Page 60
EPISODE NINE: 2018–2022
DAPHNE:The seniors home felt like the final chapter of my life. Although now I suppose I’ve added a few more! At first, I tried to keep myself busy. I read my serial killer books, I swam in the pool, I went to the center’s dances and did chair fitness. But soon I was too frail to salsa, too nervous to swim. I stopped being able to walk more than a few steps on my own, started needing a walker and then a wheelchair when I left my room.
RUTH:I have a parent who is starting to experience mobility issues and it’s hard to watch. . . You still remember how healthy and vibrant they used to be.
DAPHNE:Yeah, great, I feel so bad for all the people who have to watch me get sick.
RUTH:(Tuts) What was it like here when the pandemic started?
DAPHNE:Oh, it was grim. I would just sit in this apartment, day in and day out, watching the world die on TV.
RUTH:When did you start dating Warren Ackerman?
DAPHNE:A year ago. I was eighty-nine, we were in the middle of the pandemic, and I couldn’t watch another episode ofNCISwithout hanging myself. Of all the men in my age group, he was the most charming. But there was competition. At my age there are three women for every man. It reminded me of my twenties in New York when I had to compete with the other Bergdorf Goodman girls for dates. And I’ve always been Best in Show.
RUTH (sadly):And when did you decide to. . . kill him?
DAPHNE:Just after I turned ninety. It had been ages since I had killed anyone, but the pandemic had made me feel like I needed to take some risks and I wanted to know if I still had it in me. He was an easy target; no one blinks an eye when an old fart kicks the bucket.
RUTH:So, how did you do it? You can barely get to the bathroom by yourself.
DAPHNE:All right, Ruth, no need to rub my nose in it. But yes, it was difficult. I have arthritis and so even slipping the crushed-up pills into his coffee was hard. But on the plus side Warren was not the sharpest tool in the shed so he didn’t notice how bad his coffee tasted. That’s what decades of smoking can do to you, so there’s a good lesson for all the smokers listening.
RUTH:So he died. And people assumed it was natural causes.
DAPHNE:Exactly.
RUTH:And that bothered you? Isn’t that your usual method? To make it look like a health problem? To make it look like their cancer, their hearts, even their diabetes finished them off?
DAPHNE:Diabetes? Where did that come from? Well, yes, I was a tiny bit disappointed that I’d pulled it off. Maybe this time I wanted to get caught; I don’t know. I didn’t do this one for money; we were never married. I did it for a thrill, to capture that buzz again, but I just felt lost afterwards. This was my last adventure, and it was over. That is. . . until I decided it wasn’t.
RUTH (irritated):I just don’t buy it, that there wasn’t more to your confession. Surely there are other ways to get a thrill. And I suppose I should remind you that this was a human being you killed, that the sad part of this story was not that you found this murder anticlimactic.
DAPHNE:Yeah, yeah, you can just patch a lecture in later when you’re editing this thing. Save us all from hearing the sermon on the mount again.
RUTH (Voiceover):It was hard listening to Daphne crow about murdering an elderly man. But I knew that she didn’t care that her comments made me uncomfortable, that I worried about what Warren Ackerman’s friends and family might think when they heard this podcast. She didn’t care about Warren and she didn’t care about me and she thought we were all fools for caring so much. I wondered what it would be like to live like that, whether the freedom it offered was worth the pain it caused.
ShockAndBlah:
I still don’t understand why she did it. Why she killed all those people. Or even why she confessed to it all when no one suspected a thing. Was it a control thing? Only she got to write the ending to her story? I don’t know.
PreyAllDay:
Come on, what did you expect? ‘Oh it turns out that I’m allergic to gluten. THAT’S why I was killing everyone!!’ Why do any of us do the things we do?
BurntheBookBurnerz:
Because of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism. It all really boils down to that. She’s the dark side of the American dream, or the byproduct of it anyways.
StopDropAndTroll:
[This comment has been removed by a moderator.]
PreyAllDay:
But Ruth will do more episodes right? I think even a second season. I want to hear about prison. And if she finds any connections to the Tylenol Murders.
StopDropAndTroll:
DAPHNE:The seniors home felt like the final chapter of my life. Although now I suppose I’ve added a few more! At first, I tried to keep myself busy. I read my serial killer books, I swam in the pool, I went to the center’s dances and did chair fitness. But soon I was too frail to salsa, too nervous to swim. I stopped being able to walk more than a few steps on my own, started needing a walker and then a wheelchair when I left my room.
RUTH:I have a parent who is starting to experience mobility issues and it’s hard to watch. . . You still remember how healthy and vibrant they used to be.
DAPHNE:Yeah, great, I feel so bad for all the people who have to watch me get sick.
RUTH:(Tuts) What was it like here when the pandemic started?
DAPHNE:Oh, it was grim. I would just sit in this apartment, day in and day out, watching the world die on TV.
RUTH:When did you start dating Warren Ackerman?
DAPHNE:A year ago. I was eighty-nine, we were in the middle of the pandemic, and I couldn’t watch another episode ofNCISwithout hanging myself. Of all the men in my age group, he was the most charming. But there was competition. At my age there are three women for every man. It reminded me of my twenties in New York when I had to compete with the other Bergdorf Goodman girls for dates. And I’ve always been Best in Show.
RUTH (sadly):And when did you decide to. . . kill him?
DAPHNE:Just after I turned ninety. It had been ages since I had killed anyone, but the pandemic had made me feel like I needed to take some risks and I wanted to know if I still had it in me. He was an easy target; no one blinks an eye when an old fart kicks the bucket.
RUTH:So, how did you do it? You can barely get to the bathroom by yourself.
DAPHNE:All right, Ruth, no need to rub my nose in it. But yes, it was difficult. I have arthritis and so even slipping the crushed-up pills into his coffee was hard. But on the plus side Warren was not the sharpest tool in the shed so he didn’t notice how bad his coffee tasted. That’s what decades of smoking can do to you, so there’s a good lesson for all the smokers listening.
RUTH:So he died. And people assumed it was natural causes.
DAPHNE:Exactly.
RUTH:And that bothered you? Isn’t that your usual method? To make it look like a health problem? To make it look like their cancer, their hearts, even their diabetes finished them off?
DAPHNE:Diabetes? Where did that come from? Well, yes, I was a tiny bit disappointed that I’d pulled it off. Maybe this time I wanted to get caught; I don’t know. I didn’t do this one for money; we were never married. I did it for a thrill, to capture that buzz again, but I just felt lost afterwards. This was my last adventure, and it was over. That is. . . until I decided it wasn’t.
RUTH (irritated):I just don’t buy it, that there wasn’t more to your confession. Surely there are other ways to get a thrill. And I suppose I should remind you that this was a human being you killed, that the sad part of this story was not that you found this murder anticlimactic.
DAPHNE:Yeah, yeah, you can just patch a lecture in later when you’re editing this thing. Save us all from hearing the sermon on the mount again.
RUTH (Voiceover):It was hard listening to Daphne crow about murdering an elderly man. But I knew that she didn’t care that her comments made me uncomfortable, that I worried about what Warren Ackerman’s friends and family might think when they heard this podcast. She didn’t care about Warren and she didn’t care about me and she thought we were all fools for caring so much. I wondered what it would be like to live like that, whether the freedom it offered was worth the pain it caused.
ShockAndBlah:
I still don’t understand why she did it. Why she killed all those people. Or even why she confessed to it all when no one suspected a thing. Was it a control thing? Only she got to write the ending to her story? I don’t know.
PreyAllDay:
Come on, what did you expect? ‘Oh it turns out that I’m allergic to gluten. THAT’S why I was killing everyone!!’ Why do any of us do the things we do?
BurntheBookBurnerz:
Because of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism. It all really boils down to that. She’s the dark side of the American dream, or the byproduct of it anyways.
StopDropAndTroll:
[This comment has been removed by a moderator.]
PreyAllDay:
But Ruth will do more episodes right? I think even a second season. I want to hear about prison. And if she finds any connections to the Tylenol Murders.
StopDropAndTroll:
Table of Contents
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