Episode 656: The Attempted Murder of Alison Botha

Today we are revisiting a tragic case of negligence which originally captivated us back in 2024. When Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium in 1898, the chemical element was quickly adopted by manufacturers for its luminescent properties that would go on to be used in, among other things, the painting of clock faces, watches, and instrument panels, allowing them to be seen in the dark. At the time, the introduction of radioluminescent materials into manufacturing was hailed as a scientific solution to an age-old frustration, but it didn’t take long before that solution was shown to have terrible consequences.

In the early morning hours of July 4, 1925, the crowd at The Pickwick Club in Boston were celebrating the holiday at the “Before-the-Fourth” dance when roughly fifty couples took to the dance floor for one of the final songs of the night. With so much revelry and vibrations from the dancing, no one noticed the subtle sounds distressed infrastructure makes just before a tragedy, and even if they had, there likely wasn’t enough time to avoid the disaster. Around 3:30 am, the ceiling above them collapsed, as the entire five-story building came down on top of them, killing forty-four people and injuring countless more. At the time, the Pickwick Club disaster was the deadliest building collapse and one of the worst accidents in in the city’s history. It was followed by large investigation, during which the disaster was temporarily blamed on the Charleston, and a sensational trial aimed at punishing those responsible. However, in the one hundred years since the disaster, the tragedy at the Pickwick Club has been largely forgotten, overshadowed by larger and more devastating accidents.

On the afternoon of July 18, 1984, James Huberty left his apartment in the San Ysidro neighborhood of San Diego, California, and drove one block over to the nearby McDonalds. After walking through the door of the restaurant, Huberty raised his Uzi semi-automatic 9mm and began indiscriminately shooting at patrons, employees, and anyone else who happened to cross into his line of sight.

(Part 1 of 2) On October 30, 1975, fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley failed to return home after a night out with friends in Belle Haven, an exclusive wealthy enclave in Greenwich, CT. The following morning, Moxley’s badly beaten body was discovered underneath a tree, just a few hundred feet from her house, triggering one of the most notorious murder mysteries in the state’s history.

WEIRDOS!! For this month's BONUS EPISODE, Ash & Alaina dive fang-first into Breaking Dawn: Part 1. Share in the trauma of the ATROCIOUS Cullen wigs, the weird internalized misogyny of vampire reproduction, and the fact that Jacob imprints on a child with a name that sounds suspiciously like a pharmaceutical side effect! Honestly, NOTHING is marked safe from discussion!