Episode 1 : Frederick Gross : The Tragedy of the Family Gross

Frederick Gross – The Tragedy of the Family Gross – Eps 1

[00:00:00] Dominika: Welcome to the very first episode of Dominika Best Presents the Deviant Mind, a True Crime Podcast. This episode is going back in time to 1935 and a borough of New York City called Brooklyn and the neighborhood called Bushwick. We start March with the family Gross. The family included a father, Frederick Gross, who was born in Germany and came to the United States when he was 18.

[00:00:38] He was now a US citizen at the time. He had a wife, Katherine, and it’s interesting, but in a lot of the New York Times articles that I read about this case, she was named Barbara, not Katherine, and it took me quite some time to figure that out. I was researching Barbara Gross and I couldn’t find anything.

[00:00:59] And finally I [00:01:00] did find an article saying her name was actually Katherine and was able to find her obituary. So if you ever look yourself into this crime, know that Mrs. Frederick Gross is actually Katherine, not Barbara. And it was very interesting researching this case as a woman to see how women were treated back then.

[00:01:20] A lot of times in the news articles, the woman never got. Her first name printed. It was always a Mrs. Frederick Gross or Mrs. Husband, last name. It was just something that really popped out to me.

[00:01:36] they also lived with their mother-in-law, Olga Bien, who was Katherine’s mother. The couple had five kids all under the age of. By named Freddy, Leo, Katherine, Barbara and Frank, and again, 19 35, 5 kids a mom, and these people were not very well off.[00:02:00]

[00:02:00] The father had a job, but it wasn’t enough to make ends. They lived in a cold water flat, which meant that they only had cold water and a gas hookup, and that was it. The family had to provide everything else. There was one New York Times article that said that they lived in a hot water flat, which would have made them be up a level above where they were in society, but as the investigation unfolded, Cold water flat was consistently talked about.

[00:02:33] So I think that was the one that was true. And I know this seems like a niggly little detail, but it kind of came into the case because it became one of the motives, not specifically the cold water flat, but how close to poverty this family, in fact,

[00:02:52] By all accounts, the dad, Frederick, was supposedly a very nice man. He had a really warm [00:03:00] smile. He was quiet and had a very sweet disposition. The neighbor said that he would a lot of times sit

[00:03:10] his apartment building, watching his kids play kick the can down the. And he was very well liked in the neighborhood.

[00:03:18] He was a bookkeeper and had worked for the same importing firm in lower Manhattan for 13 years, and even there, his coworkers said he was kind, hardworking, quiet, and friendly. He had been there a long time and kind of had a run of the place and was really well liked. Another interesting thing about Frederick was the fact that he was an amputee and that he had lost one of his legs in a carriage incident in Philadelphia where he had lived prior to New York City, Philadelphia was also where he met his wife Katherine.

[00:03:52] Katherine herself was born in New York County in Manhattan, but supposedly they. Met in [00:04:00] Philadelphia and moved to Brooklyn soon after and started having kids after their first child was born. I could not find any place of where she might have been working. For all intents and purposes, she was a stay at home mom, which made sense for 1930.

[00:04:18] March happened and complete an utter disaster struck. And really the big question was, is how could this sweet and gentle family man kill off almost his entire family? And that’s the story we’re going to tell of what happened in March and April of that year. And who did it?

Dominika: Our story begins with Frederick Gross on March 29th, 1935. He came home and his wife Katherine, tells him that Fred Junior has a really bad stomach ache and is not feeling very well as she’s giving everybody else dinner. Frederick. Freddy to his bedroom, undresses him and puts him to bed. He’s actually quite worried because even though Freddy, like all kids, got the random stomach aches and colds, he looked really pale and sick.

[00:00:32] This time, Frederick stayed with him that whole night, sitting in a chair next to his bed. Frederick was woken up in the early morning hours to his son sitting up in bed, throwing up and convulsing. He quickly called the ambulance and had his boy rush to the nearest hospital. Unfortunately, he died there.

[00:00:58] I can’t even [00:01:00] imagine as a parent what he must have felt like when his poor boy died, but tragedy. Would strike again sooner than anybody could ever imagine. Two days later, on April 1st, his son Leo, who was only three, died convulsing in the same way as his brother had done. The family doctor reported both deaths as bronchial pneumonia to the Department of Health, which.

[00:01:30] So tragic, and I don’t, I know that back then kids died all the time before the age of five from various illnesses and sicknesses, because the medical community wasn’t what it is today, but still within two days, I can’t imagine what this family must have been feeling like.

[00:01:51] But the tragedies just kept coming. Katherine Gross. The mother died on [00:02:00] April 6th, just five days later, and she was diagnosed with encephalitis or what they called the sleeping sickness back then.

[00:02:09] He takes time off work. This is Frederick to take care of his remaining children with Olga, his mother-in-law, his sister-in-law, and Katherine’s sister comes to help the family out through the news articles. What I could find was that the dad, Frederick, would get his family to sleep and would go out to bars drinking.

[00:02:35] The next day, he would come and take care of his family again, but he was out in the bar till four or five in the morning. Some neighbors said,

[00:02:43] So, as this family is trying to rally, the sickness is not done yet. Seven year old Katherine, five year old Frank and baby Barbara, who was only 18 months at the time, were tired and achy and not feeling well. [00:03:00] Olga, the mother-in-law, wasn’t doing very well either, and something that comes back later, which is very telling is that all of their hair was falling out.

[00:03:13] Frederick, however, was totally healthy and did have his. Katherine’s Sister would cook dinner nightly and her kids, the cousins, would play with Katherine, Frank and Barbara.

[00:03:26] But the tragedies, again, were still coming, and only three weeks later, on April 26th, the two families were eating dinner together. And this included.

[00:03:41] The sister-in-law’s husband, William, and again, I don’t actually know her name because it was very hard to find that she was always called Mrs. Staub. I did find their children’s names, Olga and Victor. In any case, they were all having dinner together and dinner [00:04:00] was Farina and cocoa because that’s all they could afford.

[00:04:05] Frederick later told his attorney that he had given Katherine and Barbara Orange Juice along with that dinner, and they were the only ones who had that within an hour of finishing their meal. Katherine and Barbara became extremely sick and both of them were dead within four hours.

[00:04:24] That’s four children dead and their mother within four weeks. This, of course did not go unnoticed.

[00:04:34] Soon after that dinner, Frank, his only remaining child, and Olga, his mother-in-law, ended up in the hospital sick as well. The doctors diagnosed Frank with chicken pox, which of course was highly doubtful because they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him otherwise, and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with Olga, the mother in.

[00:04:58] An investigation at [00:05:00] this point had started and even though the doctors had diagnosed both Katherine and Baby Barbara as having encephalitis, which is what they said they died of, like their mother, they decided to test tissues from Olga and Frank who were still in the hospital.

[00:05:21] And it was good that this was actually in 1935 because doctors and the new forensic scientists that were just, all these things were coalescing around this time. They had instruments that could check to see if people had been poisoned before. They didn’t have these instruments, and this is like 30, 40 years ago, I think the spectroscope, which is what I’m about to tell you about.

[00:05:47] Discovered until like 1860, and before then you couldn’t tell if somebody was poisoned or not. An interesting little fact was that arsenic [00:06:00] was known as the inheritance powder because people, well, specifically children of wealthy parents, would give their parents who were staying alive a lot longer than they were supposed to.

[00:06:14] They would give them the arsenic so they could get their inheritance.

[00:06:18] In any case, the police sent Olga and Frank’s tissue samples to a local physician who had a spectroscope. The Spectroscope was a new gadget that measured the light, a material made when it was heated up to incandescence, and some materials like poisons led. They all have a specific color on the color spectrum.

[00:06:43] When this physician tested the samples, he found the very specific brilliant green Color in Olga and Frank’s tissue samples that was Thallium sulfate, an extremely [00:07:00] deadly poison that was found in rat poison back then. The moment the detectives had gotten these results, and this was Detective Arthur Edge and District Attorney Ferrari, they picked up Frederick Gross at 1:00 AM at a bar near his home and arrested.

[00:07:20] District attorney William Fx Geoghan of Kings County had the bodies of Katherine Gross, his wife, and Freddy, the first child who died exhumed and had tissue samples taken from their bodies to get them tested as well. Their bodies showed the unmistakable brilliant green of Thallium as. Although as we will later see another doctor refuted one of these claims.

[00:07:50] For all intents and purposes though, district attorney Geoghan believed that his detectives had found the cause for this family’s [00:08:00] tragedy. They had been poisoned and Frederick Gross was the man who.

[00:08:05] He was arrested and questioned for 28 hours. He wept, but he never faltered from his story and from the New York Times. As I was researching, I found the quote that he had said at the beginning of his questioning quote. I was told by the doctor that something was wrong, that they found some of it in the body of my wife.

[00:08:30] And Leo, I never bought, brought it home with me. They tell me it looks bad for me, but I’ve done nothing.

[00:08:37] He stuck to his story for 28 hours. They finally put him in lockup and he promptly fell asleep. the detectives as far as they were concerned, they had the guilty man. How could a man who had just killed his entire family and if he was innocent, go to sleep after being questioned for 28 hours?[00:09:00]

[00:09:01] As they looked further into who Frederick Gross was, they found that he had no history of violence. He had only one prior arrest for public intoxication, and the police couldn’t quite figure out what his motive could have been for such an awful crime.

[00:09:17] The one motive that they could come up with was that the family was struggling financially. They found out that Frederick had borrowed $180 the year before from a small loan company in Brooklyn. He pledged his furniture as collateral, and he still owed $50 on that. Frederick only owned one suit as well, and he had bought that on an installment plan and he still owed $17.

[00:09:50] The depression had really hit his job hard and previous he had been making $35 a week, but after the depression, he [00:10:00] had been given a choice by his company to either take $20 a week or go find another job. Frederick decided. He was going to keep his job, but he had a difficult time feeding his family on that money.

[00:10:16] They lived in a four room flat that cost $20 a month. He had a lot of mouths to feed, and as the detectives looked further, they couldn’t find any insurance that he had taken out as. On his children or his wife. So it wasn’t like he had killed them for the insurance money. He wasn’t financially benefiting from their deaths at all, except for the fact that he wouldn’t have to feed so many mouths.

[00:10:43] And there was another issue was that the renowned physician, Dr. Alexander Gettler, who was the city pathologist at at the time, said, Thallium sulfate was really hard to come by that it was a relatively rare occurrence and had a high cost. [00:11:00] In fact, though Thallium was pretty easy to obtain, seeing as it was in rat poison.

[00:11:06] And here’s another aside, which again, it’s amazing what. Materials and poisons, people were ingesting at this time.

[00:11:17] Now, this case comes up in another book that I read called The Poisoner’s Handbook, Murder in the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Bloom, which I would absolutely re. Everybody to read. It’s fascinating about how forensic pathology and detection started, especially when it came to poisons.

[00:11:41] And in this source I read about thallium sulfate and how it was used in rat poison, but it was also really good at getting rid of hair and. Makeup manufacturers thought that it would be [00:12:00] the perfect substance to put in creams to help women with their unwanted hair.

[00:12:08] In the book, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs by Arthur Kallet and F.J. Schlink of the Consumer’s Research Union. Had written about thallium and cosmetics and that it was put in depilatory creams that were essentially being advertised in vogue, and they were maiming women. One woman said she lost all of her hair except for a very small, like fringe at the back.

[00:12:33] Another woman had applied the cream to her upper lip and she lost the use of her legs, and another woman lost her vision. Meanwhile, this is happening. It’s still getting advertised in vogue as a perfect way to get rid of hair and also having a pale, beautiful complexion because that’s what women need, no hair and a pale complexion.

[00:12:59] When [00:13:00] I read that, that was just crazy. And another quote that I read from the Poisoners handbook was that at the turn of the century, Thallium had been used to remove the hair of children with scalp infections such as ringworm, so that the doctors could see and treat the fungus on their scalp. But the practice had been abandoned when too many of the toddlers died and quote, So again, this poison was well known.

[00:13:25] One of the telltale signs was that people would lose their hair and it was incredibly, incredibly deadly. I just can’t believe doctors would give that to children. Again, I always wanted to go back in time and see how other people lived back then, but you wouldn’t be able to eat, touch, put anything on. I mean, everything just looked like it was ready to kill you back then.

[00:13:53] So Thallium was of course, also found in rodent poisons, like Celo paste and Thalrat. [00:14:00] It was also in a product called Thalgrain, which all of those could have been potentially used in this case. The symptoms of the poisoning were nausea and vomiting, shortness of breath, and if you had a big enough dose, the death would happen within 30 hours.

[00:14:19] Unfortunately, these symptoms weren’t much different than virulent pneumonia, which is what the first two children were diagnosed at in this case. if the patient survived longer. However, the only other symptom was loss of hair alopecia, and of course the prolonged cases of poisoning. You would have nausea, pain, leg paralysis, tremors, and a lot of signs that simulated encephalitis, which again is what the children specifically Katherine and Barbara, that was what they were diagnosed with.

[00:14:53] This was a horrifying poison, and the fact that it was fed to little children is beyond heart [00:15:00] wrenching to imagine what they must have gone through. As the police were investigating Frederick to see what charges they could bring against him because they had to connect him to the poison they had uncovered that Gross’s employer had gotten a shipment of coco two weeks before the death.

[00:15:23] March 18th, Frederick bought two cans of cocoa for 20 cents each, and then he bought two more cans on March 23rd, and then soon after his first child died because they were so poor, they were typically eating only one meal a day, and that was Farina. And Frederick had stated that he. Bought the cocoa because he wanted to supplement the meager food that his kids were having, and it was sweet and delicious and they could put it in the milk.[00:16:00]

[00:16:00] The other thing that the police uncovered was that there had been rat poison in the same warehouse that the cocoa was stored in. So now the police had the connection between the new. Thing that was brought into the house, which was the cocoa, and also the availability of the rat poison in the same warehouse where it was stored.

[00:16:25] The problem though, that the police were starting to encounter was that no one actually believed that Frederick Gross could have done this to his family. Now, typically in any investigation, stories would come out about abuse that was happening in the home, but there was none of this talk at all, which was a little concerning for the police and the district attorney who was trying to put the case together [00:17:00] against him.

[00:17:01] So they had him connected to the rat poison. And the motive was that he was very poor. But then the intent, like even his mother-in-law, Olga, said there was no way that he could have done it. All of his longtime friends and neighbors that the detectives interviewed said that he was innocent. No one the detectives and the district attorney could find would speak negatively against Frederick Gross.

[00:17:33] So at Frederick’s arraignment, he had a attorney named Maurice Nais. And when district attorney Vincent Ferrari asked for more time for scientific tests, his lawyer argued that he wanted Frederick released on a writ of habeas corpus because he. Over 30 statements by neighbors and friends coming to his [00:18:00] assistance that a rank injustice had been done to the man and there was no way he could have killed his wife.

[00:18:06] And as I said before, his mother-in-law, Olga Katherine’s mother and the grandmother to all of these children, said that he was innocent. His sister-in-law believed he was innocent. This was really concerning for the detective. So as they were getting all of this, like no way, he couldn’t have done it.

[00:18:30] They’re trying to put a good face for the reporters. William Geoghan, the district attorney who was bringing this case outwardly to them, was saying that he was totally confident that Frederick did it, but in private, he decided he needed a second opinion for the evidence because he started to believe that there were cracks in his case.

[00:18:53] He sent all of the evidence he had found to the city laboratories at [00:19:00] Bellevue, which at that time was the premier forensic laboratory pretty much in the world. Dr. Alexander Gettler, who I had previously mentioned, he was at Bellevue and he reran all of the tests.

[00:19:15] So he also used the spectroscope, although here it said he used a spectrometer, but I believe they were the same thing to see the brilliant green flashes and he found them. But he as a scientist never only did one test. So he decided to use a second machine called the Spectograph who would take pictures of these flashes of light so he could actually really study the color.

[00:19:41] The lines in the cocoa that were formed in this experiment. He did not like the color, wasn’t the same. Thallium is this like brilliant green. And he started wondering if the metal used for the cans had leached into the cocoa because at this point, the cocoa that they had uncovered from the apartment was going [00:20:00] bad.

[00:20:00] And he had tested the metal and knew that there was copper inside of the metal. And copper could also create this greenish color. When using the spectroscope, so he decided to run a series of chemical tests, prove his theory.

[00:20:13] So while Gettler was running his tests, the Brooklyn detectives had found books on medical topics including two volumes of material medica in the gross home with Katherine Gross’s name and date, 1922, written on the fly leaf. All of a sudden, they started uncovering. Another suspect in the case, but one that was already dead.

[00:20:42] There was also a copy of Schopenhauer’s studies and pessimism, which was essentially like life was not worth living. That also had her name in the cover. When they spoke to neighbors, it seemed that Katherine had said she had nursing experience, [00:21:00] but. When they researched further, they had found out that she was in fact a telephone operator in Mount Sinai Hospital in Philadelphia.

[00:21:09] When Frederick met her in 1914, they were soon married after, of course, like back in, back in those days with these articles. There’s another article in the New York Times stating that she worked that Jewish hospital in Brooklyn as a telephone operator, and Frederick was a night clerk where they met in 1918.

[00:21:27] So there were two differing accounts, but. She was a telephone operator each time since she was not in fact a nurse.

[00:21:34] So now that there was a potentially different suspect to these heinous crimes, Maurice Nais asked Mr. Geoghan for his client to free him so he could help with the investigation. And this got out to the press and Mr. Geoghan had actually stunned the reporters by saying he was thinking about it [00:22:00] and that they had received secret communications that he dispatched his assistant district’s attorneys to uncover.

[00:22:07] And what were the secret communications you might ask? Well, and this is from the same article on May 15th, 1935, a neighbor two doors down had signed a statement with Mr. Nais Gross’s attorney that several weeks before the chain of deaths began, Mrs. Katherine Gross had told her the neighbor that she intended to kill her children, her mother, And herself with rat poison.

[00:22:39] Mrs. Gross said that she had already bought the poison and that it was slow, painless, and sure to kill According to this neighbor. The neighbor of course, tried to dissuade her and asked if she had any trouble with her husband, and Mrs. Gross said, and this is a direct quote, I have the best husband any woman could want, but [00:23:00] rather than drudge along like this and live in poverty I’d do anything.

[00:23:05] I’d do anything someday. You’ll be surprised. And the neighbor is quoted as asking, But you mean you’d give your children poison and see them suffer? This is another quote. There’s no suffering to what I’ve got. She replied, quote, It’s sure death. It might take a day, It may take 30 days. And this neighbor also said that Mrs.

[00:23:31] Gross discovered this poison when she worked at the hospital. So here’s my question to you. She obviously knew that it would take a day or 30 days, so she definitely knew about the poison, but this whole suffering, the suffering was very obvious how horrible this poison was. And she must have known that.

[00:23:51] If she had discovered this poison in the hospital, plus she also had these books that also said how painful this poison [00:24:00] was. So what in the world would cause a mother to feed this horrifying poison to her children and watch them suffer? I just, again, the questions that I have. All right, going back to our story.

[00:24:14] So her husband, Refused to believe this information. He objected strenuously and was one of the reasons why he was still in jail. The paper quoted him as saying, Yes, I’ve been told that theory, but it never could have happened that way. He told Mr. Geoghan quote, I don’t believe it. If I thought she did it, I would take the blame for it myself and the.

[00:24:39] Mr. Nias, his lawyer was completely convinced that Katherine Gross had killed her children and herself, and he was prepared to call 20 witnesses who’d heard Mrs. Gross hint at such an intention, 20 witnesses. That was probably what made Mr. Geoghan be like, Oh, okay, my case is [00:25:00] really falling apart. And then he got Dr.

[00:25:04] Gettler’s testing. Dr. Gettler had confirmed that he had found Thallium in all of the dead children, but not in Katherine Gross. She had actually died of encephalitis, like originally diagnosed,

[00:25:18] so again, she did not poison herself, which totally changes this suicidal theory. There’re another theory the detectives were looking into, which in fact, they stated that she maybe wanted to start a new life with only herself. And there’s one last thing that I forgot to mention. Katherine Gross was pregnant with her six child during this entire case.

[00:25:49] So she’s a pregnant woman who now purportedly. Poisoned her five children what kind of monster could she have [00:26:00] been and why couldn’t Frederick have seen that? Gettler’s results also confirmed that the girls had gotten different doses than the boys, which is why it took them longer to die.

[00:26:12] So originally, district attorney William Geoghan believed the father killed the girls after the mother died. But Gettler said, Girls were poisoned at the same time as the boys, but they stayed alive longer because of the dosage. The dosage was much smaller. Gettler also found no evidence of Thallium sulfate in the cocoa, and the police now had no evidence connecting him to the deaths of his children On May 20th Magistrate John D. Mason of Brooklyn.

[00:26:48] County Court released Frederick Gross and District Attorney William Geoghan, stated quote, He is either the coldest blooded murderer I have ever met or else he is absolutely innocent.[00:27:00]

[00:27:00] Frederick went straight to the hospital to see his only remaining son, Frank. He made sure to tell journalists this time to write. About the fact that he was innocent all along. He also never believed his wife killed his children, and he and Olga took care of Frank on their own and that was essentially where the case ended.

[00:27:22] The police said that they would keep investigating, but in fact they stopped because they truly believed that Katherine had given the children the poison because she and her mother Were the only ones who ever fed the children. Frederick wasn’t part of the dinner preparations ever, and the fact that she had told anybody who would listen that she was planning to kill them with rat poison, it seems pretty shut at this point, and the fact that she herself died from encephalitis, while you can’t bring charges against her, [00:28:00] but.

[00:28:01] Could happen to a mother?

 

[00:00:00] Dominika: , BUT what about Katherine, The person who supposedly killed her children, she was only 38 years old at the time of her death, and I did some research into what is called filicide, which is where. Mother kills her children and most filicidal mothers have frequent depression, psychosis, or prior mental health issues and suicidal thoughts.

[00:00:29] And maternal filicide typically have five major motives. The first one is altruistic filicide, where a mother kills her child out of love, saying she believes the death will be in the child’s best. For example, a suicidal mother might not wish to leave her motherless child to face the world on her own, so she kills them because.

[00:00:52] She’s saving her child from a faith worst in death, which is being alone in the world. Then there’s a second one called acutely psychotic [00:01:00] filicide, which is a psychotic or Delirious mother kills her child without any comprehensible motive, so she might be following hallucinations to kill. There’s a third one, which is fatal maltreatment.

[00:01:11] filicide, which is death, is usually not the anticipated outcome, but it’s a result of child abuse, neglect, or munchausen syndrome by proxy or unwanted child filicide, where a mother thinks of her child as a hindrance. Then there’s some really rare ones, which is spouse revenge filicide, when a mother kills her child to emotionally harm the child’s father.

[00:01:35] Now it looks from. What we know about Katherine, that she was suicidal cause she was talking about killing herself and her mother and her children. She also had problems with being poor, like there wasn’t enough resources for her children. And this actually in research studies, a significant [00:02:00] portion.

[00:02:00] Of mothers have psychosis, depression, or suicide, they tend to have just given birth or

[00:02:09] pregnant at the time,

[00:02:10] significant life stressors were. Part of the psychology of a mother through these studies, and it looks like most times when mothers killed, it was the altruistic or acutely psychotic motive. So they typically depressed mothers would contemplate killing their children days or weeks prior to their crimes.

[00:02:36] And obviously like we have heard from this, the mother was telling her neighbors and friends. exactly what she was planning to do. Now, psychotic mothers tended to kill suddenly, and postpartum psychosis typically has an immediate onset after giving birth, whereas little Barbara was 18 months. So I.[00:03:00]

[00:03:01] Probably I’m thinking that she was dealing with postpartum depression and then now she’s pregnant. So she has all these different hormones going into her body and she can’t feed her children, and her mind essentially explodes in depression. And again, this is. A horrifying crime. But that has happened before.

[00:03:22] We’ve heard cases of mothers killing in the news just in the last 20 years. So this is something that happens. And there are very specific triggers, psychosis and the depression. And I was reading articles about how society expects mothers to do everything and. Back then, obviously mothers were expected to do child rearing.

[00:03:49] Katherine didn’t work outside of the home and she in fact had her mother-in-law helping her out. But I think that within, them being extremely in [00:04:00] debt, not being able to feed their children the fact that they owed all these debts for their life. Was such a trigger, like a stressor for this to happen, and it was the perfect storm of mental illness. Again, hormones from a pregnancy. life just caving in on her. And that’s the fact that nobody actually stopped her and said, Hey, I think you need help.

[00:04:28] Maybe I should call the cops. Or maybe you need to go see a doctor. But again, this was 1935 and mental health wasn’t even on the horizon at that point. People could barely get out of hospitals. It was again, just. Interesting crime because the fact that we typically hear about fathers being family annihilators.

[00:04:50] And just recently we’ve had these spate of crimes where the mother was the one who killed her children, Postpartum depression [00:05:00] happens in about 15 to 20% of new mothers, which is a staggering number and. I mean, It just looks like this is probably what happened in this case, a tragedy

[00:05:10] because psychology was in its baby stages. I’m just not sure what or who could have helped. Katherine, apparently her husband didn’t know, and I wonder if they had a relationship that. They could even talk to each other and say, Hey, I’m, I’m not doing so good.

[00:05:30] Frederick, for everything that I read swore up and down that his wife would’ve never been able to do this hiatus crime. And I could imagine for a husband if she actually did do it, that he would just shut down because the possibility was so horrendous. and he lost his entire family to the woman who had created it with him.

[00:05:54] This case just is tragedy in all its forms, and again goes back [00:06:00] to mothers specifically needing help and needing to get diagnosis. Even when I was pregnant, I started getting literature about postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis, and it is now definitely. In kind of the cultural Zeit guys, but obviously in 1935 it would not have been.

[00:06:22] And even still in the poorer communities when women who don’t have prenatal care or are just in such abject poverty that again, these stressors happen. And then we see again the explosion of this pain onto the people around. . So that is the case of Frederick Gross and his wife Katherine Gross, and I guess it’s a family Annihilator case by the mom or maternal filicide.

[00:06:52] Next week, I am going to bring a serial killer case from the last 20 years. I’m sure you [00:07:00] will all have heard about it by now this case, but I’m not gonna tell you who it is. You’re gonna have to wait to listen next week, and thank you so very much for joining me on the Deviant Mind.