March 27, 2025 • 39 mins
In this special crossover episode, author and podcast host Andrea Dunlop sits down with Andrea Gunning for a deep dive into the true crime genre. It’s an unflinching conversation about the responsibility of telling real people’s stories, the limits of media, and what it’s like reporting on a story that hits close to home.
Check out There and Gone: South Street, Andrea Gunning’s investigation into the 20-year disappearance of Richard Petrone and Danielle Imbo.
You can find Andrea Dunlop’s podcast, Nobody Should Believe Me, on all platforms. Her first nonfiction book, The Mother Next Door, is available now.
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi, it's Andrea Gunning. Last week, we shared Andrea Dunlop's story.
On this week's episode, Andrea and I sit down for
a conversation about true crime podcasting.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
We get into what this work means for.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Us and how we approach these stories.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
We hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Andrea, thank you so much for joining me. I'm a
listener and also a huge fan of Nobody Should Believe Me,
which is your show, and you know, we just shared
your story on Betrayal Weekly, and I'm just so glad
our two shows are collaborating because I think that Munchausen
by Proxy, which is what you cover in your show,
(00:56):
shares a lot.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
In common with Betrayal.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Earlier, we were joking that this conversation is kind of
like the Andrea Andrea True Crime Summit, but that's really
what it feels like. So I'm hoping we can really
compare notes about what it's like working in this space.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yeah, I'd love to start off with just your background.
How did you get into being a true crime podcaster?
Speaker 1 (01:19):
You know, I often joke that I am a recovering
TV executive, and so I hail from the TV space,
but I work for a company called Glass Entertainment Group,
and we specialize in reality TV and documentaries. And for
about seven and a half eight years, I was overseeing
our business department, so I was the executive in charge
(01:42):
of production, So I did all the boring things in TV,
which is like the budget, the financing, like.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
All the hard stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
And my colleague Ben and I were constantly working through
legal deals with our development department, and we were seeing
great stories getting passed by TV executives and networks. When
one story that came across our desk, we were working
(02:10):
with Kim Goldman, who is the sister of Ron Goldman
who was murdered by OJ Simpson, and we were trying
to sell something in TV with her, but a lot
of TV networks weren't interested in the project unless OJ
was involved, or OJ was attached, or we could guarantee
an interview with OJ. And this was back when OJ
was still living I think he had just gotten out
(02:32):
of prison and was living in Vegas at the time.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
But my colleagues and I really.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Believe that there was a story here even without OJ's voice,
So we decided to make it a podcast, and instead
of telling the OJ Simpson story, we told the story
of people who lived it, and so that's how we
got started in the podcast space.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
That's a great answer. I mean I really see like
that imprint for the work you've done after for that,
you know, and also that just really plugs into what
I think is interesting about true crime stories, which is
the sort of long tail of them and the way
that they impact the people who are pulled into them.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
So one of the things you're known for is your
work on Betrayal and now Betrayal Weekly. How did you
come to that story that was the first season of Betrayal.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
It's all kind of related. So Jen Fason is the
subject of season one in her marriage and how the
marriage unraveled. But she works in television. She's in a
television executive producer, so we kind of are in the
same universe. And Jen had heard confronting oj Simpson and
reached out to her agent, and her agent reached out
(03:53):
to me and my colleague Ben for an initial conversation.
But the universe has an interesting way of working because
at this time, I was getting out of a relationship,
I had moved out of my boyfriend's house. I had
discovered a lot of deception, not to the magnitude that
Jen had, and I was kind of recovering from understanding
(04:15):
like why was I in this relationship?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Why was I ignoring a lot of signs?
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Was I ignoring it or was it like, you know,
all of these questions that were coming to the surface.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So it was like I was meeting Jen at the
perfect time.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I couldn't relate to the magnitude of what Jen was
going through, but I knew, like as it was like
I don't even want to say as a woman, as
a woman, but as a human being, I understood the
pain when she pitched me her story, I understood her
anger and her confusion, and I felt like this emotional
access and I thought, if we could maybe do something
(04:53):
with that, people will relate and maybe heal. And so
just that relatability and that timing of it just so
happened to work out.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Yeah, that's amazing, And I think that that shows up
in the quality of the season and just the emotional
depth of it. And I'm really interested in what you
said about this idea of not coming from a place
of anger. This is a really complicated part of interviewing
(05:25):
people about these stories, right because they have every right
to be angry. You have every right to want to
even go on a sort of revenge journey, but doing
that on a podcast is not actually helpful to anyone, right,
It's not helpful for the listener. It's not really ethical
(05:46):
to sort of try and get someone in that energy,
even if it can be compelling.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
In its own right.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
And I have the same sort of thing when I
talk to folks who are often dealing with really extreme
betrayals and then on top of that, you know, the
abuse to them or abuse to their children or children
that they care about, and it's I think, really important
to make sure that someone is ready to have that conversation.
(06:13):
It was important to me, you know. I started off
with telling my own story in the first two seasons
of the show kind of bit by bit, and I
sort of revisited pieces of it from time to time,
but like I had to wait, you know, a decade
until I was ready to talk about it. I was like,
(06:34):
it's such a vulnerable thing, and it's such a vulnerable
thing to put out there and then have people react to.
There are so many points along this journey where getting
on a mic would have been the absolute wrong choice
for me, right, and I think there's also like the
expectation setting, because if you're talking about a case where
it's either an unsolved case, or it's a case where
(06:56):
there wasn't a good outcome, or it's a case where
like the person you're talking to wants some action to
be taken by authorities, that's not something that we can
make happen.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Can't always guarantee, right.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
And like so I think that that's also like a
really tricky part of it of making sure that who
I'm talking to you, like, Yes, we're gonna put all
this out there, and I think people are going to care.
I think people are going to get something out of it.
They're going to learn something important, They're going to relate
with this experience. I hope you get a deep personal
Catharsis from sharing this. But like the cavalry is unlikely
to mount up because unfortunately that's just not often how
(07:34):
it works, And this may not end with the answers.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah, and that was my worry producing There and Gone,
which came out this past summer in twenty twenty four.
And I have to give iHeart a lot of credit
because we pitched them this story and there wasn't an
ending and we couldn't guarantee that we would find or
solve this case. And so you're taking a lot of risk,
and then the partnerships that you with distributors are also
(08:01):
taking a lot of risk for what's the payoff? You know,
what's the audience going to leave thinking? Are they going
to walk away feeling satisfied? And you know, these are
people like we're studying, and we're exploring stories of people
and their loss and their trauma and their grief, and
(08:21):
so we're not always going to get a payoff that
makes sense to everybody. You know, I like telling stories
that really show the complexity of the human experience, and
I think they'rein Gone is an example of that.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
Yeah, can you can you kind of give us a
give us an intro to the case and how you
got interested in it.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Sure, it's the story of Richard Patron and Danielle Imbo
twenty years ago to thirty somethings just literally vanished off
of South Street in Philadelphia, which is basically like the
Bourbon Street of Philadelphia, the busiest place for nightlife. They
were seen leaving a bar and then never seen again.
(09:03):
And the until this day, no one knows what happened.
Was in an accident? Was it murdered for hire? And
so I remember this because I was, I think a
senior in high school. And it was terrifying because one
of the victims his parents have a bakery that I
grew up going to, and both of their families look
(09:24):
so much like mine in different ways. They do Sunday dinner.
I come from an Italian family. We do Sunday dinner,
you know, they gamble on Sunday or for football bets,
like I'm wearing my Eagles jersey, like this feels like
this could be my own cousin. This happened too, so
it was very personal to me. And so it was
just this loss that kind of reverberated throughout our entire
(09:46):
community and continues because how do two people in their
mid thirties just vanish, just literally into thin air. And
when we were exploring doing the story, I thought the
families would be very interested, but we would struggle with
law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
But then I soon realized that.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
The FBI really needed our help because the FBI knows
that the more coverage it can get of this case,
more people will be able to like call in and
feel like, let me just do my part. Let me
twenty years later. I'm just gonna do it. I'm just
gonna make the phone call. I'm going to say what
I know and be done with it. And I live
(10:32):
in this city, and there are parts of this city
where this crime isn't a big question mark. There are
parts of the city, the neighborhoods in this city where
people know exactly what happened or they feel like it's
a fact. They communicate it like it's affect.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I know who did it, I know why it's done.
Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Like, how a whole neighborhood in one city there's like
this understood rumor of what happened to two random people
that have no connection. How was the neighborhood in which
I lived?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
So to me, it was.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Like, I just want to help these families. You know,
we didn't solve the crime yet, but there was enough
people that actually wrote into the FBI for them to
reopen in assign new agents. So I feel like I
did my job.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Hell yeah, I mean that's amazing. And I think this
is one of the most interesting parts of working in
the true crime sphere and why it's so important to
like take this job seriously and be really responsible. Is
because it does have real world impacts. And yeah, I
mean this question of law enforcement's like, so the case
(11:40):
that I'm working on right now for our next season
is one that I am hoping that some action will
happen on. How realistic that is, who knows, but I
do think that it is and can be a powerful
tool to getting law enforcement involved. And that can be
the kind of thing where you get, you know, political
(12:02):
will for a local prosecutor to actually file charges on
something where they might not otherwise. You can you know,
get people who are making those decisions at the police
department to assign some extra muscle to it. You can
you know, flush out some new information from the community.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Well, the first thing that just to interject, I think
one of the biggest things that I feel like we
both you know, betrayal, trauma and deception is one thing
your show covers factitious disorder, and although they're very different,
there's so many commonalities between people who you know, live
(12:40):
through or have a relationship with Munchausen's and Munchausen's by proxy,
and people who experience deception and betrayal. The topics we
cover on betrayal are extreme, but sadly they're not uncommon. Yeah,
And in season three we really focus on and male
(13:01):
sexual abuse and we learn that one in six men
have experienced this issue. But the really scary reality is
it actually is probably more, but it just goes unreported
because of the stigma around it. And I just feel
like these are two taboo issues, you know, Munchausen syndrome
(13:26):
by proxy, and to take that seriously and talk about
it to help dismantle that stigma, it's such a large hurdle. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
No, that's a really good point. And we've definitely learned
a lot from the progress that has been made around
child sex abuse, which I think it still is underreported.
I think most people except that child sex abuse is
real and not rare. Yeah, certainly anybody that's informed on
the topic knows that, But I think that did not
(13:56):
always used to be that way, right, And it was
seen as this like stranger danger type of aberration, you know,
one in a million sort of thing that happened, and
then our society grappling with it sort of went through
some interesting hurdles along the way, a major one being
the Satanic panic, where you have all these stories about
(14:18):
you know, daycare workers and underground you know, the McMartin
case and all these like underground tunnels, which my take
on it is that that was society grappling with something
that we really really didn't want to look at, which
is child sex abuse, and that actually it was easier
and more comforting to think that it was satanic daycare workers,
(14:40):
because that's a problem that you can ostensibly solve. But
I think it's more comforting to think that there's some
evil system that you can kind of shut down than
it is to confront the reality, which is that this
is boy scout leaders, priests, coaches, dads, uncles who are
doing this right. So it's most likely to be someone
(15:02):
that that child knows, and it's not going to be
someone who is an obvious creep all the time. And
it's so similar with Munchausen. And that's where we get
into kind of the hullabaloo that happened around the Maya
Kwalski case with the film Take Care of Maya and
a lot of the coverage that really followed in lockstep
with that, where they presented it as a medical kidnapping case.
(15:24):
Medical kidnapping is our satanic panic. Essentially, it's like, you
know this idea that doctors are just separating families, right, Like,
doctors don't make those decisions. Doctors evaluate abuse. It's a
legitimate subspecialty. There's just so much disinformation around that. And
the Maya Kwalski case was sort of the most high
profile one. But I think that there's a similar dynamic
(15:46):
going on there, and certainly with Munchausen biproxy, it's not
a one in a million thing. I think the behavior
is a longest spectrum, but I think it's far more
common and getting worse because of social media, because of
which I would assume actually if some of the behaviors
that I'll talk about on betrayal in this sort of
more male deception and cheating and that kind of thing,
like you're talking to Spencer Heir in case, like social
media has given people unfettered and unlimited access to attention,
(16:12):
and you know, I think it was doctor Romani says
in the TV series like, Oh, that's the dangerous combination, right,
attention seeking plus lack of empathy. I mean that is
exactly how you describe Munchausen biproxy behaviors. And so I
think there's every reason to believe that it's getting worse,
and that is a scary world to live in. I
hate to be the one to break this to you,
(16:33):
but like the world is not what you thought. That
mom of the sick child, who's raising money on GoFundMe
and seems like the most heroic mother you've ever met,
could be the scariest person you've ever met. And so
I think that's why these conspiracy theories around medical kidnapping
(16:53):
get traction because the reporting on it is very thin.
Child abuse professionals do not make good money. Child abuse
pediatrics is a highly trained and not well paid some specialty.
They get trashed in the media, they get accused of
snatching babies. I mean, it's not for the faint of heart.
And also just like that work, like doing that frontline
(17:14):
work of rushing to the hospital to see a child
that's been abused is obviously emotionally grueling work. There isn't
any scenario where you could make it make sense that
doctors just want to do that. It's a nightmare for
the hospitals. The hospitals can get sued, you know, it's
like there's no motivation. But I think the reason those
stories still take off in the media. Is that people's
(17:36):
discomfort around the reality of this abuse is so so deep.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Something that we're constantly confronting in true crime is having
to tell these hyperbolic versions of true crime stories when
in reality, the more relatable and important ones are the
ones that are kind of in the every day I
remember when we were covering Ashley Linton's case in Riverton,
Utah for Betrayal season two, you reached out to IKAC,
(18:19):
which is in Internet Crimes Against Children's task Force that
every state has, and I remember one of the task
force members asked, why are you covering this case like
I deal with, you know, perpetrators that are ten times
worse than Jason Linton. Why this one? And my response was,
(18:42):
I don't want the hyperbolic version see Sam case. You know,
I want to meet people in a very average, everyday
story because that's actually what's happening. And so I feel
like that's the same for a lot of these mothers
who are if they're on the new it's like this
monster of a mother that did this, and it's like,
(19:05):
you know, we have to hear about the extremes instead
of leaning into the reality of what's happening.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
Yeah, I mean I became a media outlet because I
was so fed up with the way that media was
covering this case, right. And it's been interesting over the
last few years, as I've kind of jumped first, I
guess I've noticed that awareness is increasing, especially because of
the Gypsy ros blanterd case, which was so high profile.
I do think that there's more of a conversation happening
(19:32):
than there was five years ago. But you know, there
was like so much reticence to talking about it. Like
I remember when my novel came out, and like I
had written like an essay for it and that got
killed at the last minute, and there was just like
a lot of like no, no, no, no no. If
there's not a conviction, you can't talk about it. And
I was like, if we're not talking about the cases
where there aren't convictions, then we're not talking about the problem, right,
(19:55):
Like when you get into the extremes and allow people
to put it at arm's length, that person is a monster,
that person is a psychopath, that like I would see
coming and this would never happen to me, and that's
not reality. And I think that was why for me
it was so important to talk about my own experience
(20:15):
because the other thing that we do with perpetrators of crimes,
especially if it's something where it just feels so like deeply, deeply,
deeply wrong, we often say, oh, well, that person must
have had a horrible child, that person must have been
abused as a child. There must be some like dots
I can connect. And I think that that's part of
the let me tell myself a story about this that
(20:37):
makes me feel safe, right where, like, as long as
XYZ doesn't happen in my family, we won't end up
with one of these perpetrators in our family. And that's
just not the case, right. I mean, my sister did
not by anybody else's you know, nobody else witnessed anything
dramatic happening to her. You were not raised an abusive household. Like,
it's not something where oh there's some straight line that
(20:59):
you can draw. And I think that's really uncomfortable for people.
I think people really want to believe that something awful
has to happen to a person to make them like this,
and I don't think that's true. I think it is
that combination of lack of empathy and need for attention
(21:20):
that really can supercharge these behaviors totally.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
I think one of the things that I also felt
was really relatable. And the circumstances are so different, but
just knowing your sister's story and having to go in
front of the judge in family court, like you're dealing
with family court and criminal court are two separate things.
(21:48):
And the issues that I've seen a lot of the
women that I deal with on betrayal having to navigate
the criminal side and once that's over and you know,
the father of their children are released, then they're dealing
with family court either in their divorce or child support
(22:08):
or dealing with visitation. It is a whole other ball
of wax where parents have a ton of rights rightfully so,
but they're in situations.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Where kids are at risk.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
It's a really scary system because they are two separate entities.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Yeah, and I think that that's something that the vagaries
of that like really is lost on people that have
not had to interact with these systems. And I think
people here and a lot of this again when I'm
talking about like you know, my Kicks and Bogs work
for NBC and his whole Duno harm series, like a
lot of this is I think intentionally created a confusion
where it'll be like courts said, doctors disagree, Like courts said,
(22:52):
you know, uh, this and that right, and you're like, okay,
which court under what circumstances like give me more information?
Right yep, And everything goes to the family court first
because those are less you know, those investigations take less
time than the criminal investigation. So we end up in
a lot of situations where the family court gives the
children back during an active criminal investigation, which just I
(23:15):
think sounds insane, but that happens all the time. Likewise,
you know, there's this thing of like, well, doctors at
this hospital said this, but other doctors disagree, without ever
mentioning that those other doctors are people who were hired
as expert witnesses by the parent defending themselves. Right, important information,
And like, I think people don't realize that the courts
(23:37):
don't take the steps that you would think in the
face of a criminal conviction to like limit that person's
access to their own children. Like for instance, you know,
we just had a case that we were talking on
the show at the Jessica Jones case in Texas where
she got a sixty year prison sentence, and the courts
did not perminate her parental rights and so now the
(23:59):
dad has to pay to do that. So just the
onus that ends up on a protective parent in any
child abuse situation, I think people have no idea what
that looks like, or just people don't realize how easy
it is actually to get access to children. Again.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah, in the case of Stacy Rutherford and Tyler from
season three of Betrayal, I think the courts got it right.
So for people that don't know, Stacy was married to
a man named Justin and he was a doctor in Rudding, Pennsylvania.
She had two children in a previous marriage and then
(24:37):
met Justin and they got married. They had two kids
of their own, and he was by all accounts, a
great husband, an incredible doctor, beloved by his community. Turns
out that he was abusing Stacy's son from her first marriage,
his step son since he was eleven and t Tyler
(25:00):
didn't disclose until he was I want to say seventeen,
so a long time.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Yeah, And you.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Know, Justin also tried to hire a hitman while he
was in prison to murder Tyler so that he wouldn't
testify in court, which is what we cover in season
three of Betrayal, And what the judge did is not
only did he get he'll be basically in jail for
the rest of his life. I don't want to miss
(25:29):
quote what a sentencing was, but he isn't allowed to
speak to his biological children or have any contact with
the family until he's done his probation, basically for the
rest of his life. And so I remember talking to
(25:50):
Stacy and Tyler and then feeling like really complicated emotions
because they deeply love justin like the person that they
knew as a he being like Tyler loved his stepdad,
but then there was the monster, the abuser.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
They were two different people to him. And that was a.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Scenario where the court really contemplated a lifetime of abuse
and grooming and narcissistic behavior and just got.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
It and knocked it out of the park.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
And I was like, heck, yeah, like this is a
Pennsylvania Like I was really proud. So yeah, like sometimes
we talk about things getting wrong, like that was a
scenario where I think the court's got it right.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
And it's you know, it's so complicated, and I think
it kind of goes back to this question of once
you have identified a person as this type of abuser,
where it has so much in common mantell'st my proxy
with with child sex abuse, where it is, you know,
an extremely compulsive behavior. It's one of those things where
(26:54):
again I think like and I think we can more
easily recognize it in child sex abuse cases where it's like, Okay,
if you cross that line with a child, you're not
a safe adult period. Like if you're capable of doing that,
like you know whether or not you should be thrown
in jail for the rest of your life or we
should do something else with you. It's sort of a
separate question. But like, you are not a print. That's
why we put people on registries. That's why we say
(27:15):
they can't go in your schools. Like we have no
such attitude towards much as my proxy perpetrators. There is
this idea that it is like some mental illness that
people are sort of quote suffering from, and much like
child sex abuse, there is an underlying psychiatric disorder. In fact,
to disorder imposed on another. It's very similar to pedophilic disorder,
which is also in the DSM, also very challenging to treat.
(27:38):
Also very you know, unlikely that a perpetrator will take
enough accountability to be treated for it, and it doesn't
reduce someone's culpability. And it's like a very complicated thing
that happens when like children always want their parents. That's
such a biological drive for kids, that's a survival mechanism.
Even if their parent is not capable of life them
(28:00):
or being safe with them, like, they will always kind
of have this longing. So you can have a situation
where someone is separated from their parent and then they
really really really idealize that parent and don't then protect themselves.
I mean, it's really complicated. And then for survivors that
have fully processed the abuse, so are not going that
direction of saying this didn't happen to me, right fully
(28:21):
understand fully process the abuse. I mean, we saw Joe
in our four season really struggling with this with their mom.
Of like they totally recognize what their mom did to them,
and they understand a lot about the dynamics and they
still love that person. And I mean, I would say
most of the survivors I know are either low contact
or no contact. But it's really complicated to navigate that relationship.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
We're working on a case for season four of the
Trial at this woman out of Colorado's Springs. She was
with her husband for twenty years. She lived like a
typical American life. She thought that she was just basically
living like the suburban dream. And I won't give all
the details because we.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Air in May.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
But things unravel and the family is torn apart, and
she has to look back on twenty years and basically
readjust her sense of reality because he shares things, discloses
things that completely alters core memories in her life where
(29:40):
she's living and thinks one thing is happening, where there's
another almost like parallel universe where he's operating, and she
has to hold both realities at the same time. She
often says, perception is my reality, and that really is true.
And I remember, because I had li into your first
(30:02):
season so long ago. I was like, let me listen
to this again, like you know, Hope's family and then
your family. I was thinking about you guys, and like
you having to look back, like once things became clearer
to you or things were coming into focus, how are
you looking back on that time? And how painful was
(30:24):
it to try to merge what you thought you were
experiencing and then the reality that you now learned. It's
just it feels like those memories start to hold on
to you in a way that you're like, I don't even.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Know what to do.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Yeah, I mean, it's a really profound part of the experience.
And I think when people, you know, people like to
throw the word gaslighting, I know, as like, you know,
it's sort of this like pop psychology term, but I
think like when you really have gone through like gaslating
to my mind is like someone is systematically making you
doubt your perception of reality, and you know, it's extremely
(30:59):
disorb and it's sort of its own whole thing to
recover from. And certainly for me, you know, given that
my sister is in my whole life growing up and
is in my earliest memories and it was a huge
part of my childhood, I mean very close in age.
She's my only sibling, it really breaks your brain for
a while.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Right, and now you're estranged.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
You guys haven't talked in over a decade.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Yeah, this is now fourteen years. This has been in
my life and I've really gone through different stages of
processing it. And it was like very clear that like this, okay,
this is permanent. And then I sort of started to
think about it as a death. I started to think
about it as there was a person that I grew
up with that I love, that I had these experiences with.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
And she died.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
I came to a new understanding of it, which is
that that person that I thought I knew was probably
never there and it was always a mask, and that
the parts of her that I experienced as being loving
and being connected were just a person like mimicking those behaviors.
(32:16):
And that was a really painful revelation. It was much
easier to think of her as a person that I
loved and was there and died, but I think it
was a really necessary one. So then there's the question
of like what do you do with all those memories?
And the way that I frame it, and when I
see other people struggling with is what I hope people
can come to eventually is a place that I think
(32:38):
I finally arrived at after a lot of work.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Which is.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
My experiences were still real. Like I loved my sister,
I had fun with her growing up, I had a
happy childhooded with her. You know, those memories are my
memories and at the end of the day, it was real.
It was real for me, So I get to keep them.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Yeah, Like I'm a twin and so you know, my
relationship with my sister, next to having my own children,
that's the most important relationship in my life always will be.
Like I entered the world with her, It did every
fundamental first with her. I can imagine losing my sister
(33:25):
or not being able to share in critical moments. It's
a profound loss, that relationship with a sister.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
It is. And I think, like I'm sure that you
get so many emails and messages from people listening to
the Betrayal shows that like relate with that experience and
see themselves in that, And I think there can be
such there's healing and making that content, there's healing and
listening to it. Listening to the betrayal shows has helped me.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Again, it's the complexity of the human experience. That's kind
of like our driving force that Glass podcast and what
we do with betrayal. You guys have that in your
DNA too, Like I've heard it and it's been evident
in every season that you guys be one.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Well, I really appreciate that means a lot coming from you,
and I similarly really respect what you guys do over
there at Glass And I think, you know, I know
how much this can mean to people as listeners, and
navigating the pitfalls of how exploitative true crime can be
is a huge job.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Yeah, I know, y'all.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Take it seriously because I know you're behind the scenes process.
And I hope that we together can set a new
standard in this industry because I think it really needs
to happen.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Yeah, I was giving iHeart credit. I kind of give
Hulu an ABC so much credit. I mean, this is
like a big platform and some of these stories are
really hard to tell, and it's time where people like
afraid to go there. I'm like really impressed. I mean
season three is tough, but they saw a landscape. I
(34:55):
mean this past year, the Menendez brothers were all over
the place.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
I was thinking about that when you're saying you guys
are tackling this, I was like, this is a really
good time. Because we did like a little thing on
our Patreon about that case because I was like, oh,
this just feels so germane like, especially talking about you know,
because obviously the Gypsy Rose Blantern case. There's a lot
of parallels there, right where you have someone who's an
abuse victim who commits a crime, and like, how do
(35:20):
you talk about that? How do you think about that?
And I think just the we were talking about how
the discomfort around male sexual abuse in particular weighed so
heavily on that court case.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Absolutely, and for them to see that people are actually
open to hearing about that and discussing that and just
really sitting with that and taking Tyler and Stacy's story
and pursuing that for the Hulu documentary is really exciting
(35:53):
because it's only going to help dismantle the stigma around
this issue. And I'm really proud to work with partners
like that. I truly am. Yeah, that's that's incredible. I'm
so I'm glad that they're supporting it. Something that is
very special about podcasting, like podcasting feels.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
Like a medium where you can take a lot of risks. Yeah,
someone has to go first, so I think like having
a proof of concept with the podcast like that certainly
helps TV folks make good decisions of like, Okay, there's
an audience for this, so maybe it is worth taking
a little bit more of a risk.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
It's a safer landing.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Yeah, exactly exactly, it's all it all works works together.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
So your book that just came out, this is your
first like intro to nonfiction, right or do I have
that wrong? No?
Speaker 3 (36:39):
This, yep, this is my first nonfiction book. The other
four our novels. And it's very funny because people are
always like with the book or with the show, they're like,
oh my god, I love your show. I mean not
because like you know, I know. It's like it's like
they're trying to tell me like, oh, not because I
love child abuse. I'm like, it's no, I know, I
understand what you're saying. And it's like, right, of course,
Like I want people to be engaged with the storytelling.
(37:00):
I want them to connect to that. They're not going
to care about it unless they are connecting to the story,
and unless they are staying engaged with the story, right,
And like, obviously we take it really seriously. Obviously we
do the utmost to tell things ethically, but like you
also have to have a good story, Yeah for sure.
(37:21):
Well this was amazing. We just got like straight in
the defend, which I love. I could talk to you
for hours.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Andrea, thank you so much for coming on our show
and sharing your story with us.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Next week, we're sharing the first episode in Andrea's latest
season of Nobody Should Believe Me. It's about Sophie Hartman,
a mother who adopted two girls from Zambia, but the
story takes a tragic turn when one of her daughters
becomes terribly ill. So stay tuned and we'll be back
next week with that episode. If you would like to
(37:57):
reach out to the Betrayal team, I want to tell
us your Betrayal story, email us at Betrayal.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Pod at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
That's Betrayal pod at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
We're grateful for your support.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
One way to show support is by subscribing to our
show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate and
review Betrayal.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Five star reviews go a long way. A big thank
you to all of our listeners.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of
Glass Entertainment Group and partnership.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
With iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason,
hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced
by Monique Leboard, also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers
are Kristin Melcuriy and Caitlin Golden. Our iHeart team is
Ali Perry and Jessica Krinchech. Audio editing and mixing by
(38:48):
Matt Delvecchio, Additional editing support from Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme
composed by Oliver Bains. Music library provided by my Music
and For more podcast from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
Hi, it's Andrea Gunning. Last week, we shared Andrea Dunlop's story.
On this week's episode, Andrea and I sit down for
a conversation about true crime podcasting.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
We get into what this work means for.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Us and how we approach these stories.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
We hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Andrea, thank you so much for joining me. I'm a
listener and also a huge fan of Nobody Should Believe Me,
which is your show, and you know, we just shared
your story on Betrayal Weekly, and I'm just so glad
our two shows are collaborating because I think that Munchausen
by Proxy, which is what you cover in your show,
(00:56):
shares a lot.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
In common with Betrayal.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Earlier, we were joking that this conversation is kind of
like the Andrea Andrea True Crime Summit, but that's really
what it feels like. So I'm hoping we can really
compare notes about what it's like working in this space.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yeah, I'd love to start off with just your background.
How did you get into being a true crime podcaster?
Speaker 1 (01:19):
You know, I often joke that I am a recovering
TV executive, and so I hail from the TV space,
but I work for a company called Glass Entertainment Group,
and we specialize in reality TV and documentaries. And for
about seven and a half eight years, I was overseeing
our business department, so I was the executive in charge
(01:42):
of production, So I did all the boring things in TV,
which is like the budget, the financing, like.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
All the hard stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
And my colleague Ben and I were constantly working through
legal deals with our development department, and we were seeing
great stories getting passed by TV executives and networks. When
one story that came across our desk, we were working
(02:10):
with Kim Goldman, who is the sister of Ron Goldman
who was murdered by OJ Simpson, and we were trying
to sell something in TV with her, but a lot
of TV networks weren't interested in the project unless OJ
was involved, or OJ was attached, or we could guarantee
an interview with OJ. And this was back when OJ
was still living I think he had just gotten out
(02:32):
of prison and was living in Vegas at the time.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
But my colleagues and I really.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Believe that there was a story here even without OJ's voice,
So we decided to make it a podcast, and instead
of telling the OJ Simpson story, we told the story
of people who lived it, and so that's how we
got started in the podcast space.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
That's a great answer. I mean I really see like
that imprint for the work you've done after for that,
you know, and also that just really plugs into what
I think is interesting about true crime stories, which is
the sort of long tail of them and the way
that they impact the people who are pulled into them.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
So one of the things you're known for is your
work on Betrayal and now Betrayal Weekly. How did you
come to that story that was the first season of Betrayal.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
It's all kind of related. So Jen Fason is the
subject of season one in her marriage and how the
marriage unraveled. But she works in television. She's in a
television executive producer, so we kind of are in the
same universe. And Jen had heard confronting oj Simpson and
reached out to her agent, and her agent reached out
(03:53):
to me and my colleague Ben for an initial conversation.
But the universe has an interesting way of working because
at this time, I was getting out of a relationship,
I had moved out of my boyfriend's house. I had
discovered a lot of deception, not to the magnitude that
Jen had, and I was kind of recovering from understanding
(04:15):
like why was I in this relationship?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Why was I ignoring a lot of signs?
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Was I ignoring it or was it like, you know,
all of these questions that were coming to the surface.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So it was like I was meeting Jen at the
perfect time.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I couldn't relate to the magnitude of what Jen was
going through, but I knew, like as it was like
I don't even want to say as a woman, as
a woman, but as a human being, I understood the
pain when she pitched me her story, I understood her
anger and her confusion, and I felt like this emotional
access and I thought, if we could maybe do something
(04:53):
with that, people will relate and maybe heal. And so
just that relatability and that timing of it just so
happened to work out.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Yeah, that's amazing, And I think that that shows up
in the quality of the season and just the emotional
depth of it. And I'm really interested in what you
said about this idea of not coming from a place
of anger. This is a really complicated part of interviewing
(05:25):
people about these stories, right because they have every right
to be angry. You have every right to want to
even go on a sort of revenge journey, but doing
that on a podcast is not actually helpful to anyone, right,
It's not helpful for the listener. It's not really ethical
(05:46):
to sort of try and get someone in that energy,
even if it can be compelling.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
In its own right.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
And I have the same sort of thing when I
talk to folks who are often dealing with really extreme
betrayals and then on top of that, you know, the
abuse to them or abuse to their children or children
that they care about, and it's I think, really important
to make sure that someone is ready to have that conversation.
(06:13):
It was important to me, you know. I started off
with telling my own story in the first two seasons
of the show kind of bit by bit, and I
sort of revisited pieces of it from time to time,
but like I had to wait, you know, a decade
until I was ready to talk about it. I was like,
(06:34):
it's such a vulnerable thing, and it's such a vulnerable
thing to put out there and then have people react to.
There are so many points along this journey where getting
on a mic would have been the absolute wrong choice
for me, right, and I think there's also like the
expectation setting, because if you're talking about a case where
it's either an unsolved case, or it's a case where
(06:56):
there wasn't a good outcome, or it's a case where
like the person you're talking to wants some action to
be taken by authorities, that's not something that we can
make happen.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Can't always guarantee, right.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
And like so I think that that's also like a
really tricky part of it of making sure that who
I'm talking to you, like, Yes, we're gonna put all
this out there, and I think people are going to care.
I think people are going to get something out of it.
They're going to learn something important, They're going to relate
with this experience. I hope you get a deep personal
Catharsis from sharing this. But like the cavalry is unlikely
to mount up because unfortunately that's just not often how
(07:34):
it works, And this may not end with the answers.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah, and that was my worry producing There and Gone,
which came out this past summer in twenty twenty four.
And I have to give iHeart a lot of credit
because we pitched them this story and there wasn't an
ending and we couldn't guarantee that we would find or
solve this case. And so you're taking a lot of risk,
and then the partnerships that you with distributors are also
(08:01):
taking a lot of risk for what's the payoff? You know,
what's the audience going to leave thinking? Are they going
to walk away feeling satisfied? And you know, these are
people like we're studying, and we're exploring stories of people
and their loss and their trauma and their grief, and
(08:21):
so we're not always going to get a payoff that
makes sense to everybody. You know, I like telling stories
that really show the complexity of the human experience, and
I think they'rein Gone is an example of that.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
Yeah, can you can you kind of give us a
give us an intro to the case and how you
got interested in it.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Sure, it's the story of Richard Patron and Danielle Imbo
twenty years ago to thirty somethings just literally vanished off
of South Street in Philadelphia, which is basically like the
Bourbon Street of Philadelphia, the busiest place for nightlife. They
were seen leaving a bar and then never seen again.
(09:03):
And the until this day, no one knows what happened.
Was in an accident? Was it murdered for hire? And
so I remember this because I was, I think a
senior in high school. And it was terrifying because one
of the victims his parents have a bakery that I
grew up going to, and both of their families look
(09:24):
so much like mine in different ways. They do Sunday dinner.
I come from an Italian family. We do Sunday dinner,
you know, they gamble on Sunday or for football bets,
like I'm wearing my Eagles jersey, like this feels like
this could be my own cousin. This happened too, so
it was very personal to me. And so it was
just this loss that kind of reverberated throughout our entire
(09:46):
community and continues because how do two people in their
mid thirties just vanish, just literally into thin air. And
when we were exploring doing the story, I thought the
families would be very interested, but we would struggle with
law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
But then I soon realized that.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
The FBI really needed our help because the FBI knows
that the more coverage it can get of this case,
more people will be able to like call in and
feel like, let me just do my part. Let me
twenty years later. I'm just gonna do it. I'm just
gonna make the phone call. I'm going to say what
I know and be done with it. And I live
(10:32):
in this city, and there are parts of this city
where this crime isn't a big question mark. There are
parts of the city, the neighborhoods in this city where
people know exactly what happened or they feel like it's
a fact. They communicate it like it's affect.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I know who did it, I know why it's done.
Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Like, how a whole neighborhood in one city there's like
this understood rumor of what happened to two random people
that have no connection. How was the neighborhood in which
I lived?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
So to me, it was.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Like, I just want to help these families. You know,
we didn't solve the crime yet, but there was enough
people that actually wrote into the FBI for them to
reopen in assign new agents. So I feel like I
did my job.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Hell yeah, I mean that's amazing. And I think this
is one of the most interesting parts of working in
the true crime sphere and why it's so important to
like take this job seriously and be really responsible. Is
because it does have real world impacts. And yeah, I
mean this question of law enforcement's like, so the case
(11:40):
that I'm working on right now for our next season
is one that I am hoping that some action will
happen on. How realistic that is, who knows, but I
do think that it is and can be a powerful
tool to getting law enforcement involved. And that can be
the kind of thing where you get, you know, political
(12:02):
will for a local prosecutor to actually file charges on
something where they might not otherwise. You can you know,
get people who are making those decisions at the police
department to assign some extra muscle to it. You can
you know, flush out some new information from the community.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Well, the first thing that just to interject, I think
one of the biggest things that I feel like we
both you know, betrayal, trauma and deception is one thing
your show covers factitious disorder, and although they're very different,
there's so many commonalities between people who you know, live
(12:40):
through or have a relationship with Munchausen's and Munchausen's by proxy,
and people who experience deception and betrayal. The topics we
cover on betrayal are extreme, but sadly they're not uncommon. Yeah,
And in season three we really focus on and male
(13:01):
sexual abuse and we learn that one in six men
have experienced this issue. But the really scary reality is
it actually is probably more, but it just goes unreported
because of the stigma around it. And I just feel
like these are two taboo issues, you know, Munchausen syndrome
(13:26):
by proxy, and to take that seriously and talk about
it to help dismantle that stigma, it's such a large hurdle. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
No, that's a really good point. And we've definitely learned
a lot from the progress that has been made around
child sex abuse, which I think it still is underreported.
I think most people except that child sex abuse is
real and not rare. Yeah, certainly anybody that's informed on
the topic knows that, But I think that did not
(13:56):
always used to be that way, right, And it was
seen as this like stranger danger type of aberration, you know,
one in a million sort of thing that happened, and
then our society grappling with it sort of went through
some interesting hurdles along the way, a major one being
the Satanic panic, where you have all these stories about
(14:18):
you know, daycare workers and underground you know, the McMartin
case and all these like underground tunnels, which my take
on it is that that was society grappling with something
that we really really didn't want to look at, which
is child sex abuse, and that actually it was easier
and more comforting to think that it was satanic daycare workers,
(14:40):
because that's a problem that you can ostensibly solve. But
I think it's more comforting to think that there's some
evil system that you can kind of shut down than
it is to confront the reality, which is that this
is boy scout leaders, priests, coaches, dads, uncles who are
doing this right. So it's most likely to be someone
(15:02):
that that child knows, and it's not going to be
someone who is an obvious creep all the time. And
it's so similar with Munchausen. And that's where we get
into kind of the hullabaloo that happened around the Maya
Kwalski case with the film Take Care of Maya and
a lot of the coverage that really followed in lockstep
with that, where they presented it as a medical kidnapping case.
(15:24):
Medical kidnapping is our satanic panic. Essentially, it's like, you
know this idea that doctors are just separating families, right, Like,
doctors don't make those decisions. Doctors evaluate abuse. It's a
legitimate subspecialty. There's just so much disinformation around that. And
the Maya Kwalski case was sort of the most high
profile one. But I think that there's a similar dynamic
(15:46):
going on there, and certainly with Munchausen biproxy, it's not
a one in a million thing. I think the behavior
is a longest spectrum, but I think it's far more
common and getting worse because of social media, because of
which I would assume actually if some of the behaviors
that I'll talk about on betrayal in this sort of
more male deception and cheating and that kind of thing,
like you're talking to Spencer Heir in case, like social
media has given people unfettered and unlimited access to attention,
(16:12):
and you know, I think it was doctor Romani says
in the TV series like, Oh, that's the dangerous combination, right,
attention seeking plus lack of empathy. I mean that is
exactly how you describe Munchausen biproxy behaviors. And so I
think there's every reason to believe that it's getting worse,
and that is a scary world to live in. I
hate to be the one to break this to you,
(16:33):
but like the world is not what you thought. That
mom of the sick child, who's raising money on GoFundMe
and seems like the most heroic mother you've ever met,
could be the scariest person you've ever met. And so
I think that's why these conspiracy theories around medical kidnapping
(16:53):
get traction because the reporting on it is very thin.
Child abuse professionals do not make good money. Child abuse
pediatrics is a highly trained and not well paid some specialty.
They get trashed in the media, they get accused of
snatching babies. I mean, it's not for the faint of heart.
And also just like that work, like doing that frontline
(17:14):
work of rushing to the hospital to see a child
that's been abused is obviously emotionally grueling work. There isn't
any scenario where you could make it make sense that
doctors just want to do that. It's a nightmare for
the hospitals. The hospitals can get sued, you know, it's
like there's no motivation. But I think the reason those
stories still take off in the media. Is that people's
(17:36):
discomfort around the reality of this abuse is so so deep.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Something that we're constantly confronting in true crime is having
to tell these hyperbolic versions of true crime stories when
in reality, the more relatable and important ones are the
ones that are kind of in the every day I
remember when we were covering Ashley Linton's case in Riverton,
Utah for Betrayal season two, you reached out to IKAC,
(18:19):
which is in Internet Crimes Against Children's task Force that
every state has, and I remember one of the task
force members asked, why are you covering this case like
I deal with, you know, perpetrators that are ten times
worse than Jason Linton. Why this one? And my response was,
(18:42):
I don't want the hyperbolic version see Sam case. You know,
I want to meet people in a very average, everyday
story because that's actually what's happening. And so I feel
like that's the same for a lot of these mothers
who are if they're on the new it's like this
monster of a mother that did this, and it's like,
(19:05):
you know, we have to hear about the extremes instead
of leaning into the reality of what's happening.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
Yeah, I mean I became a media outlet because I
was so fed up with the way that media was
covering this case, right. And it's been interesting over the
last few years, as I've kind of jumped first, I
guess I've noticed that awareness is increasing, especially because of
the Gypsy ros blanterd case, which was so high profile.
I do think that there's more of a conversation happening
(19:32):
than there was five years ago. But you know, there
was like so much reticence to talking about it. Like
I remember when my novel came out, and like I
had written like an essay for it and that got
killed at the last minute, and there was just like
a lot of like no, no, no, no no. If
there's not a conviction, you can't talk about it. And
I was like, if we're not talking about the cases
where there aren't convictions, then we're not talking about the problem, right,
(19:55):
Like when you get into the extremes and allow people
to put it at arm's length, that person is a monster,
that person is a psychopath, that like I would see
coming and this would never happen to me, and that's
not reality. And I think that was why for me
it was so important to talk about my own experience
(20:15):
because the other thing that we do with perpetrators of crimes,
especially if it's something where it just feels so like deeply, deeply,
deeply wrong, we often say, oh, well, that person must
have had a horrible child, that person must have been
abused as a child. There must be some like dots
I can connect. And I think that that's part of
the let me tell myself a story about this that
(20:37):
makes me feel safe, right where, like, as long as
XYZ doesn't happen in my family, we won't end up
with one of these perpetrators in our family. And that's
just not the case, right. I mean, my sister did
not by anybody else's you know, nobody else witnessed anything
dramatic happening to her. You were not raised an abusive household. Like,
it's not something where oh there's some straight line that
(20:59):
you can draw. And I think that's really uncomfortable for people.
I think people really want to believe that something awful
has to happen to a person to make them like this,
and I don't think that's true. I think it is
that combination of lack of empathy and need for attention
(21:20):
that really can supercharge these behaviors totally.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
I think one of the things that I also felt
was really relatable. And the circumstances are so different, but
just knowing your sister's story and having to go in
front of the judge in family court, like you're dealing
with family court and criminal court are two separate things.
(21:48):
And the issues that I've seen a lot of the
women that I deal with on betrayal having to navigate
the criminal side and once that's over and you know,
the father of their children are released, then they're dealing
with family court either in their divorce or child support
(22:08):
or dealing with visitation. It is a whole other ball
of wax where parents have a ton of rights rightfully so,
but they're in situations.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Where kids are at risk.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
It's a really scary system because they are two separate entities.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Yeah, and I think that that's something that the vagaries
of that like really is lost on people that have
not had to interact with these systems. And I think
people here and a lot of this again when I'm
talking about like you know, my Kicks and Bogs work
for NBC and his whole Duno harm series, like a
lot of this is I think intentionally created a confusion
where it'll be like courts said, doctors disagree, Like courts said,
(22:52):
you know, uh, this and that right, and you're like, okay,
which court under what circumstances like give me more information?
Right yep, And everything goes to the family court first
because those are less you know, those investigations take less
time than the criminal investigation. So we end up in
a lot of situations where the family court gives the
children back during an active criminal investigation, which just I
(23:15):
think sounds insane, but that happens all the time. Likewise,
you know, there's this thing of like, well, doctors at
this hospital said this, but other doctors disagree, without ever
mentioning that those other doctors are people who were hired
as expert witnesses by the parent defending themselves. Right, important information,
And like, I think people don't realize that the courts
(23:37):
don't take the steps that you would think in the
face of a criminal conviction to like limit that person's
access to their own children. Like for instance, you know,
we just had a case that we were talking on
the show at the Jessica Jones case in Texas where
she got a sixty year prison sentence, and the courts
did not perminate her parental rights and so now the
(23:59):
dad has to pay to do that. So just the
onus that ends up on a protective parent in any
child abuse situation, I think people have no idea what
that looks like, or just people don't realize how easy
it is actually to get access to children. Again.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah, in the case of Stacy Rutherford and Tyler from
season three of Betrayal, I think the courts got it right.
So for people that don't know, Stacy was married to
a man named Justin and he was a doctor in Rudding, Pennsylvania.
She had two children in a previous marriage and then
(24:37):
met Justin and they got married. They had two kids
of their own, and he was by all accounts, a
great husband, an incredible doctor, beloved by his community. Turns
out that he was abusing Stacy's son from her first marriage,
his step son since he was eleven and t Tyler
(25:00):
didn't disclose until he was I want to say seventeen,
so a long time.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Yeah, And you.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Know, Justin also tried to hire a hitman while he
was in prison to murder Tyler so that he wouldn't
testify in court, which is what we cover in season
three of Betrayal, And what the judge did is not
only did he get he'll be basically in jail for
the rest of his life. I don't want to miss
(25:29):
quote what a sentencing was, but he isn't allowed to
speak to his biological children or have any contact with
the family until he's done his probation, basically for the
rest of his life. And so I remember talking to
(25:50):
Stacy and Tyler and then feeling like really complicated emotions
because they deeply love justin like the person that they
knew as a he being like Tyler loved his stepdad,
but then there was the monster, the abuser.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
They were two different people to him. And that was a.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Scenario where the court really contemplated a lifetime of abuse
and grooming and narcissistic behavior and just got.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
It and knocked it out of the park.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
And I was like, heck, yeah, like this is a
Pennsylvania Like I was really proud. So yeah, like sometimes
we talk about things getting wrong, like that was a
scenario where I think the court's got it right.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
And it's you know, it's so complicated, and I think
it kind of goes back to this question of once
you have identified a person as this type of abuser,
where it has so much in common mantell'st my proxy
with with child sex abuse, where it is, you know,
an extremely compulsive behavior. It's one of those things where
(26:54):
again I think like and I think we can more
easily recognize it in child sex abuse cases where it's like, Okay,
if you cross that line with a child, you're not
a safe adult period. Like if you're capable of doing that,
like you know whether or not you should be thrown
in jail for the rest of your life or we
should do something else with you. It's sort of a
separate question. But like, you are not a print. That's
why we put people on registries. That's why we say
(27:15):
they can't go in your schools. Like we have no
such attitude towards much as my proxy perpetrators. There is
this idea that it is like some mental illness that
people are sort of quote suffering from, and much like
child sex abuse, there is an underlying psychiatric disorder. In fact,
to disorder imposed on another. It's very similar to pedophilic disorder,
which is also in the DSM, also very challenging to treat.
(27:38):
Also very you know, unlikely that a perpetrator will take
enough accountability to be treated for it, and it doesn't
reduce someone's culpability. And it's like a very complicated thing
that happens when like children always want their parents. That's
such a biological drive for kids, that's a survival mechanism.
Even if their parent is not capable of life them
(28:00):
or being safe with them, like, they will always kind
of have this longing. So you can have a situation
where someone is separated from their parent and then they
really really really idealize that parent and don't then protect themselves.
I mean, it's really complicated. And then for survivors that
have fully processed the abuse, so are not going that
direction of saying this didn't happen to me, right fully
(28:21):
understand fully process the abuse. I mean, we saw Joe
in our four season really struggling with this with their mom.
Of like they totally recognize what their mom did to them,
and they understand a lot about the dynamics and they
still love that person. And I mean, I would say
most of the survivors I know are either low contact
or no contact. But it's really complicated to navigate that relationship.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
We're working on a case for season four of the
Trial at this woman out of Colorado's Springs. She was
with her husband for twenty years. She lived like a
typical American life. She thought that she was just basically
living like the suburban dream. And I won't give all
the details because we.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Air in May.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
But things unravel and the family is torn apart, and
she has to look back on twenty years and basically
readjust her sense of reality because he shares things, discloses
things that completely alters core memories in her life where
(29:40):
she's living and thinks one thing is happening, where there's
another almost like parallel universe where he's operating, and she
has to hold both realities at the same time. She
often says, perception is my reality, and that really is true.
And I remember, because I had li into your first
(30:02):
season so long ago. I was like, let me listen
to this again, like you know, Hope's family and then
your family. I was thinking about you guys, and like
you having to look back, like once things became clearer
to you or things were coming into focus, how are
you looking back on that time? And how painful was
(30:24):
it to try to merge what you thought you were
experiencing and then the reality that you now learned. It's
just it feels like those memories start to hold on
to you in a way that you're like, I don't even.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Know what to do.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Yeah, I mean, it's a really profound part of the experience.
And I think when people, you know, people like to
throw the word gaslighting, I know, as like, you know,
it's sort of this like pop psychology term, but I
think like when you really have gone through like gaslating
to my mind is like someone is systematically making you
doubt your perception of reality, and you know, it's extremely
(30:59):
disorb and it's sort of its own whole thing to
recover from. And certainly for me, you know, given that
my sister is in my whole life growing up and
is in my earliest memories and it was a huge
part of my childhood, I mean very close in age.
She's my only sibling, it really breaks your brain for
a while.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Right, and now you're estranged.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
You guys haven't talked in over a decade.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Yeah, this is now fourteen years. This has been in
my life and I've really gone through different stages of
processing it. And it was like very clear that like this, okay,
this is permanent. And then I sort of started to
think about it as a death. I started to think
about it as there was a person that I grew
up with that I love, that I had these experiences with.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
And she died.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
I came to a new understanding of it, which is
that that person that I thought I knew was probably
never there and it was always a mask, and that
the parts of her that I experienced as being loving
and being connected were just a person like mimicking those behaviors.
(32:16):
And that was a really painful revelation. It was much
easier to think of her as a person that I
loved and was there and died, but I think it
was a really necessary one. So then there's the question
of like what do you do with all those memories?
And the way that I frame it, and when I
see other people struggling with is what I hope people
can come to eventually is a place that I think
(32:38):
I finally arrived at after a lot of work.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Which is.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
My experiences were still real. Like I loved my sister,
I had fun with her growing up, I had a
happy childhooded with her. You know, those memories are my
memories and at the end of the day, it was real.
It was real for me, So I get to keep them.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Yeah, Like I'm a twin and so you know, my
relationship with my sister, next to having my own children,
that's the most important relationship in my life always will be.
Like I entered the world with her, It did every
fundamental first with her. I can imagine losing my sister
(33:25):
or not being able to share in critical moments. It's
a profound loss, that relationship with a sister.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
It is. And I think, like I'm sure that you
get so many emails and messages from people listening to
the Betrayal shows that like relate with that experience and
see themselves in that, And I think there can be
such there's healing and making that content, there's healing and
listening to it. Listening to the betrayal shows has helped me.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Again, it's the complexity of the human experience. That's kind
of like our driving force that Glass podcast and what
we do with betrayal. You guys have that in your
DNA too, Like I've heard it and it's been evident
in every season that you guys be one.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Well, I really appreciate that means a lot coming from you,
and I similarly really respect what you guys do over
there at Glass And I think, you know, I know
how much this can mean to people as listeners, and
navigating the pitfalls of how exploitative true crime can be
is a huge job.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Yeah, I know, y'all.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Take it seriously because I know you're behind the scenes process.
And I hope that we together can set a new
standard in this industry because I think it really needs
to happen.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Yeah, I was giving iHeart credit. I kind of give
Hulu an ABC so much credit. I mean, this is
like a big platform and some of these stories are
really hard to tell, and it's time where people like
afraid to go there. I'm like really impressed. I mean
season three is tough, but they saw a landscape. I
(34:55):
mean this past year, the Menendez brothers were all over
the place.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
I was thinking about that when you're saying you guys
are tackling this, I was like, this is a really
good time. Because we did like a little thing on
our Patreon about that case because I was like, oh,
this just feels so germane like, especially talking about you know,
because obviously the Gypsy Rose Blantern case. There's a lot
of parallels there, right where you have someone who's an
abuse victim who commits a crime, and like, how do
(35:20):
you talk about that? How do you think about that?
And I think just the we were talking about how
the discomfort around male sexual abuse in particular weighed so
heavily on that court case.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Absolutely, and for them to see that people are actually
open to hearing about that and discussing that and just
really sitting with that and taking Tyler and Stacy's story
and pursuing that for the Hulu documentary is really exciting
(35:53):
because it's only going to help dismantle the stigma around
this issue. And I'm really proud to work with partners
like that. I truly am. Yeah, that's that's incredible. I'm
so I'm glad that they're supporting it. Something that is
very special about podcasting, like podcasting feels.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
Like a medium where you can take a lot of risks. Yeah,
someone has to go first, so I think like having
a proof of concept with the podcast like that certainly
helps TV folks make good decisions of like, Okay, there's
an audience for this, so maybe it is worth taking
a little bit more of a risk.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
It's a safer landing.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Yeah, exactly exactly, it's all it all works works together.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
So your book that just came out, this is your
first like intro to nonfiction, right or do I have
that wrong? No?
Speaker 3 (36:39):
This, yep, this is my first nonfiction book. The other
four our novels. And it's very funny because people are
always like with the book or with the show, they're like,
oh my god, I love your show. I mean not
because like you know, I know. It's like it's like
they're trying to tell me like, oh, not because I
love child abuse. I'm like, it's no, I know, I
understand what you're saying. And it's like, right, of course,
Like I want people to be engaged with the storytelling.
(37:00):
I want them to connect to that. They're not going
to care about it unless they are connecting to the story,
and unless they are staying engaged with the story, right,
And like, obviously we take it really seriously. Obviously we
do the utmost to tell things ethically, but like you
also have to have a good story, Yeah for sure.
(37:21):
Well this was amazing. We just got like straight in
the defend, which I love. I could talk to you
for hours.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Andrea, thank you so much for coming on our show
and sharing your story with us.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Next week, we're sharing the first episode in Andrea's latest
season of Nobody Should Believe Me. It's about Sophie Hartman,
a mother who adopted two girls from Zambia, but the
story takes a tragic turn when one of her daughters
becomes terribly ill. So stay tuned and we'll be back
next week with that episode. If you would like to
(37:57):
reach out to the Betrayal team, I want to tell
us your Betrayal story, email us at Betrayal.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Pod at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
That's Betrayal pod at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
We're grateful for your support.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
One way to show support is by subscribing to our
show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate and
review Betrayal.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Five star reviews go a long way. A big thank
you to all of our listeners.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of
Glass Entertainment Group and partnership.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
With iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fason,
hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced
by Monique Leboard, also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers
are Kristin Melcuriy and Caitlin Golden. Our iHeart team is
Ali Perry and Jessica Krinchech. Audio editing and mixing by
(38:48):
Matt Delvecchio, Additional editing support from Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme
composed by Oliver Bains. Music library provided by my Music
and For more podcast from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
Host
Andrea Gunning
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