January 16, 2025 • 45 mins
The Canadian police have a 30-year cold case, and only Deb can help them solve it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
It was a profound moment. It's the duality of Oh
my god, what in the world, Who is this cruel?
Who can pull this off? Whose friends pull it off?
How do you fabricate the details like that?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
My real name is Deborah, but typically everyone calls me Dad.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Deb Proctor grew up on the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma.
She recently retired from her role as the senior director
of her tribe's domestic violence program, and before that, she
spent her entire career as a nurse.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
After being an rin well now it's been forty eight
and a half years.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Like a lot of people in the medical profession, she
developed a keen sense for when someone is lying.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
When you mansion bullshit detectors, I can spot them a
football field away or further.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Deb is Cherokee and proud of her Native American heritage.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
My grandmother who lived until she was ninety nine years old.
She is actually our family's original in Rowly, which means
she is on the Dows role.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
The DAWs role was a list compiled by the US
government in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds.
It named about one hundred thousand Native Americans who were
allotted land.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Which was pretty unusual to have an unregionally in your
life for most of it.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Growing up, Deb's grandmother was a constant presence and a
source of inspiration.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
I think I thought a lot of my propter will
and strength and courage from her. She was born before
statehood and she was still stacking her own wood when
she was in her early nineties. She was a survivor
of many many situations in her life.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Her grandmother experienced a lot of violence firsthand. Deb's father
did too. As a child, his own father was murdered
in front of him.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Those life events are what gives the background and the
experience to what we would call intergenerational trauma or historical trauma.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
She saw the impact of that on her family. There
was alcoholism and emotional and when she was young, Deb
struggled to process it.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
When you're a very sensitive nature child, your little heart's
open and you're intuitive, you pick up that energy.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
From a young age. She experienced violence and abuse herself.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
The violence I experience, I truly am my heart know
that it's as a result of those that could not heal.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Deb believes her father's unresolved trauma led him to become
a civil servant.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
He taught me a lot about community service. He would
be in his vehicle driving through the rural areas seeing
what the natives needed, and ultimately he was a councilman
for their tribe, served many many years.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Deb grew up quickly in more ways than one. In fact,
on our sixteenth birthday, her high school boyfriend surprised her.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
They had a birthday party for me and he asked
me to marry him, and I accepted. That was the
day I turned sixteen.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
But her engagement didn't distract her from prioritizing education. Her
father insisted that she earn an advanced degree.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
He was the one in the family who said you
must have an education, and so at age seventeen, I
did start college and I finished at nineteen with my
first RN degree. That was as a result to my
dad pushing me.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Before she even had a chance to know herself, she
was married and working as a full time nurse.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I mean, I'm running the hospital as a baby nurse.
I'd probably turn twenty maybe twenty one, by then. It
was tough, but I spent a good part of my
energy on trying to achieve perfection.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
And her husband shared a very similar upbringing.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
He came from a violent background, very similar to mine,
and so we just went together like peanut, butter and jelly.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
They had two sons together, but a few years into marriage,
her husband's behavior became a problem.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
He struggled with drugs and drinking, and he had violent tendencies.
It was really hard.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
She eventually left her husband and resolved to end the
cycle of violence to make a safe and stable environment
for her and her two sons.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
And so for many years I remained single and just
spent time with myself and the boys. And so for
the next few years after we divorced, I sought to understand.
I bought books, I joined book club, anything on self understanding.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
She started going to therapy and joined support groups for
families impacted by alcoholism. She was creating a better life
for herself and for her sons. When her sons became teenagers,
she looked around and realized.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I did want to partner in live. You know, someone
to enjoy life, that I meant something too, that I'm
mad or.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Too She was forty one and felt ready to explore
a new partnership, so she made an online dating profile.
This was nineteen ninety seven, back when online dating was
a novel concept.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah this aint bumble, this a yeah, this is none
of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
One man piqued her interest. His name was Jeff Walton.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
His profile was just romantic. It was something like I'm
looking for my gwinevere.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Jeff said he wanted to treat his next partner like
a queen. Deb wrote him an email. He lived a
couple states away in Kentucky, but their conversation flowed easily
and Deb quickly discovered they shared the same interests. They
both loved golf, and Jeff wanted to hear more about
Deb's Cherokee culture.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
You know, the music, a spiritual journey. He loved the
Native American spiritual practices. And when I talked to him,
I was just smitten with him.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
She looked forward to his phone calls and emails.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
I saved all of that. I printed everything. I had
a huge three inch purple binder with all of our exchanges.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
As they got closer, she got to know more about
his backstory.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
He was born in Alaska and moved to Canada.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
He was a dual citizen of Canada and the United States,
and he had a complicated relationship with his biological family.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
He didn't know he's real dad. His stepdad was very
violent and he would share stories like, you know, his
stepdad murdered the family poodle in front of his sister
and his mom and him, and I mean, it was
horrible stories.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Deb had seen her share of violence as well. She
understood what it was like, so they bonded over their
difficult childhoods. Jeff's family was still in Canada, but they'd
fallen out of touch. He moved to New Orleans as
a young man, and along the way he picked up
the accent.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
So when he would talk to me on the phone,
he would have that you know dialect. He would say hello,
Darlin and a dory. Yeah, I can't do it. But
it was definitely New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Jeff's ex wife and adult son still lived in New Orleans,
but after his divorce, he'd taken a job in Kentucky.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
He was a project manager for a big construction company
that you know, worked on Toyota plants that worked on
the University of Kentucky that had done all this great work.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Jeff was the kind of person who'd lived a million
lives in one.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
He just fascinated me. He was a pilot and played
football for Woody Hayes at Ohio State and was phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
DEP could really see herself with this guy.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
We're gonna embark upon this journey together. We love music,
we love golf, We're both seekers. I just was so
excited about meeting this man.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
After a year of talking, they decided to finally meet
each other in person. Jeff flew to Oklahoma. When he
arrived at the airport, she was waiting for him with
a gift.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
God had a traditional here. A medicine man gone to
him and asked him to be a feather. There was
a song by Robbie Robertson and the name of it
was Golden Feather, My Love of Golden Feather, and if
you would look it up, it's so that I never
lose my way home. And I thought, what a beautiful
(10:09):
expression of love for this new man in my life
to give him a feather because he loves that Native
American song so much. So I met him at the
plane with that and I said, here's so you can
always find your way home.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
And Jeff had come with the surprise of his own.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Since he got off the plane and he was walking
toward me. It seemed like his voice was shaking, and
he said, you will marry me, won't you. You're gonna
marry me right, You are marrying me right.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
That was Jeff's marriage proposal.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
And I was like, well, of course, of course, yes.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
The weekend could not have gone better. Jeff wanted to
get to know her world.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
You know. I drove around, showed ing the rural area,
my history, some of the culture where I were. We
went out to my golf course. I introduced him to
a lot of my friends, met the family. It was
just a really good weekend. I just loved him, just
loved him.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
They started making arrangements for him to move to Oklahoma.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
And I'm a planner and an organizer in every aspect
in my life. So shoot, the next thing, you know,
I'm getting busy. I'm helping him find jobs. He's getting
his resumeating. Of course, we're still using facts is then,
and he would send things and I would write cover
letters for him to help him get relocated.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
A few months later, Jeff moved in. They spent the
next year, planning a small family wedding in Theosarks.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
We married on April twenty third, two thousand.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
It was the anniversary of the day they met in person.
Deb's youngest son walked her down the aisle, and Jeff's son,
Little Jeff, flew in to support his dad. It was
a true merging of their lives.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
I really thought it was meant to be.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
They planned their first trip together as newlyweds, a golf
trip with Deb's group of friends. Deb had been golfing
for her entire life. Every year she and her friends
traveled the country to play. Jeff was eager to join.
He'd been an avid golfer when he was younger, but
he hadn't played in years.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
So he lost these golf clubs. Well, heck, you know,
I gotta go buying golf clubs, you know, because he's
got to have golf clubs off a month play. So
then he needed lessons because he just hadn't got to
play in a while. He said, needed to brush up.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
But on their first golf trip with her friends.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Once we got all scores in and everything, the winner
was him, and I was like, well, god, oh, great job.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
But Deb's friends were stand offish with Jeff about his win,
and one of her friends was quick to point out.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
A real golfer is not going to leave their clubs behind.
It didn't make sense.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Her friends had never acted like this before. She didn't
know what happened, and neither did Jeff. But after that
they weren't invited on any more golf trips.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
I felt like everybody was mistreating him.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
A year into their marriage, Jeff was still struggling to
find the right job in Oklahoma. One day when Deb
was helping him with an application.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Well, I sound an old resume, and on this particular
resume it says Vietnam veteran. I was like, my god.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
He'd never told her he was a veteran. But Deb
had a lot of experience with the VA. While getting
her Advanced Nursing degree, she worked on a program at
the VA that specific studied Vietnam veterans with PTSD.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I'm like, you never told me you were a veteran.
You never told me you were in the Vietnam War.
That is a significant event in life. Was flabbergasted. It
had never come up, and he said, well, I don't
like to talk about it. Deb I use it on
(14:26):
my resumes, because you know that ought to tell you
something I was like, But she should have told me.
I should never found out here.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Dev felt like he needed to talk about it, even
if he didn't want to. She'd had firsthand experience with
veterans and PTSD.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
And so over the course of time, he began to
tell me what happened. It was an elaborate story, intricate details.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
As an eighteen year old, he'd been in the Special
Forces in Vietnam. One night, he caught his senior officers
using drugs. Fearing he would turn them in, the officers
allowed Jeff to be captured. He was held as a
prisoner of war and for months he.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Was tortured and they bust at his feet with the
butt of a gun so that he couldn't walk. But
he got out. He escaped and he made it back
to the US Forces by following the path of a stream,
and it was so difficult because his feet were busted up.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
He was taken to a veteran's hospital.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
He had to have metal put in his feet because
they were broken and if we flew anywhere it would
trigger the metal alarms as you go in.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
He recovered physically and was discharged, but psychologically he was scarred.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
The trauma was so bad. He said, it was just
so awful that sometimes he would just get in the
closet and he would just hide.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Deb was worried about his mental health, especially because his
support system was then. He was in a new place
and wasn't in touch with his biological family. So Deb
was happy when his siblings reached out to reconnect. They
invited him back to Canada.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
His siblings had said that his mother's eightieth birthday party
was coming up and they wanted him to come. And
he talked to him about it, and I said, well,
we've got to I've never met any of your family.
And absolutely.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
A few months later, they flew to Alberta to meet
his family. They hadn't seen Jeff in decades. They were
elated to welcome him home. And Deb never thought you'd
get the chance to meet his siblings.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
I finally got to meet his family. I was just
so excited to be there and to meet them. And
you know, at one of the brothers' houses, we might
play games and just chat and get to know each other.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Deb fit right in.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
We didn't have any serious, meaningful conversations about life or anything.
We were just doing a friendly, cordial meet the family thing.
He was up be. Everyone was up be. It was
a good trip.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
It was a good trip. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Deb didn't know it at the time, but everyone there
was in on a secret, everyone except for her Her husband.
Jeff wasn't who he said he was. In fact, everyone
and his family knew Jeff by a different name.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Come to find out. He met his siblings at the
door and told him I'm going by Jeff Walton. Now
I'll tell you later.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Deb and her husband went to Canada to reconnect with
his estranged family, and to her surprise, the trip was
a success. Meeting his family brought the two of them closer.
But one day after they returned from their trip, Jeff
collapsed on the golf course.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And a friend of ours founding setting up against a
tree and wanted him to let him take him into
the hospital, and he said, no, just take me to
my car, and so he did that. He got in
his car and he drove home.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Deb met him at their house and forced him to
go to the hospital. Jeff had suffered a major heart attack.
It would require ongoing care but Jeff still hadn't nailed
down a steady job, so the couple needed help covering
his medical expenses. Jeb had worked at the VA years
ago and insisted it was their best resource.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
And he absolutely said, I will not go. I don't
trust the government. I'm not going. And I said, well,
that's bullshit. We're going broke. We've got to get your
health care.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
That's when Jeff explained the VA what didn't take him.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
He said, they don't even have a list of me
because I was dishonorably discharged because I reported the officers.
They won't even have me on the well, anything to
do with the VA. And I said, that's bullshit. You
were a soldier, you were captured. And he said, I
won't go. He got up and he never talked about
(19:49):
it again. In that moment, I was like, that is weird.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Explanation just didn't add up. Deb even considered hiring someone
to look into Jeff's background.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
I wonder if I need to get a private investigator
or something. And I logged on to the internet and
then I was like, God, I don't have any money
to get a private detective.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
She didn't have the money or the time to hire
a PI. Shortly after Jeff's heart attack, he had a stroke.
Then his memory began to falter. All the while he
was refusing to go to the VA. It financially strained
the family, and Deb was at a loss.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
I had begun to say, I do not know what
is wrong with my life. How am I going to
get this guy health care? He's got to have healthcare.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Deb was his primary caretaker on top of her full
time nursing job. It was overwhelming.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
I begin to drink, and then I drink heavily, and
then it was uncontrollably.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Alcohol became an escape from her marriage and its problems.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
When I started drinking, I didn't have to be confused
anymore because my brain was numb.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Deb had spent so many years taking care of other
people that she neglected herself.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
As the person that was going to alan on from
the mid eighties, taking family, taking coworkers, taking friends to
aa NA rehab. I was taken everybody to get help,
but myself had, I guess, reached just a hard stop
where I couldn't deal with it.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Deb had just turned fifty and had been with Jeff
for a decade, but life with him was becoming harder
year after year. At first he failed to bring in
a steady income. Then when he became sick, he refused
resources for affordable health care. Deb turned to booze for
the stress. But one day, after a long night of drinking,
(22:03):
she found herself too shaky to put the golf ball
on the tee. She checked herself into a thirty day rehab.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Best move I ever made. I'm not going to tell
you it was pretty. It was ugly, but there's always
been a driving force within me to rise above.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Being alone. In rehab gave her a lot of clarity,
and with that clarity came questions, specifically about Jeff. When
she left rehab, she looked at Jeff's behavior with a
new set of eyes.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
I began to really observe he was strange. Something was
not right, not right.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
She wasn't ready to leave the marriage. Her focus was
on her new sobriety, but she did come up with
a plan to get some answers out of Jeff. She
gave him an assignment.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
And I began to say to him, Jeff, every day
while I'm at work, I want you to work on
your life story because I don't understand it. You told
me you were born in Alaska and you moved to Canada,
but I don't know where you even went to school.
I don't even know when you moved to Canada. If
(23:19):
something happens, I'm going to be honest with you. I
can't even write an obituary.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
She thought it would be a good exercise for both
of them, and she hoped it could help her understand
why he was the way he was.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
And so every day I would come home and I
would we'll share your story with me. Oh, I couldn't
work on it today.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
After his stroke, Jeff's memory was worse than ever.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
He began to claim that he just didn't have much
of a memory, but the neurologist at the time of
his stroke had already advised me that the stroke was
not going to impact his memory. Then he wanted me
to get in checked for possible early dementia.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
He needed more care than she could provide a home,
so she applied for him to be in a funded
outpatient care facility and he was accepted.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
It's a wonderful program that where you stay in your home,
but they basically have a center that's opened during the
day and there's activities and transportation. There's clinic on side,
everything that you could need, and if you need something outside,
they'll take you.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
He started going to the center every day.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
That was until the program called me and they said,
have you talked to Jeff? Because nobody confining he's gone.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Deb was at work. She didn't know where he was.
With his memory issues, she worried he could have gotten lost,
so they called the police.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Come to find out. He had left the group and
the care team to go to the bank.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
When Deb got there, Jeff seemed confused about what was happening.
The whole said situation confirmed that he really needed this facility.
His memory must be worse than she thought. But shortly
after Jeff's incident at the bank, Deb received another phone call.
Only this one would change her life forever.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
It was a number I didn't recognizing. I typically didn't
pick those up in the office.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
It was an international call, but Deb had a strange feeling.
When she picked up. There was a police officer on
the other line, and.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
I was like, what is this about.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
The officer was Canadian and he was investigating a cold
case from thirty years ago.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
That's when he began to say that they were looking
for ron Stan, and they had believed that they're tracking
down through social media.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
But Deb didn't know a ron Stan. The officer continued,
explaining that Canadian police had been looking for a man
named ron Stan for over thirty years. He disappeared during.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
A There was a fire in his barn at night,
and initially he was presumed to have been in that fire,
and he had left a wife, infant, and another child.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Deb's blood ran cold. She knew what the officer was
about to say before he said it. The man she
was married to, who she knew as Jeff Walton.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Was actually the complete fraud. He was ron Stan, who
was dismissing person.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Here's the thing about ron Stan. He was originally declared dead,
but in reality he'd been on the run ever since
that barnfire. Eleven years into her marriage, Deb Proctor got
(27:01):
a phone call out of the blue from a Canadian
police officer. They were looking for ron Stan, a Canadian
man who'd been missing and later declared dead after an
arson fire in nineteen seventy seven, and they believed they'd
found him in the United States. He was hiding out
in a rural part of the Cherokee Nation using the
(27:21):
name Jeff Walton. When the police explained this to.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Deb, initially I thought it was perhaps just a cruel joke.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
So she asked the officer for proof, for details.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
The more I push for dates, times, names, locations, the
more I realized, oh ugh.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
She didn't see much on the phone. She just listened,
writing down everything the police told.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Her, every detail, dates, times, information. I still have that notepad.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Canadian officials wanted to speak to Jeff or Ron directly.
Deb explained that he was in a care facility during
the day because of his memory problems. She confirmed their
home address, thanked the officer and hung up the phone
in disbelief.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
I was sitting there when there was a nurse that
looked at me from an office door and she said,
are you okay. I remember saying, I don't know. I've
just had the most bizarre phone call. So I went
to talk to my director of nursing and she said,
get out of here. What in the world.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
She debated whether this phone call was real, if the
person on the phone was even a police officer. A
coworker who was afraid for Deb suggested another possibility, he.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Probably is in witness protection and you just blew it,
so you're probably not safe, nor is he. And they said,
we'll go with you to the Cherokee Nation Marshals and
we will get to the bottom of this.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
So Deb went straight there. She wanted to know if
the call she'd received was real or if Jeff could
be in witness protection. An investigator took Deb's concern seriously
and started making calls.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
I gave her the sale number, the badge number, and
everything from the officer that called. And she did call,
and she confirmed every last detail.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
She verified that Jeff Walton didn't exist. Her husband of
eleven years was a missing person, a man named Ronald
Stan who'd faked his death in an arson fire and
had been on the run for thirty years.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
I was just heartsick, gut sick, heartsick, my whole body responded,
and all I could think of was, who are you?
How could you do this?
Speaker 2 (29:56):
When Ronald Stan disappeared from his farm in rural Ontario
andnineteen seventy seven, he abandoned his wife and two young sons.
In order to escape, He had lit his barn on fire,
killing all the animals. His family watched the blaze helpless,
fearing that ron was trapped inside.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
That poor wife and those two sons that he walked
away from in this barn far in the middle of
the night. What horror, what pain, what trauma that they
must have endured, thinking that they were watching him burn
up in front of their eyes.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Why he'd faked his death. Deb wouldn't find out until
much later. In that moment, she just knew she couldn't
go home, not to the house she shared with him.
He was a criminal, a fraud, a total stranger. So
the Cherokee Marshals helped her come up with an immediate plan.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Go to an attorney, go to the bank, and get protection.
So that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
She made an appointment with a divorce attorney for the
following day, and a friend offered to let Deb stay
at her place while she figured out her next move.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
I just was in a state of robot just trying
to put one foot in front of the other and
then formulate a plan on how to tell the family.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
She met with her sons to break the news, and
with all of their support, she called Jeff's son, the
one he'd had in America after he went on the run.
After all, he was the only child Deb knew about.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
I loved that boy. He was my son too, you know,
he was a third son, So my heart hurt for him,
just like it did for my boys. To tell him.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Everyone in the family called him Little Jeff. He was
named after his father, or rather his father's alias.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
And gives respec The box was, you know, silent initially
as you could imagine, and then just struggling. We both
needed some time to just deal.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
The one person she didn't want to speak with was Jeff.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
I really did not have any communication with him whatsoever.
I just had nothing to say.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
When the authorities finally got ahold of Jeff, they questioned
him and asked to see his proof of identity.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
He admitted to everything.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
In fact, he seemed amused. He made a joke to
police officers asking what took them so long? Because the
arson had happened so long ago, the statute of limitations
had expired in Canada, and authorities in the US couldn't
charge him either.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
There was no charges to be made here. You know,
he's a scam, but there's no charges that I could file.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
The only legal action deb could take was filing for divorce.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
The domestic Violence Service of the tribe helped me and
just took the papers and when they served in the papers,
he just signed it. He didn't even question it.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
The news got wind of the story and it was
a media frenzy.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Media showed up, some Canada and some Oklahoma from the UK.
I just didn't have any peace. I could rarely go home.
My phone ranking constantly. I was just completely overwhelmed.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Debsnye's drafted a statement to send to the press on
her behalf, and deb kept tabs on the news. That's
how she learned Jeff's real life story, the one he
claimed he couldn't remember. A journalist with the Toronto Star
had been reporting on it. Through their investigation, they uncovered
a possible motivation for why he faked his death.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Evidently, he was messing with young college girls and he
was getting ready to get in trouble.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
At the time of the arson, Ron was working at
a college in Canada. He was having a relationship with
a local girl who was much younger. The day he
went missing, it seemed this information was about to be revealed.
It's not clear how old the girl was, but the
threat of being discovered prompted him to go on the
run for three decades. Deb also learned how he pulled
(34:24):
it off.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
When he left Canada in the fire in Cana, New Orleans,
he said, I've got to find a woman with money.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
He did. In fact, he had two other marriages he'd
never told deb about. And after he found a woman
with money, he needed papers to validate his new identity.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
He got a social Security from somebody that had died
in the seventies, a girl, so he took over her
social security.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
He used his stolen identity to find work and even
collect Social Security benefits.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
That's how he worked in the decades that he came
to the United States. He used this social security and
false name. I don't know how anybody pulls this off.
It's so elaborate.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
When the story broke, Jeff himself spoke to the media
about how and why he faked his death, and he
seemed to revel in it.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
He sought that attention. He wanted to be a star.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
He said. He chose the name Jeff because it was
the name of his infant son he abandoned in Canada,
and the last name Walton was inspired by the TV
show The Waltons. It sounded like a classic American last name.
As for the documents he used to marry Dub, they
appeared to be forged.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
I had seen his birth certificate and I still have it.
But when you look there are things that have been changed.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Like the arson. Too much time had passed for him
to be charged in the US with identity fraud. And
what about his elaborate stories like being a prisoner of
war in Vietnam.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
It's all made up.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
That's why he was so resistant to using the VA.
He never fought in the Vietnam War. He wasn't even
an American citizen. The POW story, well, he ripped those
details straight out of a movie called Platoon starring Charlie Sheen.
And his football career at Ohio State with Woody Hayes.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
There was never anybody that played football, so Woody Hayes
by his name.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Ever, Deb was left wondering if anything he'd ever told
her was true. Today she doubts if he'd even swung
a golf club before she met him. After all his
lies were exposed, one of Deb's friends finally came clean
about something. Remember the golf trip where Deb's friends iced
them out. Well, back then the group had discovered that.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
He cheated all day, he never counts the strokes, and
when he was out of bounds, he never counted it.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
He cheated and basically stole a pot of money from
Deb's friends. That's why they were never invited to play
with the group again. Even his memory issues were alie.
When he talked to the press after the fact, he
seemed to remember every detail just fine. So what was
really going on that day when he went missing from
(37:28):
the facility and was found at the bank. Deb suspects
he was planning an escape. She also wonders if he
targeted her because she lives in a rural part of
the Cherokee Nation.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
It's very possible because look, this is rule, this is
a dead end road. Maybe he did think, hey, I
can get out in the woods and rule Oklahoma and
continue the hide.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
One of the most baffling aspects of his deception is
that visit to Canada a few years into their marriage.
Back then, the reunion seemed completely normal, but behind the scenes,
Jeff had asked all of his family members to use
his new name instead of calling him Ron. They said
they were so happy to see him again that they obliged.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
They did it because they'd lost him once and they
didn't want to lose him again. And I think they
were just so happy to have him back in their lives.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
There's clearly so much more to his family dynamics than
she'll ever know. It still doesn't sit right with her.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
What makes it okay that you support this kind of deception.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
In the beginning, she didn't even know how to refer
to him, what name to call him by, whether to
call him Ron or Jeff.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
But I had a really dear friend. She nicknamed him Raf,
and so for a while when I referred to him,
it was ref But now I usually just say Jeff.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
In the weeks after his double life was revealed, Deb
was emotion destroyed. It all happened in her first year
of sobriety. Jeff moved back to New Orleans with his son,
and Deb was left alone in the house they shared.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
I just remember it was a profound moment. It's the
duality of oh, my god, what in the world along
with you have to live, you have to deal with
this and go on. And I remember just laying in
(39:33):
the floor, just face down and just solvely and saying,
my god, how does another human do this to a human?
And the guise of love.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
In that moment, she couldn't get up. It felt like
her world had ended.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
I just had so much pain and confusion. I got
on my knees, I leaned into a chair, and I
just kept praying and asking for help, and just if
you can get me on my feet, I will go forward.
I will keep my sobriety. I promise a promise. I
made a commitment to live life, to help others, to
(40:16):
be the best person I can, to be loving, kind.
I mean, those were the things I'd always been, but
I was not going to let this make me harsh
and hateful.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
In the throes of despair, she gained vivid clarity.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
You know, we often talk of spiritual awakenings. I feel
like I've had a few in my life. But that
was profound, profound, And when I stood up, you know,
I was still crying, but I wasn't suffering as much.
I didn't feel the pain as deep at the betrayal
(40:54):
or shock, and I knew that when I stood up,
that it was something great later than me. It said,
get up, you got work to do.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Go on. She got up that day, and she's stayed
on her feet ever since.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
I made a commitment to do that in that moment,
and I've never turned back, and I've never tried to
rewrite the story, and I don't want to live in bitterness.
I still wanted to be open hearted and help others,
and that's what set the tone for the years to
(41:31):
where we are today.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
She's now eleven years sober.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
I maintained sobriety. I was dedicated to my meetings, and
I was dedicated to the spiritual journey and dealing with
my loss and grief and shock.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
She took on a leadership role in her tribe as
director of a program providing resources and support to victims
of domestic violence.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
I would say, you've still got to stay working on
your emotional health because it's a tough service. What I
know for sure is that we can't help others adequately
or appropriately if we haven't begun our own work to hear.
(42:22):
I feel like I'm more effective in these last years
because of all the work I've done.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
In twenty nineteen, she got a call from Jeff's son,
Jeff had passed away.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
It was a sense of relief, but also all the
emotions that flood into that moment, you.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
Just have to hold them in the last few years,
her life has taken an unexpected turn.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
I've just recently married on September seventh, and I never
saw it come in both of us or never's And
it was the most beautiful wedding outdoors, overlooking the lake.
It was just beautiful, romantic, just wonderful.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
After all, she did make a commitment to being open hearted.
Her new husband meets her at her level, and he's
put in the work too.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
He is also sober, him forty something years. Both of
us love golf, both of us love music. It's just
a blessing for us both. We feel so grateful. It's
too bad we're meeting each other at seventy and sixty seven,
but here we are.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question,
why did you want to share your story?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
If my story could help others identify lies from their
partner earlier, that's one part. The real part is we
can hear, and we can have a good lie, and
we can live well the trauma and the pain and
the suffering and the sorrow. We have the potential to
(44:07):
just be an amazing human. On the other side, leave
your heart open, love others, help others learn boundaries set limits.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
On the next episode of Betrayal.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
My mom was the first one to be like, does
this seem off at all to you? It was really
the first time someone said something that made me think,
what do you mean off? Like I had never considered
doubting it.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal
team or want to tell us your Betrayal story, email
us at Betrayal pod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal
pod at gmail dot com. We're grateful for your support.
One way to show us it is by subscribing to
our show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate
and review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way.
(45:07):
A big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal
is a production of.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group and partnership
with iHeart Podcasts. 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
(45:32):
team is Ali Perry and Jessica Krincheck. Audio editing and
mixing by Matt Delvecchio.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Additional editing support from Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by
Oliver Bains.
Speaker 4 (45:43):
Music library provided by Mob Music and For more podcasts
from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts
It was a profound moment. It's the duality of Oh
my god, what in the world, Who is this cruel?
Who can pull this off? Whose friends pull it off?
How do you fabricate the details like that?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
My real name is Deborah, but typically everyone calls me Dad.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Deb Proctor grew up on the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma.
She recently retired from her role as the senior director
of her tribe's domestic violence program, and before that, she
spent her entire career as a nurse.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
After being an rin well now it's been forty eight
and a half years.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Like a lot of people in the medical profession, she
developed a keen sense for when someone is lying.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
When you mansion bullshit detectors, I can spot them a
football field away or further.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Deb is Cherokee and proud of her Native American heritage.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
My grandmother who lived until she was ninety nine years old.
She is actually our family's original in Rowly, which means
she is on the Dows role.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
The DAWs role was a list compiled by the US
government in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds.
It named about one hundred thousand Native Americans who were
allotted land.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Which was pretty unusual to have an unregionally in your
life for most of it.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Growing up, Deb's grandmother was a constant presence and a
source of inspiration.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
I think I thought a lot of my propter will
and strength and courage from her. She was born before
statehood and she was still stacking her own wood when
she was in her early nineties. She was a survivor
of many many situations in her life.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Her grandmother experienced a lot of violence firsthand. Deb's father
did too. As a child, his own father was murdered
in front of him.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Those life events are what gives the background and the
experience to what we would call intergenerational trauma or historical trauma.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
She saw the impact of that on her family. There
was alcoholism and emotional and when she was young, Deb
struggled to process it.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
When you're a very sensitive nature child, your little heart's
open and you're intuitive, you pick up that energy.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
From a young age. She experienced violence and abuse herself.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
The violence I experience, I truly am my heart know
that it's as a result of those that could not heal.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Deb believes her father's unresolved trauma led him to become
a civil servant.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
He taught me a lot about community service. He would
be in his vehicle driving through the rural areas seeing
what the natives needed, and ultimately he was a councilman
for their tribe, served many many years.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Deb grew up quickly in more ways than one. In fact,
on our sixteenth birthday, her high school boyfriend surprised her.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
They had a birthday party for me and he asked
me to marry him, and I accepted. That was the
day I turned sixteen.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
But her engagement didn't distract her from prioritizing education. Her
father insisted that she earn an advanced degree.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
He was the one in the family who said you
must have an education, and so at age seventeen, I
did start college and I finished at nineteen with my
first RN degree. That was as a result to my
dad pushing me.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Before she even had a chance to know herself, she
was married and working as a full time nurse.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I mean, I'm running the hospital as a baby nurse.
I'd probably turn twenty maybe twenty one, by then. It
was tough, but I spent a good part of my
energy on trying to achieve perfection.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
And her husband shared a very similar upbringing.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
He came from a violent background, very similar to mine,
and so we just went together like peanut, butter and jelly.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
They had two sons together, but a few years into marriage,
her husband's behavior became a problem.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
He struggled with drugs and drinking, and he had violent tendencies.
It was really hard.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
She eventually left her husband and resolved to end the
cycle of violence to make a safe and stable environment
for her and her two sons.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
And so for many years I remained single and just
spent time with myself and the boys. And so for
the next few years after we divorced, I sought to understand.
I bought books, I joined book club, anything on self understanding.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
She started going to therapy and joined support groups for
families impacted by alcoholism. She was creating a better life
for herself and for her sons. When her sons became teenagers,
she looked around and realized.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I did want to partner in live. You know, someone
to enjoy life, that I meant something too, that I'm
mad or.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Too She was forty one and felt ready to explore
a new partnership, so she made an online dating profile.
This was nineteen ninety seven, back when online dating was
a novel concept.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah this aint bumble, this a yeah, this is none
of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
One man piqued her interest. His name was Jeff Walton.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
His profile was just romantic. It was something like I'm
looking for my gwinevere.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Jeff said he wanted to treat his next partner like
a queen. Deb wrote him an email. He lived a
couple states away in Kentucky, but their conversation flowed easily
and Deb quickly discovered they shared the same interests. They
both loved golf, and Jeff wanted to hear more about
Deb's Cherokee culture.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
You know, the music, a spiritual journey. He loved the
Native American spiritual practices. And when I talked to him,
I was just smitten with him.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
She looked forward to his phone calls and emails.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
I saved all of that. I printed everything. I had
a huge three inch purple binder with all of our exchanges.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
As they got closer, she got to know more about
his backstory.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
He was born in Alaska and moved to Canada.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
He was a dual citizen of Canada and the United States,
and he had a complicated relationship with his biological family.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
He didn't know he's real dad. His stepdad was very
violent and he would share stories like, you know, his
stepdad murdered the family poodle in front of his sister
and his mom and him, and I mean, it was
horrible stories.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Deb had seen her share of violence as well. She
understood what it was like, so they bonded over their
difficult childhoods. Jeff's family was still in Canada, but they'd
fallen out of touch. He moved to New Orleans as
a young man, and along the way he picked up
the accent.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
So when he would talk to me on the phone,
he would have that you know dialect. He would say hello,
Darlin and a dory. Yeah, I can't do it. But
it was definitely New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Jeff's ex wife and adult son still lived in New Orleans,
but after his divorce, he'd taken a job in Kentucky.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
He was a project manager for a big construction company
that you know, worked on Toyota plants that worked on
the University of Kentucky that had done all this great work.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Jeff was the kind of person who'd lived a million
lives in one.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
He just fascinated me. He was a pilot and played
football for Woody Hayes at Ohio State and was phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
DEP could really see herself with this guy.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
We're gonna embark upon this journey together. We love music,
we love golf, We're both seekers. I just was so
excited about meeting this man.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
After a year of talking, they decided to finally meet
each other in person. Jeff flew to Oklahoma. When he
arrived at the airport, she was waiting for him with
a gift.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
God had a traditional here. A medicine man gone to
him and asked him to be a feather. There was
a song by Robbie Robertson and the name of it
was Golden Feather, My Love of Golden Feather, and if
you would look it up, it's so that I never
lose my way home. And I thought, what a beautiful
(10:09):
expression of love for this new man in my life
to give him a feather because he loves that Native
American song so much. So I met him at the
plane with that and I said, here's so you can
always find your way home.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
And Jeff had come with the surprise of his own.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Since he got off the plane and he was walking
toward me. It seemed like his voice was shaking, and
he said, you will marry me, won't you. You're gonna
marry me right, You are marrying me right.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
That was Jeff's marriage proposal.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
And I was like, well, of course, of course, yes.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
The weekend could not have gone better. Jeff wanted to
get to know her world.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
You know. I drove around, showed ing the rural area,
my history, some of the culture where I were. We
went out to my golf course. I introduced him to
a lot of my friends, met the family. It was
just a really good weekend. I just loved him, just
loved him.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
They started making arrangements for him to move to Oklahoma.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
And I'm a planner and an organizer in every aspect
in my life. So shoot, the next thing, you know,
I'm getting busy. I'm helping him find jobs. He's getting
his resumeating. Of course, we're still using facts is then,
and he would send things and I would write cover
letters for him to help him get relocated.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
A few months later, Jeff moved in. They spent the
next year, planning a small family wedding in Theosarks.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
We married on April twenty third, two thousand.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
It was the anniversary of the day they met in person.
Deb's youngest son walked her down the aisle, and Jeff's son,
Little Jeff, flew in to support his dad. It was
a true merging of their lives.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
I really thought it was meant to be.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
They planned their first trip together as newlyweds, a golf
trip with Deb's group of friends. Deb had been golfing
for her entire life. Every year she and her friends
traveled the country to play. Jeff was eager to join.
He'd been an avid golfer when he was younger, but
he hadn't played in years.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
So he lost these golf clubs. Well, heck, you know,
I gotta go buying golf clubs, you know, because he's
got to have golf clubs off a month play. So
then he needed lessons because he just hadn't got to
play in a while. He said, needed to brush up.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
But on their first golf trip with her friends.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Once we got all scores in and everything, the winner
was him, and I was like, well, god, oh, great job.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
But Deb's friends were stand offish with Jeff about his win,
and one of her friends was quick to point out.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
A real golfer is not going to leave their clubs behind.
It didn't make sense.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Her friends had never acted like this before. She didn't
know what happened, and neither did Jeff. But after that
they weren't invited on any more golf trips.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
I felt like everybody was mistreating him.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
A year into their marriage, Jeff was still struggling to
find the right job in Oklahoma. One day when Deb
was helping him with an application.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Well, I sound an old resume, and on this particular
resume it says Vietnam veteran. I was like, my god.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
He'd never told her he was a veteran. But Deb
had a lot of experience with the VA. While getting
her Advanced Nursing degree, she worked on a program at
the VA that specific studied Vietnam veterans with PTSD.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I'm like, you never told me you were a veteran.
You never told me you were in the Vietnam War.
That is a significant event in life. Was flabbergasted. It
had never come up, and he said, well, I don't
like to talk about it. Deb I use it on
(14:26):
my resumes, because you know that ought to tell you
something I was like, But she should have told me.
I should never found out here.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Dev felt like he needed to talk about it, even
if he didn't want to. She'd had firsthand experience with
veterans and PTSD.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
And so over the course of time, he began to
tell me what happened. It was an elaborate story, intricate details.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
As an eighteen year old, he'd been in the Special
Forces in Vietnam. One night, he caught his senior officers
using drugs. Fearing he would turn them in, the officers
allowed Jeff to be captured. He was held as a
prisoner of war and for months he.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Was tortured and they bust at his feet with the
butt of a gun so that he couldn't walk. But
he got out. He escaped and he made it back
to the US Forces by following the path of a stream,
and it was so difficult because his feet were busted up.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
He was taken to a veteran's hospital.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
He had to have metal put in his feet because
they were broken and if we flew anywhere it would
trigger the metal alarms as you go in.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
He recovered physically and was discharged, but psychologically he was scarred.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
The trauma was so bad. He said, it was just
so awful that sometimes he would just get in the
closet and he would just hide.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Deb was worried about his mental health, especially because his
support system was then. He was in a new place
and wasn't in touch with his biological family. So Deb
was happy when his siblings reached out to reconnect. They
invited him back to Canada.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
His siblings had said that his mother's eightieth birthday party
was coming up and they wanted him to come. And
he talked to him about it, and I said, well,
we've got to I've never met any of your family.
And absolutely.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
A few months later, they flew to Alberta to meet
his family. They hadn't seen Jeff in decades. They were
elated to welcome him home. And Deb never thought you'd
get the chance to meet his siblings.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
I finally got to meet his family. I was just
so excited to be there and to meet them. And
you know, at one of the brothers' houses, we might
play games and just chat and get to know each other.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Deb fit right in.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
We didn't have any serious, meaningful conversations about life or anything.
We were just doing a friendly, cordial meet the family thing.
He was up be. Everyone was up be. It was
a good trip.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
It was a good trip. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Deb didn't know it at the time, but everyone there
was in on a secret, everyone except for her Her husband.
Jeff wasn't who he said he was. In fact, everyone
and his family knew Jeff by a different name.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Come to find out. He met his siblings at the
door and told him I'm going by Jeff Walton. Now
I'll tell you later.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Deb and her husband went to Canada to reconnect with
his estranged family, and to her surprise, the trip was
a success. Meeting his family brought the two of them closer.
But one day after they returned from their trip, Jeff
collapsed on the golf course.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And a friend of ours founding setting up against a
tree and wanted him to let him take him into
the hospital, and he said, no, just take me to
my car, and so he did that. He got in
his car and he drove home.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Deb met him at their house and forced him to
go to the hospital. Jeff had suffered a major heart attack.
It would require ongoing care but Jeff still hadn't nailed
down a steady job, so the couple needed help covering
his medical expenses. Jeb had worked at the VA years
ago and insisted it was their best resource.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
And he absolutely said, I will not go. I don't
trust the government. I'm not going. And I said, well,
that's bullshit. We're going broke. We've got to get your
health care.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
That's when Jeff explained the VA what didn't take him.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
He said, they don't even have a list of me
because I was dishonorably discharged because I reported the officers.
They won't even have me on the well, anything to
do with the VA. And I said, that's bullshit. You
were a soldier, you were captured. And he said, I
won't go. He got up and he never talked about
(19:49):
it again. In that moment, I was like, that is weird.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Explanation just didn't add up. Deb even considered hiring someone
to look into Jeff's background.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
I wonder if I need to get a private investigator
or something. And I logged on to the internet and
then I was like, God, I don't have any money
to get a private detective.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
She didn't have the money or the time to hire
a PI. Shortly after Jeff's heart attack, he had a stroke.
Then his memory began to falter. All the while he
was refusing to go to the VA. It financially strained
the family, and Deb was at a loss.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
I had begun to say, I do not know what
is wrong with my life. How am I going to
get this guy health care? He's got to have healthcare.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Deb was his primary caretaker on top of her full
time nursing job. It was overwhelming.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
I begin to drink, and then I drink heavily, and
then it was uncontrollably.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Alcohol became an escape from her marriage and its problems.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
When I started drinking, I didn't have to be confused
anymore because my brain was numb.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Deb had spent so many years taking care of other
people that she neglected herself.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
As the person that was going to alan on from
the mid eighties, taking family, taking coworkers, taking friends to
aa NA rehab. I was taken everybody to get help,
but myself had, I guess, reached just a hard stop
where I couldn't deal with it.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Deb had just turned fifty and had been with Jeff
for a decade, but life with him was becoming harder
year after year. At first he failed to bring in
a steady income. Then when he became sick, he refused
resources for affordable health care. Deb turned to booze for
the stress. But one day, after a long night of drinking,
(22:03):
she found herself too shaky to put the golf ball
on the tee. She checked herself into a thirty day rehab.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Best move I ever made. I'm not going to tell
you it was pretty. It was ugly, but there's always
been a driving force within me to rise above.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Being alone. In rehab gave her a lot of clarity,
and with that clarity came questions, specifically about Jeff. When
she left rehab, she looked at Jeff's behavior with a
new set of eyes.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
I began to really observe he was strange. Something was
not right, not right.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
She wasn't ready to leave the marriage. Her focus was
on her new sobriety, but she did come up with
a plan to get some answers out of Jeff. She
gave him an assignment.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
And I began to say to him, Jeff, every day
while I'm at work, I want you to work on
your life story because I don't understand it. You told
me you were born in Alaska and you moved to Canada,
but I don't know where you even went to school.
I don't even know when you moved to Canada. If
(23:19):
something happens, I'm going to be honest with you. I
can't even write an obituary.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
She thought it would be a good exercise for both
of them, and she hoped it could help her understand
why he was the way he was.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
And so every day I would come home and I
would we'll share your story with me. Oh, I couldn't
work on it today.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
After his stroke, Jeff's memory was worse than ever.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
He began to claim that he just didn't have much
of a memory, but the neurologist at the time of
his stroke had already advised me that the stroke was
not going to impact his memory. Then he wanted me
to get in checked for possible early dementia.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
He needed more care than she could provide a home,
so she applied for him to be in a funded
outpatient care facility and he was accepted.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
It's a wonderful program that where you stay in your home,
but they basically have a center that's opened during the
day and there's activities and transportation. There's clinic on side,
everything that you could need, and if you need something outside,
they'll take you.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
He started going to the center every day.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
That was until the program called me and they said,
have you talked to Jeff? Because nobody confining he's gone.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Deb was at work. She didn't know where he was.
With his memory issues, she worried he could have gotten lost,
so they called the police.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Come to find out. He had left the group and
the care team to go to the bank.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
When Deb got there, Jeff seemed confused about what was happening.
The whole said situation confirmed that he really needed this facility.
His memory must be worse than she thought. But shortly
after Jeff's incident at the bank, Deb received another phone call.
Only this one would change her life forever.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
It was a number I didn't recognizing. I typically didn't
pick those up in the office.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
It was an international call, but Deb had a strange feeling.
When she picked up. There was a police officer on
the other line, and.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
I was like, what is this about.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
The officer was Canadian and he was investigating a cold
case from thirty years ago.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
That's when he began to say that they were looking
for ron Stan, and they had believed that they're tracking
down through social media.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
But Deb didn't know a ron Stan. The officer continued,
explaining that Canadian police had been looking for a man
named ron Stan for over thirty years. He disappeared during.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
A There was a fire in his barn at night,
and initially he was presumed to have been in that fire,
and he had left a wife, infant, and another child.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Deb's blood ran cold. She knew what the officer was
about to say before he said it. The man she
was married to, who she knew as Jeff Walton.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Was actually the complete fraud. He was ron Stan, who
was dismissing person.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Here's the thing about ron Stan. He was originally declared dead,
but in reality he'd been on the run ever since
that barnfire. Eleven years into her marriage, Deb Proctor got
(27:01):
a phone call out of the blue from a Canadian
police officer. They were looking for ron Stan, a Canadian
man who'd been missing and later declared dead after an
arson fire in nineteen seventy seven, and they believed they'd
found him in the United States. He was hiding out
in a rural part of the Cherokee Nation using the
(27:21):
name Jeff Walton. When the police explained this to.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Deb, initially I thought it was perhaps just a cruel joke.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
So she asked the officer for proof, for details.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
The more I push for dates, times, names, locations, the
more I realized, oh ugh.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
She didn't see much on the phone. She just listened,
writing down everything the police told.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Her, every detail, dates, times, information. I still have that notepad.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Canadian officials wanted to speak to Jeff or Ron directly.
Deb explained that he was in a care facility during
the day because of his memory problems. She confirmed their
home address, thanked the officer and hung up the phone
in disbelief.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
I was sitting there when there was a nurse that
looked at me from an office door and she said,
are you okay. I remember saying, I don't know. I've
just had the most bizarre phone call. So I went
to talk to my director of nursing and she said,
get out of here. What in the world.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
She debated whether this phone call was real, if the
person on the phone was even a police officer. A
coworker who was afraid for Deb suggested another possibility, he.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Probably is in witness protection and you just blew it,
so you're probably not safe, nor is he. And they said,
we'll go with you to the Cherokee Nation Marshals and
we will get to the bottom of this.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
So Deb went straight there. She wanted to know if
the call she'd received was real or if Jeff could
be in witness protection. An investigator took Deb's concern seriously
and started making calls.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
I gave her the sale number, the badge number, and
everything from the officer that called. And she did call,
and she confirmed every last detail.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
She verified that Jeff Walton didn't exist. Her husband of
eleven years was a missing person, a man named Ronald
Stan who'd faked his death in an arson fire and
had been on the run for thirty years.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
I was just heartsick, gut sick, heartsick, my whole body responded,
and all I could think of was, who are you?
How could you do this?
Speaker 2 (29:56):
When Ronald Stan disappeared from his farm in rural Ontario
andnineteen seventy seven, he abandoned his wife and two young sons.
In order to escape, He had lit his barn on fire,
killing all the animals. His family watched the blaze helpless,
fearing that ron was trapped inside.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
That poor wife and those two sons that he walked
away from in this barn far in the middle of
the night. What horror, what pain, what trauma that they
must have endured, thinking that they were watching him burn
up in front of their eyes.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Why he'd faked his death. Deb wouldn't find out until
much later. In that moment, she just knew she couldn't
go home, not to the house she shared with him.
He was a criminal, a fraud, a total stranger. So
the Cherokee Marshals helped her come up with an immediate plan.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Go to an attorney, go to the bank, and get protection.
So that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
She made an appointment with a divorce attorney for the
following day, and a friend offered to let Deb stay
at her place while she figured out her next move.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
I just was in a state of robot just trying
to put one foot in front of the other and
then formulate a plan on how to tell the family.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
She met with her sons to break the news, and
with all of their support, she called Jeff's son, the
one he'd had in America after he went on the run.
After all, he was the only child Deb knew about.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
I loved that boy. He was my son too, you know,
he was a third son, So my heart hurt for him,
just like it did for my boys. To tell him.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Everyone in the family called him Little Jeff. He was
named after his father, or rather his father's alias.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
And gives respec The box was, you know, silent initially
as you could imagine, and then just struggling. We both
needed some time to just deal.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
The one person she didn't want to speak with was Jeff.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
I really did not have any communication with him whatsoever.
I just had nothing to say.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
When the authorities finally got ahold of Jeff, they questioned
him and asked to see his proof of identity.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
He admitted to everything.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
In fact, he seemed amused. He made a joke to
police officers asking what took them so long? Because the
arson had happened so long ago, the statute of limitations
had expired in Canada, and authorities in the US couldn't
charge him either.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
There was no charges to be made here. You know,
he's a scam, but there's no charges that I could file.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
The only legal action deb could take was filing for divorce.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
The domestic Violence Service of the tribe helped me and
just took the papers and when they served in the papers,
he just signed it. He didn't even question it.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
The news got wind of the story and it was
a media frenzy.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Media showed up, some Canada and some Oklahoma from the UK.
I just didn't have any peace. I could rarely go home.
My phone ranking constantly. I was just completely overwhelmed.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Debsnye's drafted a statement to send to the press on
her behalf, and deb kept tabs on the news. That's
how she learned Jeff's real life story, the one he
claimed he couldn't remember. A journalist with the Toronto Star
had been reporting on it. Through their investigation, they uncovered
a possible motivation for why he faked his death.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Evidently, he was messing with young college girls and he
was getting ready to get in trouble.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
At the time of the arson, Ron was working at
a college in Canada. He was having a relationship with
a local girl who was much younger. The day he
went missing, it seemed this information was about to be revealed.
It's not clear how old the girl was, but the
threat of being discovered prompted him to go on the
run for three decades. Deb also learned how he pulled
(34:24):
it off.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
When he left Canada in the fire in Cana, New Orleans,
he said, I've got to find a woman with money.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
He did. In fact, he had two other marriages he'd
never told deb about. And after he found a woman
with money, he needed papers to validate his new identity.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
He got a social Security from somebody that had died
in the seventies, a girl, so he took over her
social security.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
He used his stolen identity to find work and even
collect Social Security benefits.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
That's how he worked in the decades that he came
to the United States. He used this social security and
false name. I don't know how anybody pulls this off.
It's so elaborate.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
When the story broke, Jeff himself spoke to the media
about how and why he faked his death, and he
seemed to revel in it.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
He sought that attention. He wanted to be a star.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
He said. He chose the name Jeff because it was
the name of his infant son he abandoned in Canada,
and the last name Walton was inspired by the TV
show The Waltons. It sounded like a classic American last name.
As for the documents he used to marry Dub, they
appeared to be forged.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
I had seen his birth certificate and I still have it.
But when you look there are things that have been changed.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Like the arson. Too much time had passed for him
to be charged in the US with identity fraud. And
what about his elaborate stories like being a prisoner of
war in Vietnam.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
It's all made up.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
That's why he was so resistant to using the VA.
He never fought in the Vietnam War. He wasn't even
an American citizen. The POW story, well, he ripped those
details straight out of a movie called Platoon starring Charlie Sheen.
And his football career at Ohio State with Woody Hayes.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
There was never anybody that played football, so Woody Hayes
by his name.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Ever, Deb was left wondering if anything he'd ever told
her was true. Today she doubts if he'd even swung
a golf club before she met him. After all his
lies were exposed, one of Deb's friends finally came clean
about something. Remember the golf trip where Deb's friends iced
them out. Well, back then the group had discovered that.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
He cheated all day, he never counts the strokes, and
when he was out of bounds, he never counted it.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
He cheated and basically stole a pot of money from
Deb's friends. That's why they were never invited to play
with the group again. Even his memory issues were alie.
When he talked to the press after the fact, he
seemed to remember every detail just fine. So what was
really going on that day when he went missing from
(37:28):
the facility and was found at the bank. Deb suspects
he was planning an escape. She also wonders if he
targeted her because she lives in a rural part of
the Cherokee Nation.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
It's very possible because look, this is rule, this is
a dead end road. Maybe he did think, hey, I
can get out in the woods and rule Oklahoma and
continue the hide.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
One of the most baffling aspects of his deception is
that visit to Canada a few years into their marriage.
Back then, the reunion seemed completely normal, but behind the scenes,
Jeff had asked all of his family members to use
his new name instead of calling him Ron. They said
they were so happy to see him again that they obliged.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
They did it because they'd lost him once and they
didn't want to lose him again. And I think they
were just so happy to have him back in their lives.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
There's clearly so much more to his family dynamics than
she'll ever know. It still doesn't sit right with her.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
What makes it okay that you support this kind of deception.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
In the beginning, she didn't even know how to refer
to him, what name to call him by, whether to
call him Ron or Jeff.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
But I had a really dear friend. She nicknamed him Raf,
and so for a while when I referred to him,
it was ref But now I usually just say Jeff.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
In the weeks after his double life was revealed, Deb
was emotion destroyed. It all happened in her first year
of sobriety. Jeff moved back to New Orleans with his son,
and Deb was left alone in the house they shared.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
I just remember it was a profound moment. It's the
duality of oh, my god, what in the world along
with you have to live, you have to deal with
this and go on. And I remember just laying in
(39:33):
the floor, just face down and just solvely and saying,
my god, how does another human do this to a human?
And the guise of love.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
In that moment, she couldn't get up. It felt like
her world had ended.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
I just had so much pain and confusion. I got
on my knees, I leaned into a chair, and I
just kept praying and asking for help, and just if
you can get me on my feet, I will go forward.
I will keep my sobriety. I promise a promise. I
made a commitment to live life, to help others, to
(40:16):
be the best person I can, to be loving, kind.
I mean, those were the things I'd always been, but
I was not going to let this make me harsh
and hateful.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
In the throes of despair, she gained vivid clarity.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
You know, we often talk of spiritual awakenings. I feel
like I've had a few in my life. But that
was profound, profound, And when I stood up, you know,
I was still crying, but I wasn't suffering as much.
I didn't feel the pain as deep at the betrayal
(40:54):
or shock, and I knew that when I stood up,
that it was something great later than me. It said,
get up, you got work to do.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Go on. She got up that day, and she's stayed
on her feet ever since.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
I made a commitment to do that in that moment,
and I've never turned back, and I've never tried to
rewrite the story, and I don't want to live in bitterness.
I still wanted to be open hearted and help others,
and that's what set the tone for the years to
(41:31):
where we are today.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
She's now eleven years sober.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
I maintained sobriety. I was dedicated to my meetings, and
I was dedicated to the spiritual journey and dealing with
my loss and grief and shock.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
She took on a leadership role in her tribe as
director of a program providing resources and support to victims
of domestic violence.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
I would say, you've still got to stay working on
your emotional health because it's a tough service. What I
know for sure is that we can't help others adequately
or appropriately if we haven't begun our own work to hear.
(42:22):
I feel like I'm more effective in these last years
because of all the work I've done.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
In twenty nineteen, she got a call from Jeff's son,
Jeff had passed away.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
It was a sense of relief, but also all the
emotions that flood into that moment, you.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
Just have to hold them in the last few years,
her life has taken an unexpected turn.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
I've just recently married on September seventh, and I never
saw it come in both of us or never's And
it was the most beautiful wedding outdoors, overlooking the lake.
It was just beautiful, romantic, just wonderful.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
After all, she did make a commitment to being open hearted.
Her new husband meets her at her level, and he's
put in the work too.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
He is also sober, him forty something years. Both of
us love golf, both of us love music. It's just
a blessing for us both. We feel so grateful. It's
too bad we're meeting each other at seventy and sixty seven,
but here we are.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question,
why did you want to share your story?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
If my story could help others identify lies from their
partner earlier, that's one part. The real part is we
can hear, and we can have a good lie, and
we can live well the trauma and the pain and
the suffering and the sorrow. We have the potential to
(44:07):
just be an amazing human. On the other side, leave
your heart open, love others, help others learn boundaries set limits.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
On the next episode of Betrayal.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
My mom was the first one to be like, does
this seem off at all to you? It was really
the first time someone said something that made me think,
what do you mean off? Like I had never considered
doubting it.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal
team or want to tell us your Betrayal story, email
us at Betrayal pod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal
pod at gmail dot com. We're grateful for your support.
One way to show us it is by subscribing to
our show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate
and review Betrayal. Five star reviews go a long way.
(45:07):
A big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal
is a production of.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group and partnership
with iHeart Podcasts. 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
(45:32):
team is Ali Perry and Jessica Krincheck. Audio editing and
mixing by Matt Delvecchio.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Additional editing support from Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by
Oliver Bains.
Speaker 4 (45:43):
Music library provided by Mob Music and For more podcasts
from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts
Host
Andrea Gunning
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