Jean Baptiste: Grave Robber at Large

Summary

Stuff You Missed in History Class

Episode: Jean Baptiste: Grave Robber at Large

Air Date: January 7, 2026
Hosts: Holly Fry & Tracy V. Wilson

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the chilling historical case of Jean Baptiste, a gravedigger in 19th-century Salt Lake City whose shocking crimes of grave robbing came to light in 1862. Holly and Tracy guide listeners through his confounding origins, connections to the LDS church, the details and aftermath of his notorious crimes, the reaction of the Salt Lake community, and his mysterious disappearance. The story raises questions about justice, memory, and how communities process traumatic events.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origins of Jean Baptiste (03:45–07:45)

• Mysterious Roots: Jean Baptiste's birth year (1814) and place (often cited as Venice, Italy, though some say France) are both subject to dispute.
• Elusive Early Life: Little known about his background until the 1850s.
• Australian Gold Rush: Baptiste is drawn to Victoria, Australia, amid the gold rush, where moral decay is rampant and missionaries from the LDS Church are active.

"He had been raised Roman Catholic, but he had problems with the church and he left that church to join the Church of England. He was not happy in the Anglican Church, and then he moved on to the Methodist Church." - Holly Fry (04:27)

2. Conversion and Journey to Salt Lake City (05:41–08:23)

• Baptiste meets LDS missionaries, donates his self-built chapel to them, and immediately seeks baptism.
• Plans to bolster the new Salt Lake settlement lead Baptiste to emigrate, though a shipwreck delays his journey.
• Settles in Salt Lake City by 1859, taking the post of gravedigger at the city cemetery, marrying, and opening a tailoring shop.

3. The Crime Discovered: Moroni Clawson and Initial Investigation (08:23–14:54)

• In 1861, Baptiste buries Moroni Clawson, a local outlaw. Clawson's body, when exhumed, is found to be lacking burial clothes.
• Triggering the Investigation: Officer Henry Heath, who paid for Clawson's burial suit, investigates.
• Baptiste's house reveals a trove of stolen burial garments, implicating him in mass grave robbing.

"Judge, if you can, our horror and surprise when we discovered that this clothing was the funeral robes of people who had been buried in the city cemetery for several years past." - Henry Heath (13:33)

• An emotional Heath fears for his daughter's grave:

  “When I tell you that I had a short time previously buried an idolized daughter, and when I feared that her grave, too had been desecrated...perhaps you can partly comprehend it.” - Henry Heath (14:07)

4. Public Outrage and Police Action (14:54–17:53)

• Baptiste confesses to many thefts under duress—over 300 graves estimated as disturbed.
• Mass public panic ensues; families rush to exhume loved ones and identify burial clothing displayed in the courthouse.
• Police ultimately bury the unclaimed grave clothes in a large communal grave.

“Yes, it was a sorrowful spectacle to see a mother identify and weep over an article of clothing which belonged to a darling child long since dead...” - Henry Heath (17:30)

5. Alternate Versions and Further Controversy (17:53–19:36)

• Later accounts suggest the case broke not from Clawson’s exhumation, but from a woman recognizing her infant daughter’s dress in Baptiste’s shop window.
• Raises questions about shifting public memory and the evolution of "official" narratives.

6. Motivation and Fallout for the LDS Community (19:36–20:57)

• Baptiste claims he sold the clothes for money, both in Australia and Salt Lake, even using proceeds to fund the chapel in Victoria.
• Deep distress for LDS followers, especially due to religious concerns over burial rites.

7. Brigham Young’s Address to the Flock (20:57–25:34)

• Brigham Young delivers a prominent sermon responding to the crisis (February 9th, 1862).
• Emphasizes that the spiritual welfare of the dead is unharmed, urging the community to remain calm.
• Dismisses hanging or shooting Baptiste, instead wishing him to become a "fugitive and vagabond upon the earth," yet his intent is ambiguous.

"To hang a man for such a deed would not satisfy my feelings. What shall we do with him? Shoot him? No, that would do no good to anybody but himself..." - Brigham Young (21:24)

• Young also addresses ghostly visitations:

  “Some I have been informed can now remember having had singular dreams...imagined that they might have proceeded from the spirits of the dead calling on their friends to give them clothing for they were naked... I have little faith in these wrappings.” – Brigham Young (24:09)

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8. Baptiste’s Punishment: Exile (27:23–29:27)

• No trial is held; authorities, fearing public lynching, secretly banish Baptiste to Fremont Island in the Great Salt Lake.
• Before exile, Baptiste is tattooed on his forehead ("Branded for robbing the dead" or simply "Grave Robber") and possibly has his ears cut off (per some later accounts).
• He’s left with cattle and minimal supplies in isolation on the island.

“...to give him a chance for his life, to save him in reality, from an exasperated public, it was decided to banish him. And a well-stocked island in the Great Salt Lake was chosen for his future home.” – Albert Dewey (27:23)

9. The Great Disappearance (29:27–31:33)

• Roughly six weeks after exile, local ranchers discover Baptiste has vanished. Evidence of a makeshift raft from cattle hide and dismantled shack suggests an escape attempt.
• Baptiste is never conclusively seen again, though rumors abound (fleeing to Montana, San Francisco, or even back to Australia).

10. Later Theories and the Search for Closure (31:33–36:00)

• In 1893, a skull and shackled skeleton are found near the Jordan River; a newspaper claims it’s Baptiste, cementing a local legend.
• Direct witnesses (Heath and Dewey) refute this, saying Baptiste was never shackled.
• The episode highlights differing versions and embellishments in the retelling of history.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Community Terror:

  "It was a sorrowful spectacle to see a mother identify and weep over an article of clothing which belonged to a darling child long since dead..." – Henry Heath (17:30)

• On the Nature of Justice:

  "To hang a man for such a deed would not satisfy my feelings... What I would do... I would make him a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth." – Brigham Young (22:13)

• Musing on Ghosts:

  “Some I have been informed can now remember having had singular dreams and others have heard rapping...and have imagined... spirits of the dead calling on their friends to give them clothing for they were naked... I have little faith in these wrappings.” – Brigham Young (24:09)

• On Speculation and Mystery:

  “Where's the guy with the tattoo on his head? We don't know.” – Holly Fry (36:14)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Origins & Australian Gold Rush: 03:45–07:45
• Conversion & Emigration: 05:41–08:23
• Discovery of Grave Robbing: 08:23–14:54
• Community Reaction: 14:54–17:53
• Brigham Young’s Sermon: 20:57–25:34
• Exile to Fremont Island: 27:23–29:27
• Disappearance & Theories: 29:27–36:00

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Episode Highlights & Takeaways

• The Jean Baptiste saga illustrates how shocking crimes ripple through communities, challenge religious and social beliefs, and become embedded in local legend.
• It demonstrates how history is reconstructed over time, with contemporary sources often diverging dramatically from later “tidying up” narratives.
• The unresolved nature of Baptiste’s fate keeps the story a tantalizing “history mystery,” combining fact, rumor, and folklore.

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For listeners fascinated by historical true crime, unsolved mysteries, and the cultural aftershocks of community trauma, this episode is an engrossing exploration—and a reminder of the power of narrative in shaping collective memory.

Transcript

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.

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[Holly Fry]

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[Holly Fry]

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[Holly Fry]

Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartradio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Fry]

So this is another one of those episodes which I feel like have been happening to me lately, which probably suggests something about how my mind is working. But it started as one thing and then became something very different. I was originally planning to do an anthology style episode where we talk about like three or four criminals who vanished and were never found. Like that escaped and just went away. That still might happen, but not today, because I got to digging in on one in particular and it held my attention for a whole episode's worth of content.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I sort of watched this happen virtually in real time and then when I got the outline said that this was the right decision.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, I would hate to rush this. They're so. It's interesting because in some ways there's not a ton of News coverage of it from contemporary sources. But what there is is really fascinating if you are one of our Salt Lake City listeners, and I know we have a lot there, because every time I'm in that town, wonderful people come up and tell me that they listen to the show. And I love Salt Lake. This one will probably be familiar to you. It is the story of Jean Baptiste, who is sometimes referred to as the. With his Anglicized version of his name as John in various accounts. That was part of why he was hard to find in newspapers. But we figured it out. His story is a little bit odd and harrowing. It's about grave robbing. But there are themes that emerge about how communities deal with unthinkable crimes and the ways that the stories of those crimes change to support hoped for conclusions. And in this case, there is an escape with a big question mark at the end. So it does remain a history mystery, which makes it kind of fun and kind of thrilling to talk about.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So Jean Baptiste was born in 1814, according to census records, although there are some questions about how accurate that is. The place of his birth is also a matter of debate, although it's often cited as Venice, Italy. That's contradicted by later accounts that refer to him as a Frenchman. And there just isn't real clarity one way or the other. We also don't know much about his early life. We do know that in the 1850s he was drawn to the gold rush, not the California gold rush or the Alaska gold rush or any of the other gold rushes we've spent a ton of time on recently, the one that was happening in Victoria, Australia.

[Holly Fry]

And while in Victoria, Baptiste came in contact with missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They had traveled to the area to minister to the huge influx of gold seekers. There were nearly half a million people who had flooded into Victoria during the gold rush. And it had a reputation as being completely void of morality, where things like robberies happened out in the open in the light of day. So that's why they were drawn there, thinking maybe these people need religion. But Baptiste, unlike these other people, was very ready to convert. He seemed to have been casting about for the right religion for a bit. He had been raised Roman Catholic, but he had problems with the church and he left that church to join the Church of England. He was not happy in the Anglican Church, and then he moved on to the Methodist Church. And then in Castlemaine, Victoria, he had actually built his own small chapel while he was there for the gold rush on property that he held. It's unclear to me if he owned this property, if he just claimed it, et cetera. But he did build this small chapel there, and he actually had services there for other gold rushers on Sundays.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

When Baptiste spoke with missionary leaders in Australia, he told them that he believed in God and the Bible. And then after talking to them about the LDS Church, he wanted to convert immediately. He said, quote, I will become a baby. I want to be baptized. He gave them this chapel that he had built, and it immediately went into use as a place to give sermons, something that they had really been lacking before Baptiste's property donation.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, according to most accounts, they were like, you don't have to convert right now. You can think this through. And he was like, nope, ready?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Let's go.

[Holly Fry]

Let's do this thing. In the 1850s, at the same time, Salt Lake City was still really brand new. It had been founded in 1847, and the LDS leaders in Australia wanted to send some of their newly converted members back to Utah to bolster numbers there and help support the new municipality. And Jean Baptiste was selected to be part of that effort. He and others boarded a ship called the Tarquinia in April of 1855, and they headed for California with the plan that once they made port at California, they would make the rest of the journey over land.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

But the Tarkinia had some problems. That included with the vessel itself, which started taking on water. And also among the 72 people aboard, they developed a number of conflicts. Some of the interpersonal conflict was because there was a lot of disagreement about whether they should abandon the Tarkania completely. The ship made it to Honolulu, Hawaii, for repairs, but even after it was patched up, a number of passengers just refused to go on. And that included Baptiste. They were the smart ones. The Tarkinia didn't make it very far. It had more problems. It had to just limp back to Hawaii. In the meantime, Baptiste stayed in Hawaii and worked as a teacher for a few months before continuing on to San Francisco in February of 1856. And then in 1859, he was finally in Salt Lake City as planned.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, the Tarkinia got scuttled. It's a little unclear to me what ship Baptiste took to get to California, but he did make it there. And although he had made some pretty lucrative moves in the Australian gold rush and had not needed money for a while, eventually Baptiste did need a job, and he was employed as a gravedigger. He both dug the graves at the Salt Lake Cemetery, and he interred the bodies and he had a home next to the cemetery. He got married. And he also diversified his income by opening a tailor and millinery shop with his new wife. We do not have the name of that woman.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

To set up Baptiste's arrest, we need to veer off into an explanation of how he came to bury a man named Moroni Clausen in late 1861, after just three weeks in office. Governor John W. Dawson, who had been appointed to his leadership role in Utah Territory by Abraham Lincoln, fled that territory after accusations that he had made improper advances to a widow in the Salt Lake community. Dawson was tracked down and beaten nearly to death by several men. And one of those was Maroni Clawson. Clawson was shot and killed several days later as police were chasing him.

[Holly Fry]

Clawson's body was unclaimed. So after a police officer named Henry Heath paid for a suit for the dead man to be buried in, he was interred at the Salt Lake Cemetery by Jean Baptiste. Heath later said of this act of charity, quote, I purchased his clothes myself, and though I thought he was a very bad man, I wanted to see him laid away as nicely as possible. This I did. And I don't believe any pauper ever had better or cleaner burial clothing than he. But not long after the burial, some of Clawson's relatives showed up in town with the intent to have him exhumed so that they could bring him to Draper, Utah, 20 miles south of Salt Lake, and have him interred there near the family. And once Clawson was dug up, it became apparent that something fishy was happening at the cemetery. Because the suit Henry Heath had paid for was missing, Clawson wasn't wearing any clothes at all. And when Heath found out this detail, which he apparently learned from Clawson's brother, who was really mad, he started investigating. After first getting the go ahead from.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

A judge, we'll talk about this investigation and how it yielded results pretty quickly after we pause for a quick sponsor break.

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[Person Requesting Business Plan]

Hi, Kyle, could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks.

[Kyle (AI Assistant)]

Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link.

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[Evan Ratliff]

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[Holly Fry]

Henry Heath first went to the sexton who oversaw the cemetery grounds to investigate this odd situation. But the sexton had no information. So the next stop was Jean Baptiste's home. Baptiste was not there, but his wife was. And Heath and Clawson's brother George asked her about the missing clothes. She had invited them in, but she had no information to offer them. But as they looked around the home, they were struck by the sight of a number of boxes that were stacked inside of it.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

One of the men looked inside one of the boxes and made the awful discovery that it contained what appeared to be funeral shrouds. Of course, this led to the examination of the other boxes, and things were more and more unsettling from there as a grisly tally of garments was uncovered. Heath later wrote of this moment, quote, Judge, if you can, our horror and surprise when we discovered that this clothing was the funeral robes of people who had been buried in the city cemetery for several years past.

[Holly Fry]

Heath also recounted later a fear that he immediately had regarding his own family. Quote, When I tell you that I had a short time previously buried an idolized daughter, and when I feared that her grave, too had been desecrated, and that her funeral shroud was among the motley, sickening heap of flesh, soiled linen we found in the gravedigger's hut, perhaps you can partly comprehend it. He was very frank in thinking about this, that his first instinct was actually to kill Baptiste for what he had done. And as the men combed through these boxes, they found clothing that was estimated to have been stolen from more than 300 graves, including a box full of baby clothes and 60 pairs of children's shoes.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Heath, George Clausen and two other men next went to the cemetery where Baptiste was working. And they found him wearing a suit that was alleged to have been the burial clothing of a saloon keeper who had died not long before this confrontation. According to Heath's account, when Baptiste was initially confronted, he fell to his knees, proclaiming his innocence. But after Heath, quote, choked the wretch into a confession, the policeman's own description, he was then dragged through the cemetery to various graves, asking if he had robbed them. He said yes to a lot of them, although he vehemently proclaimed that he had not robbed the grave of Heath's daughter, which Heath later said was the only reason that Baptiste survived this encounter.

[Holly Fry]

As these events in the cemetery were playing out, word started to spread in the city, and soon people were rushing the graveyard to try to exhume their family members to see if their graves had been robbed, as well as to try to confront Baptiste. Per the police account, getting Baptiste to the jail safely was very difficult as a consequence. But even after he had been taken to jail, there was a need to transport Baptiste again. The police wanted to walk him through the cemetery so he could point out himself which graves he had desecrated. Because of the community's ire, they had to try to keep all of this under wraps. So he had to lie down in the bed of a wagon and be covered up so that people in the street wouldn't know he was there and passing by and headed to the cemetery once they got there. He did point out a number of graves that he admitted to grave robbing, although it appears he did not disclose all of them. The theory was that he was scared that as the numbers mounted, more and more people would want to kill him. Some of the graves that had been buried during the time he was working as the gravedigger, he outright denied robbing. But some of them were exhumed and bodies were found with no clothes. And in some cases the coffins were also missing, with the deceased then just reburied directly into the earth. Accounts from the time say that Baptiste was using those coffins for kindling wood to help people of the community get answers to their concerns about whether or not their relatives graves had been affected. Police displayed all of the clothes that they had found at Baptiste's home in the courthouse so that people could come and see if they recognized any of them.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Henry Heath later said of the clothing displayed, quote, yes, it was a sorrowful spectacle to see a mother identify and weep over an article of clothing which belonged to a darling child long since dead, or a husband or wife recognized the funeral apparel of the life partner who had preceded them into the unseen world.

[Holly Fry]

Once the clothing had been seen by everyone who wished to come, the police had to decide what to do with the rest, because it was not all claimed today that kind of thing would be admitted into evidence. But in 1862, a very different solution was decided. According to Albert Dewey, another man who was involved in the case and worked for the police, quote, there was some doubt in the minds of the officers of the law as to what should be done with all the clothing. And finally it was decided to bury it in one big grave in the city cemetery, which was done. It was a painful task and was keenly remembered by those to whom the work was assigned.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

There has been an alternate version of the discovery of Baptiste's grave robbing, although it appeared in papers 30 years after the events actually played out. In that version, Clausen's relatives had Baptiste with them when they went to exhume the body, and Baptiste protested that they should not open the coffin because it was sacrilegious. When the coffin was opened, the gravedigger was said to have appeared as horrified as anyone else present at the state of the body. This version further departs from the earlier eyewitness account of Heath, and that it indicates that police did not stumble upon boxes of clothes, but instead that a woman recognized a baby dress in the window of the Baptiste's shop that looked exactly like the dress her infant daughter had been buried in. In this account, because of that mother's insistence, the baby's grave was exhumed. And that was when it became apparent that there was a serial grave robber. And suspicion turns to Baptiste.

[Holly Fry]

We're going to talk a little bit more later about that differing account that came out 30 years later, so keep it in mind. When Baptiste was asked why he had robbed the graves, he stated that he intended to sell the clothes for money. Although the sheer volume that he had stashed in his house made some people wonder if he wasn't just holding onto these items for some more demented reason. Albert Dewey at one point said that he was just like a man that was obsessed and insisted that he, you know, had the devilishness about him. Baptiste also told authorities that he had started robbing graves well before he arrived in Salt Lake and that he had built a chapel in Australia with the money that he made selling grave robbed items. So that piece of information had triple implications for the LDS Church. For one, it meant that that chapel that their missionaries in Victoria had been using was deeply upsetting in its promine. This whole situation also meant that a devout member of their church, one whose zeal was often commented upon positively in the community, had been committing unthinkable crimes. And it also meant that for a religion with very specific beliefs regarding proper burials, that there was deep concern about the afterlife fates of all of the affected deceased.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

People were so concerned about their dead loved ones that Brigham Young finally made a of sense statement about it to try to reassure everyone. This statement was made in the tabernacle on February 9, 1862, and it was also published in the local papers. He noted that grave robbing was something that had been happening for many years and that he had previously had the responsibility of watching graves to prevent robbery on various occasions. He then brought up the John Baptiste situation and told those in attendance how he thought justice was should be handled. Quote, to hang a man for such a deed would not satisfy my feelings. What shall we do with him? Shoot him? No, that would do no good to anybody but himself. Would you imprison him during life? That would do nobody any good. What I would do came to me quickly after I heard of the circumstance. This I will mention before I make other remarks. If it was left to me, I would make him a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth. This would be my sentence. But probably the people will not want this done. This does sort of sound like a call to let Baptiste suffer the rest of his days knowing no peace. And it does bring up some questions. It was well known by February, when this sermon was given that a lot of people in Salt Lake wanted vengeance. And it had been really difficult for the authorities to keep Baptiste out of the hands of vigilantes. So much so that initially there was not really any news coverage about what was going on with the case because they wanted to avoid stirring people up even further. Henry Heath had believed that there was a very real danger that Baptiste would be lynched if the mobs of people who kept showing up at the jail got a hold of him. So it's unclear exactly what Young is suggesting here. If he thinks that people who want vengeance are the ones who, quote, will not want this done, then what exactly is the punishment for the acts he described to his congregation as, quote, a mean, contemptible, damnable trick? Is it simply just not having a home? It's unclear what he was suggesting here.

[Holly Fry]

Perhaps more importantly, Brigham Young reassured the members of the church that they did not have to worry about the immortal souls of their loved ones not having proper attire when the expected rapture came. He addressed this directly, opening with, quote, many are anxious to know what effect it will have upon their dead who have been robbed. He notes that he has two wives, three sisters, and several children buried in the graveyard where these crimes were committed, and that he has no intention of exhuming their bodies to see if they were victimized, stating, quote, I gave them as good a burial as I could, and in burying our dead, we all have made everything as agreeable and as comfortable as we could, according to the best of our judgments. We have done our duty in this particular, and I, for one, am satisfied. I will defy any thief there is on earth or in hell to rob a saint of one blessing. He also addressed the question of whether people should put fresh linens in the coffins of the disturbed graves. And he indicated that people should, quote, pursue the course that will give you the most contentment and satisfaction. While I was doing the research for this, I saw these sentiments that we've just talked about on the part of Brigham Young, discussed a number of times, both in news articles and papers, about the Jean Baptiste grave robbing. But there's a portion of Young's oration that I found completely fascinating that just did not seem to come up anywhere else outside of the full text printing of it in the 1862 papers, because he addressed the concerns that people had about their relatives, ghosts coming to them and asking for clothes he stated, quote, some I have been informed can now remember having had singular dreams and others have heard rapping on the door, on the bedstead, on the floor, on the table, etc. And have imagined that they might have proceeded from the spirits of the dead calling on their friends to give them clothing for they were naked. My dead friends have not been to me to tell me they were naked, cold, etc. And if any such wrapping should come to me, I tell them to go to their own place. I have little faith in these wrappings. He urged the community, quote, let the minds of the people be at rest upon this matter. What has been done, they cannot help.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

We're going to pause to hear from some of the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going and when we are back, we will talk about Baptiste's punishment.

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12 teams, six games, three days and one epic weekend. My goodness, it's win or go home and every moment counts on the road to Super Bowl 60. It's a touchdown wild card weekend powered by Verizon. January 10th through 12th. Visit watch.NFL.com for the full schedule.

[Person Requesting Business Plan]

Hi Kyle, could you draw up a quick document with a basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks.

[Kyle (AI Assistant)]

Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link.

[Person Requesting Business Plan]

But there was no link.

[Evan Ratliff]

There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co founder after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

[Sam Altman (quoted)]

There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one person billion dollar company which would have been like unimaginable without AI. And now will happen.

[Evan Ratliff]

I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award winning podcast Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people.

[Evan's Colleague]

Oh hey Evan, Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses.

[Evan Ratliff]

Listen to Shell game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Holly Fry]

After Jean Baptiste was held for several weeks in jail, it appears that there was no trial or court action of any kind. Instead, it was decided among the police and city Leadership that Baptiste just had to be gotten rid of. According to Albert Dewey, quote, it meant death to turn him loose in the community, death that he deserved and in any country would have received. But he was such a hateful object that the sooner and farther he got away from sight without being put underground himself, the better everybody would feel. So to give him a chance for his life, to save him in reality, from an exasperated public, it was decided to banish him. And a well stocked island in the Great Salt Lake was chosen for his future home. Dewey stated that he did not remember who initially proposed the idea of exile as a punishment.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

When it comes to how this punishment was carried out, the narrative once again diverges into two different versions. All accounts agree that Baptiste was taken first to Antelope island, which is the largest of the islands in the Great Salt Lake. The men who took him there did so by wagon. The island is in really shallow water at its southern tip, and it becomes a peninsula when the water level dips. The men who were tasked with this job, which included Albert Dewey, had to swear when they removed him from the county jail that they would not kill him and would indeed take him to the island to meet a second group of men who were going to pick him up in a boat, and then.

[Holly Fry]

He would go to his final destination. But before Baptiste was handed off to the boatman, he was tattooed on his forehead to brand him for his crime. The specific words that were tattooed there have been recounted differently. Albert Dewey's account stated that the tattoo read branded for robbing the dead, although an alternate account said that it simply said grave robber. That second alternate account also states that Baptiste's ears were cut off after he.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Was transferred to the boat. Baptiste was taken to Fremont island, which is in the deeper water and was believed to be inescapable. This is not an especially big island. It's less than five square miles. But there were cattle there and a little shack that had some basic food in it. The cattle and the shack belonged to a pair of brothers by the name of Miller. They used this island to keep some of their cattle. And there, with only the cattle for company, Jean Baptiste was left to fend for himself. One of the big differences in how this exile story has been shared over the years involves the detail that he was shackled with a ball and chain before being set loose on the island. This is something that the Heath and Dewey accounts do not include, but it is included in a lot of retellings. And this became important years later, which we will get to the Millers who.

[Holly Fry]

Used the island were aware of Baptiste's exile there, and they still kept their cattle on Fremont Island. And they went to check on the cattle and kind of Baptiste, roughly three weeks after the grave robber had been dropped off, and the Millers reported back to folks in Salt Lake that Baptiste was managing there. But when they returned three weeks after that, so six weeks in total after he had been dropped for his exile, they discovered a very different scene. Baptiste was nowhere to be found on the island. It was apparent that he had slaughtered one of the cattle. The remains of it were right outside the shack, and the shack itself was destroyed. The roof was gone, and so were portions of the sidewalls. And as the Millers looked around, they pieced together what had happened. The heifer that Baptiste had killed had been skinned, and the remnants of hide that they could see made it apparent that that hide had been cut into strips. So Baptiste, it appeared, had ransacked the shack for wood, used hide to strap the planks together into some kind of raft, and then dropped it in the water and took off. And he was never seen again, at least not conclusively.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In April of 1893, so 31 years after all of this happened, an article appeared in the Salt Lake Herald titled A Gruesome Tale. And it retold the entire story of John Baptist and his crimes and his exile and this disappearance. But this article also had an update. The updated section had a subtitle of the Ghastly Sequel, and it stated, quote, nearly three years ago, a party of hunters near the mouth of the Jordan river, where it empties into the lake, while walking across the sandy marsh, found the skull of a human protruding from the mud. The hunters scooped up this skull and brought it back to Salt Lake City, where it was left with a reporter from the Herald named R.G. taysom. According to the Herald, just days before this article was published, another hunter, John Weingart Jr. Had found a headless skeleton near the mouth of the Jordan River. And according to this write up quote, around one of the leg bones was an iron clamp. And in an attempt to lift this up, a chain was found attached, necessitating a little digging up of the ground. And there, attached to the chain was an iron ball.

[Holly Fry]

And the Herald states plainly that this has to have been the missing exile quote. The find, undoubtedly is the skeleton of old Jean Baptiste. In his wandering around the island, he no doubt became crazed from hunger, fear and cold, and falling into the briny water of the lake, was drowned or strangled. The article goes on to explain that the intense winds that run down the eastern side of the lake must have carried the body to the place where it was found, and that the wind also caused sand to cover it over.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This write up is the place where most of the alternate versions of the events stem from. And it seemed to people in 1893 that the paper was running a retconned version of the Baptiste affair to support the assertion that the grave robber's ultimate end was no longer a mystery. The Deseret News ran a counter article a month and a half later calling out the Herald's story as a fable and claiming to have the real information. The Deseret News version included statements from Henry Heath and Albert Dewey. Heath stated plainly, quote, I helped take care of Baptiste during the three weeks time he was confined in the county jail. Steel nor iron shackles were never put on his limbs. And there is absolutely no truth in the statement that he was turned loose on the island with a ball and chain on. Dewey reiterated that fact again later when he talked about leaving Baptiste on Fremont Island. Quote, he was conveyed there, but there was no ball and chain or shackles or chives of any kind on his limbs. He was absolutely untrammeled.

[Holly Fry]

So they, of course are saying that that skeleton was absolutely not Jean Baptiste. So if it wasn't, what became of him? That is a matter of speculation. Although there have certainly been a lot of theories over the years, it is unlikely that he stayed on the island. It is, as we mentioned, a relatively small place. I think it's the third largest island in the Great Salt Lake, but still, five miles square is not that big. And it has been combed over repeatedly since all of this happened and there's been no sign of him. Some people living at the time of Baptiste's disappearance thought that he made his way north to Montana. And there were actually rumors at the time that he was recognized there and actually confessed his identity to a man who started asking him rather pointed questions and that he even told that man how he had escaped. But there were also people who believed that he backtracked the route that he took years earlier and that he went to San Francisco for a while, but then decided to move to Southern California amidst worries that someone in the Bay Area might know him on site. There have even been speculations that he went all the way back to Australia. And one would think that eventually someone would have noted a person with a tattoo across their forehead that said they were a grave robber, if not alive, then dead. He could certainly keep his hat on and cover that up. But he's not in charge of what's on his head after he's deceased. But no account has ever surfaced that mentions that detail in a description.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

There was a heavily fictionalized movie about Baptiste and Henry Heath titled Redemption for Robbing the Dead. The depiction of Heath in particular has been noted as big departure from his actual life.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, I haven't watched the whole movie. I watched part of it, but it depicts Heath as having his own dark secrets that he's working through, and his descendants have been like, none of that's supported by anything real. It's like a dramatic tool that's used to make the story more interesting, but it doesn't appear to really portray him very accurately. It's super interesting. Where's the guy with the tattoo on his head? We don't know. What I do know is that I have listener mail though, and I love this because it lets me talk about something else that I love, which is spiders. So if you're not into spiders, this is not the time for you. This comes from our listener Alice, who writes hello Holly and Tracy, I love your show. I'm a recent adopter and I've been going back through your podcast systematically to catch up on everything I had missed. I loved the story on Cranberries and wondered if your research included any information about the wolf spiders used in the production. As you may know, in order to avoid pesticides, wolf spiders are often used and released in large numbers to help keep the pest populations down before the bogs are flooded. As a fellow spider lover, I have to admit I have always been worried that the wolf spiders who are used in pest control are not sufficiently looked after when the bogs are flooded. I tried to do my own research into whether the farmers did anything to save the spiders, but did not find anything clearly about that.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Do you know?

[Holly Fry]

Oh, I have answers, but I'm gonna finish this email first. Also, you may have already done this at some point, but I've not yet found that episode. I would love an episode on the history of nursery rhymes and lullabies. My daughter loves Rock a Bye Baby and it always creeps me out. Good news there as well. Tracy has done a number of episodes on Mother Goose and nursery rhymes. Yeah, so I think probably if you search Mother Goose you'll find them. And then Alice continues for pet tax. I have four cats and four birds. I will attach a sample. Dinah, my long haired queen of the house at 16 and Harley, my youngest cockatiel who is such a sassy girl. Everyone asks how the birds and cats get along first. I never leave the birds out when I'm not around to supervise. But between the size of the cockatiels, which must be just big enough to deter cat aggression, and the general demeanor of my cats, the cats understand that the cockatiels are off limits and respectfully ignore them. I also banned the use of feather cat toys in my home just to avoid confusion. Thank you both for all you do. I absolutely love your show and regularly share new things I learned on it with my friends and family. I love this idea of being like, don't train your cats to chase feather toys. They will think my birds are the things that's super smart. Okay, spiders.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

So I didn't include this in the episode. I hadn't done as much research as I have now about them because it did come up. But there is a really wonderful person named Travis McHenry who is a spider expert and a science communicator and he has done a longish, I think it's like 25 minute video about it that you can find on YouTube. But for here, the quick answers are the spiders are not actually put there by cranberry farmers. They are naturally attracted to bogs. It's a good habitat for them. They love it. Not all of those spiders are wolfies, and even so, they are smaller varieties of wolf spiders than you may be envisioning in your head. If you think about those, there are, and Travis McEnery mentions this, there are a lot of videos online that are very much made to make it seem like this is a terrifying, scary scenario and that's really not what's going on. And they can save the need for pesticides to be used, but they don't. Sometimes there still is some, but basically farmers kind of wait it out and see how the spiders are doing their job before they get any pesticides involved. The other thing that happens that is cool, that will answer your concerns about flooding is that the spiders actually float to the top when they flood. And there's beautiful footage you can see if you like spiders. It's beautiful of them kind of running along the tops of the floating cranberries. They're aces. The thing that gets sensationalized is that when they harvest cranberries, these spiders will often kind of just start walking right up the arms and torsos of the workers that are doing that job. And people are often like they're coated in spiders and there's definitely spiders on them, but they're little, they're not aggressive. Nobody seems to mussed up about it. It's fine. Spiders are good. And then when the waters recede and they restart that bog with a new season of growth on the vines, the spiders just, just like once again stick around. They go down with the water and then they're on the ground and can do their hunting again and all that. So the spiders are good. One, they're helping and two, I'm sure some of them don't make it, but that's just because it's nature. But they're not especially in danger from the flooding. They do great. That's a lot of spider information that people may not have been anticipating at the end of this episode, but here you go. If you ask me about spiders, I'm gonna talk about spiders. I hope that relieves your concerns, Alice. And thank you for sharing adorable babies with us. That cat is so cute I want to brush it and kiss it. As I have learned having two very long haired cats in my life right now, not all long haired cats want to be brushed. So I don't know if yours would or not, but if you would like to write to us, share questions about spiders, pictures of your cats and birds, or whatever comes to your mind, you can do [e-mail] youm can also subscribe to the show. It is easy as pie. You can do that right on the iHeart app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Holly Fry]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Guaranteed Human.