Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Violets sat in the parlor of Welsh doctor Edward Hughes Jones.

He was twice her age, but she was professing her love for him.

He was so kind and so generous.

She was an heiress.

Her first husband was a soldier who died at sea, but his fortune wouldn't become hers until her twenty fifth birthday, which was still years away.

In the meantime, doctor Jones was offering to support Violet financially.

They would become engaged and she would pay him back tenfold in just a few years.

She was so grateful she burst into tears and embraced him.

With the help of doctor Jones and other generous locals, Violet was able to live the life befitting an heiress.

In the early twentieth century, she stayed in a manor home in Wales and wore fined for coats and expensive jewelry, when appraiser remarked that she had the finest collection of diamonds he had ever seen, more than anything.

Violet loved fast cars, and she acquired a collection of top of the line automobiles.

She raced them through the countryside, and her maintenance bills grew to thousands of pounds each year, the equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars today.

But happiness is always fleeting, isn't it ed In Violet's case, her lavish lifestyle was destined to have an expiration date.

On January tewod of nineteen oh nine, Violet was driving one of her cars on a narrow seaside road just above the wall.

She lost control and crashed, being thrown from the driver's seat and into the ocean.

All that was left of her was her hat sitting on the road.

She was just shy of her twenty fifth birthday.

Violet's mother was filled with grief.

She spread the news far and wide of her daughter's death, except the police weren't quite as moved as she was.

There were a few things about the car wreck that didn't add up.

For one, there was no damage to the car other than the driver's side window being broken.

That was supposedly where Violet had been thrown from the car.

But that was the other odd thing.

There was no blood anywhere.

If Violet had really gone through the window, there should have been blood everywhere.

This all led investigators to look deeper into Violet herself.

They found that she was seventeen thousand pounds in debt.

That amount was about a million dollars today, and there was no record of her ever having a rich soldier husband who died at sea.

Violet Charlesworth, you see, was not an heiress, but a prolific con artist who had scammed dozens of people out of their money and then faked her own death when it came time to pay up.

As investigators searched for her, she became a global folk hero.

Although she was a criminal, her ability to successfully pose as a member of the upper class and then con many of them out of their money was looked upon with admiration.

Violet was ironically known for wearing a red cloak.

Many women in the United Kingdom were wearing one in her honor, although they stopped once police started to question them, thinking that they were potentially Violet, but soon enough they would get a much more promising lead.

A woman who looked like Violets and was going by the name Margaret MacLeod was spotted in Scotland and she'd skipped out on a hotel bill which definitely sounded like Violet.

Reporters found her first traveling south by train with a swarm of press taking her picture.

She had to admit that she was, in fact Violet Charlesworth.

Over the next several months, Violet's celebrity only grew.

She can now make her own money honestly by giving interviews to the press.

She wrote a song about her life, she starred in a stage show.

Producers from Hollywood reached out about a silent film deal, but by nineteen ten, investigators had completed their investigation and charged both Violets and her mother with fraud.

They were found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.

However, they only served three of those years.

Once free, Violet is said to have moved to Scotland, and after that she disappears from history.

It's possible that she finally decided to live a quiet life, or it's possible that she took on a new identity and scammed her way into another fabulous existence.

Ultimately, though we will never know, The press moved on pretty quickly with the sinking of the Titanic in nineteen twelve, arguably the biggest news story of all time up to that point.

The Violet story has survived to the modern day for those curious enough to learn about it.

Although she was a criminal, we can all sympathize with her desire to live life among societies elites.

Her schemes were always creative, although if she could do it all over again, maybe she would throw just a little bit more creativity behind faking that car wreck.

Perhaps one of the most tense places on Earth is the Demilitarized Zone or the DMZ, that separates North and South Korea and acts as a buffer between the two countries.

It was created through the Armist Disagreement of nineteen fifty three, ending the Bloody Korean War, which had caused the collective death of nearly three million people.

The agreement also created a joint security area at panmud Jam, where North Korean officials and the United Nations Command would meet to conduct diplomacy.

It was, however, an uneasy piece.

Numerous clashes still took place between North Korea and the UN Command throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies, but these skirmishes were generally small enough to keep tensions high, but not to inflame larger conflict.

That is, until the Poplar Tree.

The tree had grown too large for the UN Command's taste, as it blocked the line of sight between a checkpoint and a nearby observation post.

It was decided that this was unacceptable, and so a team of UNC and Korean Service Corps were ordered to prune the tree to create a more direct line of sight.

It would take four attempts to complete.

The first attempt was halted when North Korea objected, stating both sides would have to agree on whether or not to cut back the tree.

The second attempt was canceled due to heavy rain, the third would be deadly.

After the first two failed attempts, it was decided that two US Army officers, Captain Arthur Boniface and First Lieutenant Mark Barrett, as well as a Korean Army Captain Kim, would escort engineers to the tree in question as security.

At first, North Korean soldiers merely observed the work, but at eight thirty am, a mere fifteen minutes into the job.

Opposing soldiers approached the site demanding that the work stop, claiming that the poplar had been planted by none other than the leader of North Korea, Kim Il sung.

But when that work did not stop, North Korean soldiers seized the axes from the workers.

In the ensuing brawl, Boniface was struck down with confiscated axe handles, and a wounded Barrett managed to escape to hide in a nearby ditch.

Neither man would survive his injuries.

Of the three security officers, only Captain Kim had survived.

Things moved quickly in the aftermath of what became known as the Korean axe murder incident.

American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger suggested bombing barracks on the North Korean side, and President Gerald Ford called the event a callous and unprovoked murder, but refused to order an outright attack.

After America's stinging recent loss in Vietnam, there was little stomach in the administration for another war.

A different plan would have to be made.

There had to be a response that was both adequate for the gravity of the moment, but that would stop short of inciting violence, and so South Korean and American forces created a plan prune the poplar tree in the center of the conflict once in for all, using American and Korean military assets in a show of force that would discourage North Korean violence, and so Operation Paul Bunyan was launched.

The mission was to be non lethal unless North Korea made it otherwise.

Of course, that tree would be trimmed, and so three days after the attack, a massive convoy of South Korean and American trucks arrived at the JSA as helicopters circled overhead.

They were backed in turn by gunships and an aircraft carrier battlegroup in the Sea of Japan.

Out of the military trucks came two security platoons, who were there to guard teams of military engineers, each armed with chainsaws, who immediately got to work trimming the poplar at the center of everything.

Although the North Korean military deployed troops with machine guns, they did not act, likely cowed by the massive show of force.

When the engineers were done trimming, they had trimmed away all of the branches entirely, leaving a twenty foot tall stump as a stark reminder.

The event also ended a series of small but deadly clashes that had dogged the JSA since the nineteen fifty three Armistice.

Occasional deaths would still occur, but compared to the decades before the incident, they were few and far between.

A plaque was placed at the site of Boniface and Barrett's murders to honor their sacrifice.

In the end, the poplar's removal was more than a simple pruning job.

By wielding chainsaws under the watchful eyes of a formidable yet non lethal show of force, the Allies sent a clear message aggression would be met with strength, but not with renewed war.

It was a measured display of resolve that turned a flash point of bloodshed into a lasting symbol of restraint.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.

The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the worldoflore dot com.

And until next time, stay curious.