August 29, 2024 • 39 mins
Heather receives a phone call that changes her life and her family forever.
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.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
My dad was like, I want to talk to you
about something. Let's go talk for a second outside. He
started this whole preamble of like, you have taught me
the importance of honesty. You have been such a positive
influence on my life, Like you are an inspiration. And
he was looking me in the eye and being really
emotional about it, and he said, because of that, I
(00:22):
want to be honest with you. They're gonna have a
little bit of trouble coming up.
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. At Betrayal, we hear lots of stories about
romantic betrayals, marriages and relationships blown apart by deception. Sometimes
(01:00):
we encounter another kind of betrayal, one that's not a
violation of vowels, but instead the violation of a more
inherent trust, the trust a child puts in their parents.
That's how we found Heather summer Lad.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
As a really young child, I had no idea that
there was anything bizarre about my family.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Heather grew up in Elpaso, Texas, in the eighties and nineties.
She was the youngest child in a blended family. We're
not going to use her parents' names here. We'll just
call them mom and dad. Her earliest memories of her
parents are fond ones.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
My parents were everything. They were really silly, they were
really fun. My dad, he used to play this game
with me where he put me on his shoulders, like
a piggyback ride. But he used to call it a
camel ride for some reason. I don't know why, but
he said that he was my camel. So I never
(02:03):
called him dad. I only called him camel. I thought
he was the funniest best father in the world.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Heather's mom was also playful and charming.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
My mom wasn't strict at all. There was this kind
of running joke in my family. Anytime I quote unquote
acted up or threw a tantrum, she'd make me sit
in this little pink plastic chair, probably from the Dollar
Store or whatever, and it was called the attitude change
chair until my attitude changed. But then she would feel
(02:36):
so bad about making me sit there that every single
time she made me a chocolate malt she would joke
about it. She'd give me the malt and be like, oh,
I mean, how you're gonna act up? Just so you
can get this chocolate malt.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Her mom was part of a tight knit Mexican American family.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
I always like to joke that my mom didn't teach
me Spanish so that she could talk about me in
Spanish to other people, and then I wouldn't understand.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Heather says her mom treated her more like a confidant
or a friend and not so much like her child.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I never had a bedtime, and I remember asking my
mom for a bedtime because all my friends they had bedtimes.
But it was a free for all, like we could
do whatever we wanted.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
When Heather was in second grade, she was confronted for
the first time with something that would become a major
theme in her life, money, or more specifically, debt.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
I have a pretty specific memory of being in line
at school for lunch and I had my little tray
and I walked up and the lunch lady just looked
at me and she was like, your parents owe us
a lot of money. You can't keep taking trays, And
a shame, you know, that washed over me, and also
(03:52):
the anxiety of just like, wait, what do you mean
they owe money?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
At home, meal times were always a crisis.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Dinner would roll around and we'd be like, we're hungry,
and then my dad would act surprised that we were hungry.
And then it was dinnertime. When we didn't have money,
my dad would have to go like basically forage for
food or money. He would leave for like a few hours,
and we wouldn't know when he was coming back, and
we didn't know where he was, and then he'd come
(04:22):
back with Sometimes it was full blown takeout, and my
mom would ask me, how did you get that? Other
times he would come home with like tortillas, And this
was like a daily occurrence until payday.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Heather's childhood revolved around her parents payday.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
That was such a big day in our house. Everything
was centered around when was the next paycheck? When are
we getting paid again? And so we would get the paycheck,
and you know, it was like celebration that first day.
We'd got to eat, or we'd go to the movies,
or my mom would go shopping and we'd live it up.
We'd have all this stuff, but the money seemed to
(05:05):
always be gone a few days after pay day and
then a few days later we didn't have anything.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Between pay days, Heather and her dad would usually take
a trip to the pawn shop.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
I used to go with my father to pawn things
as early as first grade. We would drive around to
all the different pawn shops. I mean, to me as
a kid, it wasn't bizarre. It was like, oh yay,
like we're going to the pawn shop, We're going to
Applebee's tonight.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
But here's the thing that still doesn't make sense to
Heather about her childhood.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
We weren't poor, or at least their salaries suggest that
we shouldn't have been poor.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Both of her parents worked full time as teachers. In fact,
when she was growing up, her father was an assistant
principal at a high school.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
We should have been, I think, pretty clearly middle class.
Especially the cost of living where we were from wasn't
really that high, so it was bizarre that we never
had money.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
They lived above their means. When the paychecks came in,
they bought things, including jewelry and expensive electronics. They spent
so quickly that between paychecks they would run out of
money and wouldn't have enough to eat, so they pawned
whatever they had just bought. She began realizing this was strange,
especially when she made friends at school.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
My friends. A lot of their parents were teachers, and
seeing how they lived in comparison with how we lived
was eye opening.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
When she was in fourth grade, Heather was finally allowed
to go over to a friend's house for the first time.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
One of the craziest things is they would offer me food.
They were like, oh, do you want dinner? And the
idea that somebody would be offering me food willingly and
that I was welcome to it like it just didn't
feel real. So that, I think is when I started
to realize, like, this is really not normal.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
And there was another thing Heather noticed.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
She had her own room. That was really I hope,
because I never I got my own room maybe like
four times in my childhood out of like the seventeen
houses we lived in.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
The seventeen houses they lived in. Her family moved every
single year of her childhood, and Heather shared a room
with her half brothers or slept on the couch.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
We always knew it was because we were getting evicted.
There was no cover story. We heard all the fights,
we knew everything.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
After every move, Heather watched her mom become increasingly defeated, exasperated,
and angrier with her dad.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Because that was the girl. I think my mom relied
on me emotionally. Oh, your father did this and he's
done that. It started to become really clear that the
things he was doing were really shady.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Heather quickly learned that her mom didn't approve of her
dad's behavior, and it rubbed off on her.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
I started to see my father as the quote unquote
problem and my mom. I always thought of myself as
her protector.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Heather's mom would even confide in her about wanting to
leave her dad.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
She was always talking about leaving him. She never would
leave him though, because like, oh, I don't want to
be a burden to my kids, or I'm saving as
much money as i can.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Right before Heather started high school, her dad just walked out.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
He just said he couldn't take it anymore, so he left.
And that was great. I was helping my mom budget.
Family and friends came to help. My aunt paid some bills,
people brought us grocery. It was just great. And I
remember going with my mom to a divorce lawyer too,
and just like really like trying to support her and
(09:08):
actually going through with a divorce.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
But within a month or two he started coming back around.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
My dad would start to come over in this period
when they were separated. He would come over because my
mom needed him to fix a light bulb or something,
and then he'd come over, and the next day it
was just say a little bit longer, Oh, let me
fix the light bulb and also do your laundry. And
then he lived there again.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
He promised that this time things were going to be different.
He started taking steps towards financial stability.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
And so my dad started seeing the pastor and was
supposedly getting all this help with budgeting.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Heather didn't believe him at first. She was angry with
him and angry at her mom for letting him back
into their lives. It was a lot of pressure on
a child, too much pressure.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
I have memories of sobbing in front of my parents
and then just kind of like going about and eating
breakfast while I'm there, just sobbing about getting evicted again.
My mom just like eating her grapefruit and kind of
like ice colds and giving no comfort. My dad just
like catering to her needs.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Heather retreated into herself emotionally when she started high school.
She fixated on the one thing she could control.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
I was in the gifted program at school, and part
of how I connected to other adults was trying to
excel at whatever I did. So trying to excel at school,
making good grades, not being rebellious. And I played the violin,
which my mom wanted me to do, even though.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
It wasn't her passion. Heather was a gifted violinist, and
she started dreaming about a future, one that was far
away from her parents.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Wanted to be a writer. That was like a big
part of my childhood. And there was this writing contest.
And as I was looking up the writing contest, I
discovered Bennington College.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Bennington College is a small liberal arts school in Vermont.
It's known for creative student led coursework. It promised the
one thing Heather craved the most. Freedom.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Everything about it just seemed like paradise, and it was
like two thousand miles away. So I just got it
into my head that I really wanted to go there.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
From that moment on, Bennington became her goal, her only goal.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
I just had that determination. I just knew I needed
to get the fuck out. My body just couldn't take
it anymore.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
One day, during her senior year of high school, Heather
got a letter in the mail the letter she'd been
waiting for.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
It was just a normal day and my mom got
the mail and there was an envelope for me and
she handed it to me. It was from Bennington. I
remember opening the envelope and I was like, Mom, I
got in and her face just dropped like it went
ice colds, and she started walking away. And I was like, oh,
(12:19):
maybe she's getting me a present or something.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
But she wasn't getting her daughter a present. Instead, Heather's
mom felt abandoned by her decision to go to college
so far away. To Heather's surprise, it was her dad
who swooped in, and it was him who said the
things she desperately needed to hear.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Like Oh, I'm so proud of you. This is great, congratulations.
I will talk to your mom for you, like, let
me smooth this over for you, because I really want
you to be able to go to this school.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Her dad worked hard to earn her trust back. He
acknowledged his mistakes and promised that he was going to
be there to make her dreams come true.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
My dad really made me believe that he was on
my side. He would say things like, after everything that's happened,
I want you to go to school. I want to
help you do this, like I will figure this out
for you.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
For the first time since she was a child, Heather
trusted her dad.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
I wanted that cammel relationship that we had had because
after a while I stopped calling him anything, Like I
didn't call him Cammel, I didn't call him dad like
I think for a while, I was referring to him
as my biological father. So to have him put this
olive branch out of like, yes, you know what, I know.
I did wrong. I'm learning from my mistakes and I
(13:44):
want to help you. You're an eighteen year old kid,
you're gonna eat that up, which I did.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Heather had been accepted to her dream college, Bennington, two
thousand miles away from El Paso, Texas and the chaos
she'd grown up with. There was still one big obstacle
between Heather and Bennington, money, but her dad was there
to help.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
When it came time to filling out the paperwork for
financial aid. You know, he was the one helping me.
He was like brainstorming, and then he was like, I've
worked it out with Bennington. We've got this payment plan.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Heather was skeptical at first, just a few years ago,
they didn't have enough money for food even with financial aid,
how could they afford regular college tuition payments. But her
dad reassured her.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
We're budgeting and we have more money now, and like,
I know how to do this, and I want to
do this.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
So Heather enrolled at Bennington. She finally felt like her
life was starting. There was one upfront cost that financial
aid didn't cover. A few thousand dollars she needed for
travel to Vermont, a laptop, and textbooks. The family put
their heads together to come up with the money.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
I remember one day he came and was like, I've
got a co signer for you for a loan. Because
my parents were never going to be co signers. They
didn't have the credit for that, and I didn't have
any credit. It was a small loan for I think
three thousand dollars, and that was the loan that was
going to get me to school. It was going to
buy me a computer, it was going to get me
(15:34):
my textbooks. He came home he was like, I've got it.
I've got you a co signer. She's already agreed, it's
my friend. She's already signed the paperwork, like all you
have to do is sign right here, and this is it.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
When August came, the whole family took a trip to
Vermont to move her into college. As they began the drive,
Heather was overcome with anxiety.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
I kept expect there to be some sort of issue,
and the whole drive up to her mom, I was like,
I'm going to die. We're going to get into a
car crash. My dad is going to have a heart
attack and die. Just the most awful situations just kept
replaying in my head because I didn't think that I
was actually going to make it there.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Behind her catastrophic anxieties was a much more realistic one.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
I'm going to show up and they're going to tell
me that I'm like denied or something like the payment
plan didn't work out.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
When they finally got to campus, I go.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
And I ask for my ID. It took my picture
and everything like here, and I was like, Okay, this
is real.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
It was a huge relief. Her parents took her shopping
for dorm supplies and helped her move in. It all
felt shockingly normal. When it came time to say their goodbyes,
Heather expected her mom to be upset, clinging or even angry,
but she wasn't.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
She was kind of like, Okay, we had, you know,
just to have fun. And I was kind of like,
what is happening. This is very bizarre, and I was
like goodbye, and I was on my own. As far
as I knew, I was leaving my childhood behind and
entering into a new life with my parents as supporters.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Bennington was everything she expected it to be. She finally
felt free.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Oh my god, I loved it. When the leaves started
to change. Oh my gosh. My friend took me in
her car and we just like drove around and it
was just like the best freaking day ever.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
She thrived at Bennington, even though she wanted to be
a writer. She ended up pursuing a degree in music.
But in the back of her mind, she always felt
a nagging guilt that her parents were breaking the bank
to send her to college, and Heather felt a special
guilty that she had left her mom alone with her dad.
(18:04):
So she was surprised when her parents called to tell her.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
That they were moving to Boston. It was a shock
that it actually happened, and they just kind of up
and moved.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Her mom loved Boston and always talked about moving there.
So maybe Heather's dream was allowing her mom to live
hers as well. For the remainder of her time in college,
Heather's parents were just a few hours away in their
new Boston apartment.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
They moved to this really nice, cute little apartment, three bedrooms,
two stories, a tree lined street, and they were there
for a couple of years. For my family, like that
was huge, Like staying anywhere for more than a year
met things were great. They're not only paying for my education,
They've also got this amazing apartment in Boston, and so
(18:54):
when I would go back home to visit, I have
this nice place to be.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Even though her parents were doing better than ever, the
cost of Heather's tuition was still a strain. She had
financial aid and then that small loan she'd co signed
before she started college. Everything else totaled about five thousand
dollars a semester, and her parents were covering it out
of pocket pretty much.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Every semester. I would get a late notice of payment
in my box, like your past do with your tuition,
And I'd always call my dad and I'd be like, listen,
I know you're working really hard. You know, whether you
can be able to make the payments.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Every time she had to make a call like this,
it racked her with guilt.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
My parents would be really stressed, like, your mom's been
working so hard after school doing tutoring to get some
extra money, and I'm doing this, that and the other.
We've almost got it. We've almost got it.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
The day before her senior year started, she was staying
at her parents' house. Before she left, her dad wanted
to talk. He sounded concerned.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
It was like a really beautiful day. My dad took
me up to the back deck and he was like, oh,
let's go talk for a second outside. I want to
talk to you about something. So he started with this
whole preambled like you have taught me the importance of honesty,
Like you have been such a positive influence on my life,
Like you are an inspiration. And he was like looking
me in the eye and like being really emotional about it.
(20:25):
And he said, because of that, I want to be
honest with you. You're going to get a note in
your box this semester.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
He asked Heather if she knew how loans worked.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
I was like, you said that we didn't have to
take out loans for this year, like you said, everything
was all set and he was like, no, actually we
did have to take out a loan and everything is
all set, but you're going to get this paper and
just give him this. And he started phishing something out
of his back pocket and it was just like this
piece of paper he was a promised story note and
(20:57):
he was like, you just give him this and everything should.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Be get The next day, when Heather got to school
to start her senior year, there.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Was a note in my box. I went to the
business office and they told me that I had to
leave and that I couldn't be on campus unless I
came back to school with a bank certified check for
twenty thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
The number didn't even make sense. As far as she knew,
her parents only paid about five thousand dollars out of
pocket every semester. How could they possibly be this far
behind on payments.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
I called my dad and I kept on being like hey,
like they said twenty thousand dollars, How do we owe
twenty thousand dollars? And he was like, Oh, those guys,
they're real jerks over there at the business office. I
couldn't get anybody to tell me what was going on.
My father didn't know anything. My mom didn't know anything.
I just knew that I couldn't be at school until
(21:51):
this money was paid.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Without any real answers, Heather's spent a few days at
her parents' house. I'm sure if she'd be able to
continue her education. Furious and exasperated, she stopped asking for
answers from her dad. She just wanted to go back
to school, and somehow.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
It got cleared up. I can't even say I know how.
I was just like, I don't want to know anything
about this. I just want to go back to school.
I just know that at the last possible second, I
was able to graduate. That's when I started to realize, like, Okay,
something fishy is going on here, but I just wanted
(22:32):
to graduate. I didn't want to think about it, and.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
She did graduate with a music degree. She planned to
move to New York City to work as a musician.
She felt her dad had done something fishy to mysteriously
settle the bill at Bennington. That made her more concerned
than ever about her dad's behavior and what it meant
for her mom.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
I remember telling my mom, look what happened with Bennington.
He's going back to his old patterns. You have to
leave him. Like, I was so upset, and my mom
kept being like, yes, I'm going to leave him, I'm
going to leave him, And you know, I told her, like, Mom,
you're in an abusive relationship, and she was just like, oh,
I know, I know. I know.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
That summer, Heather worked gigs and odd jobs off of
Craigslist to get enough money to move herself to New York.
Even though she was in survival mode, Heather was still
worried about her mom.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
It got to the point where I even asked my
roommates if my mom could come live with us for
a little bait, which didn't go over very well with
the roommates. They were like no, that's how desperate I
was to get my mom out of this situation.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
One day that summer, Heather got a message out of
the blue.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
And as soon as I saw that it was like
an eight eight eight member. I was like, oh, I
knew what those kind of numbers meant. They're looking for
my parents, because you know, we were always getting deck
collector calls and stuff. So I called them back and
I gave them my name, and the guy on the
other end was like you're past due for your student loans.
(24:09):
And I was like, what are you talking about? What
student loans?
Speaker 2 (24:13):
As far as she knew, she didn't have any student loans,
just that initial three thousand dollars loan she signed for
before starting school.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
He said I had twelve student loans that were in
collection and that it was a really, really serious matter.
I asked him how much and he said it was
one hundred and twenty four thousand dollars that I owed.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Shortly after she graduated college, Heather summer Lad received a
call from a debt collector. She was overdue on her
student loans, twelve student loans, totally one hundred and twenty
four thousand dollars student loans with her name on them
that she never knew existed.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
It was like feeling the chain and getting clipped to
my collar. Who's like, wow, I still feel it in
my body. I feel that anger in my chest and
my chest constricting.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
In addition to the overdue loans, there was something else.
Heather would be on the hook for a fraud charge.
Turns out there was a co signer on some of
the loans and their signature had been forged.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
So of course I have visions going to jail and
being framed for something that I didn't do.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Heather knew immediately that her dad was behind this crisis.
She tried desperately to explain it to the deck collector.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
I was like, trying to tell the story my dad,
you know. I was like, no, you don't understand. My dad.
He's the one who did this.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Heather hung up and immediately dialed her parents' house. Her
mom picked up.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I told her what happened, and she was like, hold on,
there was no he did what. I was like, oh
my god, she knew. So she handed the phone to
my dad. He was just like trying to flip it
back to me. He kept talking about how I was
too expensive, your violin cost ons money, and your education
costs the switch money, and we did this, that and
(26:26):
the other for you, and you're not letting me talk.
I remember him saying that you're not letting me talk.
You don't let people talk. And he gave the phone
back to my mom and I was like, you knew
about it, you knew, And my mom was crying and
she was like, yes, I've been nagging him to pay
this back. He said he was going to take care
of it, and he promised.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Her dad had taken out one hundred and twenty four
thousand dollars in loans in Heather's name and forged her signature.
He'd also forged the signature of a co signer, someone
who was family friend. Her dad wouldn't admit to it directly,
but Heather saw the documents with her name signed in
her father's handwriting. Realizing the extent of his deception, she
(27:12):
immediately feared for her mom's safety.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
I always saw her as a victim of my father's abuse.
I wrote this to her in an email too. I
was like, I don't understand why you're still with him.
I don't know if he's threatened to kill you, if
he's threatened to kill us, like, if there's violence involved.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
She'd never seen her dad be violent, but there had
to be a reason why her mom never spoke up.
Her dad said he would fix this, that he would
be responsible for making the payments.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
But of course, my dad never made payments.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Heather was done with her father. She told her mom
that she wanted no contact with him, and if she
came home, he couldn't be there.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
And so we started on that dynamic word It's like
my mom and I, as long as we didn't talk
about the loans or my father, we were cool and
my mom was happy to respect that.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Now with her father out of her life, Heather got
another call about overdue payments. This time she was ready.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
I immediately was like, give me the fraud department, and
so through that process, they told me to file police report,
and so I did. I went to the police and
I filed the report. Who wants to file a police
report against their father? You know? I didn't want to
put my dad in jail, Like, I really didn't like.
I didn't want to be the kind of person who
did that.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
We've seen these police reports and filing them wasn't easy
for Heather.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
As soon as I said it was my dad, they
were like, well, how else were you supposed to get
an education? I had to provide copies of my signature.
That was actually really hard because I had to go
through old, old, old paperwork. They needed signed and dated
from within the time that the occurred.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Through the process of filing a police report, Heather learned
more about the fraudulent loans. She discovered that her actual
signature was on one of the loans. She didn't know about.
When she saw the date of the signature, it jogged
her memory.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
It was something that my father had said was a
gift for my grandfather, a check that was made out
to me that turned out to be one of these loans.
He didn't present me with a loan. He presented me
with a check and was like, this is a gift.
You just have to endorse it, which I did.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
She was held responsible for that one. After the police report,
the debt collectors stopped calling and sending mail about the loans.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Months later, I got the letter back saying that the
loans had been written off except for three and those
can remain on my credit report forever.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
I can't imagine being out of debt anytime soon.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Her dad was never arrested or charged for the fraud.
She's still left wondering how he was able to get
away with it.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
There were five states involved, and my dad is also
really smart, and I'm guessing he probably knew this, and
maybe that's why they ended up moving to Massachusetts. So suddenly,
I think that he had an overarching plan for how
this was going to occur and how he was going
to get out of it.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
The fraudulent loans had a lasting impact on Heather's finances.
It impacted her ability to buy a car, rent an apartment,
or take out a credit card. Today, nearly twenty years later,
she's still working towards financial stability.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
The repercussions of this financial devastation are huge. They're going
to reverberate forever. Once you are in a hole, it's
really hard to get out. It's like being buried alive.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
But this isn't the end of Heather's story of betrayal.
For a decade after she ended her relationship with her dad,
she remained close with her mother, and life moved on.
She met the love of her life and got married.
Her mom was even at her wedding. But one day,
just a few years ago, all of that changed.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
My wife and I decided to move back to her mind.
As we were moving into our apartment, I had all
my identity theft paperwork and I was looking through it
and I opened the envelope where all the forged disbursement
checks were, and I hadn't really looked through them. I
had like seen like the first one, and I saw
(31:44):
my dad's handwriting like forging my name, and I started
looking like kind of laughing about it, like wow, Nashle
and I go through and on like the third or
fourth page, I saw different handwriting and I recognized it immediately.
That was my mom's handwriting it, so my mom forging
(32:05):
my name. As soon as I saw that, my whole
reality changed. My whole soul just shattered. I was broken
to a thousand pieces because it just changed the narrative
for me, Like my mom wasn't this victim, she was
(32:28):
his accomplice.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
She thought her dad was the one behind the fraud.
For her entire life, Heather had been manipulated into seeing
her mom as a victim. She'd spent decades feeling protective
over her mother, supporting her and hoping that she would
finally find the strength to leave her dad.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
And it shifted my perspective on all those times that
my dad got away with stuff and she wouldn't leave,
And I started to think, like, was he getting away
with it or was my mom like helping him out.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Of the one hundred and twenty four thousand dollars, her
parents would have only spent forty thousand on her education,
So what did they do with the rest of the money.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
They were definitely living on it. When I think about
the nice place they lived in in Boston, I feel like, oh,
maybe I was funding that, you know, any help then
might have given me, like it was actually me maybe
paying for it.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Her mom finally achieved her own dream of living in Boston,
and she did it by nearly destroying Heather's life. That's
why she wasn't so upset when Heather went to college.
She and her husband were taking out fraudulent loans in
Heather's name and using them to fund their new Boston apartment,
(33:51):
and it left Heather on the hook for a hefty
six figure sum. If she had known that her parents
couldn't make the tuition payments, she could have applied for scholarships,
but her parents wanted the money not to pay tuition,
but to live off of and live the life they
really wanted to. Heather thought about calling her mom to
(34:12):
confront her, but when she played out the conversation in
her head.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
They knew that if I were to confront her, nobody
was going to tell me the truth. She was willing
to go this far for this long, and she knew
she was an accomplice. There was nothing more to be said.
She knew how devastating this had been, so I just
stopped responding to her. She would text and call, and
(34:40):
I just never texted or called back. After a while,
she just stopped trying to contact me, and I never
contacted her.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
That was it. In twenty twenty three, she learned that
her mother had passed away. She says it's a complicated
grieving process, especially when she tries to explain her story
to new people.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
A lot of times people are like, oh, were they desperate,
Like maybe they were like really desperate for something, And
it's like, I actually think they just enjoyed it. The thrill,
the adrenaline rush of having to run all the time,
or having to avoid debt collectors, or just the thrill
of seeing whether or not I'll find out or what
(35:24):
I'll do when I find out. It was like psychological warfare.
So I wouldn't put it past them that it was
more like an experiment or something.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Heather has been in therapy for years unpacking the trauma
her parents put her through.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
When I think about my dad, oh well, he is
a sociopath, he is a criminal.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
She's also learning to find the words for what she experienced,
words like familial fraud and abuse. Heather is leaning on
her chosen family, starting with her wife. Today, she's a
music teacher and musician in Vermont and her wife are
in the process of building their own house. She's also
(36:04):
found healing through writing. She's working on a book about
her story.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
The idea of writing the truth for me as a
kid was really daunting because it's like I wasn't allowed
to tell the truth. Shame around telling the truth stuck
with me for a long time. But the process of
writing it started out as a catharsis and has since
(36:31):
become more of an artistic process where I am learning
to make meaning from that pain. So, yeah, anybody wants
to publish it, that'd be awesome.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question,
why did you want to tell your story?
Speaker 1 (36:53):
I think that people need permission to remove themselves from
family systems that aren't safe and to understand anger is
a healthy and appropriate emotion when people do this kind
of stuff to you. I mean, we talk about forgiveness,
and I think it's because society doesn't want to grapple
(37:14):
with the uncomfortable truth that there are some things that
are just unforgivable and the emotional repercussions from those things
are very real. Everything in my life was a lie.
But telling the truth about the story and then maybe
other people seeing their reflection in my story and that
sense of connection, I feel like it helps with that
(37:36):
feeling of isolation. Telling the story allows me to be
my most authentic self.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
On the next episode of Betrayal.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
He had bamboozled a physician and if he treat her,
what else had he come up with.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal
team or want to tell us your Betrayal story, email
us at betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal pod
at gmail dot com. We're grateful for your support. One
way to show support 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. A big thank
(38:24):
you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production
of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in
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 Mercury and Caitlin Golden.
(38:48):
Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Krinchek. Audio
editing and mixing by Matt Delvechio, Additional editing support from
Nico Aruka. Betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library
provided by Mob Music and For more podcasts from iHeart,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
(39:10):
your podcasts
My dad was like, I want to talk to you
about something. Let's go talk for a second outside. He
started this whole preamble of like, you have taught me
the importance of honesty. You have been such a positive
influence on my life, Like you are an inspiration. And
he was looking me in the eye and being really
emotional about it, and he said, because of that, I
(00:22):
want to be honest with you. They're gonna have a
little bit of trouble coming up.
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. At Betrayal, we hear lots of stories about
romantic betrayals, marriages and relationships blown apart by deception. Sometimes
(01:00):
we encounter another kind of betrayal, one that's not a
violation of vowels, but instead the violation of a more
inherent trust, the trust a child puts in their parents.
That's how we found Heather summer Lad.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
As a really young child, I had no idea that
there was anything bizarre about my family.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Heather grew up in Elpaso, Texas, in the eighties and nineties.
She was the youngest child in a blended family. We're
not going to use her parents' names here. We'll just
call them mom and dad. Her earliest memories of her
parents are fond ones.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
My parents were everything. They were really silly, they were
really fun. My dad, he used to play this game
with me where he put me on his shoulders, like
a piggyback ride. But he used to call it a
camel ride for some reason. I don't know why, but
he said that he was my camel. So I never
(02:03):
called him dad. I only called him camel. I thought
he was the funniest best father in the world.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Heather's mom was also playful and charming.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
My mom wasn't strict at all. There was this kind
of running joke in my family. Anytime I quote unquote
acted up or threw a tantrum, she'd make me sit
in this little pink plastic chair, probably from the Dollar
Store or whatever, and it was called the attitude change
chair until my attitude changed. But then she would feel
(02:36):
so bad about making me sit there that every single
time she made me a chocolate malt she would joke
about it. She'd give me the malt and be like, oh,
I mean, how you're gonna act up? Just so you
can get this chocolate malt.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Her mom was part of a tight knit Mexican American family.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
I always like to joke that my mom didn't teach
me Spanish so that she could talk about me in
Spanish to other people, and then I wouldn't understand.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Heather says her mom treated her more like a confidant
or a friend and not so much like her child.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I never had a bedtime, and I remember asking my
mom for a bedtime because all my friends they had bedtimes.
But it was a free for all, like we could
do whatever we wanted.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
When Heather was in second grade, she was confronted for
the first time with something that would become a major
theme in her life, money, or more specifically, debt.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
I have a pretty specific memory of being in line
at school for lunch and I had my little tray
and I walked up and the lunch lady just looked
at me and she was like, your parents owe us
a lot of money. You can't keep taking trays, And
a shame, you know, that washed over me, and also
(03:52):
the anxiety of just like, wait, what do you mean
they owe money?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
At home, meal times were always a crisis.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Dinner would roll around and we'd be like, we're hungry,
and then my dad would act surprised that we were hungry.
And then it was dinnertime. When we didn't have money,
my dad would have to go like basically forage for
food or money. He would leave for like a few hours,
and we wouldn't know when he was coming back, and
we didn't know where he was, and then he'd come
(04:22):
back with Sometimes it was full blown takeout, and my
mom would ask me, how did you get that? Other
times he would come home with like tortillas, And this
was like a daily occurrence until payday.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Heather's childhood revolved around her parents payday.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
That was such a big day in our house. Everything
was centered around when was the next paycheck? When are
we getting paid again? And so we would get the paycheck,
and you know, it was like celebration that first day.
We'd got to eat, or we'd go to the movies,
or my mom would go shopping and we'd live it up.
We'd have all this stuff, but the money seemed to
(05:05):
always be gone a few days after pay day and
then a few days later we didn't have anything.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Between pay days, Heather and her dad would usually take
a trip to the pawn shop.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
I used to go with my father to pawn things
as early as first grade. We would drive around to
all the different pawn shops. I mean, to me as
a kid, it wasn't bizarre. It was like, oh yay,
like we're going to the pawn shop, We're going to
Applebee's tonight.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
But here's the thing that still doesn't make sense to
Heather about her childhood.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
We weren't poor, or at least their salaries suggest that
we shouldn't have been poor.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Both of her parents worked full time as teachers. In fact,
when she was growing up, her father was an assistant
principal at a high school.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
We should have been, I think, pretty clearly middle class.
Especially the cost of living where we were from wasn't
really that high, so it was bizarre that we never
had money.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
They lived above their means. When the paychecks came in,
they bought things, including jewelry and expensive electronics. They spent
so quickly that between paychecks they would run out of
money and wouldn't have enough to eat, so they pawned
whatever they had just bought. She began realizing this was strange,
especially when she made friends at school.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
My friends. A lot of their parents were teachers, and
seeing how they lived in comparison with how we lived
was eye opening.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
When she was in fourth grade, Heather was finally allowed
to go over to a friend's house for the first time.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
One of the craziest things is they would offer me food.
They were like, oh, do you want dinner? And the
idea that somebody would be offering me food willingly and
that I was welcome to it like it just didn't
feel real. So that, I think is when I started
to realize, like, this is really not normal.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
And there was another thing Heather noticed.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
She had her own room. That was really I hope,
because I never I got my own room maybe like
four times in my childhood out of like the seventeen
houses we lived in.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
The seventeen houses they lived in. Her family moved every
single year of her childhood, and Heather shared a room
with her half brothers or slept on the couch.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
We always knew it was because we were getting evicted.
There was no cover story. We heard all the fights,
we knew everything.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
After every move, Heather watched her mom become increasingly defeated, exasperated,
and angrier with her dad.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Because that was the girl. I think my mom relied
on me emotionally. Oh, your father did this and he's
done that. It started to become really clear that the
things he was doing were really shady.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Heather quickly learned that her mom didn't approve of her
dad's behavior, and it rubbed off on her.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
I started to see my father as the quote unquote
problem and my mom. I always thought of myself as
her protector.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Heather's mom would even confide in her about wanting to
leave her dad.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
She was always talking about leaving him. She never would
leave him though, because like, oh, I don't want to
be a burden to my kids, or I'm saving as
much money as i can.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Right before Heather started high school, her dad just walked out.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
He just said he couldn't take it anymore, so he left.
And that was great. I was helping my mom budget.
Family and friends came to help. My aunt paid some bills,
people brought us grocery. It was just great. And I
remember going with my mom to a divorce lawyer too,
and just like really like trying to support her and
(09:08):
actually going through with a divorce.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
But within a month or two he started coming back around.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
My dad would start to come over in this period
when they were separated. He would come over because my
mom needed him to fix a light bulb or something,
and then he'd come over, and the next day it
was just say a little bit longer, Oh, let me
fix the light bulb and also do your laundry. And
then he lived there again.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
He promised that this time things were going to be different.
He started taking steps towards financial stability.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
And so my dad started seeing the pastor and was
supposedly getting all this help with budgeting.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Heather didn't believe him at first. She was angry with
him and angry at her mom for letting him back
into their lives. It was a lot of pressure on
a child, too much pressure.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
I have memories of sobbing in front of my parents
and then just kind of like going about and eating
breakfast while I'm there, just sobbing about getting evicted again.
My mom just like eating her grapefruit and kind of
like ice colds and giving no comfort. My dad just
like catering to her needs.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Heather retreated into herself emotionally when she started high school.
She fixated on the one thing she could control.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
I was in the gifted program at school, and part
of how I connected to other adults was trying to
excel at whatever I did. So trying to excel at school,
making good grades, not being rebellious. And I played the violin,
which my mom wanted me to do, even though.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
It wasn't her passion. Heather was a gifted violinist, and
she started dreaming about a future, one that was far
away from her parents.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Wanted to be a writer. That was like a big
part of my childhood. And there was this writing contest.
And as I was looking up the writing contest, I
discovered Bennington College.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Bennington College is a small liberal arts school in Vermont.
It's known for creative student led coursework. It promised the
one thing Heather craved the most. Freedom.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Everything about it just seemed like paradise, and it was
like two thousand miles away. So I just got it
into my head that I really wanted to go there.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
From that moment on, Bennington became her goal, her only goal.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
I just had that determination. I just knew I needed
to get the fuck out. My body just couldn't take
it anymore.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
One day, during her senior year of high school, Heather
got a letter in the mail the letter she'd been
waiting for.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
It was just a normal day and my mom got
the mail and there was an envelope for me and
she handed it to me. It was from Bennington. I
remember opening the envelope and I was like, Mom, I
got in and her face just dropped like it went
ice colds, and she started walking away. And I was like, oh,
(12:19):
maybe she's getting me a present or something.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
But she wasn't getting her daughter a present. Instead, Heather's
mom felt abandoned by her decision to go to college
so far away. To Heather's surprise, it was her dad
who swooped in, and it was him who said the
things she desperately needed to hear.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Like Oh, I'm so proud of you. This is great, congratulations.
I will talk to your mom for you, like, let
me smooth this over for you, because I really want
you to be able to go to this school.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Her dad worked hard to earn her trust back. He
acknowledged his mistakes and promised that he was going to
be there to make her dreams come true.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
My dad really made me believe that he was on
my side. He would say things like, after everything that's happened,
I want you to go to school. I want to
help you do this, like I will figure this out
for you.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
For the first time since she was a child, Heather
trusted her dad.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
I wanted that cammel relationship that we had had because
after a while I stopped calling him anything, Like I
didn't call him Cammel, I didn't call him dad like
I think for a while, I was referring to him
as my biological father. So to have him put this
olive branch out of like, yes, you know what, I know.
I did wrong. I'm learning from my mistakes and I
(13:44):
want to help you. You're an eighteen year old kid,
you're gonna eat that up, which I did.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Heather had been accepted to her dream college, Bennington, two
thousand miles away from El Paso, Texas and the chaos
she'd grown up with. There was still one big obstacle
between Heather and Bennington, money, but her dad was there
to help.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
When it came time to filling out the paperwork for
financial aid. You know, he was the one helping me.
He was like brainstorming, and then he was like, I've
worked it out with Bennington. We've got this payment plan.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Heather was skeptical at first, just a few years ago,
they didn't have enough money for food even with financial aid,
how could they afford regular college tuition payments. But her
dad reassured her.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
We're budgeting and we have more money now, and like,
I know how to do this, and I want to
do this.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
So Heather enrolled at Bennington. She finally felt like her
life was starting. There was one upfront cost that financial
aid didn't cover. A few thousand dollars she needed for
travel to Vermont, a laptop, and textbooks. The family put
their heads together to come up with the money.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
I remember one day he came and was like, I've
got a co signer for you for a loan. Because
my parents were never going to be co signers. They
didn't have the credit for that, and I didn't have
any credit. It was a small loan for I think
three thousand dollars, and that was the loan that was
going to get me to school. It was going to
buy me a computer, it was going to get me
(15:34):
my textbooks. He came home he was like, I've got it.
I've got you a co signer. She's already agreed, it's
my friend. She's already signed the paperwork, like all you
have to do is sign right here, and this is it.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
When August came, the whole family took a trip to
Vermont to move her into college. As they began the drive,
Heather was overcome with anxiety.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
I kept expect there to be some sort of issue,
and the whole drive up to her mom, I was like,
I'm going to die. We're going to get into a
car crash. My dad is going to have a heart
attack and die. Just the most awful situations just kept
replaying in my head because I didn't think that I
was actually going to make it there.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Behind her catastrophic anxieties was a much more realistic one.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
I'm going to show up and they're going to tell
me that I'm like denied or something like the payment
plan didn't work out.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
When they finally got to campus, I go.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
And I ask for my ID. It took my picture
and everything like here, and I was like, Okay, this
is real.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
It was a huge relief. Her parents took her shopping
for dorm supplies and helped her move in. It all
felt shockingly normal. When it came time to say their goodbyes,
Heather expected her mom to be upset, clinging or even angry,
but she wasn't.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
She was kind of like, Okay, we had, you know,
just to have fun. And I was kind of like,
what is happening. This is very bizarre, and I was
like goodbye, and I was on my own. As far
as I knew, I was leaving my childhood behind and
entering into a new life with my parents as supporters.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Bennington was everything she expected it to be. She finally
felt free.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Oh my god, I loved it. When the leaves started
to change. Oh my gosh. My friend took me in
her car and we just like drove around and it
was just like the best freaking day ever.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
She thrived at Bennington, even though she wanted to be
a writer. She ended up pursuing a degree in music.
But in the back of her mind, she always felt
a nagging guilt that her parents were breaking the bank
to send her to college, and Heather felt a special
guilty that she had left her mom alone with her dad.
(18:04):
So she was surprised when her parents called to tell her.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
That they were moving to Boston. It was a shock
that it actually happened, and they just kind of up
and moved.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Her mom loved Boston and always talked about moving there.
So maybe Heather's dream was allowing her mom to live
hers as well. For the remainder of her time in college,
Heather's parents were just a few hours away in their
new Boston apartment.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
They moved to this really nice, cute little apartment, three bedrooms,
two stories, a tree lined street, and they were there
for a couple of years. For my family, like that
was huge, Like staying anywhere for more than a year
met things were great. They're not only paying for my education,
They've also got this amazing apartment in Boston, and so
(18:54):
when I would go back home to visit, I have
this nice place to be.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Even though her parents were doing better than ever, the
cost of Heather's tuition was still a strain. She had
financial aid and then that small loan she'd co signed
before she started college. Everything else totaled about five thousand
dollars a semester, and her parents were covering it out
of pocket pretty much.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Every semester. I would get a late notice of payment
in my box, like your past do with your tuition,
And I'd always call my dad and I'd be like, listen,
I know you're working really hard. You know, whether you
can be able to make the payments.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Every time she had to make a call like this,
it racked her with guilt.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
My parents would be really stressed, like, your mom's been
working so hard after school doing tutoring to get some
extra money, and I'm doing this, that and the other.
We've almost got it. We've almost got it.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
The day before her senior year started, she was staying
at her parents' house. Before she left, her dad wanted
to talk. He sounded concerned.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
It was like a really beautiful day. My dad took
me up to the back deck and he was like, oh,
let's go talk for a second outside. I want to
talk to you about something. So he started with this
whole preambled like you have taught me the importance of honesty,
Like you have been such a positive influence on my life,
Like you are an inspiration. And he was like looking
me in the eye and like being really emotional about it.
(20:25):
And he said, because of that, I want to be
honest with you. You're going to get a note in
your box this semester.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
He asked Heather if she knew how loans worked.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
I was like, you said that we didn't have to
take out loans for this year, like you said, everything
was all set and he was like, no, actually we
did have to take out a loan and everything is
all set, but you're going to get this paper and
just give him this. And he started phishing something out
of his back pocket and it was just like this
piece of paper he was a promised story note and
(20:57):
he was like, you just give him this and everything should.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Be get The next day, when Heather got to school
to start her senior year, there.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Was a note in my box. I went to the
business office and they told me that I had to
leave and that I couldn't be on campus unless I
came back to school with a bank certified check for
twenty thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
The number didn't even make sense. As far as she knew,
her parents only paid about five thousand dollars out of
pocket every semester. How could they possibly be this far
behind on payments.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
I called my dad and I kept on being like hey,
like they said twenty thousand dollars, How do we owe
twenty thousand dollars? And he was like, Oh, those guys,
they're real jerks over there at the business office. I
couldn't get anybody to tell me what was going on.
My father didn't know anything. My mom didn't know anything.
I just knew that I couldn't be at school until
(21:51):
this money was paid.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Without any real answers, Heather's spent a few days at
her parents' house. I'm sure if she'd be able to
continue her education. Furious and exasperated, she stopped asking for
answers from her dad. She just wanted to go back
to school, and somehow.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
It got cleared up. I can't even say I know how.
I was just like, I don't want to know anything
about this. I just want to go back to school.
I just know that at the last possible second, I
was able to graduate. That's when I started to realize, like, Okay,
something fishy is going on here, but I just wanted
(22:32):
to graduate. I didn't want to think about it, and.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
She did graduate with a music degree. She planned to
move to New York City to work as a musician.
She felt her dad had done something fishy to mysteriously
settle the bill at Bennington. That made her more concerned
than ever about her dad's behavior and what it meant
for her mom.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
I remember telling my mom, look what happened with Bennington.
He's going back to his old patterns. You have to
leave him. Like, I was so upset, and my mom
kept being like, yes, I'm going to leave him, I'm
going to leave him, And you know, I told her, like, Mom,
you're in an abusive relationship, and she was just like, oh,
I know, I know. I know.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
That summer, Heather worked gigs and odd jobs off of
Craigslist to get enough money to move herself to New York.
Even though she was in survival mode, Heather was still
worried about her mom.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
It got to the point where I even asked my
roommates if my mom could come live with us for
a little bait, which didn't go over very well with
the roommates. They were like no, that's how desperate I
was to get my mom out of this situation.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
One day that summer, Heather got a message out of
the blue.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
And as soon as I saw that it was like
an eight eight eight member. I was like, oh, I
knew what those kind of numbers meant. They're looking for
my parents, because you know, we were always getting deck
collector calls and stuff. So I called them back and
I gave them my name, and the guy on the
other end was like you're past due for your student loans.
(24:09):
And I was like, what are you talking about? What
student loans?
Speaker 2 (24:13):
As far as she knew, she didn't have any student loans,
just that initial three thousand dollars loan she signed for
before starting school.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
He said I had twelve student loans that were in
collection and that it was a really, really serious matter.
I asked him how much and he said it was
one hundred and twenty four thousand dollars that I owed.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Shortly after she graduated college, Heather summer Lad received a
call from a debt collector. She was overdue on her
student loans, twelve student loans, totally one hundred and twenty
four thousand dollars student loans with her name on them
that she never knew existed.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
It was like feeling the chain and getting clipped to
my collar. Who's like, wow, I still feel it in
my body. I feel that anger in my chest and
my chest constricting.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
In addition to the overdue loans, there was something else.
Heather would be on the hook for a fraud charge.
Turns out there was a co signer on some of
the loans and their signature had been forged.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
So of course I have visions going to jail and
being framed for something that I didn't do.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Heather knew immediately that her dad was behind this crisis.
She tried desperately to explain it to the deck collector.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
I was like, trying to tell the story my dad,
you know. I was like, no, you don't understand. My dad.
He's the one who did this.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Heather hung up and immediately dialed her parents' house. Her
mom picked up.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I told her what happened, and she was like, hold on,
there was no he did what. I was like, oh
my god, she knew. So she handed the phone to
my dad. He was just like trying to flip it
back to me. He kept talking about how I was
too expensive, your violin cost ons money, and your education
costs the switch money, and we did this, that and
(26:26):
the other for you, and you're not letting me talk.
I remember him saying that you're not letting me talk.
You don't let people talk. And he gave the phone
back to my mom and I was like, you knew
about it, you knew, And my mom was crying and
she was like, yes, I've been nagging him to pay
this back. He said he was going to take care
of it, and he promised.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Her dad had taken out one hundred and twenty four
thousand dollars in loans in Heather's name and forged her signature.
He'd also forged the signature of a co signer, someone
who was family friend. Her dad wouldn't admit to it directly,
but Heather saw the documents with her name signed in
her father's handwriting. Realizing the extent of his deception, she
(27:12):
immediately feared for her mom's safety.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
I always saw her as a victim of my father's abuse.
I wrote this to her in an email too. I
was like, I don't understand why you're still with him.
I don't know if he's threatened to kill you, if
he's threatened to kill us, like, if there's violence involved.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
She'd never seen her dad be violent, but there had
to be a reason why her mom never spoke up.
Her dad said he would fix this, that he would
be responsible for making the payments.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
But of course, my dad never made payments.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Heather was done with her father. She told her mom
that she wanted no contact with him, and if she
came home, he couldn't be there.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
And so we started on that dynamic word It's like
my mom and I, as long as we didn't talk
about the loans or my father, we were cool and
my mom was happy to respect that.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Now with her father out of her life, Heather got
another call about overdue payments. This time she was ready.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
I immediately was like, give me the fraud department, and
so through that process, they told me to file police report,
and so I did. I went to the police and
I filed the report. Who wants to file a police
report against their father? You know? I didn't want to
put my dad in jail, Like, I really didn't like.
I didn't want to be the kind of person who
did that.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
We've seen these police reports and filing them wasn't easy
for Heather.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
As soon as I said it was my dad, they
were like, well, how else were you supposed to get
an education? I had to provide copies of my signature.
That was actually really hard because I had to go
through old, old, old paperwork. They needed signed and dated
from within the time that the occurred.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Through the process of filing a police report, Heather learned
more about the fraudulent loans. She discovered that her actual
signature was on one of the loans. She didn't know about.
When she saw the date of the signature, it jogged
her memory.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
It was something that my father had said was a
gift for my grandfather, a check that was made out
to me that turned out to be one of these loans.
He didn't present me with a loan. He presented me
with a check and was like, this is a gift.
You just have to endorse it, which I did.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
She was held responsible for that one. After the police report,
the debt collectors stopped calling and sending mail about the loans.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Months later, I got the letter back saying that the
loans had been written off except for three and those
can remain on my credit report forever.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
I can't imagine being out of debt anytime soon.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Her dad was never arrested or charged for the fraud.
She's still left wondering how he was able to get
away with it.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
There were five states involved, and my dad is also
really smart, and I'm guessing he probably knew this, and
maybe that's why they ended up moving to Massachusetts. So suddenly,
I think that he had an overarching plan for how
this was going to occur and how he was going
to get out of it.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
The fraudulent loans had a lasting impact on Heather's finances.
It impacted her ability to buy a car, rent an apartment,
or take out a credit card. Today, nearly twenty years later,
she's still working towards financial stability.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
The repercussions of this financial devastation are huge. They're going
to reverberate forever. Once you are in a hole, it's
really hard to get out. It's like being buried alive.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
But this isn't the end of Heather's story of betrayal.
For a decade after she ended her relationship with her dad,
she remained close with her mother, and life moved on.
She met the love of her life and got married.
Her mom was even at her wedding. But one day,
just a few years ago, all of that changed.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
My wife and I decided to move back to her mind.
As we were moving into our apartment, I had all
my identity theft paperwork and I was looking through it
and I opened the envelope where all the forged disbursement
checks were, and I hadn't really looked through them. I
had like seen like the first one, and I saw
(31:44):
my dad's handwriting like forging my name, and I started
looking like kind of laughing about it, like wow, Nashle
and I go through and on like the third or
fourth page, I saw different handwriting and I recognized it immediately.
That was my mom's handwriting it, so my mom forging
(32:05):
my name. As soon as I saw that, my whole
reality changed. My whole soul just shattered. I was broken
to a thousand pieces because it just changed the narrative
for me, Like my mom wasn't this victim, she was
(32:28):
his accomplice.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
She thought her dad was the one behind the fraud.
For her entire life, Heather had been manipulated into seeing
her mom as a victim. She'd spent decades feeling protective
over her mother, supporting her and hoping that she would
finally find the strength to leave her dad.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
And it shifted my perspective on all those times that
my dad got away with stuff and she wouldn't leave,
And I started to think, like, was he getting away
with it or was my mom like helping him out.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Of the one hundred and twenty four thousand dollars, her
parents would have only spent forty thousand on her education,
So what did they do with the rest of the money.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
They were definitely living on it. When I think about
the nice place they lived in in Boston, I feel like, oh,
maybe I was funding that, you know, any help then
might have given me, like it was actually me maybe
paying for it.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Her mom finally achieved her own dream of living in Boston,
and she did it by nearly destroying Heather's life. That's
why she wasn't so upset when Heather went to college.
She and her husband were taking out fraudulent loans in
Heather's name and using them to fund their new Boston apartment,
(33:51):
and it left Heather on the hook for a hefty
six figure sum. If she had known that her parents
couldn't make the tuition payments, she could have applied for scholarships,
but her parents wanted the money not to pay tuition,
but to live off of and live the life they
really wanted to. Heather thought about calling her mom to
(34:12):
confront her, but when she played out the conversation in
her head.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
They knew that if I were to confront her, nobody
was going to tell me the truth. She was willing
to go this far for this long, and she knew
she was an accomplice. There was nothing more to be said.
She knew how devastating this had been, so I just
stopped responding to her. She would text and call, and
(34:40):
I just never texted or called back. After a while,
she just stopped trying to contact me, and I never
contacted her.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
That was it. In twenty twenty three, she learned that
her mother had passed away. She says it's a complicated
grieving process, especially when she tries to explain her story
to new people.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
A lot of times people are like, oh, were they desperate,
Like maybe they were like really desperate for something, And
it's like, I actually think they just enjoyed it. The thrill,
the adrenaline rush of having to run all the time,
or having to avoid debt collectors, or just the thrill
of seeing whether or not I'll find out or what
(35:24):
I'll do when I find out. It was like psychological warfare.
So I wouldn't put it past them that it was
more like an experiment or something.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Heather has been in therapy for years unpacking the trauma
her parents put her through.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
When I think about my dad, oh well, he is
a sociopath, he is a criminal.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
She's also learning to find the words for what she experienced,
words like familial fraud and abuse. Heather is leaning on
her chosen family, starting with her wife. Today, she's a
music teacher and musician in Vermont and her wife are
in the process of building their own house. She's also
(36:04):
found healing through writing. She's working on a book about
her story.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
The idea of writing the truth for me as a
kid was really daunting because it's like I wasn't allowed
to tell the truth. Shame around telling the truth stuck
with me for a long time. But the process of
writing it started out as a catharsis and has since
(36:31):
become more of an artistic process where I am learning
to make meaning from that pain. So, yeah, anybody wants
to publish it, that'd be awesome.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question,
why did you want to tell your story?
Speaker 1 (36:53):
I think that people need permission to remove themselves from
family systems that aren't safe and to understand anger is
a healthy and appropriate emotion when people do this kind
of stuff to you. I mean, we talk about forgiveness,
and I think it's because society doesn't want to grapple
(37:14):
with the uncomfortable truth that there are some things that
are just unforgivable and the emotional repercussions from those things
are very real. Everything in my life was a lie.
But telling the truth about the story and then maybe
other people seeing their reflection in my story and that
sense of connection, I feel like it helps with that
(37:36):
feeling of isolation. Telling the story allows me to be
my most authentic self.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
On the next episode of Betrayal.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
He had bamboozled a physician and if he treat her,
what else had he come up with.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal
team or want to tell us your Betrayal story, email
us at betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal pod
at gmail dot com. We're grateful for your support. One
way to show support 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. A big thank
(38:24):
you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production
of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in
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 Mercury and Caitlin Golden.
(38:48):
Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Krinchek. Audio
editing and mixing by Matt Delvechio, Additional editing support from
Nico Aruka. Betrayal's theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library
provided by Mob Music and For more podcasts from iHeart,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
(39:10):
your podcasts
Host
Andrea Gunning
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.