Dead People Talking

From English castles to desert tents beneath the Syrian stars, this episode explores the remarkable final act of one of the nineteenth century’s most unconventional women, a woman who refused, again and again, to live the life society demanded of her.

In this first episode, we trace Jane’s early life from the rolling countryside of Dorset and Norfolk to the dazzling but deeply restrictive world of Britain’s upper classes. Married off at just seventeen to the much older and politically powerful Edward Law, 2nd Baron Ellenborough, Jane quickly discovers the brutal realities of marriage, reputation, and female dependence in the early nineteenth century.

What follows is a whirlwind of affairs, scandal, gossip, and public humiliation that would make Jane one of the most infamous women in Europe. Her romances with diplomats, noblemen, and foreign aristocrats scandalize Victorian society and ultimately destroy her marriage — but they also force her into exile from the only world she has ever known.

In this episode, I tell you the extraordinary and heartbreaking story of Elizabeth McCourt Tabor, better known as Baby Doe Tabor.

From poverty to glittering wealth in Colorado’s silver boom, and back again to isolation and tragedy, her life reads like a frontier epic. Alongside her husband, Horace Tabor, she rose to become one of the most famous women of the American West.

But when the silver market collapsed, so too did everything they had built. What followed was not just financial ruin, but a decades-long descent into hardship that ended in one of the most haunting deaths in American history.