Like a Bad Dream

Support for criminal comes from better help. There are plenty of reasons we put off getting support, and for a lot of people, cost is one of them. With better help, insurance options may now be available nationwide, with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. Better help works with more than 125 health plan networks. An eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or don't live in the United States. You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/criminal to explore your payment options. That's betterhlp.com/criminal. Support for criminal comes from fair. If you run your own shop, whether it's an online shop or brick and mortar, you want your products to be unique. With fair, it's easy for independent retailers to stock products from over 100,000 brands worldwide, perfect for planning inventory for the holiday season. Sign up today and get 50% off your first wholesale order, up to $100, at faire.com/criminal. That's faire.com/criminal, terms may apply. Let's talk about the day in March of 2011. Maybe just a very detailed step by step, what you did that evening, where you'd been, and then what the day had been like. Gosh, I remember it so vividly. I had actually the night before I had returned from a trip at the Pentagon, where I was working on a large project with the government. I was jet lagged, I was exhausted, I'd gotten in really late. The next day, I remember sleeping in, I remember doing some things around the house, and then I went to fill my prescription. After I did that, I remember making myself a nice dinner. Lindsay Schwiger lived in a house in St. Louis. After dinner, she says she went to bed early, around 8 p.m., Lindsay's roommate got home a few hours later. First thing he noticed was that my garage was up and the car was gone. I never left my garage up, ever. You could get right into the house that way. It was late at night. I would never do that. Second thing he noticed, the dog was gone. And then he went into the bathroom and the water in the bathtub was overflowing. I am not a bath person. I cannot tell you the last time I've taken a bath. He thought something might have happened to Lindsay, like she'd been kidnapped. He called the police. And when he called a second time, they told him Lindsay was in jail. Lindsay says the last thing she remembers is falling asleep in her bed. When she woke up, she didn't know where she was. I remember being cold and wet. And then I remember being in the back of the police car in handcuffs. In office, her told her she'd been driving and hit another car. Apparently, she'd refuse to take a breathalyzer test. And she'd fallen three times when she was instructed to walk in a straight line. It was raining. I don't remember driving, I don't remember getting in my car. I was like, I just went, I went to bed. I mean, I was so out of it. I mean, if you even look at the mugshot from later, my eyes or just my sweatshirt was on backwards, I was completely disoriented. Lindsay's dog was in the backseat of her car. They were less than a mile away from her house. Outside of a stake in shake, she liked to go to. I remember being frantic with the officer because he said that he's going to send my animal to the dog shelter. He took Lindsay to jail. Who did you call? My brother. And what did you say? I told him I have no idea what just happened to me, but I'm in jail and Tyson is at the dog pound and we have to go save my dog. Lindsay was let out on bail. After her brother picked her up, they found her dog at the pound. They drove back to Lindsay's house. And her roommate told her what he'd seen, the open garage, the bathtub overflowing. Since Lindsay didn't remember what had happened that night, she wondered if at one point she might have had something to drink. She didn't really think so, but she and her roommate checked. They went through the whole house, including the trash, and didn't find any sign that she'd been drinking. But she had taken a sleeping pill. For more than 10 years, Lindsay had been having trouble sleeping. Her doctor prescribed her pills to help. And every so often, the medication would stop helping, and her doctor would switch her prescription, trasidone, lunesida, venambian, and the generic version of ambient, zolpedem. This warning label does include a long list of potential side effects, kind of infine printers. They always are on these medications. Under the extremely rare category, the drug now does warn that it can lead to strange behavior and abnormal thinking, and it specifically warns that you might get out of bed while not being fully awake and do an activity you don't know you're doing. The next morning, you may not remember you did anything during the night. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. In November of 1937, an article appeared in a Sunday newspaper magazine called The American Weekly. It described a detective named Robert Le Drew, who 50 years earlier was sent to a city on the coast of France, to investigate a case of sailors who'd gone missing. He arrived there, he went to sleep, and the next day he went to introduce himself to the local police force, and they said, you know, hold the phone, actually a far more serious offense has been committed overnight. Somebody has been murdered. Ramiya Negash is a lawyer in the UK. A man had been found on the beach, he'd been shot. His belonging seemed untouched, so it didn't look like a robbery. There were some footprints found around the beach where this person had been killed, and they took plaster cast of the footprints, and he looked at the footprints and said, oh, these look really familiar. And by all reports, he spent the whole afternoon kind of staring at these footprints, refusing to interview witnesses, and looking more and more troubled, and then he announced he knew who had killed this man, and retired to his room. And the next day, the chief of police says, you know, we've recovered the bullet that killed the man, and he says, great, that will be the final bit of evidence I need. So he took the bullet, opens his own revolver, sees that one bullet is missing, and compared them, and said, yes, this is the bullet that fits into the revolver, and he said, I've solved the case. I am the person who killed this man. And he said that he had killed this man, but he had done it whilst asleep. What worked the true was put in jail. To make sure it was possible that he could have killed someone in his sleep, the police gave him a gun full of blanks to sleep with. And one night he got out of bed and shot at a guard, still asleep. The American Weekly reported that he was diagnosed with homicidal somnambulism caused by overstraining his mind, and that he spent the remaining 50 years of his life on a farm, sleeping in a room with bars, under police supervision. It's the case of the truth being almost stranger than fiction, I think. You know, I've never, I don't think I've ever sleepwalked in my life. I actually, I think that's one of the reasons I got so interested in it. When I was a child, I used to sleep walk, I used to wake up near the front door with the keys in my hand, so clearly I was trying to escape or something in my sleep. But for over 20 years now, I've had an interest in the relationship between sleepwalking and committing crimes. People can do quite a lot of actions whilst they're asleep. It's not just mindlessly walking around. They can go up and downstairs, they can drive cars and open doors and things like that. In one case, a woman woke up and saw a garden axe sitting on her nightstand. It hadn't been there when she fell asleep. As she was texting her partner, she noticed messages from the night before that she didn't remember about hearing voices and seeing things and getting the axe from her tool shed for safety. Another time in Australia, a woman woke up holding a paintbrush and then saw that she had apparently painted her front door in her sleep. There are stories of people waking up to find their furniture rearranged or waking up feeling sick and realizing that during the night they'd eat raw eggs, even the shells, uncooked rice, cat food, and cigarettes with butter on them. Doctors have described patients who get dressed in things they wouldn't normally wear. Going out in 20 degree weather hardly wearing anything. What's the strangest thing that you've heard of someone doing while asleep? Oh gosh, I heard of a case where a man would every night, he was sleeping on the ground floor, their bedroom was on the ground floor. He would lift his wife up and put her outside, say. She would open the window, lift his wife up and put her outside in the grass, and she'd wake up in the grass, sort of covered in dew or whatever. And her reaction was simply to put a mattress out there. So that's quite strange. At one time, people who sleepwalked were called noctambulae or nightwalkers. Some believed that they were possessed. Sleepwalking is something that's been known of for centuries. I mean, anyone who's studied Macbeth in school knows that Macbeth's wife slept walked, having been involved in the murder in that in that play, and was said to kind of wash her hands out of guilt. Quote, "Her eyes are open, but their sense is shut." People sort of had this idea that if you were sleepwalking, you were maybe acting out your dreams. In 1859, an officer on patrol in London heard yelling coming from an apartment window, it was after one in the morning. It was a woman's voice, shouting, "Save my children." He heard a crashing sound and realized someone from the apartment had thrown something for a pane of glass above him. They hadn't opened the window. They thrown something through that glass. The woman shouting had thrown one of her children through the window, an 18-month-old. The baby was taken to a hospital with head injuries, but survived. The mother was charged with attempted murder. She told police that she'd thought that there was a fire, she'd been dreaming that there was a fire, and she was trying to save her family. She had no previous convictions, everybody said that she was a good mother, and her story that she'd been asleep at the time that she threw her baby out of the window was unheard of in England at the time. So then there was a debate between the prosecution and the judge as to how they should proceed. The judge wasn't really having any of it at first, he said, "Well, she was probably drunk. If I let her go now, she might go back to her family and throw another one out." He said, "If I were to allow her to go at large, it would be opening a very wide door. A man might set fire to his house and say it had been done while he was dreaming. It would be a most dangerous plea to establish." But her solicitor pushed for there to be no charge in the case, and eventually the judge allowed her bail. Ultimately, there was never a trial in the case, and so effectively her defence had been successful. A grand jury had refused to send the case to trial. It was the first time in the UK, as far as we know, that someone had successfully defended themselves in court by claiming to be asleep. But Rami and Agash says most sleepwalking doesn't involve dreaming at all. There is a condition called REM sleep disorder where you can act out your dreams, but that's more rather than sleepwalking, which happens in a different stage of sleep when you're not dreaming, and so people don't tend to act out their dreams. Two scientists working at the World's First Sleep Laboratory at the University of Chicago discovered REM sleep cycles in the 1950s. One of them, Nathaniel Klytman, had started the lab, and he often experimented on himself. Once he spent more than a month 150 feet underground in a cave with a graduate student to see how the complete darkness would affect their sleep. Another time, he stayed awake for 180 hours to see what would happen. Since then, scientists have also studied sleepwalking, attributing it to the brain waking up too quickly from a kind of very deep sleep called slow wave sleep. It also seems genetic. Now, people generally are very aware of it. There was sort of an explosion if you like of sleepwalking cases, relatively speaking, in the early 2000s and mid-2000s, and I think that's when it really started becoming something that people realised could lead you to commit crimes and therefore could be a defense. In 1987, a 23-year-old man named Kenneth Parks arrived at a police station in Toronto in the middle of the night. He had blood on his hands and said, "I think I've killed some people." He was a married man. He had a history of sleepwalking. And at the time of the incident in question, he'd been under extreme financial stress. Kenneth Parks had become addicted to betting on horse races. He was losing money and started spending his family's savings and embezzling money at work. He was caught, fired, and had to put the family hose up for sale. One day Kenneth went to a gambler's anonymous meeting and made plans to tell his wife's family about the problems he was having. That was a Wednesday. He resolved to tell them on Sunday. The night before he fell asleep on the couch watching Saturday Night Live, around 1.30 a.m. The next thing he remembered was seeing his mother-in-law's face. He was in her house 14 miles away. She looked frightened. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Support for Criminal comes from Mint Mobile. The fall can be a great time to rethink some of your expenses. If you have a pricey phone bill, Mint Mobile can help you replace it with one of their affordable wireless plans. They started just $15 a month. We have a friend who switched to Mint Mobile and said it couldn't have been simpler, and he was able to keep using the same device and phone number. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to MintMobile.com/Febi. That's MintMobile.com/Febi. That's it. There's no catch. Up front payment of $45 for $3, $90 for $6, or $180 for $12 a month plan required; $15 per month equivalent; taxes and fees extra; initial plan term only; greater than 50 gigabytes may slow a network as busy. Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot, capable device required, availability, speed and coverage fairies. Support for criminal comes from Quince. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and premium stretched denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. Think about the first shirt or pair of pants you reach for after laundry day. It's a kind of piece of Quince makes. And it's not just a pair. Quince also makes bedding, kitchen essentials, and thoughtfully designed furniture. I have a lot of pieces from Quince, and the one item I find myself wearing more than I expected is organic cotton t-shirt. It's comfortable and easy to wear. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Free shipping on your order in 365 day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asked where you heard about them, let them know it was criminal. It's the best way to support the show. The Toronto police started putting together what happened after Kenneth Parks fell asleep on his couch. Here's Rami and a gash. He rose from his bed, he walked out of his house, got into his car and drove 23 kilometres to his parents and laws house. Once inside their house, he arms himself with a kitchen knife, and he brutally attacked his parents and law. By all accounts, he was very close to his parents and law. This wasn't one of those sort of stereotypical jokes where somebody has an amosti with their parents and law. He was very close with them. And the attack was so severe that actually it left his mother-in-law dead, he'd killed his mother-in-law by stabbing and his father-in-law did survive but was very badly injured. At the police station Kenneth became aware of injuries to his hands. He'd cut them very badly during the attack, severing tendons. He was taken to a hospital. An emergency room doctor who saw him noted that he seemed sad, remorseful and perplexed. At first doctors thought he might have had a psychotic episode or been on drugs, but he said he only occasionally drank and almost never did drugs, and that night he did neither. And he didn't have any history of psychosis. Eventually Kenneth was sent to a sleep specialist. At first the sleep specialist was skeptical that he could have committed the crime entirely while asleep. But Kenneth had sometimes sleepwalked as a child, once he almost went out a window and sleepwalking ran in the family. In jail Kenneth's cellmates noticed that he would sometimes sit up in bed with his eyes open, mumbling but unresponsive, seemingly asleep. The jury in the case agreed that Kenneth Parks had been sleepwalking when he killed his mother-in-law. But the judge had to decide whether sleepwalking fell under the defense, not guilty by a reason of insanity, or something else, called non-insane automatism. Non-insane automatism is effectively when your body is doing something, but your mind isn't in control of it. And an example used in law school is you're driving along in your car, you've got the window down, because it's a hot day, you don't have very good air conditioning, and a swarm of bees flies into your car. And they encircle your head so that you lose control, and you crash into somebody on the sidewalk. That's an example of what we call non-insane automatism, because your mind isn't in control of what your body's doing, but you're not insane. You're not suffering from a medical condition. So the judge directed the jury at trial, that if they were satisfied that he was sleepwalking at the time, they could acquit him entirely, so no punishment, no conviction, on the basis that he was suffering from non-insane automatism. And the jury came back and Julie acquitted him. The prosecution appealed in the case went to the Canadian Supreme Court. The Supreme Court considered the matter in some detail and decided that actually the original judge was right, and they set out some principles for considering cases of sleepwalking and how it should be characterised by the courts. The court used a test to determine whether a condition could be considered insanity. There are two aspects to it, and one is whether or not the person poses a continuing danger, and the second is whether or not the cause of the defect is internal or external. And they really kind of focused on the continuing danger aspect, because on the medical evidence, Kenneth Parks was highly unlikely to commit such an offense again whilst asleep. And so they said, well, effectively, in short-hand, they said there's no real point in finding him legally insane and sending him to hospital because there's nothing they can do for him. And so he was fully acquitted and went on to kind of live his life quite quietly after that, but that decision really made shockwaves nationally and internationally, because it was the first time in modern history that somebody had committed such a brutal offense and been completely cleared of any responsibility because they'd been asleep. So that's where we're left, and I think that's why it exercises the public imagination so much, and for the public say, well, hang on a minute, somebody's died here. And we know who did it, but we can't say anything more than that. We can't do anything about it. Ramiya Nagash says that in many cases where someone commits a violent act while sleepwalking, they don't have any history of violence. And secondly, of course, the criminal law is based on punishment and rehabilitation of people who have consciously chosen to do things that are harmful to others or contrary to our kind of societal morals. And the difficulty is in sleepwalking. We lose our ability to control what we're doing. Today, there are experts who work specifically on what some call sleep forensics, which includes trying to identify the signs of sleepwalking. They will interview the defendant. They will sometimes conduct sleep studies, which is where somebody goes into hospital. They fall asleep in hospital. They spend the night in hospital, but they're hooked up to all sorts of machines which monitor their breathing, their heart rate, their activity, their brain waves. And then they determine based on their history and the sleep study, the likelihood that they could have been sleepwalking at the time. So it's not an easy defense. It's not something that people can just fall on to and say, "Oh, I was asleep." Nine years after Kenneth Parks was first acquitted, a man named Scott Falleder, who lived in Phoenix, Arizona, was arrested and charged with murdering his wife, Yarmela. A neighbor had called 911 during the night. He said he saw Scott Falleder throw Yarmela into the pool in their backyard and hold her head under the water. When police arrived, they found Yarmela falleder dead in the pool. She'd been stabbed many times. Scott was upstairs. He said he was confused and had just woken up. He said Yarmela had asked him to fix their pool filter and that the last thing he remembered was going out to try to fix it at about 9 pm. When he came back inside, he said Yarmela was asleep on the couch and that he kissed her and went upstairs to sleep. At trials, Scott Falleder tried to claim he was sleepwalking. However, prosecution experts said, "Well, there are several things that tend against that." The neighbor who'd called the police so that he'd notice Scott Falleder motioning at his dog. The dog was barking and he saw Mr. Falleder saying telling the dog to lie down and be quiet. The neighbor also described seeing Scott Falleder put gloves on before he rolled Yarmela into the pool. And police found bloody clothes and a hunting knife in the back of Scott's car. Scott Falleder's family said he had a history of sleepwalking. But the prosecutor said he "did not fit the mold of a sleepwalker." Because when we're sleepwalking, we can commit a great deal of actions. We can cook, we can get dressed, we can drive, and we can attack somebody. But we can't do things that require complex, intelligent thoughts. So concealing a crime, trying to tell your dog to be quiet, to conceal your crime is evidence of more intelligent sort of complex thought. The fact that Scott Falleder had been seen motioning his dog to be quiet and then the fact he'd also hidden his clothes and the hunting knife in the back of his car was said to be indicators that he'd been thinking about the crime and how to cover it up. And so they said, "Well, that's not something you would do whilst you're asleep." Me, right, because if you don't know what you're doing, you don't care that your clothes are bloody. Exactly, yeah, you don't have the ability to think, "Oh, my clothes are bloody, but I hide them in case the police go." That takes a lot of, if we think about it, that takes quite a few steps of thought. You have to think, "Well, the clothes are bloody." Secondly, that will implicate me in a crime. Thirdly, if the police see my bloody clothes, they'll realise I've committed this crime. Fourthly, how am I going to hide it? When you're sleepwalking, you're very objective focus. So you might think, for example, "I want to cook something, so I'm going to cook it and you do it. I want to get to this place, so I'll drive to this place." So it's a much more simple thought. Scott, for later, was found guilty of first-degree murder and given a life sentence. We'll be right back. Some things appear too good to be true, but a $15 monthly phone plan isn't one of them. Mint Mobile has affordable premium wireless plans, and they include high-speed data on unlimited talk and text, and they make signing up easy. You can do it all online. We have a friend who switched to Mint Mobile. He said that it's a great deal. And he liked that he didn't necessarily need to get a new phone or phone number when he switched. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com/phibi. That's mintmobile.com/phibi. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com/phibi. That's it. There's no catch. $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers are on first three-month plan only, speed slower above 40 gigabytes on a limited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Support for criminal comes from Shopify. As fall gets closer and life gets busier, you might feel like now isn't the right time to jump into an intense new process, like starting a business. But you don't always need to wait for the right time. Instead, you can create it. Shopify can help. It's the e-commerce platform responsible for millions of sales worldwide. They take care of everything you need to break out of the brain-storming phase and create your first successful sale. Shopify's templates and tools can help you build a great-looking website fast, no coding required. And if you have any questions, Shopify's built-in AI assistant sidekick is there to help you build, troubleshoot, and keep things moving. If you're ready to hear the sound of your first sale today, then head over to Shopify.com/Criminal to start your free trial today. You can start your free trial at Shopify.com/Criminal. That's Shopify.com/Criminal. The Year the Canadian Supreme Court, reviewed Kenneth Park's sleepwalking case, the FDA approved a new pill for insomnia, ambion. The most popular sleeping pill then, Halcyon, had been linked to suicide and psychosis, and had been banned by the UK and several other countries. In a few years, ambion became a bestseller. At first, the fine print warned that it could cause abnormal thinking, strange behavior, and hallucinations. It said sleepwalking was possible, but unusual, affecting one and a thousand people. But then, people started to tell stories of taking ambient, going to sleep, and waking up to see emails they didn't remember writing, receipts for things they didn't remember buying, and wrappers from food they didn't remember eating. In April 2001, newspapers reported that OREM guitarist Peter Bach had been arrested at Heathrow Airport. He was travelling from the US to London to a tick-pot in a concert on a British Airways flight, and he took an ambient sleeping pill at the start of the flight. He did drink a lot of wine, apparently he was topped up 15 times or so. And then during the flight, he starts attacking staff. So it started off a little, almost comically, he had a pot of yoghurt and a spoon in one hand, and he was sort of throwing them around, and people got sprayed with yoghurt. But then he tried to open an exit door in the plane and wrestled with a member of the cabin crew who was stopping him. The captain of the flight gave him a yellow card, which was something British Airways had incorporated for people who were creating disturbances. So it's effectively saying this is your last warning. He ripped it up in the captain's face and said, "Who the hell are you?" I'm a member of OREM, blah, blah, blah. He upended a serving trolley, and so he really caused chaos. So when he, they landed in the UK, he was taken to trial for various offenses, assault, criminal damage, and so on. And he said he was sleepwalking, and he was in a state of non-insane automatism, and interestingly, experts testified that ambient could actually produce these side effects. And the fact is that when he took that sleeping tablet, he could not have reasonably foreseen that it would produce those side effects, that it would make him violent in his sleep. Most people know that if you drink a lot, it's reasonably foreseeable that you could become aggressive. It's not in the same way it reasonably foreseeable that if you drink a lot and go to sleep, you could sleepwalk and commit a violent act. In relation to ambient, it follows the same path. So if somebody takes ambient and falls asleep, that's the expected effect. What's not expected is that they'll sleepwalk then and stab somebody or commit an offense. And so he was acquitted. It probably helped that he had numerous character witnesses coming to court, talking about how he was a really gentle man, and this was really out of character, and he'd never do anything like that in his right mind and so on. A few years later, in 2006, U.S. Congressman Patrick Kennedy was seen speeding in the wrong lane of traffic on Capitol Hill in the middle of the night. He hit a curb and then ran into a traffic barrier. He told the police that he was on his way to vote. But the house was on session. Later he said he was disoriented because he'd taken an ambient. That year, a study found that the number of car crashes caused by people on ambient was going up. A group of people filed a class action lawsuit against ambient's manufacturer. One plaintiff was a woman who'd been arrested for shoplifting DVDs and a candle from the Navy base where she worked. Others found themselves sleep-eating or driving after they'd taken ambient. In March 2007, the FDA began requiring a stronger warning on the ambient label and told the manufacturer to let doctors know about the risk of sleep driving. That year, the generic equivalent of ambient came out, Zolpedem, manufacturers added a similar warning, and millions of people started taking it, including Lindsay Schweigard, who just started a new prescription that she was arrested in 2011. Lindsay was charged with a DUI and for running a stoplight. As for the car she hit, no one was hurt and the damage was minor. Lindsay says the repair costs something around $450. I was facing six months in jail and then I was, that is the criminal side. Then there's the department of revenue side. That's like the DMV, the driver's license side. Lindsay's lawyer argued that what had happened was a known side effect of ambient. She ended up pleading guilty to a lesser charge, careless driving, to avoid jail time, and her license was suspended for a year. She also paid thousands of dollars in legal fees. It's still hard to believe that you were able to do all of that while asleep. I mean that's, that seems terrifying. It is so terrifying and I mean, I really, I think the other silver lining I took from it is at least I didn't hurt somebody. Talk about never being able to sleep again. Besides she hasn't taken ambient or Zolpedem, since. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Canayne. Our engineer is Veronica Seminetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at ThisIsCriminal.com. You can sign up for our newsletter at ThisIsCriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll join our membership program, Criminal Plus. Now on Patreon, it's the very best way to support our work. You can listen to Criminal. This is love and february to mystery without any ads. Plus you'll get bonus episodes behind the scenes, photos and videos, and you'll be able to talk directly with us and other criminal listeners. Learn more and sign up at patreon.com/Criminal. We're on Facebook at ThisIsCriminal and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal_Podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/CriminalPodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. [BLANK_AUDIO]