Page 7 of The Six Murders of Daphne St Clair

And it broke so many of us. There was one year where my uncle was in danger of losing his farm, but he had managed to raise a small crop of wheat.

But on the day they went to harvest the wheat, they saw the hailstorm on the horizon.

The whole family stood at the edge of the field praying to God, every single one of them from the parents all the way down to their four-year-old son.

It was moving eastwards and for a moment it looked like it was going to miss the farm.

But then, at the last moment, the storm turned and headed straight for them.

In the end, they lost the farm. My uncle ended up in an insane asylum and my aunt and cousins went to a flophouse.

How can you explain to someone born in the Nineties what it was like back then?

We were living in hell. Burning in a dirty, ugly world that just overwhelmed you, until you couldn’t feel anything at all.

Life just happened to you back then, and you were too poor and too tired to do anything about it.

You can see why I prefer to tell people I grew up in Manhattan.

Maybe it would have been manageable if I came from a happy family, but I didn’t.

I was a Cowell, born into a family that everyone thought wasn’t worth shit.

We lived in a one-room shack, a place so small that a person’s anger could fill the room.

My father was a drinker and a real son of a bitch.

We were out there alone on a patch of dirt and he acted like God, king, and country combined.

He’d come in bone-tired from a long day of farming but he still found the energy to beat us black and blue.

When he had no money for liquor, he doubled down on the beatings, since they were his only stress reliever.

He did other things as well, but I’d prefer not to talk about that. Let’s just say that I learned a lot about love and marriage from my father, none of it good. They say hard places make hard people. Well, hard people also make hard people.

RUTH: Was your family close with other people in Lucan?

DAPHNE: No. People saw us as trash. They didn’t like my father because he was a drunk and they didn’t like how ratty we all looked. In that town, you could get away with anything as long as you looked respectable.

RUTH: What sort of things did people get away with in Lucan?

DAPHNE: I’ll give you an example. There was a preacher, Michael Cole.

He had been married but his wife, who was twenty years younger than him, had died of pneumonia when I was six.

Most people felt sorry for him, especially the great and good of our little town.

But there was this rumor—it probably started with their kitchen girl—that the preacher liked to discipline his nineteen-year-old wife by locking her outside the house in the dead of winter.

That she would stand at the door in minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, wearing nothing but a housedress and slippers, begging to be let inside as the skin on her face and hands went white and frozen.

RUTH: Jesus, and she went on to die of pneumonia?

DAPHNE: Well, she’d always been frail. People used to die different back then. It happened all the time.

RUTH: What happened to the preacher? Was he sent to prison?

DAPHNE: Nothing happened to him. He was so refined, and he had the support of the town; this was just a rumor among the poor folks. Besides, the wife was from the city. No one cared much about wives back then anyways, but especially not for ones who weren’t local.

RUTH: What do you think this story says about people? What are you trying to explain to the listeners?

DAPHNE: Well, shit, I don’t know, Ruth. You wanted me to talk about my childhood, the storms outside the house and the storms inside as well. What does any of it mean? It’s just a memory.

Reddit: r/MurdersofDaphneStClairPodcast

u/Automoderator: Hello and welcome to r/MurdersofDaphneStClairPodcast!

This subreddit is dedicated to discussing the newest podcast sensation The Murders of Daphne St Clair , which is already storming the charts even though it has only published its first episode!

This is the place to discuss the podcast, the life of Daphne St Clair, theories about the crimes she committed and the places she lived!

ShockAndBlah:

Okayyy how obsessed are we already with this podcast? One episode and it’s made me forget about Serial , Casefile , and My Favorite Murder !!

StopDropAndTroll:

Basic bitch choices. Listen to something less mainstream. Like Last Podcast on the Left .

ShockAndBlah:

I didn’t ask for your opinion about podcasts. I want to talk about THIS podcast.

BurntheBookBurnerz:

Oh, sweetie, but he’s not done mansplaining to you yet. And Last Podcast is just as mainstream, but he’s an edgelord. He wants to show everyone how hardcore he is.

PreyAllDay:

Was the Dust Bowl really that bad in Canada? Wasn’t it in Oklahoma?

BurntheBookBurnerz:

I think it was all over. I did a quick Google and Saskatchewan (fuck that’s hard to spell, thank you, autocorrect!) seemed to be the worst bit of it in Canada. And those grasshoppers, man. . . disgusting.

StopDropAndTroll:

But it was a protein source. You’ll never starve if you can live off the land. That was the problem with these people—they weren’t prepping.

BurntheBookBurnerz:

Stop with the prepper bullshit, seriously.

PreyAllDay:

FFS if I grew up in a hot-ass dust storm full of bugs and poison I’d be a serial killer too !