23 episodes

November 4, 1971
Jennifer Rose Cooke, a girl from California, just turned 18, goes missing in a frigid forest in West Germany. She has been hitchhiking. First she caught a ride with a trucker, then with a West German soldier. Maybe she was trying to visit a young professor she had met on the boat over from New York. On that trip, he had heard her say she might throw herself overboard.
April 28, 1972
Another girl, just turned three, lives with her parents in a house in Laurel Canyon that lets the California rain in. Her biggest fear is of the brown snails in the garden; she will not cross the brick path if one is there. It is her father's twenty-sixth birthday; on this day his sister Jenny's remains are found. Officially, she died of exposure, although a murder investigation is begun and the file remains permanently open.

Nobody's Property Emily Kathleen Cooke

    • True Crime
    • 5.0 • 3 Ratings

November 4, 1971
Jennifer Rose Cooke, a girl from California, just turned 18, goes missing in a frigid forest in West Germany. She has been hitchhiking. First she caught a ride with a trucker, then with a West German soldier. Maybe she was trying to visit a young professor she had met on the boat over from New York. On that trip, he had heard her say she might throw herself overboard.
April 28, 1972
Another girl, just turned three, lives with her parents in a house in Laurel Canyon that lets the California rain in. Her biggest fear is of the brown snails in the garden; she will not cross the brick path if one is there. It is her father's twenty-sixth birthday; on this day his sister Jenny's remains are found. Officially, she died of exposure, although a murder investigation is begun and the file remains permanently open.

    Nobody's Property Episode 01: Tiny Dancer

    Nobody's Property Episode 01: Tiny Dancer

    I’m on the middle road from San Francisco to L.A., the 101, doing seventy behind a Chevy Chevelle past open-bed trucks hauling vegetables and buses hauling field workers, twin port-a-potties towed behind them. I noticed the Chevelle pulling out from the center divider outside Salinas—the gray dust it kicked up matched the primer that coated its aging body. Now every bus and truck it passes I blow by moments later, easing back into the right lane once I see both headlights in the rearview. I’ve had the feeling before of being in sync with another driver on this long curving road, traveling together with a stranger: the feeling that I'll make it to where I'm going.

    Because someone else seems to be going there too.

    Music by Kristin Hersh: http://kristinhersh.cashmusic.org/ or http://www.kristinhersh.com/

    • 28 min
    Nobody's Property Episode 02: Chaparral

    Nobody's Property Episode 02: Chaparral

    When I was two years old, my parents and I lived for a while in a cottage up Laurel Canyon. There is a picture of me from this time: I'm wearing toddler-sized cowgirl buckskins, my red hair is in high pigtails poking out each side of my head, I'm smiling, and I'm holding a toothbrush. Remember, this was less than two years after the Manson Family came down from the Ranch and murdered Sharon Tate and her guests up on Cielo Drive. The crazed women tasted blood and used it to scrawl PIG on the door. They crashed more than a party; they crashed a culture. And across the continent and the ocean, people were looking for my Aunt Jenny.

    Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

    Larry Harnisch mentions Pershing Square in a blog post.

    • 21 min
    Nobody's Property Episode 03: My Mother's Egg

    Nobody's Property Episode 03: My Mother's Egg

    For a few years while I was growing up, a book called How to Do Your Own Divorce sat undisturbed on a bookshelf by our living-room fireplace. It just sat there, its paper spine facing out, between Passages and Last Things. This was in Southern California, on an alluvial fan of the San Gabriels, in a little falling-down house on Twelfth Street in Claremont. We moved there when I was five years old. My father’s parents, Charles and Edith, had fronted him the down payment for the house and planned to hand over the title when Dad came up with the roughly three thousand dollars to pay them back.

    Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

    Here's an interesting resource. Love the cover photo of the couple on the beach!

    • 22 min
    Nobody's Property Episode 04: Base Line

    Nobody's Property Episode 04: Base Line

    After my father stopped living with Mom and me, he spent his nights in his woodshop, in the lemon packing house that my grandfather Charles owned. The remains of the citrus groves still grew all around us in Claremont, and an old guy sold wooden crates of local lemons off the loading dock of the packing house: the sole survivor. When I visited my dad's shop there, I was afraid to go to the bathroom, because it was all the way on the other side of the packing house, and the big, scarred wood floor seemed huge, while the hollow building seemed to whisper to me as I crossed it. The packing house sat on the old Santa Fe line, and freight trains would rumble past at random intervals during the day and night. Eucalyptus trees marched straight down the railroad right-of-way, and stony, stubbly fields and a few scattered industrial buildings stretched on either side of them. One night, somebody wandered in from the tracks and, while my dad slept nearby, robbed his jeans.

    Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

    You can view some pictures of fieldstone structures just down Base Line from my old house. Seven blocks to paradise.

    • 31 min
    Nobody's Property Episode 05: Living on the Remains

    Nobody's Property Episode 05: Living on the Remains

    A few years ago, my father told me the story of how my Aunt Jenny's remains were shipped back to be put into different ground. Dad called me from Oklahoma to describe how my grandmother Edith stood by while workers dug up the urn from under the small brass marker that barely wrinkled the surface of the grass in Oak Park Cemetery. They opened the urn; Edith looked inside. I could see her standing there, in a tasteful suit and stockings and pumps, her light hair neatly and stiffly styled, bowing her head to see. “There were actually quite large bone fragments mixed with the ashes," Dad said. The urn was too heavy for Edith to take on the plane from California to Oklahoma. So she shipped it U.P.S. Ground.

    Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

    Some names may have been changed; I can't really remember.

    • 29 min
    Nobody's Property Episode 06: Evidence

    Nobody's Property Episode 06: Evidence

    Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry
    Go to sleepy little baby.
    When you wake, you will find
    All the pretty little horses.

    Dapples and grays, pintos and bays
    All the pretty little horses.

    Way down yonder, in the meadow,
    Poor little baby, crying “mama”.
    Birds and the butterflys flutter ‘round his eyes.
    Poor little baby crying “mama”.

    Hush-a-bye....

    Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

    Sorry for the crazy German accent!

    • 37 min

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