship would be long distance. They began to picker. The enormity of the commitment started getting to them, so just a few months after they were engaged, and well before Jane's murder, they called it off. But Chris's feelings for Barbara endured. It was something her lawyers took advantage of when they asked him to testify.
It's just a strange thing, what you'll do to help someone.
It was a desperate, if not legally questionable move, but the defense didn't have much Chris was never taken seriously as a suspect. In fact, the judge ended up telling the jury to disregard his testimony altogether, claiming it had no real bearing on the case. And today, if you ask Chris if he thinks Barbara was guilty, he's unequivocal. This is the part he learned later that the police never knew.
She had purchased a gun in Richmond, Kentucky, and she went over to some woods and she practiced with a gun, so she knew she was going to use it because she practiced with it.
I'm unable to verify if Barbara bought the gun, but it is true that when her adopted father, Charles, took the stand during the trial. He testified that he'd never owned a gun or kept one in the dresser where Barbara claimed to have found it. After the trial, Barbara was sent to a women's prison in Marysville, Ohio to serve her sentence, and Chris says he visited a few times, but most of their contact was by mail. He kept Barbara's letters and sends me a photo of one. It's written on prison stationery, and most of it is pretty mundane. But what strikes me is how Barbara records the date rather than the day, month, and year. She instead writes Mother's Day. Chris also tells me that Barbara was given a wide berth at Marysville.
She was favored by Miss Wheeler, the superintendent. For example, Miss Wheeler loved Ohio state football, and she would invite Barbara only of all the prisoners to come over and watch the game. No other prisoner could go into Miss Wheeler's house.
In that he sees Barbara's special talent for manipulation. In prison, Chris says Barbara was somehow allowed to keep a camera and even a small dog, and she was paroled after fifteen years, five years earlier than the minimum stipulated by her sentence. It's all part of a bigger pattern, he says, like how his parents put up half the money for Barbara's bail.
She used people. Okay, she could get me to do things. I drove her weekly to her horse riding lessons, I bought her presence, I started smoking with her. She had this feeling of entitlement. I think I would say that was part of her character.
Hmm.
She wanted to get her away.
My mind returns to what Becky said about being with Barbara and Copenhagen, the checkers game she was forced to play, the bike ride she had to take. In nineteen seventy two, Chris got married and he and Barbara fell out of touch. In nineteen eighty four, Barbara moved to Columbus, Ohio after being paroled. Then in nineteen ninety one, Chris's marriage ended. He didn't wait long before reaching back out to Barbara and beginning a correspondence, why do you think you reached out to her after all those years apart?
Curious and I still had strong feelings for her.
Talking to Chris on the phone fifty years later, it still feels like Barbara exerts a strange force. Chris tells me about this one day in nineteen ninety one, when he was passing through Columbus on his way to visit family in Cleveland. The way Chris describes it, it almost sounds like his car started driving itself.
I had my daughter with me, and Barbara had sent me a picture of her, a little Toyota or Mazda whatever she had, with a flower on the antenna. And I remember stopping and looking at the house and telling my daughter, who was maybe thirteen at the time, I said, that's Barbara's car, and this is where she's living, and I'll never forget. My daughter said to me, Daddy, are you going to go in and see her? And I said, no, I just want to know that she's okay.
Hearing the story, I can't help but wonder if the real reason Chris changed his mind about speaking with me was simply because he longed for someone with whom to share Barbara stories. When I asked Chris if, in the years after Barbara committed the murder, he'd never heard her express remorse, Chris says no, But then he tells me one more story from Barbara's life after prison.
She was cutting the grass, wet grass, and wet grass sticks to the bottom of where the blade is and you have to clean it out. So she stopped the engine, but she didn't disconnect the wire to the sparks blog, and she moved the blade to get all the grass out, and the motor started and so two of her fingers were cut off. And later, at some point she said she thought it was punishment for killing her mother. She didn't say it as bluntly as that, but that's what she was saying.
What started this all was the obituary. Yeah, And although everything in it was accurate, it sure didn't tell the whole story.
Which is what Becky wonders about now, the whole story, because while the evidence against Barbara is overwhelming, neither Becky nor I are convinced by the motive the prosecution presented. Why would be told to move out cause the three year old college graduate to fly into a murderous rage. Plus, if Chris is to be believed, Barbara had been planning the murder for months, what was her motivation before Becky met her in Copenhagen, before Charles and Jane adopted her Barbara Shutt was a girl named Barbara Wilson. Barbara Wilson was born in Kentucky, raised in an orphanage. Who was this girl the shots ushered into their home at the age of seventeen? And why did you kill Jane?
There's so many questions I still have, so maybe some of those questions you'll find answers to.
On the next episode of Heavyweight.
When you want to solve the murder, you discover the secrets that spawned it.
I set out to unlock some secrets.
The story we got was that she had no family, and it wasn't even true.
What's this place called Galilee's Children's Home? Galilean Children's Home? I searched for the Kentucky orphanage where Barbara was raised.
There's a kid's size book right there.
And the kids now grown who were raised there with her.
I try to forget the bad ones.
There were bad ones.
Well, from the outside it look like candy and cookies.
What was going on in the inside was far from that. Part two is out now. It's available only on Spotify. Go there right now and search Heavyweight to listen to the conclusion. This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Stevie Lane, along with Me, Jonathan Goldstein, and Moheey mcgauker. Our senior producer is Khaleila Holt. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg, Brendan Klinkenberg, Mitch Hansen, Fia Ben and Justin mcgoldrich, j T. Townsend, Rachel Strom, Mark Bartlett, Jason Alexander at the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts, and Jackie Cohen. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, Blue Dot Session and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found on our website, Gimletmedia dot com slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans courtesy of Epitaph Records. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight. We're always looking for new stories, so email us at Heavyweight at gimletmedia dot com. Part two of this episode is available right now only on Spotify. We'll be back with new episodes after Thanksgiving, exclusively on Spotify
