Is it a sin? Is it a crime? Love and you do like I do.

If it's a crime, then I'm guilty.

Guilty of love and you.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Criminal Broads, a true crime and history podcast about

wild women on the wrong side of the law. I'm Tori Telfer, author of books like Lady Killers and Confident Women, both of which are about female criminals.

And I'm going to keep this introduction short because today's case is a really long one, because today's case is a really twisty one, because today's case is full of lunatics, as so many of these cases are.

We're going to Hawaii today, guys, and we're going to the 1930s, which normally I would say isn't that fun? Isn't it fun to be in the 1930s? Just think how nice the fashion is, but not today. That's not what I'm saying today.

I want to cite a source I leaned very heavily on for this episode. This fantastic book called, well, it's by David Stannard, and it's called Honor Killing, Race, Rape, and Clarence Darrow's Spectacular Last Case.

So now I've said too much already about the episode. Let's get into it.

I love a good story about rich women behaving badly, and there are two rich women at the center of this story.

Well, they were rich-ish. They were the sort of rich people who had an impeccable pedigree, and they were always staying in mansions, and they secretly had no money left.

And maybe that's why they behaved badly, a certain arrogance, a feeling like they had to maintain appearances at all costs, or maybe it was something darker.

But yes, here today we have the story of two rich women behaving badly, and there are fun parts. There's a moment in the story where someone fills a ship full of flowers.

Someone else wears a long silky fur-trimmed evening gown, which is just delightful. There's a lot of drinking, some scandalous cheating, a bombshell newspaper interview, how thrilling.

And then there are the racist caricatures, the unbelievable miscarriages of justice, and a bullet in the heart of an innocent man.

Oh yes, it's all fun and games and champagne until someone gets hurt, and these rich women manage to hurt pretty much an entire country.

Let's meet the ladies then, shall we?

Grace was a wealthy beauty who was related to Alexander Graham Bell and the president of the National Geographic Society.

She spent her summers in a house on 18 acres with 26 rooms. She was a good student and an incorrigible prankster, and she never got in trouble with a law thanks to her connections.

She was a wealthy white girl who was going to stop her, once she stole a trolley car with her friends.

Another time, she and her girlfriends held hands and roller skated down a busy street, stopping traffic.

Cute, right? Grace's wild behavior would get less cute as the years went on.

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