March 26, 2020 • 32 mins
When Axton Betz-Hamilton was in middle school, her family’s mail started going missing. Her parents told her that they’d been the victims of an identity thief, and that the perpetrator was likely someone close to them. Slowly, they began to shut out the world, enveloping Axton in a bubble of paranoia and secrecy—an atmosphere that didn’t allow her to see what was right in front of her until decades later.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. It
was the same year, my eighth grade year, when close
curtains became a hard and fast rule in our house.
Around that time, I was instructed to never answer the door,
even if I knew who it was. After the mail
(00:20):
went missing and the phone got shut off. A vulnerability
that wasn't there before seemed to permeate our daily lives.
Anyone and anything outside those drapes, those limestone walls possessed
intentions we can never be sure of. We can only
trust one another. My dad becoming increasingly convinced Mom was
(00:40):
right that someone was out to get us, and trusting
me was keeping the property safe. He started saying things like,
if someone crosses the gate, there yours, you have to
protect the property. At fourteen, I became hyper vigilant, always
on guard. At the end of each day, my neck
and shoulders would ache from fatigue from long hours. If
keen attentiveness, I heard each passing car search the eyes
(01:04):
of every strange and familiar face at the store. That
my no nonsense father and brazen spiffire mother had failed
to protect us only convinced me that they needed my help.
Paranoia became an obligation, a twistic kind of duty to
my family. That's Acton Bets Hamilton's reading from her book
The Less People Know About Us, a memoir of betrayal,
(01:27):
family secrets and stolen identity. Stolen identity. I can't imagine
anything more unsettling than having your very sense of selfhood,
the thing we all think we can count on stolen.
The financial ruin is just the tip of the iceberg.
This is primal, terrifying personal stuff. To have your identity
(01:51):
stolen is to be handpicked by an invisible, malicious force
singled out for ruin. That's what happened to Acton. From
the time she was a kid she was told that
her parents were being targeted by a mysterious identity thief.
Years later, she found out that she had been targeted too,
(02:11):
and that the thief was the last person she possibly
could have imagined. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
(02:32):
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
How old were they when they had you? Mom was
and dad was where I drew up. Didn't my dad
would even say that they were considered older parents, you know,
(02:54):
by today's standards, I think around thirty ship for having
yourverse style was Yeah, back then they were considered over there.
Tell me a bit about your dad. What was he
like that always took me outside because her mom was
always inside. But she she was in the house. She
was always watching soap o operas, which was a little
(03:16):
kids with the insane. Dad was the one who was outside.
He could hear of all the outside stuff and we
had it wasn't her property, and well it was really
a little Dad wanted to fill trails in the woods,
and so we cut trails in the woods and we
does a pond in the woods, you know, with the
tractive that he thought. And I was always with that
(03:36):
baby animals were Dad saying they weren't Moms saying. John
was always out in the barn with dad. Mom was
never wanted to be allowing the barn and to work.
What were the first hints that there was something out
of control financially going on? Like, how did that first
(03:57):
present itself to you? Parents? Males started bring up missing,
and then over time letters from my friends and sin
pals were coming up missing. And at some point along
the way and the discussions of all this missing mail.
Mom said that that's what people do when they still
(04:19):
your identity, and he said that her identity and identity
of One of the things that's striking to me is
that identity theft, which is something that there's a lot
of media focus on now and there's a lot of
awareness of that. Back then, there might not have been
nearly that kind of awareness. Right, Oh, there was a
(04:41):
zero where you know, at a public level on identity,
nobody knew about it. Fact then um in fact, consumers
were not considered victims of identity theft until with the
passage of the identity theft and assumptions that aren't act
(05:01):
and visit started in nineteen. So the you know, the mail,
I think, probably started going missing at some point in
nine and then the words identity dusk became more and
more common in our house in nineteen. I'm sure nobody
(05:23):
else is talking about back then, you know that, you
know the way that we were, The creeping paranoia builds
and bills until no one can be trusted, the family
grows more isolated. They buy an early cellular phone. This
was back in the days when cell phones were gigantic
and expensive. The phone so big it had its own
(05:45):
special stool in their kitchen is only to be used
for emergencies. Acton's mom says that the person responsible for
all this must be someone intimate with them, someone who
knows them very well, a close end, or a family member,
so better not to speak with anyone at all. We
(06:08):
didn't tell people why we weren't communicating with them anymore.
We just withdrew from them and didn't encourage any contact.
Of course, you don't have a landline trunk back in
the mid nineties, how can get hold of someone, So
it was easy for those relationships to fade away. And
(06:29):
during that time, one of the things that my parents
said was, Okay, this is someone who's really close to us,
so when you're home alone, don't answer the door, even
if you know who it is, or if someone goes
through the gate. So we had a gate separating our
(06:50):
front yards from a back there and that was a
rule as well, that is some of us to the gate.
You have to sit care of it because there's no
one to call. You know, it's up to you to
defend the property, you knowing you to defend yourself from
any intruder. And it got to the point where I
was maybe sixteen and seventeen, we're mom did want me
(07:11):
going back into the woods by myself. That wasn't allowed
in the front yard because she said that people drove
up and down the highway in front of our house
looking to snatch babies, including teenagers. So apparently though they're
always baby snatchers who were just lurking waiting to snatch me.
How did this affect you during those years? I mean,
that is such an incredibly isolating way to be, you know,
(07:36):
a middle schooler and then a teenager. Well, I thought
I was doing the right thing by not answering the door,
by not developing friendships, by just willing to be rest
along with I thought I was helping defend our families
from the identity space. So I had, you know, like
(07:59):
a warped perceptions of what I was doing. I was angry.
I didn't understand why someone was doing this to us,
and I wanted to know why, what made us good service?
Why did we have to live this way? And nobody
could be answered that, And that is what frustrated me
for years. And then during this period of time, like
(08:24):
as a sort of backdrop to what's happening in the
identity theft department. Your mother is also obsessively shopping for
inexpensive jewelry, right, because so that started right after my
grandpa died, so will be her father. And I would
(08:46):
come home from school and I get off the bus
coming the house and she would be laying on the
couch with the Home Shopping Network or QVC on, and
she would I what she called cheap, chunky jewelry, but
it was costume jewelry and she was ordering it from
these two networks. And to hide the packages from Dad,
(09:08):
she would make me go across the highway set the
mail the family's mailboxes on the opposite side of the
road from the house. This is a busy two lane
highway where the speed limit is fifty A steady whoosh
of cars and trucks. Exton's eleven years old and her
mother makes her across the highway to get the deliveries
(09:30):
of costume jewelry from the mailbox. Yeah. Cats, And I
am a little cat geek, and I don't love my cats.
You know, having childood friends, I had cats as friends
and they would follow me everywhere. So the you know,
there were cats that would try and follow me across
the road, and I was afraid they were going to
get hit. And she was asking you to collude with her,
(09:53):
to be her partner in this obsessive shopping and hiding
it from your dad, right and at a time, even
though even years old, thought was a grief thing, hoping
with the fact that Grandpa died and at some point
it will stop. It didn't stop, no, if it didn't
for months, And I finally got to the point where
(10:16):
I knew that it was going off for too long,
and I knew that it was wrong. And I went
out in the barn one night and go dead what
mom was doing. And I don't know what was said,
but the flow of packages of junky jewelry stop. By
the time she graduates from high school Accident is desperate
(10:38):
to get away from the speltifying atmosphere of her parents home.
She goes off to Purdue University, which, though still in
her home state, feels like a completely different universe full
of new and exciting possibilities. But during the first semester
of her freshman year, she receives a notice from the
bursar's office her tuition check has bounced. She is so
(11:02):
certain that there must be some kind of mistake that
she walks over to the bursar's office to get it
straightened out. And that's the point in the conversations with
the customer service representative that I was faced chase with
and they were behind bars. I said, just show me
if happy to check. This isn't right. My mom wouldn't
do this, and I said, I no, my mom paid
(11:23):
that bill. So let me come around in this full
of side room. And they brought out a copy of
the check and it was my mom's check, you know,
same design, same bank, same context, information at the cop
and the check was made out to Purdue for my
(11:43):
person amount. But the handwriting had been changed, but not
mom's handwriting, very smooth, small handwriting, and my mom's handwriting
was big and really like lupy. And it looked like
someone had gotten a hold of my mom's checkbook and
(12:03):
got in a hold of my tuition bill, which again,
you know, bill, you're still being stolen out of my
parents mail, and had written a bad check to Perdu.
What that point he got personal for me, because this
identity fief is now messing with my ability to go
to college, and Mom and Dad came over to visit
me a few days later, and I took the copy
(12:26):
the check and I shoved it under the mom's nose
nice as you can act exist, I think, I said,
why would someone get ahold of your checks and take
my tuition bill out of our mail and write a
bad check to to do? What's the point in that
other than to just measure with me? The more explanation
was someone who had neared her checking account for the
(12:47):
purposes of money wanker. So you become an academic, you
finished per due, you go to graduate school, and you
become a researcher in identity theft. That's your field. Did
that feel like a choice or a necessity? Or was
it that it permeated everything around you while you were
(13:10):
growing up? Or was it your way of thinking, if
I learn enough about this, and if I've become expert enough,
I will be able to solve this question. Oh, it
was absolutely. I wanted to learn as much as I
could to hopefully solve our case and help people as well,
(13:33):
help other victims, because I was frustrated with a lack
of response from creditors and the credit reporting agency and
the police regarding my case. Yeah, I want to be
Indian estate beliefs. Once I found out I was a
victim and thought, well, you know there's a right an
(13:54):
you go too, because they have jurisdiction over the whole state. Yea,
they can look at my parents case, they can look
at my case because that you were obviously related, and
somebody will be after handing you. We're gonna have justice.
That didn't happen. I took a police report, gaming a
copy of it and said I don't need to show
this to creditors and good luck. At nineteen, I wanted,
(14:17):
like sirens and as necessaryat hailed from fire that this
is kind of a kind of response I'm looking for,
and it's it just didn't happen. So out of frustration
with that and other interactions I had in trying to
clear my identity, I thought, well, I had a part
of the solution, and the way to be part of
(14:38):
the solution is setting and that's what I did, and I,
you know, along in the way, I hope to sell
nine case. And even after starting my first accident of position,
which would have been in eleven, because that's to myself,
(15:01):
you know, find thirteen is the year that will mark
twenty years because probably wouldn't it be great to solve
the case In the twentie of year and in twenties thirteen,
I was invited to speak at a national conference on identity,
theft out and Washington Defeat and there were representatives there
(15:25):
from the Department of Justice and the FBI, you know,
befro feral agencies. After my presentation, I went up and
talk to them and said, would you have any interest
in solving my case? He said, all your case is
too old, the original documents have long been destroyed by
banks and creditors. Your case will never be solved. That
(15:45):
was on February fourth of I solved the fey. How
did it feel on that day to be told oh,
you're never going to solve this by people who were
you know, national and international experts. It didn't the term
there was a problem you never name. I hope that
you know I was going to solve it in your
(16:07):
experience and in your research, you know, going to the
authorities and trying to get them to do something and
basically being told, well, you know, we don't have that
much interest in this. Really good luck? Was that part
of the course for people then? And is it still
part of the course for people now, yes and yes.
Unfortunately oftentimes victims don't. It's the health and support that
(16:31):
they need from government agencies like the police, or if
there's tax fraud involved, um, they don't get the support
if they need from the I R S and predators
and credit reporting agencies often don't the level of support
that victims need to deserve. We'll be back in a
(16:53):
moment with more family secrets. By now early February, Acton's
mother is very sick. She's been diagnosed with something called
Brickett's limphoplastic leukemia, which wasn't caught until she was in
(17:15):
stage four. So she's undergoing radiation. But there isn't much
reason for optimism. Your break comes very shortly after your
mother passes away. Thirteen days after she passes away, your
dad calls you and what happens again, called me to
(17:36):
yell at me for except card statement has found in
a file walks of my mother's that was from two
thousand one and those for a credit cartets and run
over limits. I said, yeah, I didn't want a credit
card of the limit. What are you talking about? Yeah,
she did. I have a credit card statement right here
(17:58):
in my head and I said, well, what credit card
is it? And he said, well, first to A said,
I said that the first two I said. It was
one of the credit cards that was taken out in
my name, was part of the identity theft. What's mom
doing was that? He said, I don't know, but it's
sitting here in the file with your birth certificate. I
(18:20):
knew right then. I knew right then because number one,
I had my birth certificate, and number two, there's no
reason for my birth certificate and the credit card statement
that was taken up as part of the identity to
be in a file folder of moms unless she was
(18:40):
a perpetrat. Accon first came on my radar when she
sent me an early copy of her book with a
personal note and the note she writes, so many people
hear my story and asked me how could she have
done that? Or how could you not have known? But
the truth is that family members, his children, parents, siblings
(19:02):
almost never know each other completely. In my family, there
were just more secrets than usual to cover up. Well.
I think it's true that we can never know each
other completely. I also think that there are thoughts we
don't entertain, places we just don't touch when it comes
to those closest to us. That's what family secrets is
all about. What was that moment like for you? So
(19:29):
it was two opposite emotions pulling on me at the
same time that I think canceled each other out into
some weird state of a membos. So there's you know,
the one extream emotion was triumph, thinking of those folks
that I've met two weeks earlier and at the Conference
of Washington be used as the games will never resolved.
I didn't know. I accomplished the impossible. And then the
(19:51):
other stream of emotion was, oh my god, it's Mom.
It's Mom. She's responsible for how we've lived for last
twenty years and she's dead, right, so I can older accountable. Well,
I told him that what I thought it was, you
know that Mom was the idea he all along. He said, no, no, no,
(20:13):
does that be some of her explanations for this and
what she was going through this outbuilding on our property
where Mom kept a lot of things. And I told that,
I said, anything that you find that's financial that doesn't
make sense, set it aside and I'll look at it
when I come back over spring break. But should have
been in two weeks, and by the time spring break
(20:38):
came and I went back in Vienna, there's a work
bench in the south wellding and he had a mountain
of papers on this workbench, of financial documents that were
in my mother's posession that he just couldn't quite make
sense of. This mountain of paper included letters from banks
where Axton's mom had tried to establish checking accounts in
(20:59):
both her name men Acidon's dad in Wisconsin. There was
a purchase agreement for a house in Delaware County, Indiana,
not too far from where they lived, signed by everyone
but her. There were paced dubs in her maiden name,
documents related to a four oh one K that she
cashed out. She had grown sloppy. Accidon's mom. Instead of
(21:21):
destroying the paper trail, she hid documents in random places,
between the pages of books, in the bottom of old purses,
in between dresser drawers. So Accident and her dad now
go through the house like c s I technicians. They
find credit card statements, collection agency statements in her grandfather's name.
(21:42):
Acidon's mom had stolen his identity as well. It's so
interesting your mom knew that she was very ill and
probably terminal. And you know, it's not like she died
in an accident or of a heart attack and had
no warning. So I wonder what went through her mind,
(22:03):
because she could have cleaned all that up, I suppose,
but she didn't. I think on some levels, she believed
she was going to get better, because her doctors said
that the six months of treatment would be very difficult,
particularly near the end, which Mom was diagnosed in August,
and by this point it was February. But we're getting
(22:25):
into the really worst part. I think because Mom thought
that once she got through Mark she would turn the corner.
I think she thought this was going to continue and
that she wouldn't get caught. And then when she was
put on hospice care, and you know, that would have
been an appropriate time to tell me and or Dad
(22:46):
at least something to the effect of you're going to
find out bad things about me, or you know, I'm
in trouble with the I R S. Because that was
another thing that Mom did. She didn't pay the taxes
for the majority of thirteen years. The I R S
is on the Burgency being the house when we didn't
know about until her Mom died, when was the point
that your dad accepted that this really was the case,
(23:08):
that this really had been your mom all along, Was
it when you came back from spring break and you
went through all those papers together. Yes, And how would
you characterize his his response to that realization? To see
this one of the situations you know, you really, really
really want something to either be true or not be true,
(23:31):
and then you find out the opposite of what you want,
and then it takes the wind out of your sails. Accident.
Finished college in three years. Partly this was to save money,
but also because of the feeling that something was looming
chasing her. She needed to keep moving to stay ahead
of it. Now it's almost a decade later, she's an
(23:52):
academic studying identity theft has become her professional life, and
she's confronting the very thing that she didn't even know
she was running from. Her mother has left a huge mess.
Her mother had been, in the deepest sense, unknowable. Now
it's Acton's job to sift through their shared history and
(24:14):
understand as much as possible about who her mother had
really been. So Acton goes where so many of us
go when trying to figure somebody out Facebook. She starts
contacting people. Her mother had been facebooking. She had over
four thousand private messages that were very detailed and entirely
(24:35):
fictitious about various businesses and properties she owned. Acton goes
to her mother's fortie high school class reunion in Ohio.
She's looking for information about her mom, but the more
she digs, the more elusive her mom becomes. He portrayed
herself as a very different person to different groups of people.
(24:59):
She had her versions of herself, and some versions she
was married and had a child, and other versions of herself.
She was divorced and my dad had been beating her,
and she had no kids, And she was by different names.
Sometimes she went by her married name, sometimes she went
by her maiden name. With her high school classmates, she
went by her maiden name because you know, she was divorced,
(25:21):
because my dad is beating her, and you know, so
I went her forty years alumni banquet. I had the
practice on the way they're introducing myself as Pam Elliott's daughter,
because that's how these people knew hers, Pam Elliott. And
nowhere's paying that like diving. Had the first under the
deep end of the pool. I was felt sleazy, you know,
(25:45):
introducing myself as Pam Elliott's daughter, because against who's that
I didn't know. I didn't know pant Elliott. Um, I
know the Pam Elliott that we're all kinds of risque
Facebook messages. But understand your mom was. I had to
dive into each of these worlds at first, and you
do a lot of listening and ask a lot of questions,
(26:08):
and ultimately through all of this, I do think my
mom had a personality disorder. You know, I talked about
psychopathy in the book and in the Dawn Size. Psychopathy
is not a clinical diagnosis that Rather, psychopathy is put
under this larger umbrella of antisocial personality disorder, and lack
(26:32):
of built as a core feature. Being motivated by power
is another core feature of antisocial personality disorder, as well
as pathological lying. Those are all things that marked it.
It's interesting that when I asked you why, you thought
(26:52):
perhaps that she didn't confess or try to destroy all
that evidence when it would have here to have been
better for her to do. So that fits in with
that as well, because if if she wasn't capable of
feeling guilt, then she wouldn't have actually felt that she
had done anything wrong right and you know, those are
(27:15):
the antisocial personality disorder. Based on my arms, her psychologist
understanding is that they know the difference between right and wrong,
so they're not stupid, you know, by any specify imagination.
These are highly intelligent people cognitively know the difference between
right and wrong, but emotionally they don't care. So what's
(27:38):
it like to come to the awareness? You know, you're
well into your adult life, you have a successful career,
you're married to your husband, rob, you have stability in
your life. What is it like to make the discovery
(28:00):
that a parent was so incredibly unstable? I mean, it's
one thing to grow up and know that you have
an unstable or a mentally ill parent, but you found
that out and makes pas make a lot more sense. Um.
For example, when I was in junior high, in high school,
(28:21):
kids bullying me, and I felt, you know, people treated
me like craps. I thought it was because of me.
I don't think it was all because of me. Now
I think a lot of it And yes, is the
way the small town's work. People judge you in part
by who your parents are. I think there were people
(28:41):
don't give like moms. And they probably said that to
you know, their kids, and so therefore people in schools
didn't like me. You talk a little bit towards the
end of your book about feeling empowered. A word that
I use often is liberated, because when something finally makes sense,
(29:03):
even if it's a really painful realization, I mean, no
fun to make that diagnosis of you know your own mom,
and yet it makes everything makes sense sorright. This is
something that comes up so often when a big family
secret comes to light, So many people use these exact words.
(29:24):
It makes everything makes sense. And while the truth may
be hard and painful and complicated, knowing it is liberating.
Why Because it's the truth, Because it's our truth, and
who among us doesn't ultimately want to make sense of
our lives. In her book, Acton uses a beautiful metaphor
(29:49):
to describe the aftermath of trauma involving a litter of
kittens born on their farm. When the kittens were born,
we could talk by their faces. They were going to
be dark, and we can tell we had a black
one and then two tigers, but the rest of their
fur was silver. And when a mama cat is stressed
(30:13):
or they have an illness. Kittens can be born with
what they call a fever coat, and so it's it's
for whatever reason, the pigment doesn't get applied to the
kittens fur in utero, and they get this silver fur instead,
and that silver fur eventually falls out and then the
(30:34):
real fur grows in. So you know, these kittens eventually
had one head and black hair and the other two
were brown tigers, and so they look like perfectly normal,
healthy kittens. It's like, I've gotten rid of that fever coat.
You know, that stress that mom flet on me was
kind of the fever coat, That paranoia, that acque vigilance.
(30:57):
That was a fever coat that she is forced me
to have. And now that you've gone, and now that
I disavered what I have about her, I've sard that
sheep because many thanks to Acton Bets Hamilton's Acton is
(31:24):
the author of The Less People Know About Us, a
mystery of betrayal, family secrets and Stolen Identity. You can
find her on Twitter at Axton seven. Family Secrets is
an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising
producer and Julie Douglas and bess Anne Macaluso are the
(31:45):
executive producers. If you have a family secret you'd like
to share, you can get in touch with us at
listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com. You can
also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook at
Family see Frits Pod, and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod.
For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com.
(32:20):
For more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. It
was the same year, my eighth grade year, when close
curtains became a hard and fast rule in our house.
Around that time, I was instructed to never answer the door,
even if I knew who it was. After the mail
(00:20):
went missing and the phone got shut off. A vulnerability
that wasn't there before seemed to permeate our daily lives.
Anyone and anything outside those drapes, those limestone walls possessed
intentions we can never be sure of. We can only
trust one another. My dad becoming increasingly convinced Mom was
(00:40):
right that someone was out to get us, and trusting
me was keeping the property safe. He started saying things like,
if someone crosses the gate, there yours, you have to
protect the property. At fourteen, I became hyper vigilant, always
on guard. At the end of each day, my neck
and shoulders would ache from fatigue from long hours. If
keen attentiveness, I heard each passing car search the eyes
(01:04):
of every strange and familiar face at the store. That
my no nonsense father and brazen spiffire mother had failed
to protect us only convinced me that they needed my help.
Paranoia became an obligation, a twistic kind of duty to
my family. That's Acton Bets Hamilton's reading from her book
The Less People Know About Us, a memoir of betrayal,
(01:27):
family secrets and stolen identity. Stolen identity. I can't imagine
anything more unsettling than having your very sense of selfhood,
the thing we all think we can count on stolen.
The financial ruin is just the tip of the iceberg.
This is primal, terrifying personal stuff. To have your identity
(01:51):
stolen is to be handpicked by an invisible, malicious force
singled out for ruin. That's what happened to Acton. From
the time she was a kid she was told that
her parents were being targeted by a mysterious identity thief.
Years later, she found out that she had been targeted too,
(02:11):
and that the thief was the last person she possibly
could have imagined. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
(02:32):
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
How old were they when they had you? Mom was
and dad was where I drew up. Didn't my dad
would even say that they were considered older parents, you know,
(02:54):
by today's standards, I think around thirty ship for having
yourverse style was Yeah, back then they were considered over there.
Tell me a bit about your dad. What was he
like that always took me outside because her mom was
always inside. But she she was in the house. She
was always watching soap o operas, which was a little
(03:16):
kids with the insane. Dad was the one who was outside.
He could hear of all the outside stuff and we
had it wasn't her property, and well it was really
a little Dad wanted to fill trails in the woods,
and so we cut trails in the woods and we
does a pond in the woods, you know, with the
tractive that he thought. And I was always with that
(03:36):
baby animals were Dad saying they weren't Moms saying. John
was always out in the barn with dad. Mom was
never wanted to be allowing the barn and to work.
What were the first hints that there was something out
of control financially going on? Like, how did that first
(03:57):
present itself to you? Parents? Males started bring up missing,
and then over time letters from my friends and sin
pals were coming up missing. And at some point along
the way and the discussions of all this missing mail.
Mom said that that's what people do when they still
(04:19):
your identity, and he said that her identity and identity
of One of the things that's striking to me is
that identity theft, which is something that there's a lot
of media focus on now and there's a lot of
awareness of that. Back then, there might not have been
nearly that kind of awareness. Right, Oh, there was a
(04:41):
zero where you know, at a public level on identity,
nobody knew about it. Fact then um in fact, consumers
were not considered victims of identity theft until with the
passage of the identity theft and assumptions that aren't act
(05:01):
and visit started in nineteen. So the you know, the mail,
I think, probably started going missing at some point in
nine and then the words identity dusk became more and
more common in our house in nineteen. I'm sure nobody
(05:23):
else is talking about back then, you know that, you
know the way that we were, The creeping paranoia builds
and bills until no one can be trusted, the family
grows more isolated. They buy an early cellular phone. This
was back in the days when cell phones were gigantic
and expensive. The phone so big it had its own
(05:45):
special stool in their kitchen is only to be used
for emergencies. Acton's mom says that the person responsible for
all this must be someone intimate with them, someone who
knows them very well, a close end, or a family member,
so better not to speak with anyone at all. We
(06:08):
didn't tell people why we weren't communicating with them anymore.
We just withdrew from them and didn't encourage any contact.
Of course, you don't have a landline trunk back in
the mid nineties, how can get hold of someone, So
it was easy for those relationships to fade away. And
(06:29):
during that time, one of the things that my parents
said was, Okay, this is someone who's really close to us,
so when you're home alone, don't answer the door, even
if you know who it is, or if someone goes
through the gate. So we had a gate separating our
(06:50):
front yards from a back there and that was a
rule as well, that is some of us to the gate.
You have to sit care of it because there's no
one to call. You know, it's up to you to
defend the property, you knowing you to defend yourself from
any intruder. And it got to the point where I
was maybe sixteen and seventeen, we're mom did want me
(07:11):
going back into the woods by myself. That wasn't allowed
in the front yard because she said that people drove
up and down the highway in front of our house
looking to snatch babies, including teenagers. So apparently though they're
always baby snatchers who were just lurking waiting to snatch me.
How did this affect you during those years? I mean,
that is such an incredibly isolating way to be, you know,
(07:36):
a middle schooler and then a teenager. Well, I thought
I was doing the right thing by not answering the door,
by not developing friendships, by just willing to be rest
along with I thought I was helping defend our families
from the identity space. So I had, you know, like
(07:59):
a warped perceptions of what I was doing. I was angry.
I didn't understand why someone was doing this to us,
and I wanted to know why, what made us good service?
Why did we have to live this way? And nobody
could be answered that, And that is what frustrated me
for years. And then during this period of time, like
(08:24):
as a sort of backdrop to what's happening in the
identity theft department. Your mother is also obsessively shopping for
inexpensive jewelry, right, because so that started right after my
grandpa died, so will be her father. And I would
(08:46):
come home from school and I get off the bus
coming the house and she would be laying on the
couch with the Home Shopping Network or QVC on, and
she would I what she called cheap, chunky jewelry, but
it was costume jewelry and she was ordering it from
these two networks. And to hide the packages from Dad,
(09:08):
she would make me go across the highway set the
mail the family's mailboxes on the opposite side of the
road from the house. This is a busy two lane
highway where the speed limit is fifty A steady whoosh
of cars and trucks. Exton's eleven years old and her
mother makes her across the highway to get the deliveries
(09:30):
of costume jewelry from the mailbox. Yeah. Cats, And I
am a little cat geek, and I don't love my cats.
You know, having childood friends, I had cats as friends
and they would follow me everywhere. So the you know,
there were cats that would try and follow me across
the road, and I was afraid they were going to
get hit. And she was asking you to collude with her,
(09:53):
to be her partner in this obsessive shopping and hiding
it from your dad, right and at a time, even
though even years old, thought was a grief thing, hoping
with the fact that Grandpa died and at some point
it will stop. It didn't stop, no, if it didn't
for months, And I finally got to the point where
(10:16):
I knew that it was going off for too long,
and I knew that it was wrong. And I went
out in the barn one night and go dead what
mom was doing. And I don't know what was said,
but the flow of packages of junky jewelry stop. By
the time she graduates from high school Accident is desperate
(10:38):
to get away from the speltifying atmosphere of her parents home.
She goes off to Purdue University, which, though still in
her home state, feels like a completely different universe full
of new and exciting possibilities. But during the first semester
of her freshman year, she receives a notice from the
bursar's office her tuition check has bounced. She is so
(11:02):
certain that there must be some kind of mistake that
she walks over to the bursar's office to get it
straightened out. And that's the point in the conversations with
the customer service representative that I was faced chase with
and they were behind bars. I said, just show me
if happy to check. This isn't right. My mom wouldn't
do this, and I said, I no, my mom paid
(11:23):
that bill. So let me come around in this full
of side room. And they brought out a copy of
the check and it was my mom's check, you know,
same design, same bank, same context, information at the cop
and the check was made out to Purdue for my
(11:43):
person amount. But the handwriting had been changed, but not
mom's handwriting, very smooth, small handwriting, and my mom's handwriting
was big and really like lupy. And it looked like
someone had gotten a hold of my mom's checkbook and
(12:03):
got in a hold of my tuition bill, which again,
you know, bill, you're still being stolen out of my
parents mail, and had written a bad check to Perdu.
What that point he got personal for me, because this
identity fief is now messing with my ability to go
to college, and Mom and Dad came over to visit
me a few days later, and I took the copy
(12:26):
the check and I shoved it under the mom's nose
nice as you can act exist, I think, I said,
why would someone get ahold of your checks and take
my tuition bill out of our mail and write a
bad check to to do? What's the point in that
other than to just measure with me? The more explanation
was someone who had neared her checking account for the
(12:47):
purposes of money wanker. So you become an academic, you
finished per due, you go to graduate school, and you
become a researcher in identity theft. That's your field. Did
that feel like a choice or a necessity? Or was
it that it permeated everything around you while you were
(13:10):
growing up? Or was it your way of thinking, if
I learn enough about this, and if I've become expert enough,
I will be able to solve this question. Oh, it
was absolutely. I wanted to learn as much as I
could to hopefully solve our case and help people as well,
(13:33):
help other victims, because I was frustrated with a lack
of response from creditors and the credit reporting agency and
the police regarding my case. Yeah, I want to be
Indian estate beliefs. Once I found out I was a
victim and thought, well, you know there's a right an
(13:54):
you go too, because they have jurisdiction over the whole state. Yea,
they can look at my parents case, they can look
at my case because that you were obviously related, and
somebody will be after handing you. We're gonna have justice.
That didn't happen. I took a police report, gaming a
copy of it and said I don't need to show
this to creditors and good luck. At nineteen, I wanted,
(14:17):
like sirens and as necessaryat hailed from fire that this
is kind of a kind of response I'm looking for,
and it's it just didn't happen. So out of frustration
with that and other interactions I had in trying to
clear my identity, I thought, well, I had a part
of the solution, and the way to be part of
(14:38):
the solution is setting and that's what I did, and I,
you know, along in the way, I hope to sell
nine case. And even after starting my first accident of position,
which would have been in eleven, because that's to myself,
(15:01):
you know, find thirteen is the year that will mark
twenty years because probably wouldn't it be great to solve
the case In the twentie of year and in twenties thirteen,
I was invited to speak at a national conference on identity,
theft out and Washington Defeat and there were representatives there
(15:25):
from the Department of Justice and the FBI, you know,
befro feral agencies. After my presentation, I went up and
talk to them and said, would you have any interest
in solving my case? He said, all your case is
too old, the original documents have long been destroyed by
banks and creditors. Your case will never be solved. That
(15:45):
was on February fourth of I solved the fey. How
did it feel on that day to be told oh,
you're never going to solve this by people who were
you know, national and international experts. It didn't the term
there was a problem you never name. I hope that
you know I was going to solve it in your
(16:07):
experience and in your research, you know, going to the
authorities and trying to get them to do something and
basically being told, well, you know, we don't have that
much interest in this. Really good luck? Was that part
of the course for people then? And is it still
part of the course for people now, yes and yes.
Unfortunately oftentimes victims don't. It's the health and support that
(16:31):
they need from government agencies like the police, or if
there's tax fraud involved, um, they don't get the support
if they need from the I R S and predators
and credit reporting agencies often don't the level of support
that victims need to deserve. We'll be back in a
(16:53):
moment with more family secrets. By now early February, Acton's
mother is very sick. She's been diagnosed with something called
Brickett's limphoplastic leukemia, which wasn't caught until she was in
(17:15):
stage four. So she's undergoing radiation. But there isn't much
reason for optimism. Your break comes very shortly after your
mother passes away. Thirteen days after she passes away, your
dad calls you and what happens again, called me to
(17:36):
yell at me for except card statement has found in
a file walks of my mother's that was from two
thousand one and those for a credit cartets and run
over limits. I said, yeah, I didn't want a credit
card of the limit. What are you talking about? Yeah,
she did. I have a credit card statement right here
(17:58):
in my head and I said, well, what credit card
is it? And he said, well, first to A said,
I said that the first two I said. It was
one of the credit cards that was taken out in
my name, was part of the identity theft. What's mom
doing was that? He said, I don't know, but it's
sitting here in the file with your birth certificate. I
(18:20):
knew right then. I knew right then because number one,
I had my birth certificate, and number two, there's no
reason for my birth certificate and the credit card statement
that was taken up as part of the identity to
be in a file folder of moms unless she was
(18:40):
a perpetrat. Accon first came on my radar when she
sent me an early copy of her book with a
personal note and the note she writes, so many people
hear my story and asked me how could she have
done that? Or how could you not have known? But
the truth is that family members, his children, parents, siblings
(19:02):
almost never know each other completely. In my family, there
were just more secrets than usual to cover up. Well.
I think it's true that we can never know each
other completely. I also think that there are thoughts we
don't entertain, places we just don't touch when it comes
to those closest to us. That's what family secrets is
all about. What was that moment like for you? So
(19:29):
it was two opposite emotions pulling on me at the
same time that I think canceled each other out into
some weird state of a membos. So there's you know,
the one extream emotion was triumph, thinking of those folks
that I've met two weeks earlier and at the Conference
of Washington be used as the games will never resolved.
I didn't know. I accomplished the impossible. And then the
(19:51):
other stream of emotion was, oh my god, it's Mom.
It's Mom. She's responsible for how we've lived for last
twenty years and she's dead, right, so I can older accountable. Well,
I told him that what I thought it was, you
know that Mom was the idea he all along. He said, no, no, no,
(20:13):
does that be some of her explanations for this and
what she was going through this outbuilding on our property
where Mom kept a lot of things. And I told that,
I said, anything that you find that's financial that doesn't
make sense, set it aside and I'll look at it
when I come back over spring break. But should have
been in two weeks, and by the time spring break
(20:38):
came and I went back in Vienna, there's a work
bench in the south wellding and he had a mountain
of papers on this workbench, of financial documents that were
in my mother's posession that he just couldn't quite make
sense of. This mountain of paper included letters from banks
where Axton's mom had tried to establish checking accounts in
(20:59):
both her name men Acidon's dad in Wisconsin. There was
a purchase agreement for a house in Delaware County, Indiana,
not too far from where they lived, signed by everyone
but her. There were paced dubs in her maiden name,
documents related to a four oh one K that she
cashed out. She had grown sloppy. Accidon's mom. Instead of
(21:21):
destroying the paper trail, she hid documents in random places,
between the pages of books, in the bottom of old purses,
in between dresser drawers. So Accident and her dad now
go through the house like c s I technicians. They
find credit card statements, collection agency statements in her grandfather's name.
(21:42):
Acidon's mom had stolen his identity as well. It's so
interesting your mom knew that she was very ill and
probably terminal. And you know, it's not like she died
in an accident or of a heart attack and had
no warning. So I wonder what went through her mind,
(22:03):
because she could have cleaned all that up, I suppose,
but she didn't. I think on some levels, she believed
she was going to get better, because her doctors said
that the six months of treatment would be very difficult,
particularly near the end, which Mom was diagnosed in August,
and by this point it was February. But we're getting
(22:25):
into the really worst part. I think because Mom thought
that once she got through Mark she would turn the corner.
I think she thought this was going to continue and
that she wouldn't get caught. And then when she was
put on hospice care, and you know, that would have
been an appropriate time to tell me and or Dad
(22:46):
at least something to the effect of you're going to
find out bad things about me, or you know, I'm
in trouble with the I R S. Because that was
another thing that Mom did. She didn't pay the taxes
for the majority of thirteen years. The I R S
is on the Burgency being the house when we didn't
know about until her Mom died, when was the point
that your dad accepted that this really was the case,
(23:08):
that this really had been your mom all along, Was
it when you came back from spring break and you
went through all those papers together. Yes, And how would
you characterize his his response to that realization? To see
this one of the situations you know, you really, really
really want something to either be true or not be true,
(23:31):
and then you find out the opposite of what you want,
and then it takes the wind out of your sails. Accident.
Finished college in three years. Partly this was to save money,
but also because of the feeling that something was looming
chasing her. She needed to keep moving to stay ahead
of it. Now it's almost a decade later, she's an
(23:52):
academic studying identity theft has become her professional life, and
she's confronting the very thing that she didn't even know
she was running from. Her mother has left a huge mess.
Her mother had been, in the deepest sense, unknowable. Now
it's Acton's job to sift through their shared history and
(24:14):
understand as much as possible about who her mother had
really been. So Acton goes where so many of us
go when trying to figure somebody out Facebook. She starts
contacting people. Her mother had been facebooking. She had over
four thousand private messages that were very detailed and entirely
(24:35):
fictitious about various businesses and properties she owned. Acton goes
to her mother's fortie high school class reunion in Ohio.
She's looking for information about her mom, but the more
she digs, the more elusive her mom becomes. He portrayed
herself as a very different person to different groups of people.
(24:59):
She had her versions of herself, and some versions she
was married and had a child, and other versions of herself.
She was divorced and my dad had been beating her,
and she had no kids, And she was by different names.
Sometimes she went by her married name, sometimes she went
by her maiden name. With her high school classmates, she
went by her maiden name because you know, she was divorced,
(25:21):
because my dad is beating her, and you know, so
I went her forty years alumni banquet. I had the
practice on the way they're introducing myself as Pam Elliott's daughter,
because that's how these people knew hers, Pam Elliott. And
nowhere's paying that like diving. Had the first under the
deep end of the pool. I was felt sleazy, you know,
(25:45):
introducing myself as Pam Elliott's daughter, because against who's that
I didn't know. I didn't know pant Elliott. Um, I
know the Pam Elliott that we're all kinds of risque
Facebook messages. But understand your mom was. I had to
dive into each of these worlds at first, and you
do a lot of listening and ask a lot of questions,
(26:08):
and ultimately through all of this, I do think my
mom had a personality disorder. You know, I talked about
psychopathy in the book and in the Dawn Size. Psychopathy
is not a clinical diagnosis that Rather, psychopathy is put
under this larger umbrella of antisocial personality disorder, and lack
(26:32):
of built as a core feature. Being motivated by power
is another core feature of antisocial personality disorder, as well
as pathological lying. Those are all things that marked it.
It's interesting that when I asked you why, you thought
(26:52):
perhaps that she didn't confess or try to destroy all
that evidence when it would have here to have been
better for her to do. So that fits in with
that as well, because if if she wasn't capable of
feeling guilt, then she wouldn't have actually felt that she
had done anything wrong right and you know, those are
(27:15):
the antisocial personality disorder. Based on my arms, her psychologist
understanding is that they know the difference between right and wrong,
so they're not stupid, you know, by any specify imagination.
These are highly intelligent people cognitively know the difference between
right and wrong, but emotionally they don't care. So what's
(27:38):
it like to come to the awareness? You know, you're
well into your adult life, you have a successful career,
you're married to your husband, rob, you have stability in
your life. What is it like to make the discovery
(28:00):
that a parent was so incredibly unstable? I mean, it's
one thing to grow up and know that you have
an unstable or a mentally ill parent, but you found
that out and makes pas make a lot more sense. Um.
For example, when I was in junior high, in high school,
(28:21):
kids bullying me, and I felt, you know, people treated
me like craps. I thought it was because of me.
I don't think it was all because of me. Now
I think a lot of it And yes, is the
way the small town's work. People judge you in part
by who your parents are. I think there were people
(28:41):
don't give like moms. And they probably said that to
you know, their kids, and so therefore people in schools
didn't like me. You talk a little bit towards the
end of your book about feeling empowered. A word that
I use often is liberated, because when something finally makes sense,
(29:03):
even if it's a really painful realization, I mean, no
fun to make that diagnosis of you know your own mom,
and yet it makes everything makes sense sorright. This is
something that comes up so often when a big family
secret comes to light, So many people use these exact words.
(29:24):
It makes everything makes sense. And while the truth may
be hard and painful and complicated, knowing it is liberating.
Why Because it's the truth, Because it's our truth, and
who among us doesn't ultimately want to make sense of
our lives. In her book, Acton uses a beautiful metaphor
(29:49):
to describe the aftermath of trauma involving a litter of
kittens born on their farm. When the kittens were born,
we could talk by their faces. They were going to
be dark, and we can tell we had a black
one and then two tigers, but the rest of their
fur was silver. And when a mama cat is stressed
(30:13):
or they have an illness. Kittens can be born with
what they call a fever coat, and so it's it's
for whatever reason, the pigment doesn't get applied to the
kittens fur in utero, and they get this silver fur instead,
and that silver fur eventually falls out and then the
(30:34):
real fur grows in. So you know, these kittens eventually
had one head and black hair and the other two
were brown tigers, and so they look like perfectly normal,
healthy kittens. It's like, I've gotten rid of that fever coat.
You know, that stress that mom flet on me was
kind of the fever coat, That paranoia, that acque vigilance.
(30:57):
That was a fever coat that she is forced me
to have. And now that you've gone, and now that
I disavered what I have about her, I've sard that
sheep because many thanks to Acton Bets Hamilton's Acton is
(31:24):
the author of The Less People Know About Us, a
mystery of betrayal, family secrets and Stolen Identity. You can
find her on Twitter at Axton seven. Family Secrets is
an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising
producer and Julie Douglas and bess Anne Macaluso are the
(31:45):
executive producers. If you have a family secret you'd like
to share, you can get in touch with us at
listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com. You can
also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook at
Family see Frits Pod, and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod.
For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com.
(32:20):
For more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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