196: Internment Camps & a Bathtub Mystery

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Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Fred Korematsu led a fairly typical American life. His family went to church every Sunday. They owned a small business. The Korematsu family had always faced some level of racism, but nothing compared to the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the relocation and incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps. None of the people who were put in the camps had done anything wrong. There wasn’t even evidence that they’d *maybe* done anything wrong. In the face of this racist hysteria, Fred Korematsu stood firm. As a person with Japanese ancestry, he had been ordered to leave his home. But he refused.

Then Brandi tells us another terrifying story about a bathtub. At around 1 a.m. on April 27, 2012,
Chad Cutler called 911. He told the dispatcher that he’d just discovered his wife, Lisa, blue and unresponsive in their bathtub. He guessed she’d been in there for a few hours. He claimed he’d fallen asleep after she got in the bathtub earlier that evening. But when paramedics arrived on the scene, they noticed that the bed in the master bedroom was still made. Chad was fully dressed, and eerily calm.

And now for a note about our process. For each episode, Kristin reads a bunch of articles, then spits them back out in her very limited vocabulary. Brandi copies and pastes from the best sources on the web. And sometimes Wikipedia. (No shade, Wikipedia. We love you.) We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases.

In this episode, Kristin pulled from:
“U.S. v Korematsu,” by Douglas O. Linder for FamousTrials.com
“Fred Korematsu Fought Against Japanese Internment in the Supreme Court… and Lost,” by Erick Trickey for Smithsonian Magazine
“Fred Korematsu,” entry on Wikipedia
“Internment of Japanese Americans,” entry on Wikipedia
“Fred’s Story,” from the Fred T. Korematsu Institute
In this episode, Brandi pulled from:
“Dead In The Water” episode Accident, Suicide, or Murder
“'None Of It Made Any Sense': Illinois Mother's Murder Staged As Bathtub Drowning” by Sharon Lynn Pruitt, Oxygen
“Relationships of Cutlers Focus of Trial” by Huey Freeman, Herald and Review
“Chad Cutler Trial Focuses on Injuries” by Huey Freeman, Herald and Review
“Cutler Jury Begins To Deliberate” by Huey Freeman, Herald and Review
“Illinois Man Who Drowned Wife For Insurance Remains Jailed” Insurance News Net
“People v. Cutler” casetext.com
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