SHOWTOWN, U.S.A. - The Lobster Boy Murders - Episode 1

He was billed as "Lobster Boy." He was convicted of murder. He never spent a single day in prison.

Grady Stiles Jr. was born in Pittsburgh in 1937 with ectrodactyly — a rare condition that fused his fingers and toes into claw-like extremities. He was the sixth generation of his family born with it. His father put him on a sideshow platform at seven years old. And in 1978 he shot his fifteen-year-old daughter's fiancé to death the night before their wedding, was convicted by a jury of his peers, and walked out of that courthouse a free man.

But before we get anywhere near a murder, you need to understand the world that made him.

This is the first of three episodes. Today we're going to Gibsonton, Florida — twelve miles south of Tampa on U.S. 41, across the Alafia River. For seventy years, "Gibtown" was the winter home of the entire American sideshow. It had zoning laws that let residents keep elephants in the front yard. A post office counter built low enough for little people to reach. A fire chief over eight feet tall, and a stretch where the police chief was a little person.

I'll teach you to talk like a carny — ten-in-one, bally, talker, tip, single-O, first-of-May, with it. I'll introduce you to the neighbors: Percilla the Monkey Girl and Emmitt Bejano the Alligator-Skinned Man, who named their property after their adopted son. Al and Jeanie Tomaini, the Giant and the Half Woman, who ran a fishing camp on the highway. Sealo the Seal Boy. Ward Hall, the King of the Sideshow.

And I'll tell you about the year Florida made it a crime for any of these people to earn a living — and about the man who fought it all the way to the Florida Supreme Court and won. That case was decided six years before a Pennsylvania judge decided the exact opposite thing about the exact same man's body. That's the whole series in two sentences.

IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 — Gibsonton, Florida. November 29, 1992. 03:30 — Welcome in 05:30 — How to talk like a carny 16:00 — The town they built 25:00 — The neighbors 36:00 — The year it was illegal to be looked at 44:00 — Seven generations: the Stiles bloodline back to 1805 52:00 — The act, the money, and the woman who married it 62:00 — The Lobster Family 68:00 — The turn: Pittsburgh, 1978 70:00 — Time Killer Files 72:00 — Close

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN What ectrodactyly actually is, how it's inherited, and how rare it is. How a traveling carnival sideshow was structured and what every part of it was called. How Gibsonton became Showtown, U.S.A. Why the 1921 Florida statute banning the paid exhibition of disabled people was struck down in 1972 — and who the named plaintiff was. And why Grady Stiles Jr., convicted of third-degree murder in February 1979, was sentenced to probation instead of prison.

SOURCES Pittsburgh Post-Gazette archive reporting. Joe Nickell, "Secrets of the Sideshows" (University Press of Kentucky, 2005). William Lindsay Gresham, "Monster Midway" (1953). The International Independent Showmen's Museum. New York Times and Tampa Bay Times obituaries of Ward Hall. Associated Press. AMC's "Freakshow" interviews with Grady Stiles III.

Where sources conflict, I say so on the record and tell you which way I lean and why.

TIME KILLER FILES I need help on this one. If your family wintered in Gibtown, worked the carnival circuit, or was "with it" in any capacity — reach out. I'm after the ordinary version of that town, not the sensational one. What was Gibsonton like on a Tuesday?

ABOUT Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton covers true crime, conspiracies, and hidden history — researched properly and told straight. Hosted from Derby, Kansas.

Follow the show so Episodes Two and Three arrive automatically. And if this one got under your skin, a rating and a review is the single biggest thing you can do to help other people find it.

Content note: this episode discusses homicide and domestic violence.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

A man is sitting on a couch in a trailer in Florida in his underwear, watching a movie. It's the end of November. Carnival season's over and everybody's home. He's got a cigarette going and a glass of iced tea beside him. And at some point he reaches over and he pauses the tape. Outside in the dark, a 17-year-old kid is looking at him through the window. The kid comes in and shoots him twice in the back of the head. He'd been paid $1,500, and the people who paid him lived in that trailer. Now stop, because if I tell you that story tonight, you'll get a monster, a hitman, and a trailer, and you will have learned absolutely nothing. The man on that couch was named Grady Stiles Jr. He was a sixth generation of his family born with hands that closed like a pincer. He had Erectodaclia. His great-great-great-grandfather had them, and his father had them. And two of his own kids had them right now. He couldn't walk, he never could, and by the time somebody put a bullet back of his head, millions of Americans had paid a dollar apiece to stand in a tent and look at him. So before we get anywhere near the murder, I want to take you to that tent. I want you to go to a town in Florida where the post office counter was built low so that little people could reach it. And the fire chief was eight feet tall. And the zoning code let you keep an elephant in the front yard. And I want to teach you how to took the cupcardi because they have their own language and it is fantastic. And I want to tell you about the year the state of Florida tried to make it illegal for any of these people to earn a living. And about the man who took it all the way to the Florida Supreme Court and won. Because you cannot understand what Grady's styles became until you understand the world that made him, and the world is the best story nobody's ever told you. This is Just Killing Time. I'm your host, Elizabeth Stanton. This is a show where we get into true crime, conspiracy, stories that keep us up at night, and a little hidden history. This is the first of three episodes, and here's how they're built. Today is the world, the carnival, the town, the family, the bloodline, and the law. Today you meet everybody. Next episode we go to Pittsburgh in 1978, where a man shoots his 15-year-old daughter's fiance the night before their wedding, gets convicted of murder by a jury, and then never spends a day in prison for it. And the third one is in 1992, The Trailer, The Kid at the Window, and a trial in Tampa that tested an argument Florida had never seen used quite that way. And every one of these episodes stands on its own. So you can start anywhere, but if you ride all three, I promise you the last 10 minutes of episode three just hits differently. So if you're new here, this is what we do. We follow the show wherever you're listening so you don't miss the next two. And stick around for the end because timekillers I need your help on this one for real. Now let's go to the midway. First thing you need to know, a circus and a carnival are not the same animal. And telling a carney otherwise is a great way to get a look. A circus is a show under a big top with a ring. A carnival is essentially only a midway, the strip of rides, games, food, and shows. And sometimes a carnival midway sat alongside a circus, a fair, or an exposition. And sometimes it was the whole event. And along that midway, intents and later trailers were the side shows. Now the show that made Grady Styles has a name and it's no freak show. That's what the public called it, but here's what the people who worked it called it. A tin in one. And it's exactly what it sounds like. Ten shows for the price of one ticket. The acts are lined up along the platform and the crowd moves down the row one to the next all the way through. And that's where Grady South spent his childhood. Not a circus, a tin in one. And a tin in one had a standard architecture, and once you know it, you'll see it in every old photograph. Four parts. There was the banner line out front, the Bali platform, and the show tent itself, and the blow-off at the end where the crowd exits. The banner line is the wall of hand-painted canvas. Giant, gorgeous, wildly exaggerated portrait of what is supposedly inside. That art now is genuinely collectible now, and museums buy it. But the banners don't sell the ticket by themselves. A guy does. Now here's your first insider test. If you say barker to any actual carny, you have just told them you're an outsider. Real carnival people never use that word. The man out front is a talker, and the platform he walks from is called the bally, short for ballyhoo, which is where we get the word we still use for sensational hype. And the crowd is a tip. The talker builds the tip, works the tip, and turns the tip. Meaning if turning it means converting standing gawkers into paying customers. And to build a tip, he'd bring one or two of the axe out into the bali to give the crowd just a free taste. Just enough. Never the whole thing. Now think about this as a business model for one second because it's brilliant and brutal at the same time. The free sample is a human being. A person walks out on a plank in front of a hundred strangers, so those strangers will pay to see more of them. That's the job, and the better your body worked as a free sample, the more leverage you had. Now, not every show was a tin in one. A single O is a small show built around a single attraction, usually independently owned, often with just a couple of banners out front. Some people called them grind shim. Because they ran continuously grinding all day. This matters for our story because a strong enough act didn't have to work for somebody else's tin and one. A strong enough act could pull its own single O to keep the gate. Now Grady Styles was that strong act. He ended up running his own shows. And there's and then there's taxonomy. Because inside the business, the acts were sorted by the performers themselves into categories. In 1953, a writer named William Lindsay Grisham wrote Nightmare Alley as he knew this world cooled. He laid out the traditional Carney classification in a book called Monster Midway. A single show would feature born freaks, made freaks, and gaft freaks, all scrambled together in the same tent. Now, a born freak means you were born that way. Made means you did it to yourself. So think of somebody like the tattooed man or the sword swallower or the human blockade blockhead, sorry, hammering a nail up his own nose. And gaffed, well, that meant faked. So rubber, wax, a mirror, it's a trick when you see that person. So on any given night walking that row, some of what you paid to see was theater. Some of it was self-inflicted, and some of it was an actual person's life. I want you to sit with that for a second before we move on, because I think this is where the whole story starts. Born freaks were the premium product. You could not fake it, you could not learn it, and you could not buy it. And there are only so many of you on earth. So if you're born into a family where half the babies came out the claw hands, like the like the Grady Styles family did, in a business, well, that's the rarest thing on the midway. What exactly is that condition to your family? Is it a tragedy or an aspect? And I don't think the Styles family ever really decided. And I think their full story is what happens when you never do decide. Couple more and then I'll quit. Although honestly, I could talk about this all day. The season ran from April to October, and every show had a route, and every route had a hundred little towns in it. You play a spot for about three days, a week, if it was a really good fair, and then you tear down overnight and drive. The season opened in the spring, so anybody brand new to be a Carnival was called a first of May, and that's not a compliment. It means you don't know anything yet, and everybody can tell. You stop being a first of May by surviving a full season, and that was the whole initiation to it. And you're if you're with it, you're one of them. You travel, you tear down, you don't talk to outsiders about how the shows work. And the road is your actual home rather than a place you visit. Being with it wasn't about your job title. Concessionaires were with it, ride jocks were with it, performers were with it. And once you were with it, that was your family, which is exactly what happened to the Styles family in 1992 that hit that particular community so hard. The world that took everyone in finally had a problem. It just could not absorb itself. So one last piece of the machine, and then we're off to Florida. The blow off is the very end of the show. The exit, and most ten of ones ran an extra attraction there. So behind a curtain for another quarter or another half dollar might be a five-legged horse. It was an illusion and something you had to pay twice for. So the show ends, everybody's filing out, and the talker gets one more crack at your wallet on the way out the door. So nothing on that midway was accidental, not one inch of it. The whole strip of lights was engineered by people who understood human curiosity better than most psychology departments do. Okay. So now the season ends in October. Now what? If you run a ride, you can go anywhere. But if the reason people pay you is that your body is different, what exactly do you do and where do you go to spend six months in 1935? Well, you go where nobody stares. And 12 miles south of Tampa, on U.S. Highway 41, you cross the Lafayette and River, and you're in an unincorporated piece of Hillsborough County called Gibson Ton. It was settled in 1884 by a man named James Gibson, and he bought about 150 acres at the mouth of that river. For the first 40 years, it was fishing and farming, and then a school showed up in 1988 and a post office by 1926. Now, in 1924, a carnival couple named Eddie and Grace LeMay, they ran one of the best cookhouse concessions on the circuit in the 20s. They pulled their trailer over the Alafia River for what they figured would be an hour's rest, and then they opened a place called Eddie's Hut, and they just never left. Word got around and what grew there over the next 40 years, I think is one of the most remarkable communities in American history. Gibson had zoning you will not find anywhere else. It had residential business zoning. People there call it RSB. It meant you could legally keep your show animals, your carnival rides, and exhibits on your residential property. An illusionist named Roy Houston, he lived there, and he once put it about as plainly as you can. He said it was the only settlement in America classed that way, which gave the locals the right to train grizzly bears in the yard. There was elephants on the lawn, chimpanzees, maybe even a Ferris wheel in the side yard because you own a Ferris wheel and it has to go somewhere. Now, I grew up in Derby, Kansas. I know exactly what small town Kansas can be like when you're somebody who might be a little different. Everybody's real friendly, right up until you just don't fit in. And then there's Gibson going the other direction on purpose. Not with the statement, not with the committee, but with a zoning ordinance. They changed the height of the post office counter. And that's not tolerance, that's carpentry. Somebody measured and somebody cut the wood. That's the town. Hold on to that because in about two episodes, we're going to watch that same town refuse to carry a man's coffin. And the post office in Gibsonton had a service counter just built low at the height that little people could actually use. And at one point, it was the only one in the country like that. And I think that's remarkable. My great uncle Bud was a little person. He referred to himself as a dwarf. And he uh farmed Kansas all of his life, and he had to adjust his equipment to fit his body. So all of his trucks, his tractors, all of them had pieces that were added to it so that he could work the machinery properly. And I just think that it's beautiful that this town said, you know what? Even the little people should be able to see over the counter at the post office. Now, on the other side of things, the fire chief, he was over eight feet tall. And then the police chief was a little person. So I love the juxtaposition of the two uh positions, one being super tall and the other one being very short. Now, doctors in Gibson, they got specialized in conditions common among sideshow performers because that's who walked in the door. Mechanics and welders learned to work on show equipment because that was what was in everybody's driveway. And a whole town's worth of infrastructure, quietly reshaped around a population everywhere else, people treated as a spectacle. And the trade came with it. Carnival equipment suppliers moved in. The industry's trade shows started meeting there, and today Gimson is home to the International Independent Showman's Museum. It's two floors, better than 50,000 square feet, most of it donated by working Carnies, including one of the earliest Ferris wheels in the country, assembled right in the middle of the exhibit floor. And the town's nickname, officially and effectually, was Showtown USA. And the people who live there called it Gibton. Gibtown. That's cute. And I want to introduce you to the people on Grady Styles Street because when this case gets told, they kind of get flattened into the scenery, and they were not scenery. Start with the couple who ran the fish can. There's Al Totominey, and he was a giant. Depending upon the source, he stood between seven foot four and something over eight feet. Super duper tall. And his wife Jeannie was about two and a half feet tall, and she performed as the half woman, and she'd been born without legs. And in the 1940s, they opened Giant's camp on Highway 41 just south at the Lafayette, a restaurant, a fishing camp, and a trailer park. Not a novelty, a working business on a real highway serving real people breakfast, and people stopped there because the food was good. Now the couple I keep coming back to because they're kind of a mirror image of the Styles family in every possible way is Priscilla Lother. And she was born in Puerto Rico in 1911 with hypertrichosis, which means she had fine dark hair over his whole body and her face. And she performed as the monkey girl. And Emmett and Bun Hano, he had a condition that made his skin hard and scaled. And he performed as the alligator man. Now, Priscilla and Emmett, they fell in love and they married and they built themselves together as the world's strangest couple. In February of 1939, Priscilla gave birth to a daughter named Francini, and she had the same condition as her mother. Unfortunately, Francina died of uh broncho pneumonia at only 14 weeks old. They were absolutely devastated, and they never tried again. They were afraid to lose another child. So in the 1950s, they bought an acre and a mobile home in Gibson, and in 1960, they adopted a baby boy named Tony. Now Priscilla named the property the P.E.T. Ranch, which is Priscilla, Emmett, and Tony. And she named their land after the three of them. Now Tony, he grew up traveling with his parents and worked the carnival himself as a ride operator and a concession man. And through the 50s and 60s, the family ran their own show, billed as the Benheo family, with gooding amusements. They are still performing with James E. Strait's shows into the 1970s, at a point when freak shows around the country were being shut down. And Priscilla gave a reporter in the 70s what I think is the definitive statement of the whole business. She said she had fun at work, and on Hecklers her line was, I can see you for nothing, but you had to pay to see me. Isn't she brilliant? I love that. And one more detail about her that ended mealing. In the winter at home in Gibsonton, she would shave the hair off of her body so she could go into stores without being recognized. She spent nine months a year being looked at professionally and three months a year just kind of buying it. And I want you to pull those two families just side by side because they lived the same life in the same town in the same business in the same decades. Priscilla and Emmet, they lost that baby and adopted a son. They named their whole property after the three of them and worked until they just physically couldn't work anymore. And four minutes down the road, another family in the same exact business ends with a man shot in the back of the head in his own living room. Same town, same trade, same money, same stairs. Whatever went wrong in the Styles House, the shy the sideshow didn't do it. So let's keep going down the street. There's the Stanislaw Barrent performed as Celio the Seal Boy. He was born with uh focamilia, which means his hands attached at very near his shoulders. So remember his name. He's about to become legally important in a way he'd probably never expected. And then there's Edward Hayes, he built himself as the um anatomical anatomical wonder. And then there's Colonel Caspin Bolsom. He lived in Gibson and he played a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. Grace McDaniels performed as the Yule Faced Woman. And Ronnie and Donnie Galen conjoined twins in 1920. Who would go on to become the longest living set of conjoined twins in the entire world came up in that circle. Grady SIII has said he grew up around them. And then there's Bruce Snowden. He performed as Harold Huge and weighed better than 600 pounds. And a pair of conjoined twin sisters, they ran the fruit stand in town. And presiding over an enormous piece of it all, a man named Warren Hull. Now Hull got the bug at 14. He dropped out of school and joined the Daly Brothers Circus for $30 a week. He bought his first sideshow in 1951 for $1,000. And he moved to Gibson Town in 1966, partnered with a showman named Chris Christ. And together they ran World of Wonders, which became the longest-running traveling sideshow in the United States. By the late 1970s, their company was running four state fair sideshows and eight grind shows and about 70 employees. They played the Ohio State Fair, the Minnesota State Fair, the Wisconsin State Fair, essentially everything east of the Mississippi. He was a talker. He wrote three books and three stage musicals, and he is in the Circus Ring of Fame. They called him the king of the sideshow, and when he died in 2018 at 88, his partner said flatly that he was the last of the old time shown. And Ward Hall said the quiet plurk out loud constantly for 60 years. He told the New York Times in 2006, I'm telling you, this life was very good for freaks. His argument, which he made until the day he died, was that before equal opportunity laws and modern medicine, the sideshow was one of the only places on earth where these people could make real money. He'd ask, who exactly was casting a bearded lady in a leading role? And his view was that people were going to stare anyway, so they might as well pay for it. Love that. Gosh. I don't know why this just gets me kind of right in the feels. He also gave the single funniest honest line about oral history I've ever read, and he told the Tale of the Bay Times in 2011 that one advantage of getting old, if you like telling a story, is that everybody else who was there is dead. So here's where I live, and I want to say it carefully because both halves are true, and people usually only say one. One is, of course, the exploitation. Children were put on a stage before they could consent. The word freak was painted on the canvas in two-foot letters, and nobody disputes that, right? But two, it was the only economy in America that would pay them. And for a lot of them, that was proud work. And they said so on record for decades. The people who ran it and the people who performed in it mostly agreed on truth number two. And the people outside it insisted on course of truth one. And in about 10 minutes, I'm going to tell you what happened when the outside finally won the argument and how badly it really went for the very people it was supposed to protect. This is the part of the story I had never heard, and when I found it out, I had to sit back from my desk. In 1921, the state of Florida passed a statute making it illegal to exhibit for pay or compensation any crippled or physically distorted, malformed or disfigured person in any circus, sideshow, or other place charging admission. It was written, you know, as protection. And I get it, truly. The impulse behind it was that decent people should not be able to buy a ticket to gawk at a disabled human being. And its practical effect, though, in the state where the winter home of the entire American sideshow was to make it a crime for Celio the Seal Boy to go to work. By the late 1960s, freak shows were under sustained attack nationally as demeaning to people with disabilities, and the shows were closing around the country. Ward Hull took the Florida statute on. He organized a campaign against it and argued that the law deprived performers of the right to earn a living. One of the named plaintiffs was Stanislaus Barret Celio. Roughly three years later, in 1972, the Florida Supreme Court agreed and struck down the statute as unconstitutional on the grounds that people with unusual bodies have the right to work. 1972. That's the year the state of Florida legally settled the question of whether Raydy Stiles was allowed to earn a living with his body. And I need you to think about 1972 because it is the hinge of this entire series, and I don't think anybody has ever connected it before. In 1972, the highest court in Florida looked at the man with an unusual body and said, he has the same right to work as anybody else. His body does not put him outside the rules. And six years later in Pennsylvania, a different court is going to look at that same body and reach the exact opposite conclusion. His body does not put him outside the rule. Specifically, outside the part of the rules where you go to prison for murder. Same fact, same decade, two courts in 1972. His difference bought him a right. In 1979, it bought him an exemption. That's the whole series in two sentences. Everything else is people paying for it. Now the shows kept dying anyway. Not because of that statute, because of everything else. Television arrived in the living room, and number of operating carnivals dropped sharply from the mid-1950s. Medicine started correcting some conditions before a child could ever be exhibited. And then disability advocacy kept that pressure on, and local ordinances and moral restrictions increasingly made public display of human oddities impossible. And the tents survived by shifting away from born acts into made acts. So think of the sword swallowers, the blockheads, the tattoo performers, those working acts. Wardhall's own complaint late in life was that tattoos and piercings had gotten so common in ordinary life that a freak she freak show couldn't freak anybody out anymore. Which is genuinely a funny sentence and also a small tragedy. So Grady Styles was born Grady Franklin Styles Jr. And he was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on June 26, 1937. He was the fourth child of Grady Styles Sr. and his wife, and he had um ictodactly, which is modern mess and usually calls it split hand, split food malformation. Okay. This is why they called him lobster boy, because his hands looked like claws. His feet would look like claws. And so its real name is Ectrodactly. Ectrodactyl. That's a mouthful, which is why people call him lobster boy. And the central bones of his hand or foot fail just to develop properly, and it happens before birth. So Valin comes in with a deep cleft down the middle, and the remaining digits kind of fuse together on either side. It's rare. Depending on which study you read, somewhere between 1 in 8,500 and 1 in 100,000 live births, it's usually inherited in what geneticists call an autosomal dominant pattern, which in plain English English is a coin flip. If you have it, each of your children has about a 50% chance. On Grady, it hit everywhere. Both hands, both feet. His legs ended below the knee with malformed feet. He could not walk on them, not as a boy, not ever. And he was not the first. And here's the place where the sources kind of genuinely diverge. And I'd rather show you my work than pick what it pretend, okay? The versions you see quoted almost everywhere, including Wikipedia, traces to Granny's own father, who said the family had a history of the condition dating back to 1840. But there's a more specific genealogy that shows that the Messides show history writing and it names names. In that version, the first styles recorded with it was William Styles, born in 1805, followed by Jacob Styles, then Alicia Styles, and then Grady Stiles Sr., and then Grady Stiles Jr. That count makes Grady Jr. the sixth in line. So 1840 and five generations, or 1805 and six. I kind of lean towards the name genealogy because it's specific. And if it's falsifiable, well, you know, you're gonna know. So either way, the headline is the same. This family had been living with this condition for well over a century before Grady Jr. drew a breath. Now, let's sit with that older date for a second, the 1805. That is Thomas Jefferson's second term. That's before photography, before the Civil War, before germ theory, and before anybody on this continent had a clue what a gene was. A baby born in a household, somewhere with hands that close like a pincer. Well, there's no word for it and no explanation, and no doctor could tell them anything. And then it happens again and again, and roughly half the time for seven generations. At some point in there, and I would give a great till to know exactly which ancestor made the call. Somebody in that family looked at it and thought, let's make a living out of this. So, you know, out here and especially western Kansas, families passed down farmland or a name or a way of doing thing that maybe nobody's written about. This family passed down an act. The condition was the business, and your body was the inventory before you were old enough to have an opinion of it. And it's not like they could opt out. In 1910, if you were born like that, what were your other doors? You know, so there's a back bedroom, an institution, and the midway. And the midway at least paid you. And I keep going back and forth whether that's the most practical thing I've ever heard or the bleakest. Now, Grady Styles Sr., he had the condition himself and he was already working the traveling carnival circuit as a sideshow attraction when his son was born. He put the boy into the act as quick as he could. How young, though, depends on who you ask. Now, most sources, including Wikipedia and the standard reference work on the subject, say Grady Jr. was folded into his father's act at seven years old. Left the International Independent Showmen's Museum, which is the carnival industry's own institution, and arguably the most inside source there is, says he was six. It's one year and it doesn't really change anything legally. I'm just flagging it because it tells you something about the case that I want you to keep in mind for the next two episodes. Even the basic facts about this man came to us through a business whose entire professional skill set was making a better story out of the trees. And there's one more document from that period, and it is the single most important detail almost nobody includes. There's a Pittsburgh article. It's from a newspaper from 1944 that reports that an uncle of Grady's was accused of breaking the boy's legs. Grady Stiles Jr. was seven years old. Accused, he was not convicted, want to be precise, but it's in the paper. In 1944, the same year he goes into the act. Seven years old. A body that already can't walk. And a grown man in his family is accused of breaking his legs. I'm not going to tell you that explains the man he became. Because plenty of people survive worse and never lay a hand on anybody. But I'm going to tell you that every version of this story that leaves it out is telling you a simpler story than the real one. Something got handed down in that family, and it was not only the lobster claw hands. So he grows up on the road because his legs didn't work. He moved by dragging himself with his arms. Now, year after year, decade after decade, he used a wheelchair some of the time. But mostly he just gone around on his hands, which built extraordinary strength through his chest, his shoulders, and his arms. And that is documented in every serious account of him. Accounts of his rage describe him choking people with those fused hands and handbutting them. This is the piece everybody's brain refuses to process. So let me say it directly. Grady Stiles was physically the most dangerous person in almost any room he entered, including rooms full of people who assumed a man in a wheelchair couldn't reach them. Now hold on to that. It's gonna matter twice. Not the money, because this is where people's assumptions really fall apart. The Styles Act, it was not just scraping by. She was billed at one point as the electrified girl. She had no physical difference at all. She was, in the language of that world, an outsider who came in and stayed, and she got with it. Now, they married Grady and Mary Teresa. They got married, they had children. Two of the four, Grady would eventually father, they inherited his condition. And he did to his kids exactly what his father did to him. The two who had it went into the act and they toured as the lobster family. I want to plan a flag on this woman now because in two episodes she's going to be one of the most argued about persons in this story. And I don't want her introduced as a defendant. She was a carnival professional in her own right. She had her own act and her own billing. She chose this life, and she was good at it. And she married a man that a whole industry by their own accounts could not stand. Whether you end up thinking she deserved it or remember that she was somebody before she was a headline. Now they had four children, two with the condition, two without. And their testimony about their father given over decades and in public is the closest thing we have to a verdict on him. Kathy Stiles, she inherited it and performed. She later married a carnival worker named Tyrell Barry. Their daughter, Misty, was born without legs and with electrodachlia in her hand, which makes seven generations still going. Grady Styles III, he inherited it, and he performed and is still working today. He appeared on AMC's Freak Show in 2014 and has given interviews since. Donna Stiles, she did not inherit it, and she's the one who tries to get out. She is the entire subject of the next episode. And I want to close today on Grady III because his account of his father is the most honest thing in this whole file. It refuses to be something. He said early on, my dad taught me it was okay to be different, and that it was boring to be normal. He says he was proud, never depressed about his condition. Says it was easier having a father and sister who were like him. Says as a kid he loved going out on the road because he was always meeting new people and seeing new places. Same man, same interview cycle about the same father said this. I'm not a fan of my dad as a person. My father was a racist and abusive. And when I cried, he'd say, I'll give you a reason to cry. In another interview, he called his father a drunken, abusive bastard. And then, and this is the part that got me, clarified that he wasn't saying it out of a leftover feeling. He said it's just a fact. It's who he was, and that he'd moved past it a long time ago. A man who can hand you your pride and your nightmares in that same childhood. That's why this case is hard. And that's why I'm giving it to you in three episodes instead of just 40 minutes. So that's the world, a trade with its own language, the town that rebuilt its post office for its neighbors, the court that said these people had the right to work, and a bloodline going back to Jefferson's America. Profitable act and four kids, and a man at the center of it who could not walk, but could break your jaw from a seated position, who drank hard and had been taught by everything around him that he was the exception to whatever rule you had in mind. In the fall of 1978, his 15-year-old daughter, Donna, decided she wanted to get married, mostly because she wanted out of the house. Her father mode at a pawn shop on East Ohio Street, and he took her with him at the counter. He made a joke about who he was going to use it on. That's next time. Now, time killers, this is the real ask, and I mean it. There's a version of Gibson history that's never been written down, and every year there's less of it. The people who lived it are dying. So if you have a family who wintered in Gibton, Gibtau is how they call it. If anybody in your line was with it, a performer, a ride jock, a concessionaire, a talker, any of it, if your grandmother worked at a cookhouse or your uncle ran a grind show, I want to hear from you. And I don't want to hear in the sensational version. I want the ordinary one. What was Gibson Tun like on a Tuesday? When the people cook, who was funny, who was kind, and what did the Stiles family look like at a cookout before any of this happened? That's the story nobody has. And it's the one I actually want to hear. Also, another specific ads. If anybody has the 1944 Pittsburgh newspaper article about the broken legs or any documentation on the 1972 Florida Supreme Court case, send it to me. I'd love the case citation. Time killers nowhere to find me at Just KillingTime Podcast at gmail.com. Now, before you go, if this is your first time here, this is the kind of thing we do every week. We ask for true crime conspiracies and the history, nobody bothered to tell you. Follow the show wherever you're listening, so the next two land in your feed automatically, because this story is not close to being done. Next time, Pittsburgh, 1978, 50-year-old girl, a wedding dress, about eight hours too early. A jury that convicted a man of murder right before the state of Pennsylvania discovered it had nowhere to put him. I'm Elizabeth Stanton. Thanks for killing some time with me today.

SPEAKER_01 45:07

Alexa, what is a chemtrail? Chemtrail. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.