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- [00:00]
Rosetta Stone Representative
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- [01:09]
Mike Ross
Giving so what I teach at the University of Maryland is constitutional history, and I've done a lot of writing about a famous Supreme Court case that come out of New Orleans called the Slaughterhouse Cases, which took place in the early 1870s. And as I was searching the New Orleans newspapers looking for references to the Slaughterhouse cases, I stumbled across in June 1870, these allegations that a baby had been abducted for use as a voodoo sacrifice. And I said, wow, that is really interesting. And anyone who's done historical research knows there's all these things you stumble across and you're like, wow, if I have time, I'll come back to that someday. But I started as I was reading each day of the New Orleans papers, following it as if it was the events of 1870, and the story just got better and more complex and more intertwined with reconstruction. And I said, this is a story that needs to be told.
- [02:15]
Jed Lipinski
That's Mike Ross, a history professor at the University of Maryland. But before moving to Maryland, Mike taught at Loyola University in New Orleans, and what he described in the beginning of this episode, the experience of stumbling upon a crazy story, is familiar to me. Most of the big stories I've worked on, whether they're podcasts, news articles, or documentaries, came out of other stories. The first season of Gone south, about the death of Margaret Kuhn, came about while I was producing a Netflix Documentary called the Pharmacist. I learned about the Dixie Mafia. The topic of gone South Season 2 while investigating the death of Margaret Kuhn. Sometimes years pass between the moment you find a story and the moment you finally commit to it. That's what happened to Mike. After reading allegations that a baby was abducted for a voodoo sacrifice in Reconstruction era New Orleans. He wrote an entire book about a landmark supreme court decision in 1873. But the story of the kidnapped baby, what really happened to her, what it meant for the city of New Orleans and the fate of the country kept gnawing at him. And so he came back to it. I'm Jed Lipinski. This is Gone South. The story Mike Ross found begins on June 9, 1870 in a working class neighborhood in New Orleans known as the Back of Town. On Howard Avenue where the Superdome stands today, a teenager named Rosa Gorman is standing in the front yard of a house with two children she's babysitting. The two children are 10 year old Georgie Digby and his 17 month old sister Molly Digby.
- [03:52]
Mike Ross
On this day, two Afro Creole women, one who is described as particularly stylish and wearing a seaside hat, stop the coup over Molly Digby and say, oh, what a beautiful baby.
- [04:07]
Jed Lipinski
You may be wondering what Afro Creole means. It describes a mixed race class who flourished in New Orleans under Spanish, French and later American rule. Before and after the Civil War, Afro Creoles often mingled with whites in New Orleans society. It would have been totally normal for two Afro Creole women to approach a white teenager like Rosa Gorman in 1870.
- [04:29]
Mike Ross
And Rosa Gorman, who is holding Molly, is talking to them when suddenly fire engines pulled by horses came racing down the street because Seligman's photographic studio two blocks away was on fire.
- [04:45]
Jed Lipinski
Rosa, the babysitter, hands Molly to her brother so she can go check out the fire. But the women offer to hold baby Molly instead and 10 year old Georgie complies. The women then send Georgie to a local market to get some bananas for the baby. But when Georgie returns, the two women and Molly Digby are gone.
- [05:05]
Mike Ross
Georgie panics, runs home to his house where his mother Bridget Digby is cooking dinner, tells her that Molly has disappeared with these women. Bridget runs out into the street calling Molly's name, shouting for help and looks down at terrified Georgie who's still clutching the bananas, grabs the bananas and throws them into the street.
- [05:31]
Jed Lipinski
In 1870 New Orleans, a missing baby in the poor back of town neighborhood wasn't exactly big news. Hundreds of children went missing in the city each year and most of them were Returned to their parents. New Orleans was also plagued by crime and violence. That same day, a drowned child was found floating in the Mississippi. Two guys got into a gory knife fight on St. Claude Avenue and a boy stabbed his friend in the head in a dispute over a ball game. But the editors of the big city newspapers saw sensational potential in the Molly Digby story. The alleged kidnapping of a white baby by two mixed race women carried heavy symbolic meaning for the citizens of New Orleans in 8, 1870. It quickly became intertwined with the complicated and radical politics of Reconstruction.
- [06:18]
Mike Ross
For a moment in 1870, African Americans are able to vote. A third of the Louisiana legislature is African American. They are serving on juries. They are empowered by the new Louisiana constitution to demand service in restaurants and bars and coffee houses. And you even have an integrated New Orleans police force with black policemen and detectives.
- [06:47]
Jed Lipinski
During the civil War, New Orleans was spared the destruction that faced other southern cities like Atlanta, Richmond, Virginia, and Columbia, South Carolina. As a result, a lot of ex Confederate leaders and soldiers relocated there after the war. Some became prominent citizens. Others joined paramilitary groups devoted to overthrowing the Republican regiment. The Digby kidnapping played to the fears of these ex confederates who thought Reconstruction would destroy the social order of Louisiana and the deep South. The democratic press, who were committed to the old social order, seized on the Digby case as an example of what was happening and what would happen more often now that African Americans were being integrated into Louisiana society. Molly's father, Thomas Digby, advertised a $500 reward for the return of his child, which ginned up some interest in the case. But what really got everyone's attention was a wild rumor printed just days after Molly's disappearance, that she'd been abducted for use as a voodoo sacrifice.
- [07:48]
Mike Ross
June 23, around the summer solstice, is the holiest moment in the voodoo calendar. It's St. John's Eve, and the practitioners of voodoo held ceremonies out on Lake Pontchartrain. The fact that Mali was abducted just a week or two ahead of St. John's Eve will lead to rumor mongers to claim that practitioners of Vodou were going to use Mali as a sacrifice in one of their ceremonies.
- [08:20]
Jed Lipinski
One reporter claimed to have interviewed an actual voodoo priestess. She claimed to have taken part in the ritual sacrifice of white children before. She described dancing naked around an iron cauldron containing a large snake, which she then draped around the shoulders of her followers. The sacrifice followed. According to the article, the child's blood was then sprinkled on the cauldron, the snake and the worshipers Such reports may have been pure fiction, but they drove many New Orleans residents to the verge of hysteria.
- [08:55]
Mike Ross
As this makes the story all the more sensational. You now have a moment where wealthy women from the Garden District and from the Creole neighborhoods in the French Quarter and Esplanade who normally don't get along too well, the Americans and the Creoles, they're now going to essentially team up and march to the home of the young Reconstruction governor, demanding that he do something to solve this heinous crime.
- [09:28]
Jed Lipinski
Louisiana's governor was a 28 year old Republican and former Union soldier from Illinois named Henry Clay Wormuth. Wormuth was a die hard supporter of Reconstruction and the integration of black citizens into public life. He saw the Digby case as a chance to prove that New Orleans newly integrated police force was capable of solving a crime with complex racial dynamics. So he put one of the city's best black detectives on the case, a man named Jean Baptiste Jourdan.
- [09:57]
Mike Ross
Detective Jourdain is a Afro Creole from New Orleans. His father was a white gentleman who had had a lifelong relationship with a African American woman. And Jourdan is the son of that union.
- [10:18]
Jed Lipinski
Jourdan's father gave him a stake in life. He gave him money and an education. As a young man, Jourdain had been a cigar maker. He later joined the Union army at the outbreak of the Civil War, but resigned in protest when African Americans were barred from becoming officers.
- [10:34]
Mike Ross
And now during Reconstruction, when the police department had called for people to volunteer to be policemen, Jourdan had joined and they had made him a detective. He is a polished, bilingual, gentlemanly figure and they are going to put him now in this kind of starring role in the digby case.
- [11:03]
Jed Lipinski
Most US cities wouldn't integrate their police forces until the early 20th century. But in New Orleans in 1870, the police force had multiple black detectives and Jourdan was one of them.
- [11:13]
Mike Ross
New York City won't integrate its police force until 1911. So the fact that you would have an integrated police force and black detectives would have jumped off the page of newspapers. And as the Digby story got bigger and bigger and went out on the AP wire around the country, it's being reported in newspapers from New York to California. And now Jean Baptiste Jourdan is going to become the first black detective in American history to make national news.
- [11:46]
Jed Lipinski
As Jourdan launched his investigation, the country saw it as a kind of Reconstruction case study. Solving the crime would support the viability of Reconstruction and failing to solve the crime would be used by the opposition as proof that integrated institutions would lead to dysfunction, chaos and crime. The city and to a large extent, the country, was watching.
- [12:13]
Jenna Fisher
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through Instacart? Because maybe you only bought two wreaths, but you have 12 windows. Or maybe your toddler got very eager with the Advent calendar. Or maybe the inflatable snowman didn't make it through the snowstorm. Or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever the reason, this season, Instacart's here for hosts and their whole holiday haul. Get decorations from the Home Depot, CVS and more through Instacart and enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees and terms apply.
- [12:43]
Angela Kinsey
I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends and together we have the podcast Office Ladies where we rewatched every single episode of the Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs.
- [12:58]
Mike Ross
Guess who's sitting next to me?
- [12:59]
Jenna Fisher
Steve.
- [13:02]
Angela Kinsey
Iz and I Carell in the studio. Every Wednesday we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the Office and our friendship with brand new guests and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus on Mondays we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.
- [13:42]
Jenna Fisher
When you think about businesses that are selling through the roof like Alo Allbirds or Skims. Sure you think about a great product, a cool brand and brilliant marketing. But an often overlooked secret is actually the businesses behind the business making, selling and for shoppers buying simple for millions of businesses. That business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet and the not so secret secret with Shop Pay that boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned and way more sales going. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell whenever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed and everywhere in between. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout experience as business powerhouses like Aloe Allbirds and Skims. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com OdysseyPodcast all lowercase go to shopify.com OdysseyPodcast to upgrade your selling today shopify.com OdysseyPodcast.
- [14:53]
Jed Lipinski
Jourdan's investigation into the kidnapping of Molly Digby opened with one advantage, reward money. Because of the stakes of the case, the pro Reconstruction governor Henry Clay Wormuth raised the reward from 500 to $2,000. Leads started pouring in from everywhere outlying Louisiana parishes, Alabama, even Cincinnati.
- [15:14]
Mike Ross
It's a big story, and the money kind of makes it the Powerball of the summer of 1870. Anyone who's seen a black woman with a white child in a place where they doesn't seem like they should be is now saying, maybe that's Molly Digby.
- [15:30]
Jed Lipinski
One tip Jourdan pursued involved a woman in the African American part of town who claimed she knew the abductor. Because the information came through a tip instead of a police informant, Jourdan was careful not to spook the source. He and another black detective decided to go undercover. They disguised themselves as formerly enslaved men, found the woman in question, and struck up a conversation with her. But as it turns out, the woman was just looking for attention. As a matter of fact, none of the early leads panned out. So Jourdan, desperate to make progress, consulted a famous clairvoyant named Madame Farris, who was in town for a performance. Ferris held a seance with Jourdan and Molly's dad Thomas. After emerging from her trance, she claimed the baby was being held captive in a nearby neighborhood.
- [16:19]
Mike Ross
They go to the house and they go in and there are indeed three young children in the house. And she says, I think that's Molly Digby. And they go over to see if it is Molly and it actually turns out to be a little boy.
- [16:37]
Jed Lipinski
It was now early August, about two months since Molly's disappearance. Jourdan was feeling the heat from his superiors and the Democratic run newspapers when he got a promising tip. The source said Molly may be in the uptown neighborhood at the home of a mixed race woman who matched the kidnapper's description. Jourdan and his Afro Creole partner headed over.
- [16:57]
Mike Ross
They arrive at the house and they are somewhat aggressive, running through the house going, where is the stolen child? And there is no baby. But as they look around at the surroundings of the house, it's a very interesting situation because it is a very nice house full of stylish furniture and most of the people there are Afro Creoles. But there's also a white woman there in an advanced stage of pregnancy and the whole situation seems a little weird. But they can't find the baby. So Jourdan and his fellow officer leave the house.
- [17:43]
Jed Lipinski
But two days later, the case took another surprising turn.
- [17:47]
Mike Ross
On August 9, the Digbys are waking up at their home under their mosquito netting and there's a knock at the door.
- [17:55]
Jed Lipinski
The man at the door was James Broadwell, a well known captain of one of the grand Mississippi river steamboats.
- [18:02]
Mike Ross
And Captain Broadwell says to Thomas Digby, I think I have your child.
- [18:09]
Jed Lipinski
Thomas Digby was stunned. They took a streetcar to Captain Broadwell's house where they found his wife holding a baby Molly's age. The child had heat boils on her face. Thomas Digby wasn't sure it was Molly, so they took the child back home to see if his wife Bridget could identify her.
- [18:25]
Mike Ross
Bridget Digby immediately says, oh yes, that's my Molly. We found my Molly. And as she's shouting this immediately, people in the neighborhood who had been caught up in this tense story start to come running to the house and there's this big moment of jubilation that soon turns into a giant crowd of people celebrating the return of Molly Digby.
- [18:50]
Jed Lipinski
When Jourdan and the cops learned that James Broadwell, the famous steamboat captain, had found Molly Digby, they rushed to his place to interrogate him. Broadwell wasn't home, so they interrogated his wife Evelina instead.
- [19:03]
Mike Ross
They immediately go into the house and start pressuring her to say, you've got a stolen baby in your house. You better tell us what happened here. And after a time of aggressive interrogation, Evelina Broadwell cracks and coughs up a lot of information about what had happened.
- [19:23]
Jed Lipinski
Evelina Broadwell tells Jourdan that the previous day an old family friend named Ellen Follen showed up at their door. Ellen Follen, who was Afro Creole, told the Broadwells that she had a child at her house that might be the missing baby, Molly Digby. Fallen said that the baby was brought to her house by a veiled white woman who asked her to look after the baby until she returned from the corner grocery. But she never returned. Fallen didn't know what to do next. Normally she might simply alert the authorities, but given the intense scrutiny of the Digby case, the fear mongering rumors of a voodoo sacrifice, and the fact that Fallen was an Afro Creole woman, she worried that people would accuse her of stealing the baby, so she came to the Broadwells for help.
- [20:08]
Mike Ross
Could you, as my friend Broadwell family, return this child, see if this child is Digby's child and return the child to the Digbys? Broadwell, in part out of his friendship for Ellen Fallon, but also because he's Interested in the reward, says, yes, I can do that. And this is how the child is returned to the Digbys.
- [20:35]
Jed Lipinski
When the cops asked where this Ellen Fallen lived, Evelina said, at the corner of Belle Castle and Camp. This, it turned out, was the same suspicious seeming house Jourdan had visited just two days earlier. So Jourdan and the cops headed back to the house and accused Ellen Fallen and the other occupants of hiding the baby.
- [20:53]
Mike Ross
This time they go in with much greater intent to figure out what the story there is. And Detective Jourdan says to Alan Fallen, you told me there was no stolen child here, and now you have turned the baby over to the Broadwells to return to the new beast. There was a stolen child here. And she says, I didn't know it was a stolen child. There was a child here. That's all.
- [21:20]
Jed Lipinski
It was then that Jourdan and the others started to piece together what was really going on at this strange house.
- [21:26]
Mike Ross
They figure out that Ellen Fallen's stylish home is what some people called a lying in hospital, or sometimes a house of secret obstetrics. And this was a place where women who got pregnant in controversial circumstances, young women out of wedlock, for example, from fine families, could go to spend the time of their pregnancy outside of the prying eyes of their neighbors. They could hide their pregnancy. And because Ellen Fallon's home was so nice, it is a place where women of a certain class could feel comfortable, even though the purpose of the house would have been seen as salacious to many.
- [22:16]
Jed Lipinski
Inside, Jourdan spoke to a young pregnant woman from Mobile, Alabama, who revealed that she'd come to the house with Ellen Fallen's younger sister, another Afro Creole woman named Louisa Murray. Louisa, it turned out, operated a similar lying in hospital in Mobile. While the cops were interrogating the pregnant woman, she let slip that Louisa Murray had been in New Orleans around the time of the abduction. And from her description, Louisa sounded a lot like the elegant woman in the seaside hat that witnesses said stole Molly. Given this new information, Jourdan and the other cops started to question Evelina's version of events. That a, quote, veiled white woman left the baby on Ellen's doorstep and never returned. The cops arrested Ellen Fallon and her teenage son George as accessories to the kidnapping. And they suspected Louisa Murray might be the missing link. That night, Detective Jourdan boarded a steamboat to Mobile. Two days later, Jourdan returned with Louisa Murray in custody. She was immediately brought to the Digby's house, where a large crowd had formed, hoping to lay eyes on the supposed kidnapper.
- [23:20]
Mike Ross
They bring Molly Digby's brother Georgie, and the babysitter from the night of the abduction, Rosa Gorman. And they bring them in front of Louisa Murray, and they say, is this the woman that you saw abduct Molly Digby? And they're like, I don't know. Yeah, it doesn't look totally like her.
- [23:40]
Jed Lipinski
So Jourdan and the cops brought Louisa inside and put her in the seaside hat that the abductress allegedly wore that night.
- [23:47]
Mike Ross
And they bring her back outside and immediately Georgie Digby says, that's her, that's her. And Rosa Gorman says, yeah, I kind of think that's her. And now she had to realize she was in a lot of trouble because she's just been identified. And she is thrown into the fetid Orleans Parish jail, a hell hole that a woman of Louisa Murray's refinement had to have been terrified of.
- [24:17]
Jed Lipinski
Louisa Murray was having a bad day, but things were about to get even worse.
- [24:23]
Mike Ross
So once Louisa Murray has been taken to the Orleans Parish prison, another witness surfaces, a white man named August Singler, who worked with Thomas Digby in his carriage business. And he now tells the police that he also was there just hanging out on the night of the abduction and saw the whole thing.
- [24:48]
Jed Lipinski
In the months following the abduction, Singler had never mentioned to Thomas Digby, his colleague whose baby had just been kidnapped, that he'd witnessed the crime.
- [24:57]
Mike Ross
But he now says he was there and saw the whole thing. So they bring him down to the Orleans Parish prison and they go up to Louisa Murray's cell and they say, is this her? He says, yep, that's her. Absolutely. And they're like, do you need us to put a hat on her? He's like, nope, that's her. I know it's her. And in the legal history of Louisiana in the 19th century, a definitive witness who is a white man testifying against a black woman would be very damning for Louisa Murray. So she, when this happens, has to be feeling very scared.
- [25:41]
Jenna Fisher
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- [26:08]
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- [26:09]
Angela Kinsey
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- [26:15]
Rosetta Stone Representative
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- [26:25]
Angela Kinsey
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- [26:36]
Jed Lipinski
Three months into the investigation of Molly Digby's kidnapping, Jourdan and the police had three suspects in custody. Ellen Fallen, her son George and her younger sister Louisa. Governor Wormuth and the pro Reconstruction Republicans were happy with Jourdan and the integrated police force. They scolded the ex Confederate Democratic press for spreading crazy rumors that Molly had been sacrificed by a voodoo priestess. But mysteries remained.
- [27:02]
Mike Ross
If Ellen Fallon and Louisa Murray's story of the veiled woman dropping off the baby is untrue, why would they abduct this child? There has to be a motive. There has to be a bigger story. And it might be a story linked to the weird stuff going on at this lying in hospital, or it might be something else. But if you're going to convict these kidnappers, you're going to need a motive.
- [27:32]
Jed Lipinski
A New Orleans grand jury indicted Ellen George and Louisa in January 1871. The case went to trial.
- [27:41]
Mike Ross
The city is riveted. The courtroom lines out the doors every morning.
- [27:49]
Jed Lipinski
But unlike trials throughout Louisiana history, the jury in this case was integrated with 10 white men and two Afro Creole men. Women weren't allowed to sit on juries in Louisiana for another 70 years. The trial posed a dilemma for Governor Wormuth and the Republicans. If the defendants were convicted, Confederate sympathizers could say, this is the kind of black on white crime we can expect in this new era. If the defendants were acquitted, they might argue that the integrated jury let Afro Creole criminals off the hook. The prosecution argued that multiple eyewitnesses saw Louisa at the scene, and they relied heavily on the eyewitness testimony of August Singler, the white man who claimed to have seen Louisa take the baby.
- [28:28]
Mike Ross
And yet the defense is able to shred his testimony and show that he's probably just making a lot of things up, particularly because he had gone two months without telling Thomas Digby, who he worked with, that he had seen the abduction.
- [28:45]
Jed Lipinski
The defense stressed that neither Georgie Digby nor Rosa Gorman, the babysitter, were initially sure Louisa was the one who took Molly. They also surprised the prosecution by putting four black neighbors on the stand who claimed to have seen the abductress and said she was much lighter skinned than Louisa. Finally they brought in another black witness from Mobile who provided Louisa with an alibi at the time of the abduction. The woman told the jury Louisa was at home getting a music lesson. In the end, the jury deliberated for just eight minutes before returning their verdict. Not guilty.
- [29:22]
Mike Ross
They clearly all agreed that the prosecution did not remove all reasonable doubt. They never came up with a motive. And August Singler was an unreliable witness. And they clearly took black testimony seriously. And we're left with, out of this one case as just yet another example, that in 1870, reconstruction was still a moment of possibility, that there were people, including the white men on the jury, who were willing to say, you know, I'm gonna look at this in a different way than I would have looked at it before the war, and we're going to give these defendants a fair shake. And people reading about the result of the Digby case would see perhaps we were headed toward a different world.
- [30:21]
Jed Lipinski
But any sense of hopefulness that followed the trial was short lived. As many predicted, the Democratic press spun the outcome in their favor. They accused Jourdan and the New Orleans integrated police force of incompetence. They'd failed to solve the case or prove a motive, and now potential kidnappers were back on the street. Jourdan was demoted from detective to a smaller role in the force. He quit two years later and won a seat in the state legislature. But Democrats accused him of accepting bribes, and he resigned, though he was never convicted.
- [30:51]
Mike Ross
And then Reconstruction ends. After 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes tells the federal troops in the south to stop intervening in Southern affairs. And the ex confederates and their supporters regain control in Louisiana. And Jourdan, who for a moment had seen this great moment of possibility, his story gets sadder and darker. He'll have trouble finding work. His friend Francis Demas will hire him. For a time in his furniture store, he contracts malaria. And he gets more and more depressed about what was happening in the South. And eventually he goes into St. Louis Cemetery number one and sits down on the steps of the Jourdan family grave and shoots himself.
- [31:50]
Jed Lipinski
In researching this story, Mike Ross spent days in the newspaper archives following the saga of the Digby case and Jean Baptiste Jourdan as it unfolded in real time. He was crushed by Jourdan's decline. He saw it as a tragic metaphor for the rise and fall of Reconstruction.
- [32:07]
Mike Ross
I was just amazed, and I immediately went to see if anyone had ever written about it before.
- [32:15]
Jed Lipinski
To his surprise, the story was almost untouched by historians. He found a few lines about it in a biography of the voodoo Priestess Marie Laveau, but no mention of Jourdan. The kidnapping was also briefly mentioned in the New Orleans Picayune in the 1930s, but they left out key details.
- [32:32]
Mike Ross
The story that the Picayune tells of the Digby case is one where there are no black police officers to be found, nothing about interracial juries, and they report that Ellen Fallon and Louisa Murray were actually convicted and sent to the state penitentiary. And it just seemed, probably by the 1930s, inconceivable, that the story could have been any different.
- [33:04]
Jed Lipinski
So Mike got a book contract and began writing what would be called the Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case. He set about exhuming the real story of the Molly Digby kidnapping and the fascinating role played by Afro Creole detective Jean Baptiste Jourdan. But this is New Orleans, the birthplace of voodoo in America, the home of Anne Rice, a place that operates at least half a dozen different ghost tours daily. As Mike started writing, weird things started happening. For one, he realized that he was living on the exact spot that Ellen Follan's lying in hospital had once stood.
- [33:38]
Mike Ross
Ellen Folland's house had been torn down, but the houses across the street were there at the time. So I was looking out my window at the exact view Ellen Folland would have had.
- [33:48]
Jed Lipinski
A very kind of strange coincidence then, another strange coincidence. While working on the book, Mike hired a New Orleans photographer named Harold Baquet to take pictures of Jourdan's tomb and other spots in the Digby story. Not long after their photo shoot, Mike got an email from Harold's cousin, a woman named Isabel Baquet.
- [34:09]
Mike Ross
And what she said is, oh, you're writing about Detective Jourdain. He is an ancestor of ours. Because she had been doing her family.
- [34:17]
Jed Lipinski
History, Isabel told Mike that she and Harold are related to Jourdan, meaning Harold, the photographer Mike had just hired to take photos of Jourdan's tomb, was also, unbeknownst to him, a descendant of Jourdan's.
- [34:33]
Mike Ross
So when he was down photographing the Jourdan family grave with me, it turns out he was photographing the graves of his family.
- [34:45]
Jed Lipinski
Isabel and Mike got together. She introduced him to other members of the Baquet family. The Baquets have operated over 10 successful restaurants in New Orleans since the 40s, including a famous Creole spot called Little Dizzy's. Charles Baquet III is a distinguished diplomat who served as a US Ambassador in Africa. His nephew, Terry Baquet, was the print editor of the Times Picayune. And Terry's brother Dean is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who in 2014 became the first black executive editor of the New York Times.
- [35:19]
Mike Ross
And Detective Jourdan was the first black detective in New Orleans to make national news, one of the first black detectives in the United States. And while Jourdan's suicide was a tragic end to his life, his legacy lives on in his descendants in New Orleans. The things that he believed could happen, happened, and his family is an example of.
- [35:57]
Jed Lipinski
If you have information, story tips or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone south team, please email us@gonsouthpodcastmail.com that's gonesouthpodcastmail.com Gone south is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss Berman, Maddie Sprung Keyser, Tom Lipinski, Lloyd Lockridge and me. Our story editors are Maddie Sprung Keyser and Tom Lipinski. Gone south is edited, mixed and mastered by Chris Basil and Andy Jaskiewicz. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to J.D. crowley, Leah Reese, Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Hilary Schuf. If you want to hear more of Gone south, please take a few seconds to rate and review the show. It really helps.
- [36:59]
Angela Kinsey
You might think financial crime is all about money, but sometimes it ends in murder. I'm Nicole Lapin, host of Money Crimes, a Crime House Original Podcast. Each episode features a thrilling story about the dark side of finance and how to protect yourself from it. Follow and listen to Money Crimes, an Odyssey Podcast in partnership with Crime House Studios. Available on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.