Autumn Lives Here
Vol. 97: Does the name Madalynne Obenchain ring a bell? No? Prepare to fall in love, and God help you if you don't.
Netflix & Chills: The Scariest Scares on Netflix
A brief list of the series shows I’d recommend for April. These aren’t the newest, just great viewing you may have missed.
1. Supernatural- It comes from network tv, but it aired for 15 years for a reason. Re-watch your favorite episodes before it leaves Netflix in 2025. Most of the episodes are great, and they give you whatever creature floats your boat: witch’s ghosts, vamps, werewolves, demons, teens… if it was angry and relentless, the Winchesters fought it.
2. Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities- The director’s pick of short stories, filmed with maximum spooky atmosphere. Crispin Glover in Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” would be enough to make a lot of us squirmy, but “Lot 36”, “The Autopsy”, and “The Outside” are particularly good.
3. The Watcher- A limited series about a family who moves into a new home in a neighborhood with a creepy past. You want sinister? Get it here.
4. School Spirits- A Paramount original series, with season one airing on Netflix while we all wait on needles for season two. Maddy wakes up in her high school and learns that she’s dead. More precisely, she’s been murdered and she trapped on the school grounds, which would hamper her investigation if her living friend Simon wasn’t able to see and talk to her. This teen murder mystery is addictive.
5. Santa Clarita Diet- The title doesn’t give you a clue about this delightful horror comedy, but trust me. It’s zombies, severed heads, a devoted family and a walking meatball.
6. Dahmer- A Netflix limited series starring Evan Peters, Richard Jenkins, Molly Ringwald and Niecy Nash, who well deserved her Emmy for this. It’s not as gory as you’d expect for the subject.
7. Nightstalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer- Netflix has quite a few true crime documentaries that are fantastic, so I wouldn’t argue if you substitute Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case, or Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, or American Nightmare, or The Raincoat Killer, but this limited series goes really in-depth to the infamous case of pre-cell phone, pre-internet serial killings. It’ll leave you jumpy.
8. Hannibal- Good lord, I don’t know how this first aired on network television. The second and third seasons go beyond scary. It’s disturbing and brutal and left Eddie Izzard hopping mad, but at least a well-cooked dinner was provided.
9. Mindhunter- If anyone deserves a curse on their head, it’s whoever canceled this show about the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit after just two seasons. The writing and performances are tremendous, and I have something of a crush on Bill Tench and his buzzcut.
Drinkiepoo!
The Grow A Pear Cocktail
½ oz bourbon
½ oz rum
½ oz pear brandy
½ oz cognac
¼ oz cinnamon syrup
2 dashes chocolate bitters
Pour all ingredients into an ice filled shaker and shake for 20 seconds. Strain into a coupe glass.
SPOOKY BOOKY
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886
This story, along with Dracula and Frankenstein, forms a triad of what monster horror is to Western society. Out of the three, this book may be the one that is the most readily transposed with modern societal problems.
For some readers, this novella will be a slog through the language of the day, but for others, you’ll be surprised by how monstrous Jekyll becomes when he throws his secret potion down his gullet. Hyde isn’t just bad for the Victorian era, he’s bad in any era. He’s trampling small children, which is horrible even to heathens like us. And this addiction to the concoction that turns him into a monster inevitably has the reader relating it to our present day ills. Is the formula comparable to alcoholism or drug abuse? The tribalism of politics, or psychosis? If you’ve yet to read this one, you’ll find it to be far deeper than you’d suspect from its page numbers. Scare Scale: 2
Madalynne and Her Many Men: A Murder
Some people are blessed with good looks that draw others to them, and we’ve all met someone who gets by just on that. Other people have good personalities, a sense of humor or joie de vivre. But there’s another character trait that makes a person the center of attention, and it’s rare: charisma. That certain quality that makes a person desirable to the point that others crave them. Madalynne Obenchain knew she had it, and that goes a long way towards explaining why she thought she could get away with anything.
Madeline Connor was born in Superior, Wisconsin in 1893. Little is known of her early life, but her father owned a successful hotel, and unusually for the period, the Conners divorced while Madeline was a child. After changing the spelling of her name, Madalynne was sent to Northwestern University in Chicago to study drama, a subject she should have been teaching. Madalynne had a way with men, and while a student, she dated Ralph Obenchain, who was studying law. He fell deeply in love with Madalynne. It was not reciprocated.
Bachelor #1- Obenchain
She also dated Arthur Burch, a school athlete who was also in love with her. She accepted Ralph’s proposal in 1914, and that might have been that if Madalynne’s father hadn’t died. At the age of twenty-one, Madalynne inherited $50,000, the equivalent of over $1.5 million today. She left school, left Ralph, and spent the next three years traveling.
Bachelor # 2- Burch
Visiting her mother in Los Angeles in 1917, she caught the eye of another bachelor, J. (John) Belton Kennedy, who went by “Belton”. He was a handsome insurance broker who worked at his father’s firm. He was also a bonafide til-death-do-us-part mama’s boy. Mrs. Kennedy kept her son on a short leash, monitoring his mail and phone calls, and when Madalynne came into the picture, a rivalry was born.
Bachelor # 3- Kennedy
But Kennedy and Madalynne became engaged. It appears that Kennedy believed that he had found a happy little niche of being engaged yet never going forward with wedding plans, thereby giving both women a sense of doom as the engagement dragged out over two years. When Madalynne’s ultimatum didn’t work, she wired Obenchain in Chicago, where he was now a successful lawyer, and asked if he still fancied her. He did. She went to Chicago and they were married, but Kennedy arrived four days later, begging her to return to him, which she did. Within three months, Madalynne asked her new husband for a divorce. He granted it, along with giving her alimony.
She went to Evanston, Indiana to wait for her divorce to be finalized while Kennedy was supposed to run California, get his things and kiss Mama goodbye, then return to Madalynne. But he never returned. Once again, Mrs. Kennedy exerted her influence and talked him out of it.
Madalynne fumed, and then she contacted Arthur Burch, who was a social worker in Chicago now. He came running.
Two years passed, and Madalynne went to visit her mother in L.A., and ran into Kennedy. They took up where they’d left off, becoming engaged again. And then they broke up again. She was twenty-eight years old, and Madalynne wasn’t going to take it. She contacted Burch in Chicago. Yes, he was willing to avenge the pride of the woman whom he called “Goddess”. He arrived in L.A. and took a hotel room across the street from Kennedy’s work.
On the night of August 5, 1921, Kennedy and Madalynne had once again reconciled and were driving to dinner when Madalynne asked to stop at Kennedy’s tiny cabin, located in a wooded area called Beverley Canyon. The cabins here were second homes, built with distance between them and surrounded by nature. Kennedy’s, often called a cottage though it was barely larger than a cabin used for ice fishing, was reached by climbing a steep flight of wooden stairs. As they began climbing, Madalynne told Kennedy that she had hidden a lucky penny under a rock on a step. She pointed and asked him to give her the penny. When he bent down, Burch sprung from the bushes and blew the back of Kennedy’s head off with a shotgun, then ran away through the woods. Madalynne ran to the road, where she flagged down a passing car. Crying hysterically, she begged the man to help. The driver went with her, saw the obviously dead Kennedy, and took Madalynne to the police station.
The shotgun stock was retrieved from the reservoir where Burch had flung it as he ran, and he was arrested in Las Vegas. Six days after the incident, both Burch and Madalynne were indicted on on first-degree murder charges.
Ralph Obenchain arrived, arranging and paying for Madalynne’s defense. Obenchain’s need to help an ex-wife who had been so cruel to him led to the prosecution publicly nicknaming him “The Human Doormat”. Burch didn’t have enough to pay for his defense, so he sold his story, and by extension, Madalynne’s story, to a tabloid in exchange for $4500. This story would later be waved off by his attorneys as just a way to get money.
Her milkshake brought all the boys to the court.
While on trial, Madalynne received gifts of perfume, flowers, and cash from admiring men. Ralph even made an attempt to remarry her in the jail but the judge stopped it. It was discovered, after the fact, that one juror had become so smitten with Madalynne that he had sent expensive treats of food to her cell, while another juror had a private meeting with Ralph that lasted for over an hour. Newspaper reports called her “inspiring”. She also had a fellow jailbird admirer in the form of Paul Roman, a career criminal doing ten years for larceny. They had a penpal romance, with much of their correspondence being more intimate than you’d expect. Roman wrote, “What you need is a lot of attention and I’m the guy to give it to you.” Madalynne’s wrote to him, “Please carry me away from it all, dear friend. Just play I am a dream girl- and you a dream boy- wandering into the Land of Desire. Hold me close to your heart and kiss my tears away.” But just days later, she soberly asked him if he was destroying her letters after reading them. He wasn’t. Roman, described by a reporter as “a handsome young convict” took the stand during Madalynne’s trial. It was likely the first time they had ever faced each other despite their passionate letters. Roman presented the letters on behalf of the prosecution. The defense countered with the owner of a costume rental shop, who said that Roman and Kennedy often rented women’s clothing together, and that Kennedy had said that Roman threatened to beat him if he ever married. Was this an implication that the “lot of attention” Roman wished to give Madalynne would be payback for his own murdered lover? As the prosecutor said, “She was the siren who lured Kennedy to his death.”
Madalynn’e had two trials, both ended in hung juries. After the second, she was released. Arthur Burch’s defense was simple: he said he wasn’t there at all.
Burch tried to commit suicide during his trial. Once again, Paul Roman was inserted into the proceedings. He testified that the doctor who had previously testified to treating Burch’s injured leg, removing a thorn that came from a plant specific to the Beverly Canyon area, was lying because the prosecutor's office ‘had something on him’.
Another witness claimed to have been in Beverly Canyon, heard the shotgun blast, then a man crying out, “I got him!”
Arthur Burch would go on trial for murder three times, each ending in a hung jury. He was released after the third trial.
The two defendants may have wanted to return to their normal lives, but other people still held a grudge. J. Belton Kennedy’s father showed up at Arthur Burch’s workplace one day and attempted to choke the life out of him. A judge gave Kennedy a thirty day suspended sentence. Burch married. When he died in 1944 at the age of forty-nine, he didn’t leave his estate of $1500 to his son, instead willing everything he had to Madalynne. It was only because she refused the inheritance that the money went to his family.
After Paul Roman was released from prison he stalked Madalynne and threatened to kill her. He was arrested and sent back to prison.
Madalynne took her maiden name again and attempted an acting career, but it went nowhere. She remained in California, never remarried or had children. She died on February 22, 1962 at the age of seventy and is buried in Orange, California.
Cecil B. DeMille directed 1922’s Manslaughter, inspired by this case. It’s considered one of his worst films.
Well...I feel like Madalynne sucked all the air out of the room, so I’ll just remind you to subscribe to Autumn Lives Here if you haven’t already, and to become a Gloriest Goriest member. I’ve just slashed the cost ‘cause I’m a slashing slasher! A yearly subscription is now just $35, and becoming a Founding Member is $50. Getting a gift subscription of two email addresses or more comes with a 20% discount. Paid subscriptions gets access to every damn post, every Tuesday, and a shout out from a creepy stranger who now has your email. Win-win. Really.
Next week: we’re watching the best true crime shows on regular ol’ network and cable. We’ll also learn the horrible truth behind The Wicker Man.