The Unknown Woman

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1:00Please use discretion. Start from the top. You just saw somebody clap. Oh, I saw someone clap. Okay. So I say, are you okay? They don't respond. So you're going to call for help because you need help coming towards you. Okay. And you're going to start doing something. And I would just tell them, don't worry, I'm calling for help. I'm not the only thing that's going to help you. Maybe that would keep them alive. Okay, and then. Yeah, we're going to go at a rate of about 100 to 120 per minute. The tune of Staying Alive is real familiar. But go ahead and let's start mashing up and down on the chest.

1:33Keep going a little faster, a little faster, a little faster. Not too fast. Ah, ah, ah, ah. Staying alive. Staying alive. Doing great CPR. Does it require more force than you've helped? Well, you know, the thing about it is that you actually, it's a lot of work. Tracy Stell teaches life support and CPR. He's a nurse at Duke Hospital, where they train around 1 ,200 people a month. So we teach adult CPR, infant CPR, child CPR, and AED use in our basic life support class. And we are surrounded by a lot of dummies. Yeah. There's even mannequins in hospital beds. And there's little babies. Tell me about this doll.

2:24She's kind of a vintage looking doll. She is. She's had a long life. We went to the hospital to see one CPR mannequin in particular, a doll named Annie, because of something we'd heard, that Annie was based on a real woman. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

2:51Annie was the first CPR doll ever made. Michael Jackson references her in his song Smooth Criminal with the lyrics, Annie, are you okay? We heard about Annie while working on our last episode about the Freedom House paramedics in Pittsburgh. Did you ever hear that story that in the old days that they would turn you on your chest and flap your arms behind you like a bird? Yep. What do you think? Do you think that was effective? Probably not as effective as what we know now. But in the older days, there wasn't a lot of science and, you know, studies and results that were shown to be effective or not effective.

3:34So lots of times people did what seemed to make sense. If I got strangled, my mama would hold my arm up over my head. Really? What was that going to do? Made her feel better. According to a recent survey, around half of all Americans say they know how to do CPR. But the number of people that actually know the right way to do it is a lot smaller. In Durham County, where he works, Tracy Stell estimates that people start CPR before help arrives less than 5 % of the time. Sometimes 911 dispatchers will try to walk people through it over the phone. He says that if you see someone who's unresponsive, you should start CPR even before checking for a pulse.

4:23Because if they're not in cardiac arrest and they open their eyes and say, what are you doing, then you'll stop. You know, they move an arm, they move a leg, they take a breath, you would stop. But really a lot of folks, and even health care providers, spend way too much time trying to figure out what's going on instead of starting what's going to help. Good Samaritan laws say that if you're doing your best to do CPR, even if you crack someone's ribs, you probably can't be successfully sued. Now, I heard this saying, it might be wrong, if the ribs don't crack, they're not coming back. I don't know that I buy that because the ribs are connected to your sternum with cartilage.

5:05And lots of time that popping sound sounds like cracking your knuckles. And it's that cartilage popping most of the time because if you're in the right place and pressing straight down on the breastbone, you really shouldn't be in a position to crack ribs. What about breathing? We teach a lot of hands-only CPR because folks really don't want to put their mouth on somebody they don't know. But I think with COVID, there's really not a lot of folks that are real eager about doing mouth-to-mouth. When CPR was developed in the late 50s and early 60s, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was a big part of it.

5:38But today, the American Heart Association says that chest compressions on their own can be life-saving. Experts say any CPR is better than none. Tracy Stell says the original Annie mannequin they have at the hospital is from the 80s. The doll is dressed in a dark blue tracksuit with red trim and plastic sneakers. She's just got a slight, tiny smile on her face. Eyes are closed. Ears and throat and hair that needs to be washed. Yeah, but she looks pretty good to me. It's not an intimidating mannequin at all. It's almost got like a friendly aura to it. They have other mannequins, too. Now, this face does not look as peaceful.

6:28Correct. I think Annie, I would prefer to be working on Annie. These are better to learn on, though, because they give you two types of feedback. When you press the chest deep enough, they click. And when you press the chest at the right speed, we have lights that turn on in the shoulder and give you guidance if you're too fast or too slow. And there are newer mannequins that can do even more. Now, this man looks a little more... His tongue is moving. This is a 3G simulation mannequin. He can breathe. You create a pulse that you can feel. He can talk. Oh, he feels really lifelike. So is this type of a mannequin a step up from the old-fashioned?

7:17I mean... I guess Ricesse Annie was kind of the pioneer to what we have today. A lot of interesting history around Ricesse Annie. The history of the Ricesse Annie mannequin begins in the 1950s when a doctor named Peter Saffer was trying to develop what would later become CPR. He decided to test the idea by sedating and paralyzing volunteers to practice on. Peter Saffer presented this technique at medical conferences, and soon other doctors started trying it. One doctor in Norway, Bjorn Lind, started using patients who were already anesthetized for minor surgeries to show the technique to the hospital staff.

8:05One time, he gave anesthesia to his wife and used her to demonstrate. Then, Bjorn Lind got a call from a toy maker named Osman Lairdahl. He was offering to help. A few years earlier, Osman Lairdahl had been on a family vacation at the beach when he saw his two-year-old son face down in the water. Osman Lairdahl rushed to pull him out. He didn't really know what to do, so he started shaking his son upside down. It worked. The water left his lungs, and he recovered. But after, Osman Lairdahl kept thinking about it. His toy company was known for making cars, trucks, and dolls, but he had made one medical device before.

8:54a fake wound kit for medics to practice first aid. The Norwegian Civil Defense had asked him to develop it, and it included 33 plastic wounds and pumps that could spurt fake blood. Osman Lairdahl told the doctors, working on early CPR, that he could make them a soft plastic mannequin to practice on, so they wouldn't need to keep using surgery patients or sedated volunteers. He started working on the design for the mannequin. He wanted to give it a woman's face, since he thought that doctors at the time, mostly men, wouldn't want to put their mouths on a male mannequin. Osman Lairdahl was still planning the design when he went to visit his in-laws, and he saw a mask hanging on their wall.

9:47She looks like a sleeping woman. She's almost smiling. Eric Nadeau owns a workshop that makes masks. Aspen Lierdahl learned that the mask he saw was supposedly made from the face of a young woman who drowned in the Seine River in Paris. She looks very serene for a dead person, especially a drowned person. So seeing this face of that beautiful drowned woman, he said, yes, I've got the face of my mannequin. Aspen Lairdahl decided to model the face of his CPR doll on this mask. He and Bjorn Lind started spending so much time working on the doll together that they became good friends. They named her Recessi Ann, or Rescue Annie.

10:38They made a prototype and tried to teach people with it, starting with a group of 200 middle schoolers. Then they showed the mannequin to Peter Saffer, who said they should add a metal spring in the doll's chest to help people learn compressions. The doll worked really well to teach the first group of middle schoolers, so well that Bjorn Lind was invited across Europe and to Cuba to talk about Rescue Annie. In Norway, Banks donated 650 mannequins to elementary schools. Over the next two years, newspapers reported a lot on people who were rescued from drowning. In 85 attempts to resuscitate people, 40 were saved.

11:26Today, people have called Rescue Annie the most kissed woman in the world.

11:36We'll be right back.

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14:24or mask out of wax. It was a status symbol for men, usually between the ages of 35 and 40, to have these masks made while they were still alive. Then at funerals, they would sometimes hire an actor to wear the wax mask of the dead. Hundreds of years later, people in Europe started making death masks again of royalty or famous people. People would use them as a reference to paint portraits from, or just as decoration. Later, phrenologists, who believed the shape of a person's skull determined their personality, studied the death masks of people who were convicted of crimes. The police also used death masks to preserve the faces of anonymous bodies and try to identify them.

15:17The death mask of Rescue Annie was shown in a 1926 catalog of death masks, where it was given the title, The Unknown Woman of the Seine. The unknown lady of the Seine died, she drowned in the Seine River in 1902, so people recuperated her body, and on the riverside, they saw that she was dead, that there was nothing to do. So they brought the body to the morgue in downtown Paris. In the morgue, the doctor that was supposed to sign the death certificate approached the body and saw that she had a beautiful face. Very delicate. So the coroner almost fell in love with her. So he wanted to have a reminder of her face.

16:11So he sent one of his assistants to get a molder, and the closest molder in the area was Lorenzi. So the assistant asks Mr. Lorenzi to come to the morgue to make a mold. Lorenzi says, okay. So he takes his molding kit, closes the shop, and gets down the hill. So on the other side of the river, he goes on the Île de la Cité, which is where the morgue is, and makes the mold. Eric Nadeau says that Lorenzi used the mold to make a cast for the coroner. But then he decided to make another copy, one to keep for himself. He put it in the window of his shop. People come here to ask to see Rescue Annie.

16:59Today, Eric Nadeau owns the Lorenzi workshop. I've got a room which is called a death mask room, which is a very dark place, cold place. The workshop is filled with thousands of old casts and molds. The Lorenzi family ran it for generations. Writers and artists would walk by Lorenzi's shop, and some of them noticed the woman's face in the window. Raina Maria Rilke described the mask of the woman's face in a book he was writing. He said it was hanging next to Beethoven, quote,

17:48Rilke wasn't the first person to write about the mask, and he wasn't the last. People kept noticing her. After a while, Mr. Lorenzi in Paris starts to have orders for the unknown lady. And he gets so many orders that he starts thinking that he's going to be a millionaire. Eric Nadeau says the orders came from all over Europe. People had written short stories, plays, books, and a movie about the woman. Everyone wanted to hang her face on their wall. A critic named Al Alvarez wrote that in the 1920s and 30s, quote, nearly every student of sensibility had a plaster cast of her. I am told that a whole generation of German girls modeled their looks on her.

18:39Still, no one knew who she was. But writers imagine the story of her death over and over. Often they said that she jumped into the Seine after she was abandoned by a lover. In the water, she says, what did I do? I'm losing my life because of a stupid man. So she's trying to get out of the Seine River, but the souls of the drowned people in the Seine River are catching her by her legs because they saw that she was beautiful. She was either pregnant and drawn herself, or she committed suicide because she was in love, or she was murdered and pushed in the water of the river. Anne-Gel Salyot wrote a book about the stories of the unknown woman of the Seine.

19:36The one common feature of the narrative is that she's been fished out of the Seine and she's dead. One story says that the woman grew up in Liverpool with an identical twin. She eloped to Paris with a Frenchman and never came back. Years later, they said her twin visited Paris and saw her own face in the shop window. It was only then she realized it was her sister's and that she had died. In a best-selling novel, she was an orphan, seduced by an English aristocrat. A man named William Wood said she was a Russian noble named Valerie and that he knew where her tomb was. The other narrative is that the mask was made by a businessman so that he just, you know, took a beautiful model, made a mask, invented a story that would go along the mask and sold it.

20:33Another alternative is that after that, And the woman had a very, you know, romantic afterlife as being still alive. Like she became a cabaret dancer in Argentina. She escaped. All kind of stories. Some people thought she drowned around 1900. But an image of her cast appears in a drawing manual from 30 years earlier. The manual also has images of Homer and the founder of the Roman Republic. In 1951, an article in the newspaper La Presse said, The mysterious identity of the unknown woman of the Seine has not yet been discovered. Anne-Gal Salyot first read about the woman in a novel. I was then a student in Paris, so wandering around the streets of the Sixth Arrondissement, more precisely on the Rue Odeon, I came across a face in a window of a molder shop, the Lorenzi Molder Shop, and I realized, okay, she exists, she has a material existence.

21:41In French, she's called the Incanue de la Seine. Eventually, Anne Galsalliot went back to the workshop to find out more about the woman. When she went in, she met Lorenzi's great-niece. I came unannounced and I asked her about the inconnue lesson and her reaction was, again, again! She was, obviously it was not the first time that people were asking her a question, but she nevertheless took the time to answer me. And what she told me, that we don't have the original mold. We don't know when and how our great uncle got hold of that mold. People have pulled hair and skin particles from death masks to use as DNA evidence in other cases.

22:29But Lorenzi's great-niece told Angel Saliot that there's no way to know where the original mask of the unknown woman is, because molders would often switch original molds and copies, using them interchangeably to make new casts. It's something that, you know, this kind of workshop would do. They would just swap imprints and casts of all kinds. So it's nearly impossible to track her down. We will certainly never find the original. We only have copies of copies of copies of copies.

23:06Do you remember the first story you heard about the unknown woman of the Seine? Ah, yes, the inconnues de la Seine. Kat Byers is working on a PhD on the morgues of Paris and New York. She says that the Paris Morgue kept detailed records, and that once photography was invented, the police kept a catalogue full of pictures of the bodies that came to the morgue. If the unknown woman had been brought there, as many people believed, there should be some record. Did you ever look for her in the records? I did. I did look for her in the records. She would have been photographed and I was looking through these photographs the other day and there's no one from that period that resembles her exactly The likelihood of her ever actually having been at the morgue is, I would say, not very likely If you question any professional mold maker they will all tell you, as forensic doctors will tell you it's impossible that this mask was taken on a dead woman.

24:19More especially a woman would drown herself because she's too beautiful, her skin is perfect, there are no cavities, there's no wrinkles. You know, if you plunge a body in water for a certain amount of time, even for a couple of hours, it will never look that smooth and beautiful. So multiple people went to the archives of the national police in Paris and of the morgue trying to track down a trace of that woman. You know, when was she drowned? We don't know. When was the mass taken? We still don't know today. It still remains an enigma if ever she drowned herself. But there's no trace.

25:06We'll be right back.

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27:06According to Eric Nadeau, owner of the Lorenzi Workshop, in 1914, Michel Lorenzi did an interview on French radio about the mask. In the interview, he said that the woman had never drowned. Michel Lorenzi said that he had made the mold of her face in 1866, not in 1902. He said that actually she was a model, and that so many painters had wanted her in their workshops at the same time that they started making copies of her face. Did you ever believe for a second that the legend about the unknown woman might be true? I think there were probably plenty of women like her. I think that when I first read about it, what mattered wasn't necessarily that it was true of this specific woman, but the possibility or the story of a young woman taking her own life and ending up in the morgue felt very true.

28:15So I didn't necessarily think that that woman did, but I felt that I know that plenty of women did. It's unlikely that the woman who served as a model for L 'Inconnu de la Seine was dead, but why she became so famous, it's because it was very, very resonant with things which were happening. In the 1800s, hundreds of thousands of people started moving to Paris. When we start the century, Paris has, I think it's about 600 ,000 people. By the end of the century, there's over 2 million. And during that period, there was more of what we would perhaps consider now to be untimely death. And that was essentially what the morgue was born out of, is the fact that so many people were being found dead in the streets or in the river in a scenario where they couldn't be immediately identified.

29:14And perhaps that's because they were away from home, but also they might have been away from home in every sense that they may have recently come into the city to work, not had those strong social or community ties. And as a result, there wasn't anybody to identify them. Many people were, you know, transporting all kinds of things on the river and it was a necessary thing for business. So there were regular accidents. Two-thirds of the bodies in the morgue were reported to be pulled from the Seine. A French writer called the Seine the great dumping ground where assassins come to bury their victims.

29:54The police would distribute photographs of the bodies and ask people to try to identify them. Anyone could walk into the morgue from the street. And so you would go in, and then at the back of the room, there was a wall of glass, and behind the wall there were bodies laid out on slabs. They are displayed naked, although they have a cloth covering the groin. So the clothes are taken away and the clothes are often hung behind the body to help with recognition. And the condition varies. They didn't have very many ways to keep the bodies fresh, for want of a better word. So they would drip cold water on the bodies and you would probably only get about two to three days before the body started to become unrecognisable.

30:44But then once the fridge technology was introduced, you could maybe get two to three weeks. The morgue showed up in novels. Charles Dickens visited it over and over again. And it was part of a book called Thérèse Rican by Emile Zola. A murderer goes to the morgue to see if the body of his victim is there. And in seeing the body, he has this awful reaction to it and he feels so guilty. Apologies for spoilers, but it has been out for 150 plus years. Illustrations of the newspapers showed the police bringing people they suspected into the morgue to confront their supposed victims. Journalists would report in detail about the crimes connected to the bodies on display.