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Sometime in late nineteen hundred, Louisa and Alma Nesbit disappeared.
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Their absence was discovered not through a dramatic event, but
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through silence, the absence of routine activity that normally defined
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life on a homestead. No one saw smoke from their chimney,
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no one saw them in town, no one observed movement
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around their property. Eventually, neighbors began investigating. What they found
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raised alarm. Their home and land appeared abandoned. Daily life
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had stopped abruptly. Hi, Cassie, Hi, Caitlin, Hi, creepy people. Hello,
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This is PNW Hansen Homicides, where we chat about true crime,
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the paranormal and all things spooky in the Pacific Northwest
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or the pan w if Yon knife nasty and has
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been well established. Clearly you must be. I smell it
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from here. I smell you're nasty from here. Oh boy, okay,
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I don't know that we had to associate like a
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smelliness with it, but I didn't. It was a bad smell.
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Nasty means great. Okay, all right, that's part. That's the
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that's the lore we want to go with. All right.
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We also do a little taro reading at the end
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of every episode for a little bit of deeper insight
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into our topic, just a yes, well that we do
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for yeah, because we're fun witches.
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Yeah, and which is not a bad word.
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Correct. Today I'm feeling very much like a task master
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witch because we're trying to pre record a little bit
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because next weekend I'm on a pilgrimage to procure my puppy.
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I want to squeal so bad, but I know nobody
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wants that another years. Yeah, probably not, probably not, But
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you can imagine the squealing, the internal squealing that's happening
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right now.
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Yeah, exactly, just you fill in the blank. I'm sure
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we've squealed before when we hadn't thought better of it. So, yeah,
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that's true.
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I've probably got something to work with. I'm so excited,
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I know, all right.
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In rural Oregon at the turn of the twentieth century,
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in many regards, there was a certain quiet, uneasy tension,
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the sense that people depended on one another that also
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feared one another. The Hood River Valley was still a
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developing agricultural community, more frontier than town, while the Columbia
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River Gorge had long served as a transportation corridor. But
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orchards now were beginning to spread across the hillside. Timber
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stands pressed against newly cleared homesteads coming on up.
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Yeah, woodn't fruit wooden freeze. I think of orchards. That's
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like fruit, right, Yeah, if it could be anything.
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No, orchards, Yeah, I think orchards specifically, like A refers
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to fruit trees. I could be rong, okay, cool, I
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don't know. The roads were rough and farms were distant
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from one another. Many residents were homesteaders or small farmers,
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trying to build stable lives from rugged land. Families relied
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heavily on routine tending livestock, cutting wood, hauling water, and
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preparing food stores to survive the winter month. Because and
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I don't think about this nearly enough when we talk
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about different points in history. They didn't have refrigerators. Yeah,
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meal prepping is already enough of a challenge for me.
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I can't really wrap my head around. Like they had
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to make jerky. Yeah, I remember reading about this in
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Little House on the Prairie that like you ate a
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lot of jerky meat, Yeah, a lot of jerky. Or
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there was a lot of like dried fruit and things
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like that, or canning depending on you know what it was.
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Sounds like an absolute nightmare, like what happens when you
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just you know, it's like Thursday and you just want
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it to be Taco Tuesday. But there's going to kill
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a cow. Yeah, there's nothing freus. News traveled slowly unless
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something serious happened, and when it did, everyone knew. In
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the winter of nineteen hundred, something serious did happen when
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two women vanished from their homestead. Their absence would ignite
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suspicion and divide a community. Louisa Nesbitt and her daughter
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Alma lived together on a homestead in the Hood River area.
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Like many rural women of the era, their lives revolved
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around domestic labor, farm maintenance, and survival work that rarely
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entered official records, but to find frontier existence. Child wives, yeah,
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the og Yeah. Their household was small but stable, and
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they were part of the loose social network that connected
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rural communities in the valley. Nothing about their lives suggested
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violence or danger, I guess, other than you know, just
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being in the middle of nowhere where anybody could happen
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upon your little lovely homestead any given moment, even in
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the wild. Wow list right, Yeah, quite literally. In frontier communities,
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relationships between neighbors could be complicated. Land disputes, financial struggles,
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and personal conflicts were not uncommon, especially in areas where
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legal boundaries and property lines were still being formalized, because
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this is when you could just be like, I got
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a dollar and I want those ones, all those acres.
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Yeah yeah, you could have it, as long as you
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didn't live there originally, right.
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Right, right, yeah, that little mitigating circumstance, if you will.
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Sometime in late nineteen hundred, Luisa and Alma Nesbit disappeared.
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Their absence was discovered not through a dramatic event, but
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through silence, the absence of routine activity that normally defined
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life on a homestead. No one saw smoke from their chimney,
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no one saw them in town, no one observed movement
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around their property. Eventually, neighbors began investigating what they found
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raised alarm. Their home and land appeared abandoned. Daily life
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had stopped abruptly. Signs suggested that women had not left voluntarily,
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though nothing immediately confirmed any kind of violence. In an
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era without modern investigative tools, disappearance alone could quickly become
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evidence of wrongdoing suspicion began to grow.
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You sure they didn't just run away, right, Yeah, they
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just decided, you know what, it's just really not for me. No,
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But like when you have your own your own land
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and house, and seems odd.
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The thing about it is, it's it's it's one thing
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to run away when there's a possibility of just catching
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an uber and going wherever you want from there, when
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you're literally hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from
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you know, members of your family or you know, civilization,
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it seems a little bit less likely. And here's the
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thing too, Like a lot of what I read talked
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about just how much Alma in particular had really romanticized
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coming out west, and how excited she was at the
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idea the possibility of like interacting with natives in the area,
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even like everything about like the Frontier and the wild
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West was really just like fascinating to her. She just
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was so excited to get out here. Wow. So the
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idea of abandoning everything that she had tried to build
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out here with her mother just doesn't It doesn't really
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track attention soon turned toward and neighboring man as it does.
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Initially nothing about Williams publicly marked him as dangerous. He
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was simply part of the community. That perception would change quickly.
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His proximity to the Nesbit property made him impossible to ignore,
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but as it happens, proximity was far from his only
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tie to the Nesbit women. H Oh, yeah, it's not
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great scandal. Born January seventeenth, eighteen fifty seven in Sambra, Ontario,
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Daniel Norman Williams was hardly a gentleman, even by the
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standard of the era. Pretty low. Yeah, the bar was
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truly in free fall through all nine circles of Hell.
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You said it way better than me. Yeah, well I
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had some time to think about it, so.
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Yeah, you did write this.
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Yeah, truly my least favorite Canadian. That's hard to do,
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you know, but every once in a while you find
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a you find one that ego I don't know. I
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don't know about him. I don't know about a boot
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about a boot. I feel like it's whenever I hear
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someone from Canada talking and like you pick up the accent,
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they're never actually saying a boot. It's a little bit
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softer than that.
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Yeah, yeah, let's not offend our friend Clint from Canada
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by trying to do his accent well.
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And I think of Alicia too. I'm like, uh, Alisha,
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you're you're a pod bffe so Eddie, who's all better
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muzzle this lady before she In eighteen ninety four, he
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was released from a Nebraska penitentiary after serving three years
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for assaulting and nearly killing his sister in law. That
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he ended up in Colwell, Iowa, where he met his
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lovely lady. And I just damn, it just would have
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been so much better off never meeting a man, you
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know usually yeahh then thirty one year old Almond Nesbit. Whoo,
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that's that's their little meet cute.
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Yeah, I bet he didn't tell her about how he
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assaulted his sister in law.
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You know, I have to imagine probably not. I'm gonna
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go with no.
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Did it say why he did? Which would he? She like,
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wasn't into sleeping with him because it's like her brother in.
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Law or what? You know, It's unclear. It's unclear. Actually
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I didn't really find anything like. That's a pretty good guest. Yeah,
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I feel like that, you know, given the time and
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and just the madness of it all. But Alma joined
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Williams fur their West in Oregon in eighteen ninety nine.
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There the pair claimed adjoining homestead claims about twenty miles
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outside of the river.
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Can we unjoin?
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Please? Right, I'd like to consciously unadjoin. On July twenty fifth,
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eighteen ninety nine, they were secretly married in Vancouver, Washington.
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Why was it a secret? Put a pin in that? Okay.
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At the time, neighboring Washington State's marriage laws were apparently
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less restrictive, which was handy seeing as mister Williams was
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apparently already married to an Oregon woman in Defer, shortly
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before Alma joined him in Oregon. So they meet after
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he's released from prison, and they're like, oh, love you
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so much, and he takes off for Oregon. She joins
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him out there in I don't know, it's it's unclear
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the exact amount of time, but it's like, I think
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roughly maybe a year maybe a little bit less that
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they are separated and he literally marries some other broad Wow,
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which kind of rude. Couldn't get officially divorced or I
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don't think that he was really concerned about bothering with that.
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I you know, I just I think that he had
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so many other things.
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That he was worried about.
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By October, her mother, Louisa, then in her late sixties,
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had joined Alma in Oregon. On March eighth, nineteen hundred,
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it was a stormy night as the trio boarded a
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Portland train for Hood River. Upon arrival that evening, Williams
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rented a wagon and two horse team from the Fashion
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Livery Stables. It sounds so fancy, It sounds so fancy,
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so fancy, but it's me, you said, Just to be clear,
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it's it's just stables. That's just where you rent your horses,
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and and the buggies for the horses anyway, and then
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they headed to their homestead. That was the last time
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either woman was seen alive. But the fashion Stables were
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sounding so good. I know, it was really sounding promising.
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Months later, but long before the fate of the Nesbit
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women would come to light, Williams encountered some issues within
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his plot, because of course there's there's a plot afoot,
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I'm sure. Well, I mean a man was involved, so
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you knew it was gonna get mad.
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Doesn't mean it's a good plot, Yeah, yeah, no, they
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just always be plotting, right, And you know how they
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say like and the plot thickens.
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It's like it actually kept getting thinner.
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And the plot limpens.
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Like literally the plot was mortally wounded. You see, marriage
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did not give him the right to Almah's land, given
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the era. I honestly found that surprising because I just
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I would have assumed their marriage would have automatically made
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him the default owner of any of her worldly holdings. Yeah, historically,
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that's been my understanding of how things work. Maybe she
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had a prenup. Yeah, yeah, maybe since the marriage was secret.
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I you know, I tend to doubt it, but anything's possible.
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So I just it's very strange because I feel like
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that's the logic behind a lot of fathers being adamantly
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opposed to, you know, certain matches for their daughters, because
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the justification is that, like, this is the person that's
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gonna have to take care of you. Anything that you
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inherit from me, that becomes his property. H Yeah. So
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I don't know why in this situation, you know, he
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wasn't automatically like the you.
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Know, maybe because they weren't married in Oregon. I don't know,
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maybe that's it.
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I have no idea, and I just I just you know,
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I was like, listen, there's a lot here. That's probably
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not the thread that I'm gonna pull at this time.
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But you can only own one of your wife's properties.
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Well, actually that you know, it's funny you say that.
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It's funny, you say, oh, bad luck for Williams. But
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worse still was the fact that his house and barn
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had both been mistakenly built on almost land.
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Claim mistakenly huh hmm, interesting.
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Which I don't I don't know how you. I don't
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know how you do that.
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Uh yeah, because he thought he would just own it.
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So he was like, well, I'll put it anywhere I want, right, you.
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Know, maybe maybe I I just feel like it's really
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interesting to watch really devious and yet terribly mediocre or
238
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underperforming men not have you know, the follow through to
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just like, I mean, maybe you should just at least