Plead The Belly Plead The Belly

The podcast has come to an end, but the love has not. 

Lorena Bobbitt was born October 31, 1970 in Bucay, Ecuador. Not much is documented about her life until she married John Bobbitt in 1989.



On June 23, 1993 Bobbitt claimed that her husband raped her. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence and she had suffered other forms of physical and mental abuse from him.



That night, after he went to sleep, she went to the kitchen and grabbed a carving knife. She then returned to her bedroom and cut off his penis.



Bobbitt then left the apartment with the severed appendage and drove away. After a while she threw it out of the window then stopped to call 911, telling the police what happened. The appendage was later found and reattached.



Bobbitt was tried for her crimes. During the trial vendors sold shirts that said “Love hurts” and penis-shaped candy.



John was charged with marital sexual assault. During this time period, marital rape was a relatively new crime and the law made it almost impossible to prove. He was arrested several more times and has served jail time for assault.



In court she testified that he sexually, physically, and emotionally abused her during their marriage. Her attorneys claimed that all the abuse made her snap and that because of the abuse she was suffering from depression and PTSD.



John denied the claims but, during cross examination his statements would conflict.



John was later acquitted of rape and she was found not guilty due to insanity. As a result she had to undergo a 45 day evaluation at Central State Hospital, after which she was released.



In 1995 the two divorced.



John went on to form a band and star in two porn films. He was also a regular on the Howard Stern show.



This case received a lot of media attention. Terms like the "Bobbittized punishment" and "Bobbitt Procedure" became common and the Bobbitt worm was named after this case.



After Lorena served a short sentence in a mental hospital she went back to her life as a manicurist. She remarried and had one child. She also formed a charity called Lorena’s Red Wagon which helps survivors of domestic violence.

Elizabeth Holmes  was born on born on February 3, 1984 in Washington D.C. Her mother worked as a congressional staffer while her dad was employed by Enron and later worked for government agencies like the United States Agency for International Development. 

She was considered to be a bright child and, at age seven, tried to invent a time machine. She filled notebooks with notes and ideas. 

At age nine she told her family that she wanted to be a billionare when she grew up. She was known to be very competitive. 

In high school she was a straight A student and started a business where she sold C++ compilers, a type of software that translates computer code, to schools in China. She also participated in a summer program at Stanford. 

After graduating she went to Stanford to study chemical engineering. She spent the summer after her freshman year interning at the Genome Institute in Singapore. 

In her sophomore year she went to one of her professors, Channing Robertson, and asked him if he wanted to start a company with her. With his help she founded Real-Time Cures, later changing the company's name to Theranos and filed a patent for a "Medical device for analyte monitoring and drug delivery”. She then dropped out of college to work at her company full time. 

She claimed to be developing a machine that could run a variety of tests from a small drop of blood for things like high cholesterol and cancer.

Some of the early Theranos investors were Larry Ellision, who founded Oracle, and Tim Draper, founder of VC firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Holmes was able to raise over 700$ million dollars from investors.

Holmes began to model her style and speech after her icon, Steve Jobs and was known to dress like him. She also dropped her voice to a lower tone. 

She began dating the president and COO of Theranos, Sunny Balwani, who was 20 years older than her. They had met during Holmes' third year in Stanford’s summer Mandarin program, the summer before she went to college. 

In 2008 the Theranos board attempted to remove Holmes to replace her with someone more experiences. After a two hour meeting Holmes convinced them to let her stay on. 

As Theranos gained in fame so did Holmes. She was on the cover of Fortune and Forbes, gave a TED Talk, and spoke on panels with Bill Clinton and Alibaba's Jack Ma. Theranos also began partnering with other companies such as Capital Blue Cross and Cleveland Clinic. They made a deal with Walgreens to open testing centers in their stores. 

Holmes became the world’s youngest self made female billionaire with a net worth of around $4.5 billion but no one in the outside world knew how her company worked. Anyone who visited Theranon had to sign NDAs and was escorted everywhere by security. 

In 2015 Ian Gibbons, a chief scientist at Theranos, warned Holmes that the tests weren’t ready to take public and that there were issues with the technology. Others began voicing their concerns too. 

In August of that year the FDA began investigating the company and found "major inaccuracies" in their testing. 

Then in October John Carreyrou, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, published his investigation. He had discovered that the blood testing machine wasn’t giving accurate results and that they were running their samples through traditional blood testing machines. He spoke to ex-employees and retrieved official company documents. 

Theranos threatened to sue if he published the story but did it anyway. 

Holmes denied all allegations and appeared on CNBC’s Mad Money to defend herself and her company, saying that "This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.” 

By 2016 the FDA, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and SEC were all looking into Theranos. In January Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent Theranos a warning letter that talked abou

Andrea Yates was born in Hallsville Texas in 1964. She started to show signs of depression at age 17. She graduated from high school in 1982 as class valedictorian,  captain of the swim team, and an officer in the National Honor Society. She went on to get her nursing degree from the University of Texas and then worked as a nurse until she married Rusty Yates on April 17, 1993.

In 1883 she immigrated to Chicago to live with her sister while her brother stayed in Norway. 

In 1884 she married Mads Albert Sorenson and they had four kids and one foster child. Her husband owned a candy store. 

In 1890 their house burned down and in 1895 the store burned down and they received insurance money for both. During this time two of their children died from acute colitis. 

Interestingly acute colitis and strychnine poisoning share some common symptoms, such as abdominal pain and this will come into play later in Gunness’ life. 

Her husband also died in this time period on the one day that his two life insurance policies overlapped. His family demanded an inquiry but no charges were filed. The family thought that it was strychnine poisoning but her doctor overruled them and ruled it as heart failure. 

With the insurance payout, Gunness bought a farm with more than 40 acres near La Porte, Indiana. She remarried Peter Gunness, who had two children. He suspected that something wasn’t right and sent his oldest daughter to live with relatives. She is the only child who survived Gunness. Peter and his younger daughter both died shortly after. 

After this Gunness began posting in a singles column in the local paper.  Many men answered the posting. She demanded that the men sell everything they had before coming to see her.

In July 1907 Gunness hired Ray Lamphere to be farm hand and began sleeping with him. He didn’t like all of her suitors but she refused to be with him because of his gambling problem. 

She began a long distance relationship with Andrew Helgelien from South Dakota. They wrote each other for 16 months before meeting. He arrived in January 1908 with $2839  to build a new life with her. 

Shortly after Gunness and Lamphere got into a fight and she kicked him off the property. She complained to the sheriff that she saw him through her windows and had him arrested and fined for trespassing. 

During this time Helgelien’s brother Asle began to worry about him. One of their farmhands found their letters and Asle became suspicious of her motives when he read the she asked him to withdraw all of his money and come to her. 

He wrote to Gunness and asked where his brother was. She claimed that he left for Chicago and speculated that he may go to Norway. Alse didn’t think that that sounded like his brother. 

Gunness was still worried about Lamphere and in April went to a lawyer and had a will drawn up. After the meeting, she went shopping and came home with cakes, a toy train, and two gallons of kerosene. She treated her family that evening to a large meal of meat and potatoes and spent the night sitting on the floor, playing with her children and their new toy train.

The following morning her house had burned down. Four burnt bodies were found, three were children and the last was an adult female. The woman’s corpse was headless. It was assumed that the woman’s body was Gunness’. Lamphere  was arrested immediately and when Alse read this in the paper he rushed to Indiana.  

Alse went to the sheriff’s office and the sheriff drove him to the house to search for clues. A week later and the skull of the woman’s body had yet to be found. Some assumed that Lamphere had hidden it. 

Since they weren’t having luck digging through the rubble Asle suggested that they look in the hog pen. There they a gunny sack Inside were two hands, two feet, and one head. Asle recognized the withered, rotten face: It was his brother. Then the men digging realized that there were dozens of slumped depressions in Gunness’s yard. As the property was searched more body parts were found. Between 14 to 40 bodies were recovered. 

Each body was butchered into six parts: The legs chopped at the knee, the arms hacked at the shoulder, and the head decapitated. Most of the remains could not be identified. The skulls had evidence of blunt force trauma. The bodies that were still in tact had evid

In Nasik, Pune India a mother, daughter, Seema Mohan Gavit, and step daughter, Renuka Kiran Shinde, trio teamed up to commit crimes. The daughters were in their twenties when they started pick pocketing people.

In 1990 they realized that they could use children to creat a diversion. Shinde was caught pickpocketing outside a temple and her son was with her. She used him as a defense, convincing the crowd that a woman with a child couldn’t be a thief.

Shortly after this the women began abducting children and using them as a front. Most of the kidnappings took place in busy places such as temple compounds and fair grounds in cities like Nasik, Kolhapur and Pune. They were nicknamed the Sinister sisters by the news.

Kiran Shinde drove the getaway car, a Fiat. Most of the kidnapped children were from poor families.

The first victim was a beggar woman's one-year-old son, Santosh. The sisters used him as a distraction, if they were caught the woman carrying the child would throw them on the floor, creating a commotion while the other escaped.

If the child cried or complained they would kill them. The mother was usually the one in charge of this.

The sisters were caught when they visited Mohan to kidnap his second daughter in October 1996. His second wife had filed a complaint against them and their mother when her elder daughter went missing. During questioning the police found evidence of the other murders. The women were arrested on November 19, 1996.

The police were able to get Shinde to crack and tell them everything, though later the women denied all the charges.

On June 29, 2001, The women were charged with thirteen cases of kidnapping and nine murders. The first court found them guilty of kidnapping and murdering of six children. The high court found them guilty in five of those cases and gave them the death sentence. They did not convict them of the murder of Gavit’s son.

The mother died while awaiting trail. The two daughters have exhausted their appeals, in 2014 the President of India rejected their mercy appeal.