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Tired of ads barging into your favourite news podcasts? Good news ad free listening on Amazon Music is included with your prime membership. Just head to Amazon.com adfreenewspodcast to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Enjoy thousands of acad shows ad free for prime subscribers. Some shows may have ads welcome to your 2023 work recap. This year you’ve been to 127 sync meetings. You spent 56 minutes searching for files and almost missed eight deadlines. Yikes. 2024 can and should sound different. With Monday, you can work together, easily collaborate and share data, files and updates, so all work happens in one place and everyone’s on the same page. Go to Monday.com or tap the banner to learn more. BBC sounds music radio podcasts from BBC Radio Four, this is things fell apart season two I’m John Rodson, and in the last season of things fell apart, I unearthed strange origin stories of the culture wars that have divided us so toxically for decades. But now new battlefronts have opened, many of them linked by one extraordinary thing, which is that they all blew up and engulfed us within days of each other six weeks into lockdown, that bizarre experience of lockdown changed people psychologically. We grew ever more suspicious of our neighbours and our institutions. People fell apart. And so I wanted to make a new season, this time about those culture wars and their origins. But they’re also stories about untruths and their consequences. In each episode, someone will say something that isn’t quite true, and the ripples are devastating, including in this story. I sat down and I focused on television, and I’m looking at this and I’m thinking, wow, man, won’t somebody help them? Won’t they stop? And my sister calls me and said, did you see what they did to Perry? And I set the phone down. John one of the first great lockdown culture wars has the most unlikely origin moment. This story will end with an act of violence committed during lockdown that was so shocking, it completely transformed America’s oldest culture war while kickstarting many new ones. But the story starts in Miami in the 1980s. During that decade, 32 women were found dead in alleyways, junkyards. There weren’t many media reports about the deaths, presumably because the women were black sex workers. But the stories that did appear captured how perplexed the police were. As one detective Frank Wazlowski told Fox television back in 1989, quote, these are by far the most mysterious deaths you will ever find. The women are dead? Yes, they’re gunshot wounds. No stab wounds, no blood, no it’s a mystery. You just know they’re dead. Correct. There may have been no apparent cause of death, but the women did have two things in common. They had all been found naked from the waist down, and a particular drug was found in low levels in their systems, one that was sweeping Miami back then. The problem is glaring, especially in south Florida. Good, cheap cocaine everywhere. You could just walk through the block and you might have three or four people come up to you and ask you if you would like to buy some. Know you don’t have to look for it at all. I’m Frank Wislowski, presently in Miami, Florida. Residing was a police officer for 25 years, patrol, and then got into homicide. I found an interview that you gave back in the 80s about a spate of deaths that occurred in Miami. You said it was the most mysterious case you’d ever come across. Correct. All of them was found in backyards or in open lots, all basically lying on their backs. Their legs were spread apart. And when you get on the scene, you can superimpose the victims over one another, and they’re all in the same position. And it seemed like sex was involved, but there was no signs of death. You. My name is Joy Carter. I am a forensic pathologist of 40 years. 40 years ago, Joy spent her training fellowship year in Miami just when the women’s bodies were being found. I know that there were over 30 cases, and they had started occurring prior to my fellowship year, but they were still occurring, and I had at least a couple of those cases. But for some reason, Dr. Wetley was able to kind of get all those cases thrown into his box. Dr. Wetley being Dr. Charles Wetley, Miami Dade county’s deputy chief medical examiner, a man joy trained under but did not get on with. During my first couple of weeks, we had a child that had drowned. And Dr. Wetley starts off his discussion by saying, black people don’t know how to swim. And so I said, wait a minute, I swim. I said, my friends swim. I said, my father swim. I said, I think what you mean to say is that black children may not have access to a swimming pool to use. He was arrogant. We were not close. I mean, it takes a certain amount of confidence to do the work that we do. But I thought he was arrogant. Joy says that Dr. Wetley’s main interest in the mysterious deaths was the cocaine found in the women’s systems. He was involved in studies about the metabolism of cocaine in the human body. Currently, since the beginning of the year, we’ve been seeing about one cocaine induced death every ten to 14 days. That’s Dr. Wetley on NBC News. Back in 1984, last fall, we predicted that if the availability would increase, the price go down, the purity increased, that we would start seeing more deaths. And I think that’s what’s happening now. Dr. Wetley examined the women’s bodies, and finally, in 1988, he announced that he had determined the cause of death. The women had all spontaneously dropped dead as a result of a combination of cocaine and sex. It was from the black women having sex with the male of the species. He was quoted saying this. Dr. Wetley’s exact quotes were, autopsies have conclusively shown that these women were not murdered. And for some reason, with chronic cocaine use, the male of the species becomes psychotic and the female of the species dies in relation to sex. Dr. Wetley coined a term to describe his findings. He named his diagnosis excited delirium. They were young black women, and he was grouping them all under excited delirium. What is this excited delirium? But then something happened. There was another death. 14 year old Antoinette burns. She had last been seen alive hitching a ride with a neighbour to go to the movies. She was found in a junk strewn yard under a pepper tree. At first, everything seemed to fit the pattern. She was lying in the exact same position as all of the others, except she didn’t fit the pattern at all. The young woman did not have drugs in her system. My child was not a prostitute. She didn’t use drugs. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s Antoinette’s moment Mother Lehlene, talking to Fox television back in 1989. What did the police tell you about your daughter’s death? How she died? They said she had no gunshot wounds, no stab wounds. Cause of death was unknown. Not a clue. None. An autopsy confirmed it. Antoinette was clean of drugs. It was the first kink in the excited delirium theory, which didn’t surprise Detective Frank Woslowski because he had had his doubts from the start. I mean, wow, that blows Dr. Wetley’s theory. Now people started to open their eyes. Maybe this lowly detective sergeant might be correct. Where a well known doctor might be off. Did it seem like most people were just automatically believing the medical examiner? Because we all basically just trust doctors. Well, I think that’s human nature. Hey, he’s a doctor. Who’s this guy? And the police began to question, was this excited delirium? What’s going on? Antoinette’s mother herself spent time investigating, visiting the place where they found her daughter’s body, trying to make sense of it. But she got nowhere, and neither did the police. The investigation ground to a halt until something else happened. And then there was a victim who lived, who got away and was able to tell her story. What did she say? She was able to describe being involved in a sexual act and that the person tried to choke her. So she said, someone tried to kill me? Yes. The woman told the police, quote, the man chokes you like he intends to kill you. It is not a choke where he’s playing with you at all. He wants to kill you. The look on the guy’s face had changed from a nice gentleman to a damn maniac. And so they were able to get her story and start building a description of this person. So this is real law enforcement. And that’s when they began to debunk. This is not excited delirium. These are homicides. A serial killer. Serial killer. He prowls the streets of Miami, moves among the ladies of the night. But his lust is not for sex. It’s for death. The women’s bodies were exhumed and reexamined, this time by Dr. Wetley’s boss, the chief medical examiner. He found things that Dr. Wetley had missed, like haemorrhaging of the eyes, which can come from being choked. So then, of course, that kind of awakened us. All of a sudden, the detective. Hey, did you have one? Did I have one? And that’s what started to put together, ended up. The county had, I think, at least 19 or 20. And then when we got together with the city that we found out they had another 19 or so. While police say they have a number of suspects, they refuse to name names. In the meantime, Miami hookers who face certain death from AIDS and drugs now risk another terrible fate at the hands of a serial killer who has claimed at least 19 lives and has left the mother of Antoinette burns with a broken heart. I know I can’t bring you back, but whoever did this, they’ll pay. We started picking up on her name, and then all of a sudden, when you follow the name, there were 16 rape cases, similar but not deaths. What was the name? Charlie Williams. So tell me about him. Tell me everything you can remember about him. Charlie Williams’s first arrest was for choking a girlfriend and beating her up. And he got a year in jail for that, did the year, and then got another rape case. A prostitute did charge rape and choking. He was ordered to take a psych evaluation in 74. When you read his medical files, he admits that he has a woman problem and he needs help. He admitted he had a temper. And he even admitted in one of the reports that, yes, if you have to slap him, you slap him to get the respect. He goes on to say, well, you’d have to be stupid to let him go. You got to kill them so they can’t talk against you. It seems like he was treated pretty leniently. Yes, and it’s a terrible thing to say. You’re convicted of rape and you get one year. Let’s be honest, you’re a prostitute. I hate to say that. Yeah, you’re right. Very lenient. Now, the police had a name. They re interviewed the sex workers who had been around one of the victims just before her death. Actually, when you start talking to the prostitutes out there, they knew Charlie. And then there was a couple that said, well, the last person near her we seen walking away, it was Charlie Williams. Our theory was that there could be oral sex involved. So let’s cheque Charlie. And maybe she bit him. And sure enough, Charlie had teeth marks on his penis. So we called in a dental expert and he was able to compare her teeth marks were on his body. And so it was finally determined what the actual cause of death had been. It was forced fellatio. By the time the police charged Charles Williams, he was already serving a 40 year sentence for rape. But ten days before his murder trial was due to begin, he died of AIDS. And what happened to Dr. Wetley after these murders? He moved on to be the medical examiner for New York City. So he had a very glorious career. Dr. Wetley. Yes. Did Dr. Wetley ever admit that he was wrong? Not that I know of. No, not that I know of. When Dr. Wetley discovered that these people, who he had also died of excited delirium, had actually been victims of a serial killer, did he drop the term? Apparently not. He had written several papers. They were published, and he was speaking all over the country. The term continued, and all of a sudden, excited to larry him is being used all over the country by offices that were nowhere close to Miami, nowhere where Dr. Wetley had worked. So it seems to me that the term had been pretty much debunked by the early 1990s. But instead of dying a death, the term seems to have spread like wildfire. How did that happen? Well, my position is 14 year old Antoinette Burns debunked excited delirium in Miami all those years ago. And unfortunately, we did not have the Internet back then, so I think the junk science nature of that didn’t get further than Miami. This is Julia Sherwin. She’s a civil rights lawyer from Oakland, California. She deposed Dr. Wetley back in 2014, sat face to face with him as he gave sworn evidence, and she has followed what happened to his theory of excited delirium in the years since the Miami murders. He was avidly active in the forensic pathology community and would go to forensic pathology conferences and continue talking about his excited delirium theory, even after his boss re examined all the women’s autopsies and determined that they were the result of a serial killer. And nobody at these conferences presumably brought that up to him. They didn’t know. As far as I can tell, they didn’t know about the scandal in Miami. Dr. Wetley kept it quiet. Nobody looked into it, as far as I can tell. And even as recently as 2020, I was asked to participate in an international death and custody conference, and I discussed the junk science origins of excited delirium as part of my presentation. And it was news to these people, forensic pathologists from around the world. Wow. They still didn’t know. Right? Along with his theory about women and sex, Dr. Wetley spent decades promoting a corresponding theory of male deaths from excited delirium. Quote, the women may be dying from sexual activity The men just go berserk before spontaneously dropping dead. Here he is on ABC News in 1984. They’ve done some very bizarre things. For example, they get angry and suddenly rip off all their clothes, start smashing furniture, running through windows. Seems to be fairly popular with these individuals. I think some people listening to this will have this idea that, oh, they’ve seen video of some guy on drugs really acting crazily like running around. So I suppose my question is this phrase excited delirium, is it ever true in any cases? I don’t think the term should be used. I think you should call it what it is, drug intoxication or all of these spice drugs that come from Asia that also cause excitation of the central nervous system. This could be someone who has diabetes mellitus and maybe they’re low on their blood sugar and that can cause some mental difficulties. Just calling them one thing and putting them all in the basket is what’s problematic and it’s biassed and it doesn’t lead to good results. By the way, excited delirium isn’t recognised by the American Medical association, nor the American Psychiatric association, nor the World Health Organisation, and it isn’t listed in the DSM, the Manual of Mental Disorders. It really should have gone the way of discredited junk sciences like phrenology, but instead it’s flourished, especially in the law enforcement world. Julia, the civil rights attorney, says this is mainly for one reason lobbying by Taser International. After Dr. Wetley promoted excited delirium as a potential cause of death, one of his colleagues, Dr. Vincent Demayo and Dr. Demio’s wife Teresa, wrote a book and was published in 2006 called Excited Delirium syndrome. By 2007, Taser International had purchased 1000 to 1500 copies of that book to hand out for free at forensic pathology conferences to forensic pathologists. Given that there were only about 750 full time forensic pathologists in the United States, Taser, now known as Axon, had purchased enough copies to cover the entire community twice over. It was obviously beneficial for Taser to promote a book that presented excited delirium as a cause of death because it would allow them to argue that if a suspect died after being tased, there may be another explanation. They’ll smash out windows, they’ll run through traffic. These people are acting bizarrely and this is a medical emergency. That’s Dr. Wetley’s colleague, Vincent Demio, who co wrote the book that Taser distributed they describe as having superhuman strength. You can taser them, you can hit them, and it doesn’t seem to bother them, they still keep going. The police have to restrain them because they’re a danger not only to others, but a danger to themselves. They’ll go running through traffic. Like Dr. Demayo, Dr. Wetley acted as a paid court expert for Taser. Many times when a taser was used on someone who subsequently died, they know when they hire him what he’s going to say. He’s always going to say the Taser had no role in a person’s death. And do they know that he’s going to say, actually, they died as a result of excited delirium? Yes, he’s the father of excited delirium. So, yeah, they know exactly what they’re buying. All Taser needs is a plausible non taser explanation for the person’s death. And they knew when Dr. Wetley was alive that he would give that to them. Dr. Wetley testified. I think he said he wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been retained in 100 excited delirium cases. I don’t know how many of those cases were taser specific. I’ll say, just having done this for 28 years, when people encounter law enforcement in the United States, if they’re tased very often, they’re not just tased, they’re tased and restrained and beaten very frequently by multiple officers. So I don’t think that we can really know how many of his cases would have been solely taser cases without any kind of manhandling involved. Actually, according to Reuters, it happened 276 times between 20 20 17. On 276 occasions, a person died after being tased, and excited delirium was listed as a cause of death. Taser told us that they defer to scientists on whether excited delirium is medically recognised and that their weapons are the safest use of force available to law enforcement, with nearly 4 million uses over 25 years. But Taser’s role in this story is only part of it. There’s another thing you need to know. According to Dr. Wetley himself, 70% of the men who died of, quote, cocaine induced excited delirium were black, even though most cocaine users are white. But that didn’t sway him from his diagnosis. Black men dying in custody had nothing to do with racism or police brutality, he implied. Rather, black people were just more prone to spontaneously dropping dead of excited delirium. It may, he wrote in 1990, be genetic. All of which alarmed joy Carter, the pathologist who trained under him. My fear was that you had law enforcement being trained, that people of colour will attack you. They’ll have superhuman strength. You have to shoot them or hold them down because you can’t do anything with them. The phrase excited delirium should have died with the arrest of the Miami serial killer. Instead, it was kept alive by Dr. Wetley and by Taser. And now it was about to explode during lockdown in the most horrifying way. Well, I was born in rural North Carolina, basically a sharecropper’s son. I’m the baby out of 17, grew up working in tobacco fields and getting paid very minuscule amounts of coins. Do you know where the tobacco ended up? Like which cigarettes? It ended up in? Marlborough. Winston, Palmall. This is Selwyn Jones of Gettysburg, South Dakota. Selwyn grew up, became a pro football player and then a motel owner, renovating decrepit motels. Cut to March 2020 when the world went into lockdown. You know, everybody was scrambling, man, including Selwyn’s nephew, Perry. Perry had had a rocky past. He had been jailed for drug possession and aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. But by 2014, he was turning his life around. He moved to Minneapolis and settled down, getting work as a security guard at a music club. But then lockdown happened and the club shut down, laying him off. He was out of a job and out of money, and lockdown was dragging on. Tell me a little bit about your relationship with him. Were you close? I’m Uncle Selwin. You know, I watched him grow from a baby to a man. And he was just one of my favourites. When was the last time that you and he communicated? Oh, John, you had to ask me that, didn’t you? My birthday is May the 22nd, and he text me, hey, happy birthday. I was busy just living life. I ignored the text. And that taught me a very valuable lesson. If somebody reaches out to me, I’m going to return their message. I’m sorry about that thing with the text. Next. I am too. I think about my big baby every day. Can you tell me a little bit about how you discovered that he had died? I was doing the same thing that I do every day, John. I have a Nine year old, and it’s my job to get them up and get them dressed. I remember getting their baths and putting their clothes on and then getting ready to walk out the door. And I sat down and I focused on a television. The news was showing a video of a black man on the ground. He had been accused of passing off a counterfeit 20 a bill. Now he was surrounded by police, one of whom had his knee on his neck. And I’m looking at this and I’m thinking, wow, man, won’t somebody help him? Won’t they stop? God, they’re going to kill him. And my sister calls me and she said, did you see what they did to Perry? And I set the phone down. John, so you were watching on the news the footage of your nephew dying, being killed, but for a moment you didn’t realise that it was your nephew? I had no idea, John. I just sat there and digested what I saw. And what I saw was probably the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Selwyn always called his nephew by his middle name, Perry, but his full name was George Perry. Floyd, as he cried out and said, I can’t breathe, the first thing tossed around is, well, maybe it’s excited delirium. Roll him on his side. As Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, another officer said, roll him on his side. I just worry about excited delirium or whatever. Worry about the delirium or whatever. He wasn’t excited. He was on the ground begging for his life. It turned out that the Minneapolis police had been taught all about how to spot if a suspect was suffering from excited delirium. So usually what police are trained is these are the markers of excited delirium. The person has superhuman strength. They’re worked up and hyper and delirious. They have a high body temperature, they sweat a lot, they’re impervious to pain. That’s Julia, the lawyer who deposed Dr. Wetley in 2014. We found a slide about excited delirium from a Minneapolis police training PowerPoint. The slide has a picture of the Hulk next to the phrases unlimited endurance, reduced sense of pain, superhuman strength. The training that the people have superhuman strength and are impervious to pain, I think, causes officers to overreact and really want to use overwhelming force on the person and to hold them down much longer than is necessary. So at what point did you realise that there was a connection between excited delirium and the murder of George Floyd? Oh, the minute I saw the video, immediately I knew that excited delirium was going to be involved in the defence of that case, superhuman strength. Obviously, this has occurred because of the evolution of life. If you put a big black man with a big black woman, you are going to create a big black kid. That is what happened in the 18 hundreds. So that slave would be bigger and stronger and could work harder and work more. So that’s just called genetics. Selwyn’s claim, by the way, is a contentious one among historians of slavery. Some say slaves were pretty much left to themselves to find partners. But the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld did write in 1839 that slave owners sought to improve their, quote, stock in the same way that farmers tried to improve their cattle by crossing the breed. You know, man, in the 18 hundreds, doctors come to America and they said that black people could endure more pain, black people could endure more heat. This is, in fact, still widely believed. In 2016, the National Academies of Science published a survey about racial bias in pain assessment, which revealed that 40% of first and second year medical students in the United States assumed that black people’s skin is thicker than white people’s. If you tell me that my nephew had superhuman strength, if you tell me that he didn’t feel any pain, well, he’s dead now. I don’t get to see George Perry Floyd Jr. Anymore in this living world. Not because of excited delirium, because Derek Chauvin basically choked him to death with his knee on his neck. I got eight and a half billion people that saw my nephew die slowly by the seconds. You. And so what began with a medical examiner in the 80s making grand pseudoscientific pronouncements ended with the murder of George Floyd two months into lockdown. Of course, the protests by Black Lives Matter and antifa that followed his murder gave rise to a whole new wave of culture wars. We’ve tried peaceful for years upon years, and it has gotten us nowhere. They murder us for being peaceful. At 01:00 a.m. The president triggered outrage when he tweeted, these thugs are dishonouring the memory of George Floyd. When the looting starts, the shooting starts. As it happens, that same month, May 2020, turns out to be an extraordinary one in the evolution of the culture wars. After six weeks of lockdown compliance, a great number of the cultural conflicts that consume us today blew up within days of each other. And some, just like the story of excited delirium, have the most unexpected origins. Next time things fell apart, my David’s like, no, I don’t want anything to do with a yacht club. And I’m like, no, honey, it’s not like that. They don’t wear ties. They’re not stuffy. They’re like us. So we were just the friendliest little sailing club. And something happened. One day at the yacht club, things fell apart. Was written and presented by me, John Ronson, and produced by Sarah Shebia. The music was composed by Phil Channel. The programme was mixed by Giles Aspen, the editor was Philip Sellers and the commissioning editor was Dan Clark. It’s a BBC audio production for BBC Radio Four and BBC Sounds. I love you. I know that. Carolyn is 80, a wealthy widow. Dave is in his 50s, homeless, a former drug addict with a long criminal record. Their love affair causes a huge rift in Carolyn’s family. That’s our mom. We’re not going to let you just do that. I’m Sue Mitchell and this story unfolded in California, on the street where I live. Look at you, brought into your house. He’s a con artist, mother. Is Dave a dangerous interloper or the tender carer he claims to be? That’s why I’m here. Thank the Lord. Find out in intrigue. Million dollar lover from BBC Radio Four. Listen on BBC sounds. If anything happens to you, I will just die. Tired of ads barging into your favourite news podcasts? Good news. Ad free listening on Amazon Music is included with your prime membership. Just head to Amazon.com ad freenewspodcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Enjoy thousands of ac shows ad free for prime subscribers. Some shows may have ads as we get older, our scalps age and our hair thins. It’s the same as how our faces age and we develop wrinkles. Hi, I’m Dr. James Kilgawa, a Stanford dermatologist. 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