pplpod

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For eight years in the early 20th century, the people of the Garhwal region of India barricaded themselves indoors every night. The reason was a single male leopard, seven feet six inches long, that officially killed more than 125 people. Its first recorded victim was taken from Benji village in 1918, and its territory lay across the pilgrim road to the shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath, which supplied a steady stream of tired travelers sleeping in the open. It did not only ambush people on trails. It scraped the mud mortar from between the stones of huts or tore through thatched roofs to drag sleepers into the dark.

This episode traces the failed campaign against it and the man who ended it. Bounties, units of British and Gurkha soldiers, gin traps, and poisoned bait all failed, and each near miss seemed to teach the animal more about human methods. In the autumn of 1925 the hunter and tracker Jim Corbett took up the task, sitting through nights on tree platforms and reading the alarm calls of monkeys and peafowl. After ten weeks he shot the leopard on May 2, 1926. What he found when he examined the body changed the explanation for the whole affair.

• The official toll is likely an undercount, since many kills went unreported and victims who later died of infection or blood loss were not counted.
• Soldiers could not hide their noise or scent in the forest, and the leopard simply moved away until the patrols had passed.
• Corbett used a .275 Rigby rifle, a bolt action firing a small, fast bullet. The original is still held by the gunmaker John Rigby and Company.
• The dead leopard was an elderly male in excellent condition with sound teeth and claws, not the injured or worn out animal that usually turns to human prey.
• Corbett linked the first attacks to the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed so many people so quickly that bodies went uncremated. The leopard scavenged them, then turned to the living.

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In the Ottoman Empire, a condemned grand vizier could be offered a foot race against the head gardener of the palace, who doubled as the state executioner. Beat him to the fish market gate and the sentence became banishment. That practice is one of many oddities in the history of a job that rarely involved killing. A typical town might see one or two death sentences in a decade, so executioners rode circuits to carry out floggings and brandings, and survived on the work nobody else would touch: disposing of animal carcasses, emptying latrines, collecting fees from sex workers, and policing gambling dens.

This episode looks past the scaffold to the people who held the warrant and to the societies that kept them at arm's length. In early modern Germany executioners were legally dishonorable, barred from guilds, courts, and even a shared cup in a tavern. Similar outcast status attached to the role in France, Korea, and Japan. Shut out of ordinary life, executioner families married each other and formed dynasties that lasted for generations, a pattern that shows how communities demanded harsh justice while refusing to own the violence.

• In 1822 Grand Vizier Haji Salih Pasha won his race against the executioner and was later made governor general of Damascus province.
• The Sanson family supplied six French executioners between 1688 and 1847, including the one who executed Louis XVI. The line of successors ran to Marcel Chevalier, who served until abolition in 1981.
• British hangmen such as the Pierrepoints were respected and even ran a pub, partly because an 1868 act moved executions behind prison walls. In France they stayed public until 1939.
• Ottoman executioners were buried under rough, uncarved stones with no names so that victims' families could not find and deface the graves.
• In Roscommon, Ireland, a condemned woman known as Lady Betty volunteered to hang her fellow prisoners when the hangman fell ill, and became the county's executioner in exchange for her life.

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Colditz Castle sits on a rocky spur above a river in Saxony, and its story begins in 1046, when Emperor Henry III allowed a settlement on the hill. It was burned by the Hussites in 1430, burned again in 1504 when a baker accidentally set it alight, and rebuilt as a Renaissance residence and hunting lodge. Over the centuries it held one of the largest zoos in Europe, grew to 700 rooms, and then declined into a workhouse, a mental hospital from 1829, and a sanatorium where 912 patients died of malnutrition during the First World War.

This episode follows the castle to its most famous role. In 1939 it became Oflag IV-C, a high security camp for Allied officers, and the Germans filled it with men who had already escaped from other camps, trusting the cliffs, the 90 foot walls, and the guards to hold them. Concentrating the best escapers in one place had the opposite effect. They forged uniforms from dyed blankets, tunneled through medieval stone, and in the winter of 1944 to 1945 built a two man glider in the attic above the sentries.

• The first British prisoners were the Laufen Six, officers moved to Colditz in 1940 after trying to tunnel out of another camp.
• The glider, designed by Bill Goldfinch, used stolen floorboards for its frame and bedsheets stiffened with boiled prison porridge for its skin. It was never flown before U.S. troops took the castle in April 1945.
• A replica built from the original drawings flew in 2000, and in 2012 an unmanned replica launched from the castle roof crossed the river and landed in a meadow below.
• Inmates included flying ace Douglas Bader, double Victoria Cross winner Charles Upham, and Desmond Llewelyn, later Q in 17 James Bond films.
• Repairmen kept finding hidden tunnels for decades, along with a secret radio room built by French prisoners. Today the castle is a museum with glass floors over the tunnels, and the old guard quarters are becoming a youth hostel.

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In 2007 the British military in Basra, Iraq had to issue a formal denial that it had released man-eating beasts on the local population. The animal behind the panic was the honey badger, Mellivora capensis, also called the ratel. It weighs up to 16 kilograms, about the size of a medium dog, and its reputation rests on real hardware. Its skin is so loose that a badger seized by a predator can twist around inside it and bite back, and around the neck the hide is about six millimeters thick, armor that evolved mainly for fights with other honey badgers.

This episode tests the internet legend against the biology. The honey badger eats almost anything, from roots and insects to tortoises, cobras, and black mambas, whose venom fails to bind to its mutated nerve receptors. It digs into baked earth in ten minutes and has been filmed building mud ramps and popping gate latches to escape captivity. Yet it is not invincible. Leopards, lions, hyenas, and pythons kill it, jackals steal its food, and many of its cubs never reach adulthood.

• An eversible anal pouch releases what researchers call a suffocating odor, which may work like smoke on bees while the badger tears a hive apart.
• There is no scientific evidence that honeyguide birds lead honey badgers to beehives. The story is folklore.
• A 2022 study in the Kalahari found black-backed jackals shadow foraging badgers and snatch exposed prey, cutting their calorie intake by 5 percent.
• Males patrol home ranges averaging 548 square kilometers. Mothers raise one or two cubs alone for over a year, and cub mortality in one park study was 37 percent.
• A single badger was recorded killing 17 ducks and 36 chickens in one raid, and in July 2021 a rabid one attacked a dog and several people over two days in South Africa.

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In September 1943, with Sicily's government collapsed and as much as 70 percent of its food coming through the black market, a young olive oil trader named Salvatore Giuliano was stopped at a police checkpoint with two sacks of illegal grain. He shot an officer dead, took a bullet in the back, and fled into the hills. On Christmas Eve he escaped a dragnet in his hometown and killed a second officer. From then on he lived as an outlaw, building a gang through a jailbreak and paying peasants up to ten times the market rate for supplies, which bought him an early warning network across the mountains.

This episode follows his short life, from 1922 to 1950, as he moved from survival to celebrity to disaster. He posed for photographs labeled Robin Hood and became a colonel for Sicilian separatists in 1945. Then, on May Day 1947, his men fired on a crowd of peasants at Portella della Ginestra, killing eleven people, among them a woman and three children. Abandoned by the politicians he served and hunted by Colonel Ugo Luca with the Mafia's help, he was shot in his sleep on July 5, 1950 by his closest lieutenant.

• In 1944 he robbed a duchess by kissing her hand, taking a diamond ring he wore for the rest of his life, and borrowing a John Steinbeck novel that he returned a week later with a note.
• When the interior minister put 800,000 lire on his head, Giuliano offered two million for the capture of the minister.
• He executed suspected informants and pinned notes to their bodies, enforcing the code of silence through terror.
• After Gaspare Pisciotta killed him, police dragged the body into a courtyard, shot it, and announced a gun battle. Journalist Tommaso Besozzi exposed the lie.
• Pisciotta confessed at trial and died in his prison cell in 1954, poisoned by strychnine in his morning coffee.

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The red tunic, the Stetson, and the dark horse form an image recognized around the world, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is younger and far more complicated than the postcard. It was created in 1920 by merging the Dominion Police with the Royal North-West Mounted Police, a frontier force founded in 1873 to control First Nations and Metis populations and clear the way for settlement. Its officers arrested, prosecuted, and jailed the same people, and later removed Indigenous children to residential schools. Meanwhile pulp magazines and film studios were selling the world a polite hero who always gets his man.

This episode measures the gap between the symbol and the institution. It follows the force through undercover infiltration of political groups, the scandal that cost it its intelligence branch, and the subsidized contracts that turned it into the local police for most of the country. It then looks at what that sprawl has cost: officers killed at Mayerthorpe in 2005 and Moncton in 2014, a criminal conviction under the Canada Labour Code for failing to equip its members, and a long reckoning over how it treated women in its own ranks.

• The famous slogan traces to an 1877 report from Fort Benton, Montana, noting that two Mounties who had lost their horses still caught three whiskey smugglers.
• The McDonald Commission found that the security service had burned down a barn and stolen membership documents from the Parti Quebecois. In 1984 its intelligence work passed to a new civilian agency, CSIS.
• Under contract policing the federal government paid 60 percent of the cost, and by 1950 eight of the ten provinces had disbanded their own provincial forces.
• A review after Moncton found officers lacked C8 carbine rifles that leadership had been told to issue years earlier.
• Women were first admitted in 1974. In 2016 the force apologized to female employees and set up a $100 million compensation fund, and in 2018 it appointed its first permanent female commissioner.

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Harry Alonzo Longabaugh was born in Pennsylvania in 1867, the youngest of five children, and went west at 15 by covered wagon to help settle a cousin's homestead in Cortez, Colorado. He learned to wrangle and breed horses and seemed headed for a ranching career. Then came the winter of 1886 to 1887, the freeze that killed millions of cattle and wrecked the open range industry. Laid off by the N Bar N Ranch in Montana, he stole a horse, a saddle, and a gun near Sundance, Wyoming in 1887, was caught in Miles City, and served 18 months. The town gave him his name.

This episode rebuilds his life in order and without the movie gloss. He tried honest work in Canada before turning to rustling, then to trains and banks with Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch. With bounties reaching $30,000 and the Pinkertons closing in, he sailed for Buenos Aires in February 1901 with Cassidy and Etta Place and bought a 15,000 acre ranch near Cholila. The quiet did not last. The trail ends at a boarding house in San Vicente, Bolivia in November 1908, and in a grave nobody has been able to confirm.

• After jail he worked at the Bar U Ranch in 1891 and became joint owner of a Calgary saloon, until a dispute with his partner neared a gunfight and he fled back to Montana.
• The gang's real killer was Harvey Logan, known as Kid Curry, who murdered at least five lawmen. Longabaugh is documented only as wounding two men in a shootout.
• A Welsh Argentine sheriff, Edward Humphreys, warned the group that Pinkerton agent Frank Dimaio had found them, and by May 1, 1905 they had sold the ranch and fled to Chile.
• A Chilean newspaper digitized in 2022 showed that Longabaugh, using the alias Frank Boyd, killed a police officer in Antofagasta and got out on bond.
• The pair were betrayed by a mule carrying the mining company's brand. DNA tests after a 1991 dig in San Vicente and a 2008 exhumation in Utah matched neither man's relatives.

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On May 30, 1899, a woman with cropped hair and men's clothes held up the stagecoach running between Globe and Florence, Arizona, one of the last horse drawn lines in the territory. With her partner Joe Boot covering the passengers, she collected $431.20 and two guns, then handed each victim one dollar back for a meal. The gesture made Pearl Hart famous. She told reporters she was Pearl Taylor, the educated daughter of a wealthy Ontario family, led astray by a gambler named Hart and drawn west after seeing Buffalo Bill's show at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

This episode sets that story beside the one historian John Boessenecker pieced together. She was born in 1871 as Lillie Naomi Davy, the third of eight children of illiterate parents, with a violent alcoholic father and a childhood of poverty, petty crime, and prostitution. At 11 she was caught with her brother trying to resell a stolen cow. The robbery itself came after a mine closed in Mammoth, Arizona, cost her a job as a boarding house cook, and a gold claim she worked with Boot turned up nothing.

• The stage carried no armed guard because the route had not been robbed in years. A posse led by Sheriff Truman found the pair asleep in the brush on June 5.
• Jailed in Tucson, she became such a celebrity that a fan gave her a bobcat cub. In October 1899 she escaped through an 18 inch hole in the wall and was soon recaptured.
• A jury acquitted her after she wept about needing money to reach her dying mother, to the fury of Judge Fletcher M. Doan. Prosecutors rearrested her at once for tampering with the U.S. mail.
• At Yuma Territorial Prison she was the only female inmate, with a larger cell, a private yard, and visiting reporters. Joe Boot drove a supply wagon out of the prison and was never seen again.
• She was pardoned in December 1902 by Governor Alexander Brodie amid rumors of a faked pregnancy. Research shows she died in Los Angeles in 1935, not in Arizona in 1955 as long believed.

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Dodge City began with a sod house and a bar in a tent. Rancher Henry L. Sitler built the house near Fort Dodge in 1871, the town was staked out in 1872 on the hundredth meridian, and George M. Hoover opened the first business, selling liquor to soldiers. When the Santa Fe Railroad arrived that September, the main trade was buffalo hides and bones. The cattle came later, and for a reason nobody planned. Texas longhorns carried ticks that killed Kansas cattle, so the state drew a quarantine line and kept moving it west. By 1876 Abilene was cut off, and the herds were funneled to Dodge.

This episode follows the real town behind the phrase get the heck out of Dodge through each of its lives. There is the boom of 1883 and 1884, with Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday on the streets and vice confined to one side of the railroad tracks. There is the collapse, when the quarantine covered all of Kansas. Then come the reinventions: a motorcycle racing capital in 1914, and today a meatpacking city of just under 28,000 people, nearly 64 percent Hispanic or Latino, that sells tickets to the past it once tried to bury.

• Two earlier outposts on the Santa Fe Trail failed before Fort Dodge. Fort Mann, built in 1847, collapsed within a year, and the Army abandoned Fort Atkinson, built in 1850.
• In 1884 the town staged a bullfight with imported Mexican bullfighters and specially chosen aggressive Texas longhorns.
• To clean up its image, Dodge dug up the bodies on Boot Hill and built a schoolhouse on top of the old graveyard.
• At the 300 mile motorcycle race on July 4, 1914, a Harley-Davidson team rider carried a piglet on victory laps, the origin of the nickname hogs.
• In 2018 the city's roughly 13,000 registered voters had a single polling place, which was moved a mile outside the city limits. A lawsuit ended after the county clerk agreed to open a second site.

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The real wolverine, Gulo gulo, is about the size of a medium dog, 24 to 40 pounds, and nothing like the bear sized monster of legend. What it has is equipment. It walks flat on oversized paws that work like snowshoes, climbs ice with claws like crampons, and wears oily fur that sheds frost. An upper molar rotated 90 degrees shears meat frozen as hard as wood, and its jaw bone measured 940.8 newtons of compressive strength, the highest of any carnivore tested. Its reputation as a glutton may come from a mistranslation, when a Norwegian name meaning mountain cat was confused with a German word meaning devours much.

This episode takes the animal apart piece by piece: how it shadows wolf packs to scavenge their kills, how it brings down a moose trapped in deep snow, and how a female pauses her pregnancy for months until her fat reserves justify it. It also explains why such a tough animal is in trouble. Wolverines need enormous territories and deep spring snow for their dens, and the snow is melting earlier. In November 2023 the species was listed as threatened in the lower 48 states.

• After summer mating, the embryo sits unimplanted in the uterus for months. If the mother has not stored enough calories by midwinter, her body reabsorbs it.
• Females dig multi-chambered dens under the snowpack and bury frozen meat nearby, using the snow as both insulation and freezer.
• Males are not absent loners. Fathers visit their kits until weaning at around 10 weeks, and juveniles have been documented traveling with them later.
• A male tagged in Wyoming in 2009 as M56 walked more than 500 miles to become the first confirmed wolverine in Colorado since 1919. He was shot in North Dakota in 2016.
• Michigan calls itself the Wolverine State, yet a single sighting there in 2004 was major news. In Innu tradition the wolverine is both the creator of the world and a trickster.