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[cc: Heyyyy, freaks and geeks, welcome back to another episode of Makeup and Mayhem! Where we shamelessly poke around in other people’s trauma while attempting to heal our own with glitter highlighter. As usual, it’s me, Lexie Kent, and maybe if we’re very patient, the bestest baby boy Corkboard will show up, too. So, without further ado, let’s dive right into it!
Right off the bat, this murder. Has. Everything. Romance! Drama! Society scandals! Family secrets! Incest! Dead babies! Alleged ghosts! Cute dogs! And if I’m being honest, proooobably the biggest smokeshows we’ve ever featured on this channel. Mark, could you-? Could you just put the pictures somewhere over here in post? Thanks, Mark, you’re the best.]
[quietly sobs in bisexual]
[If you’ve ever wanted proof that Bryce Dallas Howard is the reincarnation of a Victorian serial killer, there you go.]
[Oh, right- I’m doing just a really simple no-makeup look today. I’m starting off with my primer, of course. I was up preeeetty late last night, so I’m just really trying to get a very smooth, even surface. It’s not easy, but we’re- we’re just gonna- there we go! Already way better.]
[So, on December 20th, 1901, 24-year-old newlywed Edith Sharpe stumbles into a postal depot outside the village of Thornthwaite, England. Beneath a wool cloak, her white silk nightgown is covered in blood, only some of it hers. She’s supporting her childhood best friend, Dr. Alan McMichael, who is bleeding heavily from two abdominal stab wounds and lapsing in and out of consciousness. He is also unbelievably hot- Mark! Get that other picture up! Seriously, are all of these people movie stars or something? Anyway, right. Murder.]
[Followed by your standard crowd of torch-bearing villagers, Edith- who will later turn out to be suffering from chronic cyanide poisoning, walking on a broken leg, and about six weeks pregnant -gets her friend settled and only then sits down herself. You might think this girl is made of adamantium, and the old-timey doctor they got in to examine her thought so, too.]
[(old-timey doctor voice, snooty violin music in the background) “In all my years of practice, I have never met a woman so determined to overcome the frailties of her own body.”]
[So I guess he was sexist as hell, too. No surprise there.]
[Her story, though, is almost weirder than her Terminator physical abilities. Over the next hour, Edith tells a story straight from her own unpublished gothic novels: her husband and sister-in-law have been poisoning her over the months since her arrival at their country estate, and they have just been killed following a more direct attempt on both her life and Alan’s. Her husband Thomas by his sister, Lucille, and Lucille by Edith herself in self-defense. The bodies are still four hours’ walk north at the house, where they fell- and so are the bodies of Thomas’ three previous wives, his infant son by the third wife, and the siblings’ own mother. All, she claims, killed by one or both of the Sharpes.]
[You know. Like you do.]
[This is the same foundation I used last week, by the way. I really like the shade, and it gives great coverage without feeling greasy. As always, brands and colors will be in the description.]
[Obviously no-one trusts Edith right away. Nobody there has met her more than once, about two weeks earlier when she and her husband had traveled into the village to pick up mail and gotten snowed in at the depot overnight. She agrees to go with them back to the house, once the doctor’s set her leg and cleaned the many cuts on her face, hands, and arms. And what they find there is…chilling.]
[Blood spatters the stones on the threshold, immediately visible through the open front door. Lucille Sharpe’s body lies beneath a dusting of snow in the yard, bearing a massive head wound apparently dealt by her sister-in-law. High in the third-floor attic, in Lucille’s own bedroom, searchers find the corpse of Thomas Sharpe, stabbed twice in the chest and once just below the left eye. Meanwhile a famous type of scarlet clay that had made the family’s mining fortunes for centuries stains the snow around the house a deep, bloody red.]
[Like I said, I was up pretty late, so concealer is even more of a must than usual. Same brand as the foundation- check out the description box for more info!]
[In the immediate aftermath, Edith Sharpe may come to regret her honesty. The village constable, knowing none of the parties involved in this case well, arrests her for the murders of Lucille and Thomas Sharpe. No good deed goes unpunished, right?]
[She doesn’t go to jail, but remains under guard while being treated for that pesky cyanide poisoning. The new widow asks for only two things: a stationary set, and the contact information of the closest lawyer. Meanwhile, the men searching Allerdale Hall have made another grisly discovery: the mummified bodies of three women and a male infant, stored in locked clay vats beneath the house. Edith, it seems, may be telling the truth after all.]
[Public opinion seems to have turned in her favor after that, and her lawyer barely has to argue at all to get her charges dismissed on the grounds of self-defense. After all, she’s hurt and poisoned, and every one of those women met a violent death before she’d even heard of the Sharpes or their rotting house. The discovery of a marriage license between Thomas and one Pamela Upton, linked to a body that showed evidence of underdeveloped leg muscles, turns things even further against the Sharpes.]
[In the end, Lady Edith Cushing Sharpe is declared innocent of murder by reason of self-defense. She inherits the estate and everything in it. But let’s press pause on her for a moment to talk about the real killers: the Sharpe siblings. Because their story is kind of bonkers.]
[I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t use brown shadow again. But this palette is really pretty, okay? Don’t @ me! I don’t even remember where it came from- MAC, maybe? Anyway, I’m trying it again; tell me how it looks in the comments!]
[Lucille Sharpe was born in 1865 to Sir James and Lady Beatrice Sharpe. She first appears in the official record on the 1871 census, at age six. And for a long time, nothing else was known of her childhood. Her brother, Thomas Montgomery Bartholomew Sharpe, was born on February 18th, 1867, and christened at the nearby Church of St. Saviour a week later. Official info about their early lives is pretty weak- that 1871 census provides most of what we know for certain; it mentions the children’s ages and a German woman named Therese Wolmar, age 26, living at the house as a nanny, but that’s about it.]
[Their father died of an unspecified illness in 1876. And then the shit hit the fan bigtime in 1879. Because their mother, Beatrice Sharpe, was brutally murdered.]
[Shit! Okay, this is why you don’t investigate murders and do your liner at the same time, kids. Ow ow ow.]
[It’s right out of a horror movie, like everything else about this case. The 60-year-old was found in the bathtub, blood still oozing from a deep wound in her forehead. It was determined to have been made by an axe or cleaver of some kind, but they never found the murder weapon.]
[There was no-one in the house at the time. Only the children. 12-year-old Thomas and 14-year-old Lucille were found in the attic nursery, fast asleep. Upon being awakened, they claimed to have heard nothing and been in bed the whole time. Police questioned them before turning them over to an aunt and uncle in Whitehaven. According to the newspaper clippings about Lady Beatrice’s death, both children went to boarding schools: Thomas nearby, and Lucille at a Swiss convent as was popular for young, wealthy girls at the time.]
[At least, that’s what everyone thought. But we’ll get to that.]
[In 1886 they returned to the house, and Thomas set about reopening the mines. He would try unsuccessfully to gain investors until his 1887 marriage to Pamela Upton, the sickly daughter of a prosperous London merchant. No records indicate how this union ended, but on October 3rd, 1901, he married the wealthy and newly orphaned Edith Cushing at Trinity Episcopal Church in Buffalo, New York. And there the records end until both Sharpes’ deaths.]
[It came to light at Edith’s trial, and in the subsequent inquest into the deaths at Allerdale, that Thomas Sharpe had married two other women after Pamela: 45-year-old Margaret McDermott of Edinburgh, Scotland, and 33-year-old Enola Sciotti of Milan, Italy. Edith testified that Enola had borne him a child, who had died of some unknown illness. She believed the cause of her predecessors’ deaths to be poison, administered in the same tea she had been drinking since she arrived at the house.]
[Just in case you needed another reason not to trust fancy leaf water.]
[I really love this new lash-defining mascara. Seriously, I can’t talk about it enough. Does that make me boring? Probably, but, you know. Gaze upon the field in which I sow my f*cks.]
[In possibly the weirdest coincidence on this channel, a pot of cold tea was discovered on the kitchen table when the house was investigated. Testing proved it to be laced heavily with- surprise! -cyanide. Just insane amounts of cyanide. So we have a cyanide-poisoned woman with serious injuries, a story of poisoned tea, an actual Pot Of Poisoned Tea, and mummies in the basement.]
[It did not take the jury long to acquit, unsurprisingly.]
[And just a really simple nude lip- skipping my brows today because I just had them done for Bryan’s birthday dinner. Yes, I know, I’m so good at adulting. You may all marvel at my life skills!]
[The deaths of Thomas Sharpe, Pamela Upton, Margaret McDermott, and Enola Sciotti were ruled murder. Lucille was deemed a casualty of self-defense. The baby seemed to be a crib death, exact cause unknown. Edith inherited the land, the house, what little money her husband had to his name. She went on to become one of the biggest names in Gothic literature of the twentieth century, had a daughter named Enola in 1902, and died in her sleep in 1957 at the age of 80. If you liked this video, be sure to slam that subscribe button- in the back of my Dragula -and I’ll be-]
[Old-timey record scratch. Laughter.]
[Whoa, no, no, no. You thought we were done? Guys, come on. This is the Cumberland Bluebeard case- if you haven’t actively shouted “what the f*ck?!” yet, you haven’t heard the whole thing.]
[The story’s not over. Oh, hell no. Because in 2012, forty-five years after Edith Cushing’s death, her unpublished thirteenth novel was found in a desk in the attic of Allerdale Hall. And that’s where things get REALLY weird.]
[Buuuuut you’ll have to come back next week for the rest, because this is the return of…[[Drumroll]] Two-Part Tuesdays! That’s right, kids- manufactured drama for your delight and fury!]
[ [[Valley Girl Voice]] Aren’t you just, like, sooooo glad you follow me? Love ya! [[kiss kiss]] ]
[Oh, and before I forget, huge thanks to the subscriber who sent this to my P.O. box! Look, can you- can you see? Ugh, this stupid camera won’t focus. Hold on.]
[There! Look, it’s a cool pin! This style is called a cameo- I think it’s made out of a seashell! Pretty, right? Look how the twisty border catches the light. Ooooh…ahhhh….Okay, let me just get it back on here. I cannot stop wearing this thing, I swear. It keeps making my tops sag, but I’m just like. I’m obsessed.]
[So yeah, thank you so much to Agatha- wow, that’s such like a. A gnarly old name, right? Love it. Never change it. -Agatha N. from Buffalo! That’s wild; I first heard about this case visiting my cousin in Buffalo. Did some research there and everything. Maybe we met and I had no idea. It must be fate! There wasn’t a note, but it’s such a sweet gift and I really appreciate it. Thanks, Agatha!]
[And now, for real this time, if you liked this video be sure to slam that subscribe button- in the back of my Dragula -hit that bell for notifications and I’ll be back here next week. Bye, guys!]
[CC by Adrian Q.]]