816: Poultry Slam
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When I talked to Charlotte Holman, she'd spent 35 years working with defense teams on death penalty cases, including some very high-profile cases, but she hadn't given an interview to the press in decades ever since an incident where she had a few drinks with a reporter and said something she was unhappy to see in print. It was so embarrassing and I thought, well, I either have to quit drinking or quit doing interviews, and I wasn't ready to quit drinking yet, so I quit doing interviews. So this interview is a very rare event for me. I haven't done any kind of interviews with the media since '85. And you are ending the moratorium in this one instance for this story. Why? Well, a fluffy, red-combed leg horn deserves his moment in the sun. I mean, just the image, and I'm not talking about any chicken, I'm talking about, you can just picture this beautiful leg horn, his tail perked up, and that red comb sitting at kind of a rakish angle on his head and his head kind of cocked to the side and he looks at you with his little eyes. That's what this story is about. That is not just what this story is about. That is what a lot of today's radio show is about. Back in the early days of our radio show, once a year, during the highest poultry consumption time in the country, which is of course, if you think about this for a second, you can guess the answer to this, it's the weeks that begin with Thanksgiving and go through Christmas in New Year's. Anyway, during that period, for years on our show, we had a tradition here we would devote an entire hour of our program to stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, foul of all kind, and an homage to Chicago's poetry slams, which was spread across the country, but were created at the Green Mill Bar on the north side by poet Mark Smith, we named these programs poultry slams, poultry, but I just want to be clear before we begin, the word slam, we are using that with no malice toward any bird of any kind at all. No birds were hurt, no birds were slaughtered, no birds were slammed in the making of today's program, and we have incredible stories today, incredible enough that at least one woman has ended a quarter-century moratorium on talking to the press to be here with me. And you should too, from W.B.'s East Chicago, it's This American Life, I'm Aaron Glass, stay with us. Equine, witness for the barbecution. Sir Charlotte Oldman didn't just get the idea of calling a chicken as a witness in a murder case out of the blue, she was working on this case, and we're going to call this guy Harry, and there was no question that the guy had killed somebody, there's one about whether he'd done it, it was just about what sentence he would get. He had sat on Death Row at Sam Quentin for 10 years, but Charlotte says he was schizophrenic with an IQ of 58 and just out of touch with reality. And one of the things he did, he wrote messages and symbols on little pieces of toilet paper and rolled them up in a ball, and it'd done this for years on Death Row, rolled their little secret messages up in a ball, and then rolled them in feces, his own feces, and then to little tiny bead-sized balls and put those into the braids in his hair, so that they dangled around his forehead. And the things he was putting in his hair, and from his point of view, were they communicating some information, the little messages? Exactly, but he couldn't tell me what the messages were because they were secret. When I would talk to him about his mother, he would tell me she lived in a Coca-Cola can.
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