For Want of a Nail

"A most noxious diet.": The Swill Milk Scandal

The young man is tired. His assignment that day had forced him up before the sun, tracking his target back to its resting place. And now that he is here, in this dark part of town with its hulking warehouses and polluted air, he wishes he had turned his boss down. Even outside the building, the smell is overpowering, filling his nose and lungs with its hot reek of rot, feces, sickness, and putrefying meat. Puzzled but determined, the young man slips inside past the workers smoking and laughing in the streets.   Inside it is as dark as a cave. The windowless building offers no succour, no comfort, from the horrors enfolded within. The smell, a foggy stink within the streets, is almost a physical entity here. It forces its way into the young man's nostrils, over his tongue, down his throat, gagging him and churning his stomach. It is through sheer force of will that he does not vomit. But that will dissolved when he rounds a last corner and sees the true horror. The sight of hundreds living in squalor, misery, and disease...and the knowledge that poison is being spread throughout the streets of the city. Poison that may well have caused the deaths of thousands of children.  Clapping a convulsive hand to his mouth, the young man rushes outside and vomits into the dirty street.  This is the swill milk scandal.

"I have just given up.": The tragic deaths of Fiona Pilkington and Francecca Hardwick

The car rolls into the layby, unnoticed in the darkness, and grinds to a halt on the dirt. She is crying at the wheel. Perhaps she knows what she is about to do is wrong, but for her, so far as she can see, there are no more options. This is the only avenue they have left her with.   In the back, her daughter starts to cry. It is late, she should be in bed. She is confused and tired, cuddling a shivering rabbit on her lap. Her mother rubs her face. They will rest soon. All of them.  She clambers out of the car, hefts the gas can, spins off the lid. The pungent liquid splashes across the hood, the roof, the seats. Her daughter's cries grow louder as the fluid strikes her and the fumes fill the car. As she climbs back in, the gasoline soaks into her coat and trousers, the smells stings her eyes. She takes her daughter's hand. She closes her eyes. She strikes a match.  This is the story of Fiona Pilkington and Francecca Hardwick.

"Mom, I've done something terrible": The final rampage of Laurie Dann

The young man stands in the sunwashed kitchen, sweat still drying on his skin. He cannot take his eyes from the young woman standing a few feet away, the young woman dressed only in a T-shirt and a plastic garbage bag wrapped around her waist. The young woman holding a gun on himself and his mother.   The young woman is agitated, fretting. She claims to have been raped, and to have shot her rapist, but she will not allow them to call 911 and refuses their offer of clothing. And she will not put the gun down. All that she will do is call her mother on the phone and say, “Mother, it's bad.”  When the man asks to speak to her mother, the young woman passes him the phone. But the woman on the other end of the line is calm, almost to the point of being disinterested. Her husband is not home, and she does not have a car, so she has no way of getting there to help her distressed daughter. No, she cannot take a cab. He cannot believe his ears. Her daughter has been raped, has killed a man, and is now in his home, threatening him and his mother with a gun. But no, she insists, seeming to find nothing noteworthy or distressing about his words.  As the young man stares at the intruder, sunlight gleaming off the handgun in her grip, he hears her mother say, “Make sure she gets home safe.”  Join us as we take a deep dive into the infuriating and tragic story of Laurie Dann and Nicky Corwin, and see just how the rampage of May 20, 1988 could have been prevented.

"Men awakened but to die" - The Burning of the Sultana

The engineer of the steamboat hears the crew, shouting and raging once again. His stomach turns as he hears their protests. He knows what the captain will say, and he knows why it is necessary, but he also understands why the crew is so repulsed, why they have threatened mutinies. They are military men, and the job they are being forced to do shocks and horrifies them.   The engineer can do little, as he approaches the massive paddlewheels that churn the muddy riverwater into a froth. Debris commonly becomes trapped in between the heavy, wooden slats, and must be cleared for the boat to move on. It's a common enough chore aboard Mississippi steamboats, but now no one wants to do it. No one wants to pull out the flotsam that is now clogging the massive wheels.   The engineer surveys the wheel, his stomach turning. Jammed in between the slats, dripping with mud, is not the usual mass of leaves and driftwood...but dozens of bodies, the corpses of drowned men.   This is the sinking of the S.S. Sultana.  Join us for a deep dive into America's worst maritime disaster, and the greed and negligence that lead to the deaths of over 1100 men, women, and children.

"A tiny little thing": The Rana Plaza Collapse

The young man weeps as he stands at his window. For months his mind has been dominated by the memory of falling masonry, his ears ringing with the screams of the dying, his nose choked by the stench of decomposing flesh. When he closes his eyes he can see them, the ones he was unable to save. The famous image, a woman with her head thrown back, a man with his arms around her and his head laid on her chest, blood running down his face, both of them encased in dust and crumbled concrete, locked in a final embrace. When he closes his eyes he can hear those he was able to save, their screams and the grinding of the hacksaw blade biting into bone, their limbs smashed beyond repair. There is no help. There is no respite. None then, and none now.  He opens the bottle, pours the liquid over his head. For a moment, the pungent smell of gasoline mercifully covers the stink of rot. It was two weeks of his life, only two weeks of his 27 years, but it has dominated his mind and broken his spirit, and he can take no more.   A few moments later, his neighbours shriek in horror as a flaming body drops from the young man's window. By the time the flames are beaten out, the screams have been silenced. He could take no more. And he is far from the only one.   This is the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse.  Join us for a deep dive into the world's worst non-deliberate structural collapse, and Bangladesh's worst industrial disaster, and the failings that lead to the deaths of over 1100 men, women, and children.