Hey, everybody, it's Josh, and Chuck is here in spirit too, and we just wanted to drop a casual reminder that we are going to have a swinging Pacific Northwest Swing this coming February, and tickets are now on sale. February one will be at the More Theater in Seattle, February two will be at Revolution Hall in Portland, and on February three, for s F Sketch Fest, will be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater. Go check out all of our social media's for more information and links to tickets, and we'll see you in February. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's hanging out too, so that makes us a good old fashioned Stuff you Should Know, Episode Old School Top ten of Dish. Yeah. Do you think we'll actually make it through ten of these? I'm not. Maybe you'll you'll do all tend keep going after you log off, how about that? Yeah, we could probably get through all ten. And these they're they're pretty uh, it's we'll see. Let's just start at the beginning. I just want to make sure that we hit the last one, number one for sure. Okay, let's do it. Then, all right, what are we talking about? Even well, we're talking today about cases of mistaken identity, as anyone who read the title of this episode or maybe even the synopsis could tell you. And we talked a lot Chuck in our Doppelganger episode, which hopefully came out before this episode or else people won't know what we're talking about. We talked a lot about some of this stuff, which is like, you know, terrible things can happen if somebody mistakes you for somebody else. Um. And that even in in the age of facial recognition technology and genetic testing, UM, that stuff can still happen. And because of our faith and things like facial recognition programs and DNA testing, if if you you come up with a mistaken identity case, it makes it much harder to be believed when you're like, I swear to God, it wasn't me, because people say we've got your d N a man, and it's a match. It was you. You're just fibbing, yeah, And I think it gets a lot more interesting when you're talking about mistaken identity for a crime that has been committed. Yeah, totally, So I already want to skip this first one, can we sure, let's do it and we'll go instead to uh grand Old Israel, where there was a an Australian ex pat named Nicole McCabe who'd been living there for years, was married. She was six months pregnant at the time. That has happened in two thousand and yes, and apparently she um was watching the news, the local news in Israel, and Um I saw that there was an assassination of one of the Hamas chiefs, Mahmoud. I'll mab Mabou, That's what I'm going with. Mabu, Yeah, Mabu m ab h o u A how else you going to say that? That's how I would say it. So Um he was assassinated in Dubai and the Dubai authorities were looking for twenty six people, and one of them was Nicole McCabe and she knew they were looking for because they showed her passport on television. That's right, So she was like, what is going on? W t F. So it turns out that if you are in Israeli intelligence agency and it's called Massad, you can say, hey, I want to use real identities as a cover. So instead of like making up a false identity as a cover for their agents, they use real identities and they basically use the identities of of foreigners living in Israel, and all twenty six of these Westerners evidently, and this is why they were suspected, is because they were real identities used by Massad as cover that we're real people, and they just basically lifted their information from government databases. It's not like she lost her her license in her passport and stuff like that. They just took it basically sorry, except they didn't say sorry. I didn't even say sorry. They just did it. And that's so like insidious that apparently the one some of the ex pats living in Israel were Brits, and the UK expelled the highest ranking MASSAD agent from the Israeli embassy as a result of this. It's just like you don't do that. And apparently that was like standard procedure for the MASSAD. So Nicole McKay, being an Australian, was expecting that Australia would help her out of like this legal jam that she had been gotten into, and they were like, how about we just give you another passport, and she said, is that in And they said, yeah, that's it, but you should probably take it because you're going to be on every single watch list in the world now using your old passport. Just go with a new one. Do the smart thing, McCabe and she said, cry key, let's go Now, this isn't twenty in. I wonder if they've stopped using real identities because that just seems like a recipe for trouble. It definitely does. It's one of those things that was like super reported on, and they never reported on the rain so I didn't see any follow up stuff, but it was widely reported on in different outlets about it, and it wasn't just the same story over and over again. It was. It was investigated, but there wasn't a lot of follow up. Yeah, alright, moving on to the next one. Number eight or number two, depending on how you want to number these. This was a case of a mistaken identity. That also was the case of someone else having that same name as well, which is we talked a little bit about this someone else I think in the Oh no, I don't think that anyone had the same name in the Doppelganger episode. Did they No, No, I don't think so. But that was the case with Will West in New York about the turn of the twentieth century. Yeah, he was brought up on charges of manslaughter and taken to Level and Worth prison. Um to be um, what's it called when they induct you. It's not inducted? UM identify you? I guess when they book you. Yes, you procedurally check you in. Sure, that's what we'll go with as better than induction. I'll tell you that, UM. And he said, I've never been here before. I've never been in trouble with the law before. H And as part of standard procedure, they followed the um uh bertillion um process of measuring your head, your face, the distance between your eyes, the length of your nose, the width from ear to ear, all this different stuff. It's a form of what's called anthropometry and throw and throw. No, I'm going with anthropometry. And we've talked about before, I think in the forensics episode, probably the fingerprinting episode. It was the way that you distinguished one person from another, usually criminals. Before we relied on fingerprints, and apparently it worked really well because it was so granular and so detailed and so they took will West's measurements and they said, you know what, we found somebody with the exact same measurements as you. Right, so you have the same name, you have nearly identical measurements. According to this French uh police procedure of of identifying people. Um, you look like him in the photograph. It's not just that your head measures out the same. And so we think we've got you, buddy, and he's like, it's not me, I promise you. And as it turns out, the real William West was already in Leavenworth, already serving a life sentence for murder. And even though fingerprinting wasn't widespread, they were able to use in the early days of fingerprinting, um, their fingerprints to to right this wrong. Yeah. Um. And some people have speculated that these guys were actually like related somehow, maybe even twins that were pulling a scam um. But as far as anyone officially knows, they were essentially doppelgangers. That how upen to have the same name, and they looked so much alike if you look at pictures of them, like, they were clearly doppelgangers. Um that will will West when he was being booked. They showed him the pictures from the past booking and he said, yeah, that's me, but I don't know where you got that photo. Like that's how much it looked like him. He thought it was a photo of himself. So they ended up um moving to fingerprints. I think the Warden of Leavenworth stopped using the barche ln Um process like the next day, essentially the fingerprints instead, because yeah, because everyone thought the bear chelon Um process was like unassailable, and then it showed no, there's a problem, and fingerprints got got us out of this jam. So let's just all move to fingerprints. From that point one, the headtime headline the next day said bird alone process assailable. Exclamation point. Clark says fingerprints rule. Uh oh, yeah, you're Clark. I got that. Now it sounds like he was Clark, all right, And now we can move on to the case of uh, well, three gentlemen. Uh there was a bad guy who committed crimes under the names John Smith and a much more fancy pants and name Lord Wilton to Willoughby. Uh And it seemed like this guy and for about uh geez, for almost twenty years, was bilking women out of their jewelry by uh, I guess writing bad checks. He was a con man and a thief, and I made a man named Adolph Beck was mistaken for this man. And it wasn't just the case of oh you look like him, we booked you, but hey, we cleared it up. This guy did hard time, seven years in prison. Yeah. So um. Apparently Lord Wilton to Willoughby's scam was he would find a woman say that he was looking for a mistress, and I think he'll do you just find you like me? I like you, um, And hey, that jewelry you're wearing is kind of shabby. Why don't you give it to me? And I will take it and use it for size to get some very nice jewelry. Um. And then he just wouldn't return the jewelry. And it was such a petty crime. This wasn't nice jewelry. Like he must have taken tens of dollars worth of jewelry, but he did it very frequently. He was convicted and put in prison in eighteen seventy seven. The exact same crime was carried out in eighteen nine by him. But it just so happened that Adolph Beck was fingered for that crime, and they were like you and you were the same man who was convicted in eighteen seventy seven, and we know it. And he said, no, it wasn't me. It wasn't me, and they didn't listen to him like you said. He did hard time, like for years, yeah, for seven years, and he had a lot of evidence to prove that it wasn't him. He was like, hey, I was in Peru during this initial crime, and I can prove that. And he said, also, I'm not circumcised. Take a look at this, and everyone went hey, no, no, no, no no. He said this is important to stop being childish. Well, but that's true. He was not circumcised apparently. I mean, who was the real name. I think maybe Frederick Meyer. I saw that, I saw William Thomas, William Wyatt. I'm not sure. Most people just referred to him as John Smith, John old circumcised Smith. So, uh, fifteen convictions, seven years in prison, and it gets worse. He finally gets out of prison for a crime he didn't commit. He's in his I think he's sixty at this point, and old Lord Willoughby was still going to work and this guy got convicted again for the same guy's crime. Yeah. So somebody, luckily and journalists that the Daily Mail had taken an interest in this, was like, this is a gross miscarriage of justice, Like it's been documented, this is not the same guy for years, and they're going after him again. So he turned public um opinion against the Crown and basically pointed to the to the prosecutor and said this point his penis right. He said, this man is not not not only incompetent, he's almost a fraud. He's such a bad lawyer, um, and we should release this guy. So not only did they release him, the Crown gave him a five thousand dollar compensation I'm sorry, five thousand pound compensation, I chuck. Not only did I do the inflation calculator for pounds, I converted it to dollars. All right, let's hear it. So in nine, five thousand pounds was worth about six hundred and eighty three thousand pounds today, And if you convert that to dollars today, he got seven hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars. That's about a hundred grand a year in prison. I get the impression he wasn't a bad guy from what I saw, but he Um was not a magnet for money. Apparently he did not die Um with any money. I'm gonna just say it. I know how much you hate it. He died penniless. But one of the upshots of this is a direct result of the miscarriage of justice from just mistaken identity Um. The British Court of Appeals was established like three years after he was convicted the last time. Well, and it became sort of a hey, eyewitness because I think sixteen people identified him, and it sort of became a hey, this reliability of eyewitnesses is not something we could really lean into all the time. Sixteen people, he really did look a lot like him. But I mean, come on, there's got to be something like, like, you can't read a genuine protestation from an innocent person. Let's let's open our eyes a little bit here, people, Okay, yeah, and open your pants and just check out the penis. That would have solved that once and for all right. They were just so prude. I guess they wouldn't even look at that very clear evidence. I mean they were Victorian Chuck, all right, Should we take a break. Yeah, I gotta say I'm having a lot of fun here, but I do think we should take a break at this point. Okay, let's do it all right. Uh this one is a little uh sad on a lot of levels. Um. This was a medical identity theft. And by the way, this we want to thank our old If we're doing a top ten, chances are it's from our old friends at house stuffworks dot com because to write a lot of those. This one specifically is by Nicholas Jervis or gerbas So. I don't know how you pronounce the thing, but I think he did a bang up job on this one. Bang up job. Uh. So. This is a case of Anne Dorree Sacks, who lived in Salt Lake City, Utah, was a mom at four kids, and um, all of a sudden was reported that her newborn child under her name tested positive for legal drugs, which is a problem for that mom. She's like, hey, listen, I got four kids, but I don't have a newborn and I certainly don't have a newborn that tested positive for drugs. Myth no less um. So, not only was the newborn tested positive for meth, the newborn had been abandoned by the mother, who had also split with a ten thousand dollar medical bill, Dick's her baby to meth abandons. The baby doesn't pay a ten bill, So of course the hospitals like, you're a crook and we're not gonna listen anything you said. The woman's like, no, I swear to God it was not me. And finally turned out that drug addicted um uh woman had broken into and Dory Sacks's car, got her I D which is a lesson, never leave your life your license in your car. That's just a bad idea all around, got her medical records and then went and gave birth as and Dorry Sacks and ultimately apparently amended and Dorr Sachs medical history. Um with with this this information that may or may not have been purged. Yeah, so you know, who knows what uh this impostor reported about their medical history? But Sacks can't find out because there are laws, privacy laws that prevent the records from being shown even to her. So basically she has uh she has to always sort of be on the lookout for this. She has in real life a clotting disorder in her blood and if she's given the wrong blood type she could die. So she doesn't really even know what's in there for what kind of blood type she has on her medical records. So now Andrey Sachs has to be just really careful and I guess proactive anytime she goes to the hospital or doctor. Yeah, the whole thing is called medical identity theft. This happened and I think two thousand tennis and it was like a super scary two thousand ten things to happen, But apparently it was happening at the time early frequently enough that they interviewed a couple other people and they were like, man, if this happens to you, you are on your own, because not only is the hospital not helping you, they sick um basically billing investigators to find out what's going on. And they interviewed and Dory Sex's like children to find out had mommy been pregnant recently. Um. They would not believe her. They just they did not take her word for it. And it wasn't until she um took a DNA test to prove like, this is not my child they finally off. I wonder if you could like demand that first rather than putting your family through all that, you know, I think, so you just show up with a zip block bag of blood at the investigator's office and be like test this. You just plunk it down on the desk in front of them, or just spit at them and say collect this. Oh boy, check. That turned dark pretty fast. But I liked it. Well, that whole story was dark. It's very just a heartbreaking situation all the way around. I've got a little positive spin for you. Then at the end of the article I read, you know, this is a different article. Apparently the mother um, the actual like biological mom who had abandon her kid, got let out of jail because she played guilty to some other stuff and did some time, and like did her time. But and Dory Sachs was interviewed and when asked how she felt about it, and she said, if the use of my ideas would allowed that baby a chance to survive, then it's worth it to me. Wow, I thought you were gonna say that, you know, the biological momb turned her life around and reclaimed the baby. And don't be naives. Oh that's a good one. How about this number five? Or we skipped one, so number four, six, six? How can we be that's this bad? At this? I don't know math, Uh in two thousand three, the cops in Britain said, we would very much like to arrestue Peter hamm Can and that's how we do things over here for cops. Because we think you've murdered someone. We're not gonna pull a gun on you, or we're just gonna ask you very kindly to come with us. We think you murdered murdered a woman in Italy last year in two thousand two. You match the description of the person, and you're coming with me. But this bartender was like, I've never been to Italy and they're like, you sound like you have it. As a matter of fact, you sound like you're from Italy, friend, he said, but it's not a true. So this bartender, what was his name, Peter Hampkin, I believe he was like, what do you guys have never been to Italy. I certainly wasn't there when this this murder happened. They said, okay, not only do you look just like the description of the guy that we're looking for, we're gonna take your blood and oh yeah, you're a match, my friend, you're a match to this. Uh. I guess the evidence that had been found on the scene and um, Peter Hampkin was suddenly in a lot of trouble despite the fact that it was not himp And this is where we were just kind of like the beginnings of the true dystopian um mistaken identity stuff. Yeah, this one I don't. I mean, I understand it in a way. But here's how it works. If you are using DNA databases to match someone, it is going to compare um subsites on the strand that are called locusts or together they're called loki. And that's just like I've seen it described as showing like the genes neighborhood is the physical location of the geneo a chromosome, And depending on where you are and what lab you are and where you are in the world, you might use a different a certain amount of these low key as identifiers. In the States, I think the FBI uses thirteen. In the UK it is ten. And apparently that you can like make mistakes, like I thought DNA was the gold standard, and reading this, it seems like if you're just looking at as low as six low ki for a match, then that's can be a real problem. It certainly can. I think they thought before that nine gave you a one and a hundred and thirteen billion chance of a false positive. But apparently people looked into and they're like, where did you get that evidence? FBI, and they're like, we don't have to tell you'd be quiet. Um, So no one's entirely certain what m the actual chances. But the basis you said d NA was the gold standard, it totally is for forensics, and the chances are really really small that there would be a false match using standard search procedures. Because they're looking at I think you said thirteen. I believe they've up to ten. Yeah, they've uped it to twenty. There's twenty sites that they say these loki. These loki are going to be the ones that we check. And you can have a minimum when you like, if you arrest somebody and you take their blood, you work up a DNA profile of that person, you have to have at least a minimum of those twenty cover preferably up to twenty for your for your profile. And then the more you have and the more you match the twenty loca, the less of a chance you have of a false positive. But it can happen. And I think the point of the people who are saying like, um, we need to talk about this. That there can be false positive is because if you are on a jury, especially if you watch a lot of C s I or Law and Order, you're like, you got DNA evidence, it's over for you. Pal The idea that it could be wrong is just out the window. And they're like, we need to train the public injuries better than this because they think it's it's again unassailable, right, But the idea is you can always get way more granular with your DNA uh peek alou and and and really find out the truth though, right, Well, that's how Peter Hampkin finally got off that bartender that kicked this whole thing off. He they did a further DNA profile of them, and they're like, Okay, it's not you. Because the chances of somebody having those same mutations. They look at short tandem repeating um snippets, which are non protein coding sequences, which means like, it doesn't matter if they mutate a lot, So they mutate a lot. So the chances of you having the same mutation in all twenty of those is vanishing lee small, and even in all eight of them is pretty small enough. That it is still the gold standard. It's just if you get caught and you have money for a good lawyer, you can be like, you need to do a better profile, and then they'll find that it's not actually you. And of course I use peak alou, that's not the official language they use for looking at DNA. That's peekaboo. I used the slang. Okay, all right, I think we do one more then we take our other break. How about that? Okay, I'm still having a lot of fun here, chuck um. Alright, so I guess we're on either number four or number three and number five or number uh. There was a interesting case of mistaken identity in UM which turned out to be a sibling. In Alaska, police had a sexual assault case and it was they had a semen sample, they had usable DNA, they had a DNA match. This guy was already in the system, so they thought like, all right, this is an open and shut case. Except one problem. This guy is was in jail already when the crime was committed, So what are we gonna do? Yeah, this one was incredibly fascinating. I think this Alaskan um UH. DNA analysts or forensic analysts like like went around the country giving talks on this case and really opened people's eyes because it turned out that the guy who was in prison whose DNA matched the semen on the crime scene. I guess um had gotten a bone marrow transplant from his brother, and because of that, he was carrying around his brother's DNA in his blood. Because when you get a bow marrow transplant, you're getting uh like a red blood cell um stem cell transplant, and those things turned into red blood cells and they test your blood, So whatever DNA your blood has is what they come back with on the DNA profile. I wonder if the other brother immediately was like, you're looking for my brother, because like maybe it sounds like the brother. You know, the other brother was not a good guy obviously, I mean, clearly if he committed sexual assault, but if he was already in jail for something else, then it sounds like good good brother, bad brother. They were both sexual assaulters. The one was already in jail for it. The one who actually did it had not been caught yet. They thought that the guy who was in jail already was the purp for the outside one, and it turned out knows the whole family of sexual assaulters makes a lot more sense now, Yeah, I get it, Okay, all right, I mean it made sense before, but this, this makes such glorious sense. The like the blinders are off, so um, this really is like enough of a thing that that forensic analysts from Alaska who discovered this, because at first they were like, well the lab obviously made as up and they looked in there like what is going on here? They started looking into it more and they're like, this could be a thing. Actually we need to let the law enforcement know, Like there's a thing that happens when you get a bowemarrow transplant. Your DNA changes. And they there was a guy named Chris Long on a um I read about an I f L Science article UM and they tested him four years after he'd gotten a um A transplant from a donor in Germany who we never met, I don't believe, and his DNA in different parts of his body were entirely the donors. Including get this, chuck, his semen had had nothing but his donor's DNA. So if he fathered a child, whose kid would that be? Because the kid would have the same DNA as the donor, not him. His dad, Um, well, it would be his kids. Still, legally it would be his kid, but biologically wouldn't it be the German Donors child. I don't know. I think there's an old saying about that, like whoever smelt it delta? But I can't quite work it out. Uh, there's a couple of rhymes. I'm trying not right now. Two bad brothers, man. I just that was sitting there right in front of my face. Yeah, well so they both went to jail, right, Yeah, I believe the Alaska forensic analysts got them, nabbed their person. Sweet, is it time for that break now? You promised? Yeah, I'm gonna go ruminate on that justice served and we'll be right back and things. So I guess we should say, chuck, if you're out there in podcast land listening to us and you didn't actually have to hear an ad, give us a double twot. Dude, dude. You know there was an email er I think he bothered me several times with Emil that trying to convince us that we were in podcast land. Because we used to say that out there in podcast land and this guy ruined it. We just quit saying it because he was like you in fact or in podcast land. I kind of get where that guy's coming from. Was that you nabe? That's weird? He signed your name is Jehan Jehan Paul Dusseldorf three seven at hotmail. What I don't get that one? That was who who sent it in? John John Paul seven at hotmail dot com. I gotta check that was their email. Can we talk about these twins? Sure? Um, because apparently in real life, Chuck twins actually get out of criminal prosecution because they say, no, it wasn't me, it was my identical twins. Yeah. I don't see how this is. I mean, can't they do more work to arrest somebody for a crime when they know it's one of the two. All right, Well this happened in Germany. A big department store in UH in Europe is the calf House uh dis Weston's. And in January two thousand nine, Um, there were three people who broke into one of these department stores. They were smart, they were masks, they were Latex gloves. They sold close to seven million dollars in jewelry. But one of them left one of their gloves behind and they did a DNA test on the sweat inside the glove gross. And they had two matches of these two identical twins uh psalm and a boss uh. And Germany doesn't give last name, so the last initials oh and yeah a Samo Riley And they basically did what you said. These twenty seven year old twins were like, um, whatn't me? And the other one said what didn't me? And they let them go. They did. And I just wanted to give a shout out to this group whom I'm not like a um an admirer of criminals or anything like that, but I read Chuck. They did like real great Muppet caper stuff and like slid down ropes coming from the skylights to do this robbery. It wasn't like a smash and grab. They had finace at least, okay movie style robber robbery. So so yeah, exactly so in Germany, UM, they like, you can't just lock up both people because one of them might be innocent. And if you have to make that decision under German law, and the same thing in America, UM, you can't lock up innocent people. It's better to let criminal go free until lock up an innocent person. That's the trade off. That we have. And it's not just happened in Germany with the O'Reilly brothers. Um, It's happened around the world in other places too. Yeah. I think in Malaysia in two thousand nine there were identical twins who, um, we're narcotics traffickers, and they had a death sentence, but they couldn't prove who was who. Um. Here's my thing, and I agree with due process, but I think if you strong arm them a little bit, no, nothing like that, but like, hey, one of you is going to go to prison, and we'll flip a coin, We'll flip a Deutsche Mark. I still got one in my pocket from the old days. Uh, and and one of you is going to go to jail. I think they could pressure them into one of them, like they got to really be in unison, you know, one of them would eventually crack the person who didn't do it or did do it. So the thing is is, I mean we're talking about twin siblings here. I mean if they've got resolved and not rap the other one out, they've got it. Yeah, exactly. So I'm sure if both of them know hack, both of them might have been there. It was three three robbers, so two of them might have been the twins. They just could not say which one they that was definitely there, so they said no. And yeah, I mean, if you have no other evidence, what can you do? What can you do hot shot? Smack them around with I guess so you'd be like by Dousldorf, you will crack all right. So I think we got a couple of more. We just had a brief This is how the sausage is made, a brief off Mike convo. We're going to circle back to the original one that I wanted to skip at the end because Josh is in love with it. I love it, he wants to marry it. He's in love. I'm already married. We're skipping. Uh. I wonder if anyone ever goes to see what we skipped. I don't care. But there's some army members they're like, uh, listen up, everybody all time. I got the dirt on the one, all right, So we're gonna finish or do you want to finish with the one I didn't like? And then because you really wanted to do number one? Yeah, we have to. Man, it's the most astounding case of mistaken identity. And recent memory. All right, so let's do it right the second Okay, go now, So this was a case uh jeez, it's both sad and uplifting, kind of depending on whose family you're in. But it was a very tragic day in two thousand six. I kind of remember this happening. Um. There was a semi truck driver who in April of that year, like I said, fell asleep at the wheel, crossed the median and crashed into a university van from Taylor University that had nine people uh in the in the van. And it was a very bad crash. It killed five uh I think all students, but five people. And it was just you know, people were flung all over the place there. Stuff was flung all over the place. Uh. And it was obviously a mess of a scene of an accident scene and two young women got mistaken for one another in a very tragic way. Yeah. So I guess um uh Whitney saranac Um had her. She was basically bundled up onto a stretcher and um met of act out by helicopter. But the first responder who put her on the stretcher had grabbed an I d of another girl who was in the van that looked a lot like her, especially I'm sure at night under a crazy circumstances like that, And the I D went to Laura van Wrinn and while Whitney Sarak was alive, Laura van Wren was dead. But people now thought that this person who was bloodied, beat up um, whose face was swollen and would suit be bandaged for weeks was Laura van Wrin, when in fact it was Whitney's Iraq. Yeah. So boy, this one is um. Like I said, very very bad news for one family and very good news for another. And that one family thought their daughter was alive and she had passed and the other way around. So, uh, it's just this, this one's a tough one to even think about how someone gets through something like this in true movie fashion, Um and inconsistencies sorted to kind of pile up as she recovered, and people were sort of suspicious of what was going on, and finally someone asked her to write her name, and she wrote down Whitney. Uh, it's just it's a moment, like you know, it's a pretty chilling moment. It's a movie moment for goodness, sick. It's crazy because I mean in the meantime, like Laura's family were the ones who were at Whitney's bedside as she recovered for weeks in the hospital. Um and like they had had a funeral service for Whitney. So her family was just now coming to terms with her with the fact that she was dead when they found out that, no, she's alive. And Laura's family, who had been like hoping that their child was recovering, now found out that their child was dead. Like it's just mind boggling that this actually happened somewhere in Michigan. No less. Yeah, very very sad case. But we don't want to leave you with the said case, right, No, that's why we're going looping back to do number one, which is actually number nine, number sin which is number nine. Boy. This is about Peter Sellers, who uh somehow was mistaken for Woody Allen early in his career. A couple of key times. They're famously doppel gangers. I know, they don't look much alike. A couple of things I'll attribute it to is Woody Allen looked um when he was younger. He you know, he looked different than you might think of him now. First, Hall. Uh And Peter Sellers was was a sort of man of a thousand faces. As an actor, he was well known for doing disguises, doing accents. No one ever knew who the real Peter Sellers was. Um. Fascinating dude, very troubled, not too great guy in real life. But I'm a huge Peter Sellers fan and like read biographies on him. Uh And, but that's what he was known for, is is looking like other people. So it's no surprise that maybe he would get confused with someone else. I'm a David Niven guy, by the way, I love David Niven. So apparently on the set of Casino Royal, um Leo Jaffee, who's the head of Columbia Pictures, the studio making the movie at the time, which is I think nineteen sixty seven is when that movie was made. Yeah, it sounds right, And it was based on the Ian Fleming novel Casino Royal. It was a James Bond movie, but it was a horror show. It was so poorly conceived and made that they had five directors um each shooting different parts of the movie, each working with different James Bonds, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, I don't know who else was there. Um, and then each of the directors didn't know what the other one was doing. And then they put it together and thought it was going to be a good idea. But even before then, um, they had bigger problems on their hands because Leo Jaffey was talking to who he thought was Woody Allen, when in turn it was actually Peter Sellers, and um, he started complaining about Peter Sellers to Woody Allen, who was in fact actually Peter Sellers. That's right. And I'm just now looking at a picture of Peter Sellers from the late sixties and with the horn room glasses he and Woody Allen, I can see it a little bit, I guess, especially if you're a studio exactly, who couldn't like all the actors are just like cattle to you with or cash registers as well. You know. Uh. This happened again on the set of What's New Pussycat? Uh, And at this point Sellers was pretty annoyed that this kept happening and that he was, you know, he was a big star at that time, and what Allen was kind of just getting started, so uh and he had quite an ego, so he wasn't none too pleased. Yeah, so, if you read um write ups on UM Casino Royal the nineteen sixty seven version, people are just like this was a legendary catastrophe, which are some of the most fun movies to read about. Those in Stanley Kubrick films are in large. Von Tarier films are the most enjoyable to read about because people are just agog for one reason or another, about what their their subject is. Mm hmm, great word. I think so too, man, I've been peppering really great words throughout this episode. If you ask me, I've noticed you got anything else? You want to talk about some more stolen identity or mistaken identity stuff? Nah? All right, let's not then. Um. If you want to know more about mistaken identities, you can check out this article on how stuff works. And since Chuck said nah, it's time for listener mail, I'm just gonna read the first thing I saw because it didn't have one prepared, and this is called Chuck's rope Trauma. Oh yeah, hey, guys, I'm imagining we're gonna play this out for years. Hey guys, I'm imagining Chuck at a rough go at practicing shabari on himself. I'm sure hoping this is true so we can get a future topic on the art of shabarim thing. I don't know here it is. Yeah, I think it's rope binding for sexual pleasure Japanese bondage. You well, I just I just know that, like in the back of my head. Apparently those pictures are Yeah, these pictures are interesting. So Chuck answer the question, is that where you got your rope trauma? No, it wasn't shabari. Unfortunately, that seems like a lot more fun than what happened to me. Um. But this is from Ryan Loves the Show. Listen to every episode and Ryan works in a diesel shop. Diesel like the clothing wine No for over the road trucks, which I don't even know what that means. Is that like a long haul trucker? Probably over No, I think it's like a flying truck. Okay, right, you should leave that in there. A momo. Yeah, I just parked, everybody. Uh, it's nice to keep my mind active while I'm mindlessly wrenching on bolts all day. And that is from Ryan Schmidt and Waterloo. I A uh, Waterloo Idaho. I A, where is that? That's Iowa? Yeah, I just wanted to rip the Iowans and the idaho WANs. Uh. And that was Ryan. That's Ryan. Thanks a lot, Ryan. That was a good question. So, Chuck, do you want to share now what the rope trauma was? No? I think I literally think we should play this up for years. And so I was talking to one of my one of my friends and neighbors, Wesley, and he had just heard the episode about Mallory today and was like, so, so, what was it what happened to Chuck? I was like, he won't tell me. He could not believe that you didn't actually tell me. I was like, I don't know any more than any one else. So, oh, we've got a genuine internet mystery. Then I love it. It's a genuine one. If you want to send us a guess at what happened to Chuck with the rope, you can already cross Shabari off of the list. You can send it in an email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows

Hey, everybody, it's Josh, and Chuck is here in spirit too, and we just wanted to drop a casual reminder that we are going to have a swinging Pacific Northwest Swing this coming February, and tickets are now on sale. February one will be at the More Theater in Seattle, February two will be at Revolution Hall in Portland, and on February three, for s F Sketch Fest, will be at the Sydney Goldstein Theater. Go check out all of our social media's for more information and links to tickets, and we'll see you in February. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's hanging out too, so that makes us a good old fashioned Stuff you Should Know, Episode Old School Top ten of Dish. Yeah. Do you think we'll actually make it through ten of these? I'm not. Maybe you'll you'll do all tend keep going after you log off, how about that? Yeah, we could probably get through all ten. And these they're they're pretty uh, it's we'll see. Let's just start at the beginning. I just want to make sure that we hit the last one, number one for sure. Okay, let's do it. Then, all right, what are we talking about? Even well, we're talking today about cases of mistaken identity, as anyone who read the title of this episode or maybe even the synopsis could tell you. And we talked a lot Chuck in our Doppelganger episode, which hopefully came out before this episode or else people won't know what we're talking about. We talked a lot about some of this stuff, which is like, you know, terrible things can happen if somebody mistakes you for somebody else. Um. And that even in in the age of facial recognition technology and genetic testing, UM, that stuff can still happen. And because of our faith and things like facial recognition programs and DNA testing, if if you you come up with a mistaken identity case, it makes it much harder to be believed when you're like, I swear to God, it wasn't me, because people say we've got your d N a man, and it's a match. It was you. You're just fibbing, yeah, And I think it gets a lot more interesting when you're talking about mistaken identity for a crime that has been committed. Yeah, totally, So I already want to skip this first one, can we sure, let's do it and we'll go instead to uh grand Old Israel, where there was a an Australian ex pat named Nicole McCabe who'd been living there for years, was married. She was six months pregnant at the time. That has happened in two thousand and yes, and apparently she um was watching the news, the local news in Israel, and Um I saw that there was an assassination of one of the Hamas chiefs, Mahmoud. I'll mab Mabou, That's what I'm going with. Mabu, Yeah, Mabu m ab h o u A how else you going to say that? That's how I would say it. So Um he was assassinated in Dubai and the Dubai authorities were looking for twenty six people, and one of them was Nicole McCabe and she knew they were looking for because they showed her passport on television. That's right, So she was like, what is going on? W t F. So it turns out that if you are in Israeli intelligence agency and it's called Massad, you can say, hey, I want to use real identities as a cover. So instead of like making up a false identity as a cover for their agents, they use real identities and they basically use the identities of of foreigners living in Israel, and all twenty six of these Westerners evidently, and this is why they were suspected, is because they were real identities used by Massad as cover that we're real people, and they just basically lifted their information from government databases. It's not like she lost her her license in her passport and stuff like that. They just took it basically sorry, except they didn't say sorry. I didn't even say sorry. They just did it. And that's so like insidious that apparently the one some of the ex pats living in Israel were Brits, and the UK expelled the highest ranking MASSAD agent from the Israeli embassy as a result of this. It's just like you don't do that. And apparently that was like standard procedure for the MASSAD. So Nicole McKay, being an Australian, was expecting that Australia would help her out of like this legal jam that she had been gotten into, and they were like, how about we just give you another passport, and she said, is that in And they said, yeah, that's it, but you should probably take it because you're going to be on every single watch list in the world now using your old passport. Just go with a new one. Do the smart thing, McCabe and she said, cry key, let's go Now, this isn't twenty in. I wonder if they've stopped using real identities because that just seems like a recipe for trouble. It definitely does. It's one of those things that was like super reported on, and they never reported on the rain so I didn't see any follow up stuff, but it was widely reported on in different outlets about it, and it wasn't just the same story over and over again. It was. It was investigated, but there wasn't a lot of follow up. Yeah, alright, moving on to the next one. Number eight or number two, depending on how you want to number these. This was a case of a mistaken identity. That also was the case of someone else having that same name as well, which is we talked a little bit about this someone else I think in the Oh no, I don't think that anyone had the same name in the Doppelganger episode. Did they No, No, I don't think so. But that was the case with Will West in New York about the turn of the twentieth century. Yeah, he was brought up on charges of manslaughter and taken to Level and Worth prison. Um to be um, what's it called when they induct you. It's not inducted? UM identify you? I guess when they book you. Yes, you procedurally check you in. Sure, that's what we'll go with as better than induction. I'll tell you that, UM. And he said, I've never been here before. I've never been in trouble with the law before. H And as part of standard procedure, they followed the um uh bertillion um process of measuring your head, your face, the distance between your eyes, the length of your nose, the width from ear to ear, all this different stuff. It's a form of what's called anthropometry and throw and throw. No, I'm going with anthropometry. And we've talked about before, I think in the forensics episode, probably the fingerprinting episode. It was the way that you distinguished one person from another, usually criminals. Before we relied on fingerprints, and apparently it worked really well because it was so granular and so detailed and so they took will West's measurements and they said, you know what, we found somebody with the exact same measurements as you. Right, so you have the same name, you have nearly identical measurements. According to this French uh police procedure of of identifying people. Um, you look like him in the photograph. It's not just that your head measures out the same. And so we think we've got you, buddy, and he's like, it's not me, I promise you. And as it turns out, the real William West was already in Leavenworth, already serving a life sentence for murder. And even though fingerprinting wasn't widespread, they were able to use in the early days of fingerprinting, um, their fingerprints to to right this wrong. Yeah. Um. And some people have speculated that these guys were actually like related somehow, maybe even twins that were pulling a scam um. But as far as anyone officially knows, they were essentially doppelgangers. That how upen to have the same name, and they looked so much alike if you look at pictures of them, like, they were clearly doppelgangers. Um that will will West when he was being booked. They showed him the pictures from the past booking and he said, yeah, that's me, but I don't know where you got that photo. Like that's how much it looked like him. He thought it was a photo of himself. So they ended up um moving to fingerprints. I think the Warden of Leavenworth stopped using the barche ln Um process like the next day, essentially the fingerprints instead, because yeah, because everyone thought the bear chelon Um process was like unassailable, and then it showed no, there's a problem, and fingerprints got got us out of this jam. So let's just all move to fingerprints. From that point one, the headtime headline the next day said bird alone process assailable. Exclamation point. Clark says fingerprints rule. Uh oh, yeah, you're Clark. I got that. Now it sounds like he was Clark, all right, And now we can move on to the case of uh, well, three gentlemen. Uh there was a bad guy who committed crimes under the names John Smith and a much more fancy pants and name Lord Wilton to Willoughby. Uh And it seemed like this guy and for about uh geez, for almost twenty years, was bilking women out of their jewelry by uh, I guess writing bad checks. He was a con man and a thief, and I made a man named Adolph Beck was mistaken for this man. And it wasn't just the case of oh you look like him, we booked you, but hey, we cleared it up. This guy did hard time, seven years in prison. Yeah. So um. Apparently Lord Wilton to Willoughby's scam was he would find a woman say that he was looking for a mistress, and I think he'll do you just find you like me? I like you, um, And hey, that jewelry you're wearing is kind of shabby. Why don't you give it to me? And I will take it and use it for size to get some very nice jewelry. Um. And then he just wouldn't return the jewelry. And it was such a petty crime. This wasn't nice jewelry. Like he must have taken tens of dollars worth of jewelry, but he did it very frequently. He was convicted and put in prison in eighteen seventy seven. The exact same crime was carried out in eighteen nine by him. But it just so happened that Adolph Beck was fingered for that crime, and they were like you and you were the same man who was convicted in eighteen seventy seven, and we know it. And he said, no, it wasn't me. It wasn't me, and they didn't listen to him like you said. He did hard time, like for years, yeah, for seven years, and he had a lot of evidence to prove that it wasn't him. He was like, hey, I was in Peru during this initial crime, and I can prove that. And he said, also, I'm not circumcised. Take a look at this, and everyone went hey, no, no, no, no no. He said this is important to stop being childish. Well, but that's true. He was not circumcised apparently. I mean, who was the real name. I think maybe Frederick Meyer. I saw that, I saw William Thomas, William Wyatt. I'm not sure. Most people just referred to him as John Smith, John old circumcised Smith. So, uh, fifteen convictions, seven years in prison, and it gets worse. He finally gets out of prison for a crime he didn't commit. He's in his I think he's sixty at this point, and old Lord Willoughby was still going to work and this guy got convicted again for the same guy's crime. Yeah. So somebody, luckily and journalists that the Daily Mail had taken an interest in this, was like, this is a gross miscarriage of justice, Like it's been documented, this is not the same guy for years, and they're going after him again. So he turned public um opinion against the Crown and basically pointed to the to the prosecutor and said this point his penis right. He said, this man is not not not only incompetent, he's almost a fraud. He's such a bad lawyer, um, and we should release this guy. So not only did they release him, the Crown gave him a five thousand dollar compensation I'm sorry, five thousand pound compensation, I chuck. Not only did I do the inflation calculator for pounds, I converted it to dollars. All right, let's hear it. So in nine, five thousand pounds was worth about six hundred and eighty three thousand pounds today, And if you convert that to dollars today, he got seven hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars. That's about a hundred grand a year in prison. I get the impression he wasn't a bad guy from what I saw, but he Um was not a magnet for money. Apparently he did not die Um with any money. I'm gonna just say it. I know how much you hate it. He died penniless. But one of the upshots of this is a direct result of the miscarriage of justice from just mistaken identity Um. The British Court of Appeals was established like three years after he was convicted the last time. Well, and it became sort of a hey, eyewitness because I think sixteen people identified him, and it sort of became a hey, this reliability of eyewitnesses is not something we could really lean into all the time. Sixteen people, he really did look a lot like him. But I mean, come on, there's got to be something like, like, you can't read a genuine protestation from an innocent person. Let's let's open our eyes a little bit here, people, Okay, yeah, and open your pants and just check out the penis. That would have solved that once and for all right. They were just so prude. I guess they wouldn't even look at that very clear evidence. I mean they were Victorian Chuck, all right, Should we take a break. Yeah, I gotta say I'm having a lot of fun here, but I do think we should take a break at this point. Okay, let's do it all right. Uh this one is a little uh sad on a lot of levels. Um. This was a medical identity theft. And by the way, this we want to thank our old If we're doing a top ten, chances are it's from our old friends at house stuffworks dot com because to write a lot of those. This one specifically is by Nicholas Jervis or gerbas So. I don't know how you pronounce the thing, but I think he did a bang up job on this one. Bang up job. Uh. So. This is a case of Anne Dorree Sacks, who lived in Salt Lake City, Utah, was a mom at four kids, and um, all of a sudden was reported that her newborn child under her name tested positive for legal drugs, which is a problem for that mom. She's like, hey, listen, I got four kids, but I don't have a newborn and I certainly don't have a newborn that tested positive for drugs. Myth no less um. So, not only was the newborn tested positive for meth, the newborn had been abandoned by the mother, who had also split with a ten thousand dollar medical bill, Dick's her baby to meth abandons. The baby doesn't pay a ten bill, So of course the hospitals like, you're a crook and we're not gonna listen anything you said. The woman's like, no, I swear to God it was not me. And finally turned out that drug addicted um uh woman had broken into and Dory Sacks's car, got her I D which is a lesson, never leave your life your license in your car. That's just a bad idea all around, got her medical records and then went and gave birth as and Dorry Sacks and ultimately apparently amended and Dorr Sachs medical history. Um with with this this information that may or may not have been purged. Yeah, so you know, who knows what uh this impostor reported about their medical history? But Sacks can't find out because there are laws, privacy laws that prevent the records from being shown even to her. So basically she has uh she has to always sort of be on the lookout for this. She has in real life a clotting disorder in her blood and if she's given the wrong blood type she could die. So she doesn't really even know what's in there for what kind of blood type she has on her medical records. So now Andrey Sachs has to be just really careful and I guess proactive anytime she goes to the hospital or doctor. Yeah, the whole thing is called medical identity theft. This happened and I think two thousand tennis and it was like a super scary two thousand ten things to happen, But apparently it was happening at the time early frequently enough that they interviewed a couple other people and they were like, man, if this happens to you, you are on your own, because not only is the hospital not helping you, they sick um basically billing investigators to find out what's going on. And they interviewed and Dory Sex's like children to find out had mommy been pregnant recently. Um. They would not believe her. They just they did not take her word for it. And it wasn't until she um took a DNA test to prove like, this is not my child they finally off. I wonder if you could like demand that first rather than putting your family through all that, you know, I think, so you just show up with a zip block bag of blood at the investigator's office and be like test this. You just plunk it down on the desk in front of them, or just spit at them and say collect this. Oh boy, check. That turned dark pretty fast. But I liked it. Well, that whole story was dark. It's very just a heartbreaking situation all the way around. I've got a little positive spin for you. Then at the end of the article I read, you know, this is a different article. Apparently the mother um, the actual like biological mom who had abandon her kid, got let out of jail because she played guilty to some other stuff and did some time, and like did her time. But and Dory Sachs was interviewed and when asked how she felt about it, and she said, if the use of my ideas would allowed that baby a chance to survive, then it's worth it to me. Wow, I thought you were gonna say that, you know, the biological momb turned her life around and reclaimed the baby. And don't be naives. Oh that's a good one. How about this number five? Or we skipped one, so number four, six, six? How can we be that's this bad? At this? I don't know math, Uh in two thousand three, the cops in Britain said, we would very much like to arrestue Peter hamm Can and that's how we do things over here for cops. Because we think you've murdered someone. We're not gonna pull a gun on you, or we're just gonna ask you very kindly to come with us. We think you murdered murdered a woman in Italy last year in two thousand two. You match the description of the person, and you're coming with me. But this bartender was like, I've never been to Italy and they're like, you sound like you have it. As a matter of fact, you sound like you're from Italy, friend, he said, but it's not a true. So this bartender, what was his name, Peter Hampkin, I believe he was like, what do you guys have never been to Italy. I certainly wasn't there when this this murder happened. They said, okay, not only do you look just like the description of the guy that we're looking for, we're gonna take your blood and oh yeah, you're a match, my friend, you're a match to this. Uh. I guess the evidence that had been found on the scene and um, Peter Hampkin was suddenly in a lot of trouble despite the fact that it was not himp And this is where we were just kind of like the beginnings of the true dystopian um mistaken identity stuff. Yeah, this one I don't. I mean, I understand it in a way. But here's how it works. If you are using DNA databases to match someone, it is going to compare um subsites on the strand that are called locusts or together they're called loki. And that's just like I've seen it described as showing like the genes neighborhood is the physical location of the geneo a chromosome, And depending on where you are and what lab you are and where you are in the world, you might use a different a certain amount of these low key as identifiers. In the States, I think the FBI uses thirteen. In the UK it is ten. And apparently that you can like make mistakes, like I thought DNA was the gold standard, and reading this, it seems like if you're just looking at as low as six low ki for a match, then that's can be a real problem. It certainly can. I think they thought before that nine gave you a one and a hundred and thirteen billion chance of a false positive. But apparently people looked into and they're like, where did you get that evidence? FBI, and they're like, we don't have to tell you'd be quiet. Um, So no one's entirely certain what m the actual chances. But the basis you said d NA was the gold standard, it totally is for forensics, and the chances are really really small that there would be a false match using standard search procedures. Because they're looking at I think you said thirteen. I believe they've up to ten. Yeah, they've uped it to twenty. There's twenty sites that they say these loki. These loki are going to be the ones that we check. And you can have a minimum when you like, if you arrest somebody and you take their blood, you work up a DNA profile of that person, you have to have at least a minimum of those twenty cover preferably up to twenty for your for your profile. And then the more you have and the more you match the twenty loca, the less of a chance you have of a false positive. But it can happen. And I think the point of the people who are saying like, um, we need to talk about this. That there can be false positive is because if you are on a jury, especially if you watch a lot of C s I or Law and Order, you're like, you got DNA evidence, it's over for you. Pal The idea that it could be wrong is just out the window. And they're like, we need to train the public injuries better than this because they think it's it's again unassailable, right, But the idea is you can always get way more granular with your DNA uh peek alou and and and really find out the truth though, right, Well, that's how Peter Hampkin finally got off that bartender that kicked this whole thing off. He they did a further DNA profile of them, and they're like, Okay, it's not you. Because the chances of somebody having those same mutations. They look at short tandem repeating um snippets, which are non protein coding sequences, which means like, it doesn't matter if they mutate a lot, So they mutate a lot. So the chances of you having the same mutation in all twenty of those is vanishing lee small, and even in all eight of them is pretty small enough. That it is still the gold standard. It's just if you get caught and you have money for a good lawyer, you can be like, you need to do a better profile, and then they'll find that it's not actually you. And of course I use peak alou, that's not the official language they use for looking at DNA. That's peekaboo. I used the slang. Okay, all right, I think we do one more then we take our other break. How about that? Okay, I'm still having a lot of fun here, chuck um. Alright, so I guess we're on either number four or number three and number five or number uh. There was a interesting case of mistaken identity in UM which turned out to be a sibling. In Alaska, police had a sexual assault case and it was they had a semen sample, they had usable DNA, they had a DNA match. This guy was already in the system, so they thought like, all right, this is an open and shut case. Except one problem. This guy is was in jail already when the crime was committed, So what are we gonna do? Yeah, this one was incredibly fascinating. I think this Alaskan um UH. DNA analysts or forensic analysts like like went around the country giving talks on this case and really opened people's eyes because it turned out that the guy who was in prison whose DNA matched the semen on the crime scene. I guess um had gotten a bone marrow transplant from his brother, and because of that, he was carrying around his brother's DNA in his blood. Because when you get a bow marrow transplant, you're getting uh like a red blood cell um stem cell transplant, and those things turned into red blood cells and they test your blood, So whatever DNA your blood has is what they come back with on the DNA profile. I wonder if the other brother immediately was like, you're looking for my brother, because like maybe it sounds like the brother. You know, the other brother was not a good guy obviously, I mean, clearly if he committed sexual assault, but if he was already in jail for something else, then it sounds like good good brother, bad brother. They were both sexual assaulters. The one was already in jail for it. The one who actually did it had not been caught yet. They thought that the guy who was in jail already was the purp for the outside one, and it turned out knows the whole family of sexual assaulters makes a lot more sense now, Yeah, I get it, Okay, all right, I mean it made sense before, but this, this makes such glorious sense. The like the blinders are off, so um, this really is like enough of a thing that that forensic analysts from Alaska who discovered this, because at first they were like, well the lab obviously made as up and they looked in there like what is going on here? They started looking into it more and they're like, this could be a thing. Actually we need to let the law enforcement know, Like there's a thing that happens when you get a bowemarrow transplant. Your DNA changes. And they there was a guy named Chris Long on a um I read about an I f L Science article UM and they tested him four years after he'd gotten a um A transplant from a donor in Germany who we never met, I don't believe, and his DNA in different parts of his body were entirely the donors. Including get this, chuck, his semen had had nothing but his donor's DNA. So if he fathered a child, whose kid would that be? Because the kid would have the same DNA as the donor, not him. His dad, Um, well, it would be his kids. Still, legally it would be his kid, but biologically wouldn't it be the German Donors child. I don't know. I think there's an old saying about that, like whoever smelt it delta? But I can't quite work it out. Uh, there's a couple of rhymes. I'm trying not right now. Two bad brothers, man. I just that was sitting there right in front of my face. Yeah, well so they both went to jail, right, Yeah, I believe the Alaska forensic analysts got them, nabbed their person. Sweet, is it time for that break now? You promised? Yeah, I'm gonna go ruminate on that justice served and we'll be right back and things. So I guess we should say, chuck, if you're out there in podcast land listening to us and you didn't actually have to hear an ad, give us a double twot. Dude, dude. You know there was an email er I think he bothered me several times with Emil that trying to convince us that we were in podcast land. Because we used to say that out there in podcast land and this guy ruined it. We just quit saying it because he was like you in fact or in podcast land. I kind of get where that guy's coming from. Was that you nabe? That's weird? He signed your name is Jehan Jehan Paul Dusseldorf three seven at hotmail. What I don't get that one? That was who who sent it in? John John Paul seven at hotmail dot com. I gotta check that was their email. Can we talk about these twins? Sure? Um, because apparently in real life, Chuck twins actually get out of criminal prosecution because they say, no, it wasn't me, it was my identical twins. Yeah. I don't see how this is. I mean, can't they do more work to arrest somebody for a crime when they know it's one of the two. All right, Well this happened in Germany. A big department store in UH in Europe is the calf House uh dis Weston's. And in January two thousand nine, Um, there were three people who broke into one of these department stores. They were smart, they were masks, they were Latex gloves. They sold close to seven million dollars in jewelry. But one of them left one of their gloves behind and they did a DNA test on the sweat inside the glove gross. And they had two matches of these two identical twins uh psalm and a boss uh. And Germany doesn't give last name, so the last initials oh and yeah a Samo Riley And they basically did what you said. These twenty seven year old twins were like, um, whatn't me? And the other one said what didn't me? And they let them go. They did. And I just wanted to give a shout out to this group whom I'm not like a um an admirer of criminals or anything like that, but I read Chuck. They did like real great Muppet caper stuff and like slid down ropes coming from the skylights to do this robbery. It wasn't like a smash and grab. They had finace at least, okay movie style robber robbery. So so yeah, exactly so in Germany, UM, they like, you can't just lock up both people because one of them might be innocent. And if you have to make that decision under German law, and the same thing in America, UM, you can't lock up innocent people. It's better to let criminal go free until lock up an innocent person. That's the trade off. That we have. And it's not just happened in Germany with the O'Reilly brothers. Um, It's happened around the world in other places too. Yeah. I think in Malaysia in two thousand nine there were identical twins who, um, we're narcotics traffickers, and they had a death sentence, but they couldn't prove who was who. Um. Here's my thing, and I agree with due process, but I think if you strong arm them a little bit, no, nothing like that, but like, hey, one of you is going to go to prison, and we'll flip a coin, We'll flip a Deutsche Mark. I still got one in my pocket from the old days. Uh, and and one of you is going to go to jail. I think they could pressure them into one of them, like they got to really be in unison, you know, one of them would eventually crack the person who didn't do it or did do it. So the thing is is, I mean we're talking about twin siblings here. I mean if they've got resolved and not rap the other one out, they've got it. Yeah, exactly. So I'm sure if both of them know hack, both of them might have been there. It was three three robbers, so two of them might have been the twins. They just could not say which one they that was definitely there, so they said no. And yeah, I mean, if you have no other evidence, what can you do? What can you do hot shot? Smack them around with I guess so you'd be like by Dousldorf, you will crack all right. So I think we got a couple of more. We just had a brief This is how the sausage is made, a brief off Mike convo. We're going to circle back to the original one that I wanted to skip at the end because Josh is in love with it. I love it, he wants to marry it. He's in love. I'm already married. We're skipping. Uh. I wonder if anyone ever goes to see what we skipped. I don't care. But there's some army members they're like, uh, listen up, everybody all time. I got the dirt on the one, all right, So we're gonna finish or do you want to finish with the one I didn't like? And then because you really wanted to do number one? Yeah, we have to. Man, it's the most astounding case of mistaken identity. And recent memory. All right, so let's do it right the second Okay, go now, So this was a case uh jeez, it's both sad and uplifting, kind of depending on whose family you're in. But it was a very tragic day in two thousand six. I kind of remember this happening. Um. There was a semi truck driver who in April of that year, like I said, fell asleep at the wheel, crossed the median and crashed into a university van from Taylor University that had nine people uh in the in the van. And it was a very bad crash. It killed five uh I think all students, but five people. And it was just you know, people were flung all over the place there. Stuff was flung all over the place. Uh. And it was obviously a mess of a scene of an accident scene and two young women got mistaken for one another in a very tragic way. Yeah. So I guess um uh Whitney saranac Um had her. She was basically bundled up onto a stretcher and um met of act out by helicopter. But the first responder who put her on the stretcher had grabbed an I d of another girl who was in the van that looked a lot like her, especially I'm sure at night under a crazy circumstances like that, And the I D went to Laura van Wrinn and while Whitney Sarak was alive, Laura van Wren was dead. But people now thought that this person who was bloodied, beat up um, whose face was swollen and would suit be bandaged for weeks was Laura van Wrin, when in fact it was Whitney's Iraq. Yeah. So boy, this one is um. Like I said, very very bad news for one family and very good news for another. And that one family thought their daughter was alive and she had passed and the other way around. So, uh, it's just this, this one's a tough one to even think about how someone gets through something like this in true movie fashion, Um and inconsistencies sorted to kind of pile up as she recovered, and people were sort of suspicious of what was going on, and finally someone asked her to write her name, and she wrote down Whitney. Uh, it's just it's a moment, like you know, it's a pretty chilling moment. It's a movie moment for goodness, sick. It's crazy because I mean in the meantime, like Laura's family were the ones who were at Whitney's bedside as she recovered for weeks in the hospital. Um and like they had had a funeral service for Whitney. So her family was just now coming to terms with her with the fact that she was dead when they found out that, no, she's alive. And Laura's family, who had been like hoping that their child was recovering, now found out that their child was dead. Like it's just mind boggling that this actually happened somewhere in Michigan. No less. Yeah, very very sad case. But we don't want to leave you with the said case, right, No, that's why we're going looping back to do number one, which is actually number nine, number sin which is number nine. Boy. This is about Peter Sellers, who uh somehow was mistaken for Woody Allen early in his career. A couple of key times. They're famously doppel gangers. I know, they don't look much alike. A couple of things I'll attribute it to is Woody Allen looked um when he was younger. He you know, he looked different than you might think of him now. First, Hall. Uh And Peter Sellers was was a sort of man of a thousand faces. As an actor, he was well known for doing disguises, doing accents. No one ever knew who the real Peter Sellers was. Um. Fascinating dude, very troubled, not too great guy in real life. But I'm a huge Peter Sellers fan and like read biographies on him. Uh And, but that's what he was known for, is is looking like other people. So it's no surprise that maybe he would get confused with someone else. I'm a David Niven guy, by the way, I love David Niven. So apparently on the set of Casino Royal, um Leo Jaffee, who's the head of Columbia Pictures, the studio making the movie at the time, which is I think nineteen sixty seven is when that movie was made. Yeah, it sounds right, And it was based on the Ian Fleming novel Casino Royal. It was a James Bond movie, but it was a horror show. It was so poorly conceived and made that they had five directors um each shooting different parts of the movie, each working with different James Bonds, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, I don't know who else was there. Um, and then each of the directors didn't know what the other one was doing. And then they put it together and thought it was going to be a good idea. But even before then, um, they had bigger problems on their hands because Leo Jaffey was talking to who he thought was Woody Allen, when in turn it was actually Peter Sellers, and um, he started complaining about Peter Sellers to Woody Allen, who was in fact actually Peter Sellers. That's right. And I'm just now looking at a picture of Peter Sellers from the late sixties and with the horn room glasses he and Woody Allen, I can see it a little bit, I guess, especially if you're a studio exactly, who couldn't like all the actors are just like cattle to you with or cash registers as well. You know. Uh. This happened again on the set of What's New Pussycat? Uh, And at this point Sellers was pretty annoyed that this kept happening and that he was, you know, he was a big star at that time, and what Allen was kind of just getting started, so uh and he had quite an ego, so he wasn't none too pleased. Yeah, so, if you read um write ups on UM Casino Royal the nineteen sixty seven version, people are just like this was a legendary catastrophe, which are some of the most fun movies to read about. Those in Stanley Kubrick films are in large. Von Tarier films are the most enjoyable to read about because people are just agog for one reason or another, about what their their subject is. Mm hmm, great word. I think so too, man, I've been peppering really great words throughout this episode. If you ask me, I've noticed you got anything else? You want to talk about some more stolen identity or mistaken identity stuff? Nah? All right, let's not then. Um. If you want to know more about mistaken identities, you can check out this article on how stuff works. And since Chuck said nah, it's time for listener mail, I'm just gonna read the first thing I saw because it didn't have one prepared, and this is called Chuck's rope Trauma. Oh yeah, hey, guys, I'm imagining we're gonna play this out for years. Hey guys, I'm imagining Chuck at a rough go at practicing shabari on himself. I'm sure hoping this is true so we can get a future topic on the art of shabarim thing. I don't know here it is. Yeah, I think it's rope binding for sexual pleasure Japanese bondage. You well, I just I just know that, like in the back of my head. Apparently those pictures are Yeah, these pictures are interesting. So Chuck answer the question, is that where you got your rope trauma? No, it wasn't shabari. Unfortunately, that seems like a lot more fun than what happened to me. Um. But this is from Ryan Loves the Show. Listen to every episode and Ryan works in a diesel shop. Diesel like the clothing wine No for over the road trucks, which I don't even know what that means. Is that like a long haul trucker? Probably over No, I think it's like a flying truck. Okay, right, you should leave that in there. A momo. Yeah, I just parked, everybody. Uh, it's nice to keep my mind active while I'm mindlessly wrenching on bolts all day. And that is from Ryan Schmidt and Waterloo. I A uh, Waterloo Idaho. I A, where is that? That's Iowa? Yeah, I just wanted to rip the Iowans and the idaho WANs. Uh. And that was Ryan. That's Ryan. Thanks a lot, Ryan. That was a good question. So, Chuck, do you want to share now what the rope trauma was? No? I think I literally think we should play this up for years. And so I was talking to one of my one of my friends and neighbors, Wesley, and he had just heard the episode about Mallory today and was like, so, so, what was it what happened to Chuck? I was like, he won't tell me. He could not believe that you didn't actually tell me. I was like, I don't know any more than any one else. So, oh, we've got a genuine internet mystery. Then I love it. It's a genuine one. If you want to send us a guess at what happened to Chuck with the rope, you can already cross Shabari off of the list. You can send it in an email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows