The Quintuplets

When Elzire Dionne gave birth to five identical babies, she caught the attention of reporters and doctors hundreds of miles away, the Chicago World’s Fair – and the Ontario government. Before the quintuplets were ten months old, they passed a new law: the Dionne Quintuplet Guardianship Act. “These children are our own royal family.” Sarah Miller’s book is The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:02Speaker 02

  In 1934, a woman named Elzire Dionne was pregnant in Ontario. She was 25. She and her husband, Oliver, lived on a farm and already had five children. And now she thought she might be having twins.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  She was due in July. On May 28th, she went into labor very early in the morning. Her aunt came to the house. She'd helped deliver Elzire's babies before.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  Auntie Legro comes and sees that things just don't seem right. Elzire doesn't... She's just not well, and she's frightened.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Author Sarah Miller.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  And so they call the local midwife. And the two midwives deliver one, then two, and then, in shock, three baby girls. In the meantime, they have also had Oliver go for the doctor. Go get Dr. Dayfoe. So the doctor arrives just as the third baby is delivered. And he scrubs up and he assists in the delivery of two more infants.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  How big are these babies?

• 2:13Speaker 03

  They're so tiny. They are... All five of them together weigh under 14 pounds.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  The doctor, Alan Roy Dafou, had helped deliver a set of quadruplets 26 years earlier, but none of them had lived more than a week. There were no records of any quintuplets anywhere in the world that had survived longer than 50 days.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  He then looked at the babies and made a statement to the midwives. They're not going to be alive come daylight. I'm going home.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Brian Callahan, Elzieer and Oliva's grandson. As Dr. Dafou was leaving, Oliva's brother Leon arrived. The doctor told Leon about the five babies.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  He actually called the newspaper in North Bay called The North Bay Nugget and inquired about placing a birth notice in the newspaper. And he asked if a notice for five babies would cost more than just a regular notice for one baby.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  The editor thinks it's a joke. He's like, Leon, you're kidding me. Come on. And he says, no, you know, his sister-in-law has just given birth to five little girls. And the editor says, it's free. We're going to print this one for nothing.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  That morning, about six hours after the birth, a reporter and photographer from The North Bay Nugget arrived at the Dion's house. Elzieer's aunt let them inside to take a picture.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  It was a picture of my grandmother laying in bed with the five babies right beside her. And at the time, that picture was put on by telegram and sent all over the world.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  The babies were identical. At first, they were just labeled A, B, C, D, and E. But within a few days, they had names. Yvonne, Annette, Cecile, Emily, and Marie.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  The smallest baby was two pounds, four ounces.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Everyone was concerned for all of them, but Marie's existence was by far the most precarious because she was just so little. So initially, like, they're putting, opening the oven door and putting a basket on the door and putting the babies in this basket in front of the open oven because they need to be kept warm. You know, hot water bottles pinned to the sides of the basket because they, they need an incubator, but there is no such thing within hundreds of miles.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Dr. Defoe drove to the Red Cross to get more help.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  That evening, they sent a 21-year-old nurse named Yvonne Leroux. She stayed up through the night with the quintuplets. The next day, at 5:30 a.m., Dr. Defoe got a phone call from a newspaper editor in Chicago asking if the babies were still alive. Then a journalist from New York called. Then a doctor, a health commissioner in Chicago, who said he was an expert on premature babies. He asked Dr. Defoe what he needed.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  El Zir Dion had actually had trouble nursing her singly born babies. Her milk supply was, was not that high. And so they have to improvise. What are they going to feed these, these babies if they keep living? And at first, it's just water. And then he comes up with this improvised formula of cow's milk and corn syrup. But there are these really frightening spells when they start to turn blue and, you know, they're not getting enough oxygen is what the real issue is. But he concocts another little formula with diluted rum, which he's instructing the midwives and nurses to give them to bring them back.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  The doctor in Chicago said he would send frozen breast milk. And he said that the babies needed to be kept at 85 degrees with an incubator. But the Dion's didn't have any electricity.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Chicago newspaper sends one of its reporters with an incubator. They find an incubator that does not need electricity. Very old fashioned model. They had to go into the basement or the attic of this medical supply warehouse in Chicago. And this fellow called Charlie Blake gets on a train with this incubator and speeds north with it.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  A reporter and photographer from the Toronto Star brought a car full of supplies and gifts when they came to take pictures of the babies.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  To everyone's astonishment, they just keep living. I mean, they say that in the newspapers over and over again. They're still breathing. They're still living. People, that's such a basic thing to say, but it is so unheard of. It has never happened in 400 years of recorded medical history. Dr. Dayfo famously said, you know, somebody asked him, what do they look like? He said, like rats. One of the reporters said that you would almost swear they're transparent when he saw one of them lifted up like for a bath or diaper change. There's a picture of Nurse Leroux holding one of the girls and that baby's entire torso is contained in her palm.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  The day after the babies were born, the Toronto Star printed three pictures of the Dion family. The article read, "Have good chance of surviving," states quintuplets doctor.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Mr. and Mrs. Dion don't fare as well with the press, or Mr. Dion in particular. But even Mrs. Dion, as the very morning of the birth, when she first talks to her husband about what's just happened to them, she says, what will people think? They'll think we're pigs. And that's kind of in reference to, there's not a great way to put it. She feels like people are going to think she's had a litter of babies and that that's somehow vulgar. And Mr. Dion, when he's first confronted with the press, they ask him, well, do you feel proud of yourself? And something about the tone or the manner of that question

• 8:29Speaker 03

  got right under his skin immediately. And what he swore to his dying day that he said was, you, you talk like I should be put in jail. But what they reported him as saying was, I'm the type of fellow that should be put in jail, as if he was indeed ashamed of having fathered so many children at once. And that encounter would taint his view of the press for the rest of his life.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  The next day, May 30th, The Toronto Star reported that Oliver had agreed to take the quintuplets to the World's Fair in Chicago. A promoter had reached out to him about a deal to put the quintuplets on display there.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  When the World's Fair calls and says, hey, we, we want your babies, they are offering solutions to so many problems that just arose so suddenly, such as, who's footing the bill? Nobody has really talked about who's paying the nurses? Who's paying the doctor? Who's paying for these shipments of breast milk that come every day? Their family literally doubled overnight. They had five children on May 27th. They had 10 children on May 28th. And the folks at the World's Fair say, if you bring your babies here, we will give them the best care that is medically available in the city of Chicago. We will pay your expenses, we will, travel expenses.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  We will pay your living expenses for yourself, your wife, all of your children.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  They said they would also pay for the baby's medical care for up to six weeks before coming to the fair. Oliva went to ask their local priest for advice. They drove south so they could meet the promoter and to review the contract.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  He wanted a provision added saying if the children weren't well enough to travel, that, you know, the contract was off.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  The promoter said okay, and Oliva signed the contract. When he arrived home, there were even more cameras and journalists waiting outside. Some addressed as nuns, coming to pray for the babies in an attempt to get inside. Oliva refused to talk to them or be filmed.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  The World's Fair promoter announced that they'd signed a contract, and newspapers reported exactly how much money Oliva would make from exhibiting the quintuplets: $250 a week and over 20% of ticket sales.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Within about 24 hours, Oliva Dian begins to regret signing that contract. I think in part because of the way people reacted. They think he's putting his daughters up for sale, more or less.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  The Cleveland Press reported that Dr. Dafou did not agree with the decision Oliva had made. Quote, "As long as I am boss, there will be no trip anywhere for these babies. The father can go if he wants to, but not the children."

• 11:38Speaker 03

  It appears publicly that Dr. Dafou and Oliva Dian are going head to head, as if Mr. Dian wants to take the children to Chicago, and Dr. Dafou is sort of like putting himself in front of the incubator and saying, "No, no, no, I won't let you do this." When in fact, it was Oliva Dian's insistence on putting that clause into the contract that gave Dr. Dafou the power to say, "We're not moving these babies yet."

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Oliva started trying to get out of the Chicago contract. He refused to cash checks from the promoter.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  He said the contract didn't mean anything because El Zier hadn't signed it too. But the promoter said it was legally binding.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  The government comes up with this plan to protect the babies from being sent to Chicago, which is if the Deans will sign custody of those five children to the Red Cross, they will be protected. Because Oliver Dean is still bound by that contract he signed, but the Red Cross is not. So if they transfer custody, the children are protected. And so with great reluctance, but with no other way around it, Oliver and Elzire sign a different, a brand new contract.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 13:10Speaker 02

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• 13:29Speaker 02

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• 16:10Speaker 02

  While they were waiting for the hospital to be done, a nurse partitioned off the parlor of the house for the quintuplets. Dr. Defoe was so worried about the babies getting sick that he barely allowed anyone besides the nurses inside.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  The parents are left just sort of feeling like, almost like aliens in their own home. And Elzire, after that birth, is not well for several days, if not weeks. So she's so distressed by her separation from her newborn daughters that Grandpa Dion cuts a hole in the wall. He makes a little window so that she can look through from her bed and see into the baby's room.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Construction on the new hospital began in August.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  People are literally sending nickels to northern Ontario to help build the hospital for these babies. One little girl from Rhode Island sent a nickel and said, "Well, I wish I could send more, but Daddy only works three days a week to keep us five going." So that's all they could spare. But they wanted to send all they could spare.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  In late September, when the quintuplets were just under four months old, Dr. Dafou and the nurses moved the babies to the finished hospital.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  It was billed as this sort of infant utopia, because everything was going to be modern and new and just for them and the best of everything. There were chimes that were rung at these certain hours for meals, for playtime, even for-- like, there was six designated potty times during the day. There was this sort of aura around the science of child rearing. And it was presented to the public as though these children were going to have the best possible upbringing, because we're going to have the latest in everything scientifically, psychologically.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  It's all going to be here for them, and we are going to make these children the most perfect children you ever saw.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Elzire and Oliver were allowed to visit at any time, as long as no one in their house was sick.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  The official policy is anytime you want, they're your children, come on in. But the logistics and everything just make it feel very strange to the Deons. Who walks across the street to see their children? There's a fence with barbed wire, and they had to, like, ring a bell and wait for the guards to let them in. Once they're past those gates, they're always under the nurse's gaze. And Elzire in particular felt very much like she was treated like a criminal, like she couldn't be trusted with her own children.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Crowds of people had started driving to the hospital to see the quintuplets. But they would also gather around the Dion's house. Once a man broke their kitchen window and reached inside.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  In February of 1935, things have calmed down a bit. There's been some health scares with the babies that have passed. And things are seeming fairly stable. And once again, it dawns on Oliva Dion, okay, in two years, these five children are going to come home. Well, then what? We still have the same house. He still has the same job. That's more than he can financially stretch to. And so for that reason, the Dion's explain, they go on a vaudeville tour in the United States in February of 1935.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  A theater agent from Chicago had proposed the idea to them for $1,700 a week.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  It was basically just displaying themselves. All they did in essence was say, you know, we thank you for your attention. We thank you for all of your care and your prayers and your donations. And Mr. Dion said two or three sentences in English. And Mrs. Dion said, "Thank you very much and may God bless you," in French, because that was her native language. And that was it.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Audiences loved it. But newspapers published jokes making fun of the Dion's. They called Oliva a, quote, "little shrimp," and the tour a flop. The Premier of Ontario called it nauseating to Canadians, revolting, and cheap.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  We're trying to save these children from exploitation. We gave them a beautiful hospital. The Red Cross is taking care of them. And now look at what their parents are doing. They're out exploiting and exposing themselves for money.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  In March, the Ontario Legislature proposed a new bill about the Dion quintuplets.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  The legislature proposes taking forcibly seizing control and custody of Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Emily, and Marie, making them wards of the crown until they are 18 years old to save them from the exploitation that now people seem to believe they will suffer at the hands of their own parents.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Are they allowed to do that?

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Ah, they did it. It caused a great deal of debate in the legislature, but ultimately, the Dion's five daughters became wards of the crown.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  It was called the Dion Quintuplet Guardianship Act, and it made the Minister of Public Welfare the quintuplet's special guardian, along with a board appointed by the government. The minister said, "These children are our own royal family. We want to make it possible for them to lead normal lives."

• 22:02Speaker 02

  When the bill passed, Elzir and Oliva packed bags and tried to move into the hospital in protest. But a police officer showed up, and after two hours, they went home.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  They said over and over again, "We're raising these five other children. Nobody has complained about them." And they characterized it as kidnapping.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  The quintuplets were nine months old.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  That spring, Dr. Daffo had started letting some visitors inside the hospital between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon to look through a window into the nursery.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  It turns out that that gazing through the windows kind of seems to make the babies nervous. And so they changed tactics and start displaying the children on the front porch of the nursery at set times during the day. They would put out a placard that said "Yvonne", and one of the nurses would come out and hold up Yvonne. And the people lined up at the fence would just cheer and fuss. And because they were identical, they could dupe the public. So if Cecile was having a rough time, they could just show Emily twice. Just change the sign, change the nurse, bring out the same baby. And at that distance, no one was any the wiser.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Are they being charged?

• 23:22Speaker 03

  No. No, it's always free, of course, because the government, the government can't exploit these children. And money equals exploitation, so there is no charge.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Journalists and psychologists debated whether the public should be allowed to view the quintuplets. A well-known psychologist wrote in Cosmopolitan, "Life in a glass house is not conducive to normal human development. Babies are not fishes." But then he recommended they be separated and raised by different families, quote, "to make them forget they are quintuplets." A judge on the quintuplets guardianship board said, "These children are the treasures of the world. Why should they not be seen?"

• 24:13Speaker 03

  They said, "Well, people are gonna come no matter what, and the more we try to thwart them, the more obnoxious they're gonna become, so we need to do it on our terms." And that's the tactic that they took.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  And what did they do?

• 24:28Speaker 03

  They built an observatory, a horseshoe-shaped building, and in the center of the horseshoe is a playground. So you enter, if you're a member of the public who wants to see the Dion quintuplets at play, you enter through sort of the bottom of the U in that horseshoe, and you file in one of two directions, and there are these windows that allegedly are one-way. They've put these screens that are painted white over the windows. So the theory is, you can look out into the playground at the children, but they can't see you. And the observatory is lined with cork and felt to muffle sounds.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  People are admonished not to speak and stuff, but they do because they just can't help themselves. They are not to take pictures. They are just to file in an orderly fashion through this, you know, whatever leg of the horseshoe you choose, and you can go through that observatory as many times as you please during the observation period, but traffic must be kept in motion at all times. You're not to linger. So the children, the policy states health and weather permitting, are herded into their little private playground and are stared at for twice a day, every day.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  The observatory opened on July 1, 1936, just after the baby's second birthday. How did they seem to react to this attention?

• 25:57Speaker 03

  There are mixed accounts. There are some nurses who claim that the children were completely oblivious. And there are others who are like, that's nonsense because they observed girls even after the public had left. If the children were given access to those windows, they would take their building blocks and and sort of climb up to the windows and wave at nobody. They knew people were in there looking at them and they would perform. Emily took particular delight in climbing the jungle gym and, you know, looking precarious and and making people gasp and wonder if she was going to fall. And there were times when it it did. Some nurses said it, it seemed to disturb them. They seemed to not want to be there.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Between 3,000 and 6,000 people came every day to see the quintuplets.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Outside the gates of the hospital, all kinds of tents and stands had started popping up to sell things to tourists. Newspapers called it Quintland.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Elzire's aunt was the first one to open a tent.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  She sold food. She sold souvenirs. She she told her story, offered autographs. The two midwives wrote a little pamphlet describing the birth and the family and everything that they would sign.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Oliva opened a booth, too. He sold photographs, postcards, and autographs for a quarter.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  In 1937, the Deion Quintuplets were a more popular tourist attraction than Niagara Falls. Businesses are booming because these folks, again, that have come so far to see the famous Deion Quintuplets, they need other stuff to do if they've come that far. Well, you might as well offer them hotels and restaurants and fishing excursions. And the girl's uncle Leon ran a gas station and he installed five gas pumps and put Yvonne, Annette, Cecile, Emily, and Marie's name each had was assigned to a gas pump. And also, critically, it will come out later, the province is pocketing all kinds of money

• 28:07Speaker 03

  because they are charging a higher gas tax than any other province in Canada because they can, because people are going to pay it because they want to see the Deion Quintuplets. And when you've got to drive a couple hundred miles north of Toronto. That adds up.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Newspapers paid thousands of dollars for exclusive rights to photograph the quintuplets. And Hollywood producers made a deal to shoot three movies in their nursery.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  The Madame Alexander Doll Company made sets of five identical dolls, named after the quintuplets. Companies used their photos in advertisements. Dr. Dayfo gave endorsements.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Products like caro syrup, palm olive soap, Colgate toothpaste, Baby Ruth candy. Anything Dr. Dayfo said was the best for the Dion quintuplets was perceived as the best for anybody, and he was paid for that. His influence was so great that, at that time, there was some hesitation toward things like pasteurization of milk and vaccinations. And when Dr. Dayfo comes out and says, "Pasteurized milk is best for your child. Vaccinations are best for your child," that has a great effect on public health. So milkborne illnesses decrease markedly, as do a lot of childhood diseases that people,

• 29:36Speaker 03

  you know, who had been wary about vaccinating their children, when they hear that the Dions are vaccinated and they see the pictures of the Dions being inoculated in the papers, they say, "Okay, if the Dion quintuplets are receiving this, then I'm going to trust that and that it's best for my child as well."

• 29:56Speaker 02

  In 1937, Dr. Dayfo said, "There isn't any point in bringing them up as normal children. They must learn to be looked at, talked about, and studied, without losing their sense of proportion or their ability to enjoy life.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  And because they will always have to buy their privacy and pay dearly for it, we are trying to build up sufficient funds to make it possible for them to have peace and freedom as the years go by."

• 30:27Speaker 02

  The money from the photographs and advertisements went into a trust fund for the quintuplets, managed by the guardianship board. Oliva was a member of the board, but he stopped attending meetings when he kept being outvoted.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Elzire was worried the quintuplets weren't getting enough to eat. She fought with the nurses. When a nurse left her job at the hospital and the quintuplets would cry, they remembered Elzire would get angry.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  The nurses are put in this position where they are the children's parents in practice. They're never supposed to speak sharply. They're never supposed to physically discipline the children. But on the other side of that is they're not supposed to hug and kiss them either. So for instance, when they're put to bed at night, you're put in your crib and it's lights out. There's no toys. There's no singing. There's no rocking chair. There's none of that kind of routine.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Twice a day, the quintuplets had their hair curled. Researchers visited to analyze their physical similarities, their handprints and eyelids, and their personalities. It was reported Dr. Defoe had them on a special diet to, quote, "keep them from growing too fast." On holidays, like Halloween and Valentine's Day, they did special photo shoots. Their birthday parties were filmed. Later, Cecile said, "The gifts were all empty boxes. The cake was a big hole. It was always like that. There was no cake at all when we cut it."

• 32:14Speaker 02

  The quintuplets were allowed to leave the hospital for the first time when they were about five years old to meet Queen Elizabeth in Toronto.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  By 1940, Oliva had filed two lawsuits against Dr. Dafou. He demanded that Dr. Dafou reveal how much he was making from advertising contracts and put his profits in the trust fund. Dr. Dafou resigned from the guardianship board, and Oliva withdrew the lawsuits. By then, World War II had begun, and fewer Americans were making trips to Quintland. And the way journalists wrote about the quintuplets was changing.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  As the girls grew up, they became... There's not a nice way to say it. They weren't as cute as they used to be. They got to be perfectly ordinary-looking little girls. And that didn't have the same draw as these adorable, little, ringleted toddlers.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  A nurse who had taken care of them as babies came to visit them at Quintland in 1942, when the quintuplets were seven, and told a reporter, "I was disappointed in them. I thought they were not as pretty." Another former nurse spoke up, saying she felt sorry for the quintuplets.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  The tide of public sympathy starts to turn toward Mr. and Mrs. DeYoung and away from the doctor.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Dr. Dafou had been diagnosed with colon cancer and went away for surgery.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Then it's like six months or so. It's quite some time before they see him again. And in that intervening period, they've realized that the expectation is to love their parents. They can feel that expectation from their parents now. And so, when Dafou returns from his recovery, the feeling between them is very, very different.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  One nurse said, "They just wouldn't go near him. We literally had to push them." Later, the quintuplet said, "We were old enough to know that Mom and Dad did not want us to do that. We were anxious to please."

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Then Dr. Dayfo died of pneumonia. He was 60. No one told the quintuplets for six months. And in 1943, at nine years old, the girls were sent home to live with the rest of their family.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  They have two new little brothers have been born. So now there's seven siblings that they haven't seen that much of. And they're all expected to just magically have this fairy tale reunion and everything is supposed to be great. And Cecile and Yvonne, like one says it and the other snaps her fingers and they say it was like that. All of a sudden, your life as you know it in the nursery is over.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  We'll be right back.

• 35:35Speaker 02

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• 36:19Speaker 02

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• 36:34Speaker 02

  Support for Criminal comes from Talkiatory. Mental health support can come in many forms, but it's not always easy to access. Talkiatory is different. It can help you find a psychiatrist, and it makes the experience simpler and more flexible. You can find someone who takes the time to get to know you and provides a clear, personalized treatment plan. Talkiatory is 100% online psychiatry practice. They provide comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and more. Unlike therapy-only platforms, Talkiatory is psychiatry. That means your medical provider is qualified to diagnose mental health conditions and prescribe medication whenever it's appropriate.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Head to talkiatory.com/criminal to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's T-A-L-K-I-A-T-R-Y.com/criminal to get matched in minutes. Talkiatory.com/criminal.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  I've heard the story all my life growing up. I'd be at my grandparents' house every weekend.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Brian Callahan. His mother, Teres, was one of the Dion Quintuplets' older sisters. She was 14 when the Quintuplets were sent home to live with the rest of their family on their farm. They'd moved into a new house that Oliva had built with money from the Quintuplets' trust fund. They called it "The Big House."

• 38:08Speaker 04

  As a young boy, I'd play in that house when it stood empty.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  When the Quintuplets moved back in, Oliva said he wanted everyone to act like one big family.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  One way or the other, the siblings weren't interested in being part of the family with the Quints, and the Quints, in turn, weren't interested in being part of the family with the siblings.

• 38:31Speaker 04

  If you can understand that.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  For the first time, the quintuplets were separated into different bedrooms.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  At dinnertime, at the table, they weren't seated together. They were all sandwiched between their siblings.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Oliva didn't think the quintuplets should go to a regular school. So they eventually started a private school for them in the old hospital nursery.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  Instead of having the siblings go to school with their sisters, they then interviewed and selected 10 young ladies from the surrounding area to come in and go to school with the Quints as their classmates.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Later, one of their classmates said, "They wouldn't confide in us for a long, long time. You had to really, really work on gaining their confidence." When they did, the quintuplets would ask the other girls questions about everything, going to the movies, getting soda, having boyfriends.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  At first, the quintuplets slept at the school during the week. But when they got closer with their classmates and teachers, Oliva told them, "Morally, those people are taking you farther and farther from your parents. They are there to divide our family once again."

• 39:51Speaker 02

  After that, Oliva wanted them to come back to the big house for meals and to sleep.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  There was no bonding, even for the nine years that they actually did live together. They didn't know each other. You had the five princesses. They were raised by the nursing staff. Everything was done for them. They had no concept how to take care of themselves, let alone do farm work. Meanwhile, the other siblings, they were still out working the farm.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  Mr. Dion wanted them to be one of the family, not one of five. But they craved that five-ness, that togetherness that they'd had for almost a decade together in the nursery. That feeling to them was home to them, more than any physical place. And yet, they wanted to be individuals also. They were very weary of being treated as a group with no differentiation between the five of them. So, they kind of wanted to go their separate ways, and yet, they really didn't know how or what it would be like to live like that.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  When they were 18, Olivia enrolled them at a small Catholic women's college in Quebec.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Even though it was the small world of the campus, they felt that freedom and really reveled in it, in addition to being able to be together as much as they wanted and craved, with no punishment for that.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  So, it was the first time in their life when they were free?

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it really is. And I believe Annette, and at least one other of her sisters, put it very much like that and said, "It was like being a bird."

• 41:45Speaker 02

  After about a year, Marie left school to join a convent, and then, so did Emily.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Emily has epilepsy, which is a huge secret. Almost nobody outside of the family knows it. And while she is in this convent contemplating whether to stay, if this is really for her or not, she has a seizure, and she dies.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Her sisters were all at home visiting when they got the news. They were 20 years old.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  Cecile said there was a part of her that she almost believed that they were immortal, because it had been such a miracle that they had lived. She didn't fully understand, it seems, that they could also die.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  But at the same time, they say, that was the real start of them finding their individuality, because once there's only four instead of five, then the public's attention really, really diverts. It's like they're not magic anymore.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  There's a picture of the five of them together. Emily is in a casket. Yvonne later said she remembered thinking, Emily is still playing the part of a quintuplet for the camera, even though she's dead. Oliva opened their house to anyone "genuine in their grief", and 5,000 people came to see Emily. Shortly after, Yvonne, Annette, Cecile, and Marie found out about their trust fund.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Because they had no concept of its accumulation, they did not know how much had been just sort of dribbled or siphoned away.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  The account contained about $800,000 for the sisters. They would get access when they turned 21. Emily's share would be split among all the members of the Dion family. But there were rules about how and when they could use the money, and they had to keep paying to maintain their parents' house. Marie left her convent and decided to use the money to open a flower shop called Salon Emily. She liked to give flowers away to friends in churches. The shop closed after six months. Annette and Cecile both married. Cecile used trust fund money for her wedding

• 44:18Speaker 02

  and left her bouquet at Emily's grave. Marie married two. All three had children. Yvonne went to nursing school and eventually became a librarian. They all stayed in Quebec. Marie died at 35, reportedly from a blood clot in her brain. Cecile eventually divorced. So did Annette.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Her husband seems to have been a very good, kind, understanding man. But as he said, you know, he would make plans with his wife in the morning, go to work, and then come home and find that the plans had been changed because, like, Yvonne showed up and the two sisters just changed everything. And he said, "I, you know, I only married one person. It's, you have to choose. It's either me or it's them."

• 45:13Speaker 02

  As Yvonne, Annette and Cécile got older, they stayed close, often calling each other every day. For a while, they moved in together. And the money that was left in the trust fund dwindled.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Cécile's son, Bertrand, he was very aware of his mother's financial struggles. Even as like a kid in school, he knew. And he remembered very specifically somebody coming into class and they had a pencil with his mother's face and his four aunts' faces on it. And he thought, why is there this pencil with their faces on it and they don't get any money for this? So as an adult, he goes to the Archive of Ontario and he starts digging into the Quintuplet guardianship files and looking for the financial records.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  In Toronto, Bertrand found that between the ages of four and 10, half of the Quintuplet's trust fund had been spent. And the records of the first three years of guardianship board meetings had been burned by the welfare minister.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  He comes home with like literally suitcases full of documents, discovering things like when the welfare minister, who was part of the Dion Quintuplet guardians board, when he would come to North Bay to look over the books, he wasn't charging his lodging and his fish and chips to his government department. He was charging it to the Dion Quintuplet account. The Dions were being billed for their own birthday presents. They were being billed for the toilet paper in the public washroom at Quintland. The Quintuplet fund had paid for Mr. Dion's new cars. The girls had unknowingly paid tuition for their siblings' educations.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  They paid for Dr. Daphos stamps and telephone bills and telegrams, the nurses' tennis courts. Anytime somebody could dip into there and justify it as necessary for maintaining that whole Dion show, they did.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  And then Bertrand found out about the gas tax. In the Quintland years, Ontario had increased its gas tax to six or eight cents a gallon versus the two or three cents in other provinces.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  That was really a big fat nail in the coffin for him, saying, "That's proof that the government knew what these children were quote unquote 'worth' to the province and that they were being used to make money."

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Bertrand went to court to get royalties back for use of the sisters' names and faces, which no one had paid since 1957. They asked for $10 million in restitution from the government of Ontario. More than a year later, the Ontario government offered to pay Yvonne, Annette and Cecile, each $2,000 a month for the rest of their lives.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  And they find it just deeply offensive. Like, "We didn't ask for an allowance, you know? This was money that was set aside for us. Where is it?"

• 48:33Speaker 02

  The Sisters decided to hold a press conference in Toronto.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  They take the sort of, for them, unprecedented step. After all those years of being, in my opinion, abused by the media, they finally took the reins. And then the premier offers $2 million. And the Deans say, "No, not enough." He offers $3 million. And they say, "No, not enough." And finally, he says $4 million and an inquiry into the accounting. And they accepted that.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Brian Callahan says that beyond that press conference, the Sisters had hardly ever come back to Ontario.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  He remembers seeing them when Oliva died in 1979. What were your aunts like at the funeral?

• 49:24Speaker 04

  Very, very soft spoken. You wouldn't know that they were there. They just kind of blended in.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  In 1995, Annette, Yvonne, and Cecile said publicly that Oliver had sexually abused them as children. They said that it had taken a long time to talk about. Quote, "But that's normal for something so deep." They remembered telling a priest when they were younger.

• 49:55Speaker 03

  And he felt bound by his religious duty, as if that had been a sort of confession. He didn't think he was able to tell that outside of the confession booth.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  When the news came out, Brian's mother, Thorez, told a reporter, "We assert that we had good parents and that, to our knowledge, our father was certainly not a sexual abuser."

• 50:20Speaker 03

  They just didn't understand how a secret so monumental could have been kept when they were all in the same house.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  All the other siblings actually signed a joint letter denying anything to that fact, refuting the claims of the quints. I believe that it didn't happen, but who's to say?

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that must be, that must be a difficult thing to have circulating. You know, very divisive, I can only imagine, for a family.

• 50:59Speaker 04

  Oh, yes, it was, yeah. And you have to understand that to this family, due to what they were put through, the number five to them was like a number 13 to most families, considered unlucky.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  Brian remembers when his younger brother joined a junior ice hockey team.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  His name wasn't Dion, so nobody knew his relationship.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  What number do you think they gave him to wear playing for the North Bay Trappers?

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Five.

• 51:31Speaker 04

  My mother refused to go and watch him play hockey because he was wearing the number five. Extreme? Certainly. But that's the way it was with the family.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  Today, there's a Dion Quints Museum in North Bay, Ontario, inside the log house where the quintuplets were born. Brian lives nearby and leads tours there.

• 52:00Speaker 04

  I actually had a 94-year-old woman come up this summer. Her son drove her up from Colorado. And she was actually, she actually came up when she was three years old to see the quintuplets with her grandparents. Drove all the way up, expecting to play with them. And of course, she wasn't allowed to play with them. So she made a pilgrimage, so she called it, to come up and fulfill her, the one item on her bucket list for that. And she's not the only one.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Brian says another woman told them she visited because it was her own mother's dying wish. Sometimes the museum gets donations of vintage dolls and other quintuplets memorabilia people collected.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  In total, over 3 million people came to see the Dion Quintuplets at Quintland. You have to understand that it was in the Depression era, and it gave people a ray of hope, you know, something to, something to brighten their day.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  Annette Dion told The New York Times, "I think the museum staying in North Bay will help them from making foolish choices like what they did to us. It should never be repeated again." In 2016, Cécile told The Montreal Gazette that her son Bertrand, who'd been managing her money for her, had disappeared. Her money was gone, and she was made a ward of the state. Last year, she and Annette, the last surviving quintuplets, died. They were 91.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  To see the famous photo of Elzie or Dionne and the quintuplets on the day they were born, go to our Instagram at @criminal_podcast, or find us on Facebook at ThisIsCriminal. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajikko, Lilly Clark, Lena Silhison, and Megan Kinnane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Sarah Miller's book is The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne

• 54:54Speaker 02

  Quintuplets. You can find a link on our website. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spoor, talking about everything from how we make our episodes, to the crime stories that caught our attention that week, to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 56:06Speaker 05

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