Episode One: The Anna O Files Podcast

Written By Lex Brookman

The World Will Know Her Name (ft. The Swedish Refugee Phenomenon)

Here’s the full written transcript for Episode One of our podcast. All cited works will be listed below, along with the content warnings.

Hello listeners, and welcome to the first episode in a brand-new companion podcast series, to celebrate the sensational new thriller from Matthew Blake - I am, of course, talking about Anna O. My name is Lex, and I’ll be your host for the podcast.

Allow me to introduce our very own sleeping beauty, Anna Ogilvy - who hasn’t opened her eyes in four years. Not since that night at The Farm when she was found asleep with a kitchen knife in her hand, her clothes bloodstained, the bodies of her two best friends lying close by. She’d committed the crime of the century – but nothing and no-one could wake her from the nightmare.

For those of you who are new to the Anna O murder case, here are the facts…

It was 3.10 a.m. on the morning of August 30th, 2019, when Anna Ogilvy, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a senior shadow government minister and founding editor of the magazine Elementary, was found asleep in her cabin at a farmhouse retreat in Oxfordshire with a blood-soaked, twenty-centimetre kitchen knife. In the neighbouring cabin were the bodies of her best friends: Douglas Bute, twenty-six, and Indira Sharma, twenty-five.

Both victims were found dead at the scene, each with ten stab wounds. Anna’s fingerprints were the only ones found on the knife, and the victim’s blood was discovered on her clothes. A WhatsApp message on Anna’s phone contained a partial confession: ‘I’m sorry. I think I killed them.’ 

Despite numerous attempts to rouse the suspect, Miss Ogilvy remained asleep and unresponsive. 

All tests proved normal. She was alive. Her body was functioning. The mystery illness causing her deep sleep was impossible to identify. Four years later, Anna O is yet to open her eyes. 

Believers in Anna’s innocence call her ‘Anna O’. Believers in her guilt dubb her ‘Sleeping Beauty’. But no one can take their eyes off the story.

According to an online source, @suspect8, there’s a startling new development in the #AnnaO case. A sleep expert on London’s Harley Street, Dr Benedict Prince, has been called in at the eleventh hour to wake Anna for trial. We all wait with bated breath to see if he is successful…

But the question remains: in the court of public opinion, is Anna O guilty? Will she ever wake up, and if so, will she pay for her alleged crimes, or be free to kill again.

This is the premise of the thrilling new fictional novel by Matthew Blake, published by HarperCollins in 2024. Now before you relax thinking that this gruesome murder case I’ve just described is only make-believe let me correct you. The details of the Anna O case are actually based on some real-life and very creepy sleep cases and I was lucky enough to speak to Matthew Blake, the wicked wordsmith about the real-life crimes that inspired the creation of Anna O.

So Matthew, before we dive into the specifics that informed Anna O, let's talk about true crime in general.  Would you say you are a consumer of true crime?

It’s an invaluable resource for all thriller writers. I think it'd be rare to find a crime thriller writer who isn't fascinated by what's actually out there. And we're living in, really, a golden age for documentary making, particularly with Netflix and the way they've elevated the true crime documentary to a sort of art form, really. So yeah, huge consumer.

The most fascinating thing is always the sort of enemy within if you like. The person within a small community who is trying to bring harm to the small community, that's always the basis of every whodunnit effectively, that's the basis of every sort of true crime piece that really I think chimes with a lot of people because everyone lives in a community. Everyone in the world is made up of small blocks of people from families, to villages, to towns, to cities. So the most dangerous thing really is the idea of the enemy within, the idea that there's a could be a killer next door who looks just like you, acts just like you, you know, you have absolutely no idea of what's really going on in their lives. 

And I think that is particularly the conundrum that drew me to the idea of killing someone while you're sleepwalking is that it's again, it's sort of that idea  times 100 which is the person in front of you has their eyes open and looks totally conscious, but isn't. It's the mask, it's the fact that you cannot tell what's going on in their mind. The mind is the sort of great mystery about it all. And I think all great true crime stories have that to a degree but that anything with sleep walking or anything where someone's eyes are open, but they're not fully conscious has that to even greater extents. And that is that fundamental mystery of what's going on in someone else's mind.

The reason why I think crime thrillers are the most popular genre in the world, really, and why True Crime documentaries have such a hold is that it, you know, it goes back to the most elemental parts of being human, which is survival, which is someone within your own community, or people within your own community who are looking to damage or hurt other people. You know, it's the most fundamental part of being a parent or, you know, being responsible for someone, so it's always going to resonate extremely widely. So I think that's why these true crime cases do have such a sort of hold on our collective imagination, because they do sort of go down fundamentally to what it means to, to survive.

So on hearing that Anna O falls into a deep sleep for 4 years, my first reaction as a reader was to presume this was all make-believe, something you’d imagined as a work of fiction. But as I will discuss with Matthew next this deep sleep, coined as ‘resignation syndrome’, is actually scientifically true and something that has taken place real life. So let’s jump in to this shocking and terrifying case…

There's an article mentioned called The Trauma of Facing Deportation, which was published in 2017, in the New Yorker, and it details resignation syndrome, as we know it. Yes. 

So I'm  going to tell you a summation of the article. But the article will also be linked in the show notes, because there is obviously lots of important detail that I have missed here. And I would encourage you all to go and read it as and when you can.

This article details the horrific story of hundreds of young refugee children falling unconscious after being informed that their families were to be expelled from their current country of residence, where they had built lives, made friends and attended schools. 

It was a phenomenon dubbed ‘Uppgivenhetssyndrom’ or resignation syndrome, and - according to The New Yorker - was only said to exist in Sweden, and only in refugees. The Swedish referred to the sleeping children as ‘de apatiska’; the apathetic. 

In 2015, Georgi’s family were rejected by the Swedish board of Migration and told to leave - to go back to Russia. Upon receiving this news, Georgi - one of the only Swedish speakers in his family, retreated to bed. He was taken to hospital after four days of not eating and after not having spoken for a week. Upon admission to hospital, all of his reflexes were intact and his pulse and BP were normal. He showed no response to care- giving or even having a feeding tube inserted through his nose - a procedure which would have been uncomfortable at the least. 

Even though hundreds of children were experiencing this, the deportations continued.

Georgi’s neighbour, a Russian girl called Revekka, was given the diagnosis of ‘apathetic’ three years before Georgi just as her family were also rejected by the Migration Board. A friend of both families, Ellina Zapolskaia had practised medicine in Russia and was reported, upon Georgi’s first day in bed, to say that she “knew it was the same sickness” that Revekka had suffered from. 

After years had passed, a 76-page document on treating Uppgivenhetssyndrom advised that the patient would not recover until their families had been given permission to remain in Sweden. 

The Swedish Parliament passed a temporary act that gave thirty thousand people whose deportations were pending the right to have the Migration Board review their applications again. The board began allowing apathetic children and their families to stay.

Over a year later, and just two-weeks after hearing his Mother read a letter revealing a decision that allowed them to stay in Sweden, Georgi woke up. Of his experience, Georgi tells The New Yorker; that he felt as if he were in a glass box with fragile walls, deep in the ocean. If he spoke or moved, he thought, it would cause the glass to shatter. “The water would pour in and kill me,” he said.

“Never had ethics of compassion had such power, fed by vague historical guilt. This was about the whole image of Sweden - a country dripping in wealth but prepared to deport the most defenceless.” - Karin Johannisson; a Swedish historian.

So that is a hugely powerful story. And as I've said, the full version of it is in the show notes. So please do go and read it. 

Matthew, tell me how you came across that article, and the real life examples of resignation syndrome?

It all came out of the research and podcasts. And I got particularly fascinated by the idea of mystery illnesses. And there's been a series of great books written by the neurologist called Susanna Sullivan, who, if anyone is interested in mystery illnesses, or as she calls them functional neurological disorders, I'd recommend go and read her collection of books, because that I think there’s about three in total, where she has case studies of real life examples.

And as a mystery writer, you're always looking for real life things that have that inherent mystery in them. And obviously, a mystery illness has that sort of pre-packaged for you really because someone's displaying all these symptoms, but no one knows the cause. So I got fascinated by reading up about that.

In Susanna Sullivan's book, she talks about the children in Sweden, but also lots of other examples in Kazakhstan and other places in the world where the idea is that communities have lost hope. I thought that was fundamentally the sort of connective glue that seems to be true amongst all the communities where people have found resignation syndrome. And that struggle is just such a fascinating idea.

You know, I think I'm particularly interested in the sort of division between the brain and the mind and how even though we can explain a lot of things that happen in the brain, we are still quite clueless about the idea of the mind as a sort of bigger entity. And so, yeah, I just got very interested in resignation syndrome. That's when I came across the article in The New Yorker. That's where I came across all the other articles, obviously for my own professional purposes, the idea of someone falling into deep sleep. And the idea that that is actually scientifically true and that you can have a sort of mythic, deep sleep was just an extraordinary moment. 

When I found that that was true, because it seemed to me that you get a huge amount of that in myth or in fairy tales, the idea of communities falling into a deep sleep is there if you look for it, in some of the greatest stories ever written. So the idea that there were real life contemporary examples of this happening, and no one knew really what caused it, was just mind blowing for me, really. And that's what sort of sparked the whole, the whole book. 

But yeah, the more you get into it, and Susanna Sullivan, her book, she goes to all these communities, she interviews all the parents, she interviews some of the patients, some of whom have woken up, she goes into the background of these communities. And I mean, her end conclusion, in part, I think, is that you almost need to have a completely different understanding of the mind. And in terms of some ways medicine and the way in which the mind interacts. And that we're stuck in a very old fashioned model of a complete divide between sort of physical health and mental health. And people often talk about things like parity of esteem to try and get esteem between the two and she's sort of almost looking at the interaction of mental health and physical health, two separate things, but actually, one is impacting the other. So yeah, I think it's just it's a fascinating area, I can't begin to pretend that I have more than a, you know, a surface knowledge of it. And there are some real experts out there who know so much more than I do. 

But it is just mesmerising, when you get into it. 

You're so right. I think the thing that blew my mind the most in this project so far is that I was vaguely aware of, you know, medical mysteries and functional neurological disorders, on a silo basis on an individual, one person in one hospital having this thing that nobody quite understands. But it was really The New Yorker article that hammered home that this happens to societies, it happens to groups of people, that was the bit that truly I, you know, all of my medical knowledge that I've, you know, got from Grey's Anatomy, I was just like, I didn't even I couldn't even fathom how this could happen.

Yeah. And the idea that it can be contagious, or that there's all sorts of social things going on that again, just are beyond even the most trained even the most well qualified neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists. So it does, I think, in some ways, take you back to the start of psychology to Freud’s studies in this area to that idea that then those case stories he is investigating mysteries, either they lend themselves to that detective quality, where you're trying to go from symptoms to a cure, very much drawn, like a Sherlock Holmes short stories where he gets presented with the symptoms of a someone, and then he has to use his powers of deduction to go back and find the cure, ie the clue that reveals the truth.

So yeah, I think that is fascinating. And the study of the mind is fascinating. And I hope I get some of that flavour and texture and fascination that comes through in the book, I mean, and that people will go off and explore those things further.

Matthew makes a really interesting point just there about the division of mind and the psyche; something that’s a huge theme for resignation syndrome, and the case of Anna O. 

The principle question driving Anna O – which by the way will have you wanting to speak to everyone when you’re reading this book - is can you be guilty of a crime when you committed it in your sleep? Did Anna O really know what she was doing when she killed her two best friend whilst sleep walking – how can you ever be sure? And more terrifyingly can you ever truly know what you do in your sleep?

What is our mind in control of, and is our psyche something different? Here’s a snippet of another conversation I’ve had with Matthew where we discuss the case of Kenneth Parks, and the differences between actus rea and mens rea. 

So, in my understanding, and again, anybody who's listening, I have absolutely no qualifications. I have just read some things on the internet. That is my qualification. 

I think in my understanding the actus reus is did you or not, did you or did you not physically commit this crime, and the mens rea  is did you actually intend on committing this crime. And that intention is discussed a lot in the article While You Were Sleeping, just to give it its full kind of citation. It's from a magazine called Neuroethics. And it details the enigma of legal responsibilities of violence during parasomnia which in layman's terms is being violent while sleepwalking. Which is obviously highly important to the conundrum at the centre case for our Anna O.

How much weight did you give the legal research into this. We've talked a lot about the kind of medical side but when it becomes a crime, this act of violence obviously in the book, we've got some, some legal things to deal with. So where did you start on that one? 

My sort of writing principle that everything should be as accurate as it possibly can be. I got very interested in all that and hopefully ensured that that was all accurate. I think the book does reference a lot of real life cases of people who did stand trial having committed murder, citing the sleepwalking defense. There's famous cases all over the world, but particularly in the US and the UK. And the way in which people can end up with extremely different outcomes. You know, for some people the sleep walking automatism defense is accepted, and therefore they're not punished to the full extent of the law as in other cases, it's not believed at all, and then they are put in prison for a very long time. So I was, I mean, that disparity fascinated me the way in which juries clearly struggle to decide whether someone was sleep walking or they weren't sleep walking. There's, you know, that gives you two [sides]. Any dramatist or novelist is always looking for an argument that  has got compelling arguments on both sides, there's, there's shades of gray. And so I did a lot of research on that.

I mean, anyone who's interested, there is an amazing Wikipedia page, actually, with all this stuff which is cited in the book where you get a complete summary of all of this, and you can click through and see about all the real trials and find articles and things. But it's, it's terrifying in the sense that there's no consensus on it. But it's also fascinating because there's such disagreement amongst the experts. I mean, as far as I've been able to find out, they haven't decided quite what the answer should be. So, yeah, it really, really is fascinating.

 You're so right. When I was reading While You Were Sleepwalking, I was assuming that I would get to the end of the journal and then there would be a conclusion answer. This is the way that we run our legal decision making around this but there purely isn't. And one case that you do reference in the book that I would just like to read a little summary of now because I think it's really interesting is also cited in the While You Were Sleepwalking journal. 

On May 23 of 1987, Kenneth Parks rose from his bed and wandered out of his house to his car. He drove fourteen miles to the home of his mother-and-father-in-law. Upon arriving at their home he removed a tire iron from the back of the car and entered the house. He proceeded to beat his mother-in-law to death and choke his father-in-law. A blood-spattered mess, he then drove to the local police station, and in a disorientated, confused manner, he told the police he “thought” he killed someone. Though confused, he managed to identify his in-laws, murmuring that it was “all his fault.” Parks was tried for one charge of murder and one charge of attempted murder. His defence claimed that, during the entire episode, he was sleepwalking. And later, he was acquitted of all charges.

The article explains his being acquitted based on the fact that he was incredibly stressed, because at the time, he was also facing charges for an entirely separate embezzlement trial. 

Which I think if we were thinking about this as a TV show, because that is what the predominance of our readers will have experience of, nobody, I hope has experienced something like this in their own lives. So think of it as a TV show. If Kenneth was a character, who was separately being investigated for embezzlement, and then also happened to kill his mother in law and attack his father in law, you would say, No, he's lying. He unfortunately committed both of these crimes. But this article is stating that the amount of mental stress that a person can be under can dramatically change who you are, whilst you're awake and whilst you're asleep. 

Kenneth and his family actively described, he has absolutely no reason to dislike his in-laws, there was nothing in Kenneth's history that would have ever pointed towards this behaviour, and especially this behaviour towards his in-laws. 

So the fact that this happened, and even then the fact that he was acquitted for it is absolutely wild.

Yeah, and I think I mean, that, again, was one of the issues that I looked at in the book about what triggers sleep walking, say, for instance, alcohol does, or can do, and to what extent people who are sleepwalk because if they drink heavily or if they are, you know, to what extent again, can you look at the idea of culpability: is there no culpability, is there some culpability. And this discussion goes right back to someone like Aristotle, there's a quote from him about how culpable people might be if they have a sleeping disorder. So it's nothing new in some ways, but it's still a fascinating issue. 

You know, I mean, what might we do when we sleep but then what might we do to cause us not to sleep? You know, what might we be doing that brings on these episodes and how responsible are we for doing those things to bring the episodes to life in a sense. I mean, I don't think there are any answers but it',s there are just amazing questions and the book just tries to ask those questions really and but always within the context of the really shocking real life cases that have actually happened and you just don't need to make them up because they're all there. I mean, they're all the far more shocking than I could dream of.

So at this point, I know that Matthew is a huge research-buff. But how did Anna O, come from all of this reading, and researching? Here, I ask him about Bertha Pappenheim - the only thing to come from a Google Search for ‘ANNA O’ in the summer of 2023. 

The original inspiration for the name Anna O, and for that whole area came because I was listening to an interview with someone who'd written a book about Freud's patients. So the real life patients who got well, semi fictionalised, really in his case studies and given these pseudonyms, these famous names like Anna O or The Wolf Man, or The Rat Man. 

Trying to find out whether the real life person really bore much correspondence with how Freud and Breuer represented them. And I thought that was fascinating. So I thought to serve someone like Bertha Pappenheim, to be famous and to become sort of almost infamous, but under someone else's pseudonym for you. 

So Anna O is what she's called. It's the first case study in Freud and Breuer’s very famous book Studies in Hysteria, which was the sort of start of the psychoanalytic method, and really almost the start of psychology full stop, if you like. And basically, it's a series of case studies, they're written a bit like detective stories, almost psychological detective stories, where patients have these symptoms and Freud and Breuer are trying to figure out what causes them. What they call the Biography of a Psychosis, so you know, they give each of their patients a catchy pseudonym, and disguise their identity. 

And yeah, with Bertha Pappenheim it's this idea of hysteria in the late 19th Century.

 All women at this stage displaying signs which no doctor can diagnose, what is the cause of it. And Freud and Breuer come in and develop their talking cure, and basically therapy, as we would now understand it as a way to probe the mysteries of the mind. So I thought Anna O was such an iconic name that I shamelessly stole it. But actually, it's the case, the structure of those case stories, which also was hugely inspiring in the book, there are case notes about Patient X, which were directly inspired by the way these case studies are presented, and presenting it as a mystery, you know, presented the, who is this person? Who's the reality behind the pseudonym? And how do you investigate the mysteries of what's going on in their head?

Matthew, how did you decide what to include and what to leave out especially with your passion of making everything as true to life as possible?

Well, I mean it all had to be in service of the story, I mean it's a thriller, the chapters are very short, the scenes are very quick, I want the reader to be absolutely thrilled and entertained and you  know reading the entire book in a single sitting ideally. So everything had to service that and I hope I wouldn't put anything in that would ever get in the way of the reader's experience.

It's like a dressing on a salad or something, it's simply to add flavour, to make it nicer, to make it more real, to enhance the reader's experience. I mean, it's not an non fiction book, it's not a study of all these cases in that case, it's a fantastic pacy story, I think as with all great thrillers that I enjoy you want to learn something as well, and I think all the great thrillers if you think about them in history have always been rooted in real threats, real danger, real things, and there's nothing more dangerous, nothing more threatening than the enemy being your own mind, effectively, the weird process of your own head, and so that's what explored in all these cases and that's why they’re referenced.

Yeah, it must be kind of a true crime obsessive's dream to be able to get lost in all of this research but then also a very important writers tool because you have written a character who is a forensic sleep expert, you've written characters who are journalists who need to know all this information. So the fact that you have to do the research is both a pro and con… 

Yeah, well again I mean a lot of the real life stuff comes from either Ben who is the sleep expert or Anna when she is investigating these pieces in her notebook so again it is all in the service of the character to be more authentic to the character themselves. I mean I’m sure we’ve all read books. It's a sort of pet hate of thriller readers, when you read a thriller where a character is meant to be an expert on something or meant to have some sort of knowledge but it seems as if they don’t know more than the average reader. It just doesn't feel credible, it sort of undermines the menace and credibility of the book. 

So I desperately didn’t want that to happen. If you have a forensic sleep expert they should know a lot about sleep and if you've got a really good investigative journalist who is writing a piece that will make their career; they should be pretty tenacious in hunting down the stories and finding out the truth. So I think everything in it is always governed by the characters and what's true to them as a character. 

How did you curate your research down to where you wanted to be?

Well, it was a challenge, because I mean, there's so much amazing stuff out there. I mean, you could spend your entire life and indeed people do spend their entire lives researching sleep and sleep crime. But I think I turned it to my advantage in some ways, in the sense that because there's such a wealth of information out there, you can pick all the most interesting things for a thriller writer to use and put them together. So in some ways, I felt the volume of material was a great bonus, really, rather than getting sort of submerged within a book list. So yeah it was fantastic really, and there's so many great things out there, a lot of it's very accessible, if you're not a sort of trained neurologist, and there's lots of, everyone's so interested in sleep, that there's lots of books written for the general reader. And I think I said, I think, episode one, which is that I love thrillers that are so real, that you don't know where the fiction comes in. And that was my aim here to make it so real, to make it so authentic, that you can't tell where I've made something up. So if that sends people down lots of research rabbit holes and gets them thinking about their own sleep and what's possible then I think the book has done its job.

I’m so excited because in the next few weeks we are going to introduce our Anna O Readalongers to all these characters with their knowledge and their backstories and what happens when they come together. I'm so excited, I almost can’t wait. I feel like, well, you've obviously been waiting a lot longer because you wrote the book. 

It is the exact [type of]  book that when you finish it you have to talk to someone about it.

Exactly, that was always the aim, that was what I hoped to do, all the readers who got early proof copies said everyone has something to say about their own sleep stories and their own sleep psychology. What they, their partners, their children, their parents the things they've been battling with,I think it turns out that we are a world of closet sleepwalkers, I think it's something that people don’t  talk about but believe me when you get them talking people don't stop so I think it's something that's absolutely there and I hope this book will get everyone talking about it.


If you’d like to be one of the first to get into this propulsive, powerful novel about the case of a young woman who commits murder in her sleep, then you can order Anna O now, from the links in our show notes, and in the transcripts which always available on our website thetandemcollective.co.uk

Make sure you ‘follow’ our podcast to ensure you receive a notification when our next episode goes live, where we’ll have even more insight into the world of Anna O - just for you.

Content Warnings for THE ANNA O Podcast. and the book itself:

Murder

Psychosis / Therapy / Psychotherapy

Suicide

Death

Hospitals

Poisoning

Death of a Child 

Imprisonment 

Refugee Crisis 

Alcohol Dependency 

Drug Addiction 

True Crime / Consumption of True Crime

Lex Brookman
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Episode Two: The Anna O Files Podcast