A Jewel Worth Dying For

[00:00:00] Have you ever traveled to another country? Maybe no one spoke the same language as you. Maybe there were some cultural differences you had to get used to. How did you feel? Were you excited, scared? Maybe you stumbled upon natural beauty like nothing you've ever seen in your own country. If you had the chance to bring some of that beauty home with you, would you? And how far would you go to get your hands on it?

[00:00:25] A jewel thief from the 17th century must have asked himself that same question. In the Golconda region of India, there was once a Hindu temple honoring the goddess Sita. She is a deity known for her purity and sacrifice. The temple honored Sita with a statue. Its eyes were made of diamonds, and diamonds are sacred in Hinduism.

[00:00:49] The jewel thief didn't care about angering the gods though, or maybe his greed got the best of them. Maybe this diamond was just that beautiful. In any case, when the thief sneaked into the temple and stole one of Sita's diamond eyes straight from its socket, nothing happened. Excited with this new treasure, the thief walked right out of the temple. But the moment when he stepped over the threshold, no longer inside the sacred place.

[00:01:17] He dropped dead.

[00:01:48] He had the diamonds and other precious jewels. He would then sell these back home in France. And at the time, India was the only place in the world where diamonds could be found. But one of these diamonds would travel all over the globe, gaining a reputation for causing misery to everyone who owned it. The world would come to know this cursed gem as the hope diamond.

[00:02:12] In today's episode, I'm going to tell you all about this cursed object from the beginning, its origins to today. Why has it gone through so many hands? And why do so many people believe that this beautiful blue gem is cursed? My name is Edwin. And here's a horror story. In the mid-17th century, Jean-Baptiste Tavenier was traveling in the Galkanda region of India, like I mentioned earlier.

[00:02:41] Galkanda started as a military forge in the 11th century. And by the 17th century, it was better known for its diamond mine. A lot of famous diamonds have been found there, including the Koh-i-nor, which is also said to be cursed. According to legend, the Koh-i-nor brings limitless power to any man who wears it. But that power will also come with great misfortune. Only gods and women can wear it without suffering. The curse of the hope diamond isn't like that, though.

[00:03:11] It affects men, women, children. The victims of the curse seem to only have one thing in common. Greed. It was, after all, greed that pushed them to want to possess the hope diamond. But what makes it so special? Diamonds are valuable enough on their own, but blue diamonds are even more rare. They get their color from traces of boron in their molecular structure. And boron isn't found where diamonds typically grow.

[00:03:39] That's how blue diamonds are different. You see, they just grow deep underground. Like, very deep in there. So deep that they grow right next to the ocean crust. Their boron atoms might be recycled from ancient oceans. And if that's not enough to give the hope diamond an air of mystery, it's also the only known blue diamond to glow red under ultraviolet light. Most of them glow green.

[00:04:06] Scientists have concluded that the very few red glowing diamonds actually come from the hope diamond. They are chunks of the original 115 carat gem. But the average diamond buyer isn't going to know all that history. Maybe there's something else about this particular diamond, though. Something supernatural. That makes it irresistible. Jean-Baptiste was the first in a long line to give in to the hope diamond's mystical appeal.

[00:04:35] Of course, back then, it wasn't called the hope diamond. Jean-Baptiste actually named the jewel after himself. The Tavernier Blue. Then sold it to King Louis XIV. Along with over a thousand precious gems he bought while in India. Because the Tavernier Blue was so rare, no one knows how Jean-Baptiste got a hold of it. It's actually another mystery surrounding the rare diamond.

[00:05:02] The ruler of Golconda in India had the right to keep any diamond over one carat. So the Tavernier Blue probably wouldn't have been accessible through trade. It's possible that Jean-Baptiste could have gotten the diamond through his connections with Indian nobility. He had been crafting these relationships since the 1630s when he first visited the Golconda mines. It's also possible that the diamond showed up on the black market. And Jean-Baptiste bought it illegally.

[00:05:30] A third possibility is that the story about the jewel thief that he wrote about in his autobiography was secretly a confession. And he was a thief. Still, though, it remains a mystery. All historians know for sure is that Jean-Baptiste sold the Tavernier Blue to King Louis XIV in 1668 for what equals to $8 million in today's money. On top of that, Louis XIV gave Jean-Baptiste a title of nobility and some land.

[00:06:01] The gem merchant retired and should have lived happily ever after. Except that wasn't the end of Jean-Baptiste's tale. In 1685, Louis XIV declared that all Protestants were to be exiled from France. Jean-Baptiste was a Protestant. And neither his money nor his title could save him from the royal decree. After his exile, Jean-Baptiste almost completely disappears from the history books. Most reports say that he was seen in Moscow in 1689,

[00:06:30] asking the Russian government for financial support. After all, he wanted to travel to India again. Was he trying to return to the diamond mine that had given him so much success decades earlier? Was he hoping to find another Tavernier Blue? We'll never know. Moscow was the last place anyone saw him, dead or alive. Jean-Baptiste was certainly a victim of circumstance. But he may have been cursed too.

[00:07:01] You see, there were so many moments when he could have brought on the diamond's wrath. Diamonds are sacred in Hinduism. If he stole the Tavernier Blue, the gods might have exacted their revenge on Jean-Baptiste for his disrespect. It turns out that in Hindu tradition, cutting a diamond is bad luck. King Louis XIV had their Tavernier Blue cut down to 67 carats. Maybe selling the Tavernier Blue to Louis XIV and putting it in the position to be cut

[00:07:30] was enough for Jean-Baptiste to suffer from the diamond's curse. Louis XIV wasn't exempt from the curse either. His decision to cut the Tavernier Blue, now called French Blue, might have accidentally unleashed the curse. And that's because what followed was a chain of events that led to the misery of every future owner of the diamond. Alright, so I mentioned that when Louis XIV got it,

[00:07:59] the Tavernier Blue diamond was cut into a triangle and renamed the French Blue. The diamond was proudly displayed at Versailles, and there it was one of the many symbols of the French crown's wealth and power. But just like Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, no amount of wealth could protect Louis XIV from the curse. About a decade after he purchased the French Blue, the king was at the height of his reign, and the beginning of his slow, painful descent into ruin.

[00:08:29] The last three decades of the king's reign were marked by war, death of loved ones, and revolts from his subjects. It started with the choice to exile Jean-Baptiste and the other non-Catholic Frenchmen. This was one of his least popular policies, although he did live to a respectable 76 years old. Still, Louis XIV died full of regret. Some of his last words were how he wished he had been a more peaceful ruler.

[00:08:58] After he died, the French Blue was passed on to his grandson and successor, King Louis XV. Now, Louis XV was only five years old when he inherited the throne. He lived until he was 64 and died just as unpopular and hated as his grandfather. Some would even try to kill him during his reign. And his greatest legacy was leaving the monarchy vulnerable to the revolution that began during the next king's reign.

[00:09:26] So now it's time for Louis XVI, and he had the worst luck of the three. He was a king during the French Revolution. He and his wife, Marie Antoinette, faced a guillotine, one of the most violent and frightening ways to die. But the king and queen weren't the Hope Diamond's only victims during the revolution. Marie Antoinette apparently loaned the diamond to her best friend, Princess Marie Therese Louise,

[00:09:55] so that she could wear it at parties. And that was enough for the curse to grab a hold of the princess too. Not only was she decapitated like the rest of the royals, no, it was not enough. The revolutionaries impaled her head on a spike and then paraded it around the streets of Paris. After the revolution broke out, the crown jewels, including the Hope Diamond, were taken and displayed by the new French government. Now in public possession,

[00:10:24] the diamond's curse could have ended there. But in 1792, the jewels were stolen. Most of them were eventually recovered, except for the French blue. And it was missing until the year 1812. And when the Hope Diamond resurfaced, it had been cut a second time, from 67 carats to its final 45 carat form. Rumor has it that a Dutch jeweler named Wilhelm Fals was the one who cut it. And after he took it and cut it,

[00:10:53] the curse struck. Wilhelm's son, Hendrik, stole the diamond. And the grief of losing such a valuable and gorgeous gem, was too much. It actually killed Wilhelm. And Hendrik, his son, owed a lot of money to a man named Francis Ballou. He stole this diamond from his own dad to pay off that debt. Some say Hendrik murdered his own father for the diamond and then killed himself after paying off Francis. He couldn't live with the guilt.

[00:11:23] Francis Ballou then took his new diamond to London jeweler Daniel Eliasson. But he meant misfortune. Francis died of a fever before the sale could go through. He didn't get to enjoy any of the money he would have made. And if this wasn't enough for the curse, Daniel also died. He killed himself just like Hendrik. The diamond apparently wasn't done. He claimed four more victims over just a couple of decades.

[00:11:55] After Daniel Eliasson's death, the whereabouts of the diamond were unknown. It might have found its way back to the hands of royalty. A portrait of King George IV of England, painted in 1822, shows him wearing a bright blue diamond. The very same French diamond that brought so much misfortune to those who owned it before him. No one is sure how it got to him, but some say it was through Caroline of Brunswick. Either way, some believe the curse got him too.

[00:12:25] When George IV died in 1830, he was in a lot of debt. The diamond, along with other jewels, were sold in an attempt to cover his debts. The diamond's next confirmed owner was a London banker named Henry Philip Hope, who gave the jewel the name it still has to this day, the Hope Diamond.

[00:12:53] It is unclear when Henry Philip bought the diamond. Not long after it came into his hands, his banking company went bankrupt. It only became public knowledge that he owned it in 1839, after his death. He died unmarried and without kids. So the Hope Diamond was passed on to one of his three nephews, Henry Thomas. He died at the early age of 54, as the second hope to own the cursed object.

[00:13:21] The third hope to own it seemed to be the most unlucky. Lord Francis Hope inherited the family diamond in 1884, after his grandmother, the wife of Henry Thomas, had died. A decade later, he met American actress Mae Yohi. They fell in love and were married. The couple enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, even though they were really not that rich. They were doondling their funds and growing debt to keep up with their lifestyle.

[00:13:51] And through all this financial struggle, Lord Francis managed to hang onto the Hope Diamond. But the curse caught up to him. In 1900, Francis and Mae went on a world tour. And during the trip, they met a U.S. Army captain. And Mae actually left Francis for him. A year later, Lord Francis Hope was out of options, financially speaking. He was running out of money,

[00:14:19] and he owed too much of it to too many people. He wanted to sell the diamond to pay all of it off, but his siblings didn't want him to. And finally, in 1901, he sold the Hope Diamond. But getting rid of it was not enough to end the misfortune. The year after that, Francis declared bankruptcy, he lost his foot in a hunting accident, and officially divorced his wife. He ended up remarrying and living into his 70s, but he died poor.

[00:14:48] And so did his ex-wife, Mae. The Hope Diamond was allegedly bought and sold several times between 1901 and 1909, traveling the world and leaving tragedy in its wake. One of the diamond's owners during this stretch of time was a French banker, who was said to go insane and then died by suicide. The owner after him was a Russian prince named Ivan Kanetowski, who then gave the diamond to his lover, Mademoiselle Laurence Ledoux, to wear on stage.

[00:15:17] She was shot and died in the middle of the performance. The prince himself was stabbed to death by Russian revolutionaries the day after his girlfriend died. A Greek jewel broker also owned the diamond. He sold it to a Persian diamond merchant. The very night he sold the diamond, though, the Greek accidentally drove off a cliff, killing himself, his wife, and their child. The Persian then sold the diamond to a representative of Dulhemi II,

[00:15:47] the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The sultan then gave the diamond to his favorite concubine, who was then stabbed to death in a failed robbery. He was overthrown not long after this, too. Then the diamond's official polisher was wrongly accused of being an accomplice and stealing the jewel. Both he and the thief were tortured and executed. Abdulhamid was the Hope Diamond's last victim in this eight-year period,

[00:16:17] and in 1908, a revolutionary movement called the Young Turks led an uprising. Abdulhamid reluctantly accepted their demand to restore the constitution that he suspended 30 years earlier. The following year, he was forced to resign, and then he lived under house arrest until his death in 1918. The ex-sultan didn't die in poverty like many of the Hope Diamond's other victims, but he did die as a disgraced leader, another common thread

[00:16:46] between all of the victims of the curse. The Hope Diamond's next notable owner was French jeweler Pierre Cartier. As a grandson of the Cartier jewelry brand's founder, Pierre probably felt a lot of pressure to live up to his grandfather's legacy. And maybe that's why, in 1910, he took a risk by purchasing the Hope Diamond for over $2 million in today's money. If he could find the right buyer, then the Hope Diamond

[00:17:15] could be Pierre's greatest investment yet. That is, if the curse didn't find him first. Pierre had a specific buyer in mind. American heiress Evelyn Walsh McLean. Evelyn was no stranger to luxury. Her father made his fortune through owning and operating a profitable Colorado gold mine around the turn of the century. The Walsh family home was more of a mansion. It had four floors and 60 rooms

[00:17:44] in the middle of Washington, D.C. The top floor of the mansion had a ballroom where the Walshes would host parties, often with hundreds of guests. They were friends with foreign nobility like King Leopold of Belgium and his son, King Albert, as well as American politicians like Vice President Thomas Marshall, who served under Woodrow Wilson. Evelyn herself was close friends with Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, Alice. Evelyn and her husband, Edward, Ned, McLean,

[00:18:14] inherited the Walsh family home, although they spent most of their time at a second D.C. mansion. In short, the Walshes were like the American version of nobility. And on top of that, Evelyn called herself a lover of jewelry. Getting her to buy the Hope Diamond should have been a piece of cake. But unfortunately for Pierre, Evelyn didn't make the sale easy on him. His first two sale attempts didn't go like he thought. She just didn't want it. But he kept trying.

[00:18:44] He put it in a necklace to make it more enticing. He even offered to let Evelyn give the gem a test run. He was finally able to seal the deal with Evelyn's husband. Ned paid $180,000, about $5 million in today's money. It was for a necklace with tiny silver diamonds framing the Blue Hope Diamond. Ned's family was just as wealthy as Evelyn's. The McLeans owned the Washington Post, which had actually run an article

[00:19:13] about the curse of the Hope Diamond a few years earlier. If we came across this on the paper, why would Ned risk cursing his own wife? Well, it turns out the Hope Diamond's legend worked in Pierre's favor. Evelyn believed that things that brought others bad luck had the opposite effect on her. She didn't think the curse would affect her. Maybe the diamond itself wanted Evelyn as its next victim.

[00:19:42] Because when she brought the necklace home, she claims that it called to her, urging her to put it on. But the diamond's hold on Evelyn did not last. She must have decided that the curse of the Hope Diamond was more than she could handle, and she didn't want it anymore. But Pierre wasn't going to let her and Ned walk away. He and his brother went so far as to try to sue the couple for breach of contract.

[00:20:10] And it wasn't until a full year later that Pierre finally received payment and could wash his hands of the Hope Diamond. Unfortunately, the lawsuit he started cost Pierre Cartier to lose a lot of money. Still, Pierre didn't see the investment as a loss. He was glad to part ways from the curse. But regardless of it, Evelyn loved to wear the necklace and show it off. Just like those who owned it before her, Evelyn's adult life was struck

[00:20:39] with plenty of tragedy. Her brother died young. She developed an addiction to morphine. Her husband became an alcoholic and cheated on her. He ended up in a mental institution where he ended up dying. Her firstborn son died in a car accident at only nine years old. And then her only daughter died of a drug overdose at 25. Still, Evelyn wore the Hope Diamond proudly, even on her deathbed. Her granddaughter inherited the diamond

[00:21:09] after her passing. Not long after, she died at the same age as her mother, 25 years old. Two years later, in 1949, her two living children sold the necklace to American jeweler Harry Winston. He traveled around the world, never believing in the curse. He ended up donating the diamond to the Smithsonian Institute in 1958. The curse, though, would still claim one final victim before the Hope Diamond

[00:21:38] reached its current resting place in the National Museum of Natural History. Mailman James Todd didn't believe in the curse. To him, the Hope Diamond was nothing more than an expensive package to be delivered. But within a year of making that delivery, James' wife died of a heart attack. His dog was strangled to death by its own leash. His house caught on fire. He also suffered both a leg injury

[00:22:07] and a head injury in two different car accidents. It's easy to think of the Hope Diamond's curse as nothing more than greedy people getting the bad karma they deserve. After all, most of the diamond's victims were wealthy, kings, queens, members of the social elite. Of course, there were some exceptions like Henry Philip and Henry Thomas, those who owned the diamond for years without falling victim to the curse. What made them different from people like James Todd

[00:22:37] who barely touched the gem? It seems like the Hope Diamond plays by its own rules. Maybe it knows something about its victims that we don't. If greed is what unites all of those who came in touch with the diamond and the curse that comes with it, then maybe the safest place for the Hope Diamond really is a free public museum where no one can fall victim to it again. Let's hope it stays that way.

[00:23:06] If the Hope Diamond finds itself on the market again, legally or illegally, and that you have a means to buy it, think twice. you might just become the curse's next victim. We have some local stories coming up thanks to your suggestions, but for now, make sure that you tap follow on your app to make sure you get next week's story.

[00:23:36] Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon. See you soon.